Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (10 page)

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was found the following day along with the upturned boat, she was

floating— as dead bodies will do shortly after a drowning—in calm

lake water just eight feet deep.

The jury did not find Chester Gillette’s version of events credible,

even though he was the only living witness. Like all men who carefully

plan the killing of an intimate partner, he had the chance to draw

any picture he wanted. But strangely, Gillette, like so many other

eraser killers, chose what seems to be the least credible of all possible

explanations.

Why would Grace commit suicide right at the moment when

Gillette is saying that he is willing to take the responsibility to face

her parents and tell them the truth? Why did Gillette make no

effort whatsoever to rescue the drowning girl? After all, death by

jumping into a relatively shallow lake is no instantaneous matter.

Why, following such a terrible tragedy, would he not run to the

nearest cabin or lodge along the shore to call for assistance or at least

to report the incident?

The truth is that Chester Gillette wanted to make Grace Brown

disappear, to erase her existence and his connection to her. If the

police had been less curious or less competent, and if the autopsy of

Grace’s body had been less accurate in identifying bruises, contusions,

and a probable concussion that seemed to precede her immersion in

the water, he might have gotten away with his plan.

But what clearly marks Chester Gillette as a psychopathic eraser

killer is his total lack of any sense of guilt or remorse. During

their intensive investigation, police discovered that Chester had been

making plans for what he would do after erasing Grace from his life

even as he was riding the train to their purported romantic idyll.

Although Grace was actually on the same train, Chester carefully

avoided being seen with her, purposely boarding a different car

where he spotted two female acquaintances he knew from Cortland.

He struck up a long, friendly conversation, in the course of which he

learned that the young ladies were going to be staying a few miles

away from Big Moose Lake. Chester claimed that he was on his way

to meet a friend whose uncle had a cabin on a nearby lake, but that

he was planning to be very near the lodge where the women were

staying later in the week, and would love to meet up with them. They

agreed and invited him to join them.

After disposing of Grace in the lake, Chester calmly hid the wooden

tennis racket under a log and found a trail he had picked out after

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having carefully studied maps of the region; and by catching a small

train on its scheduled run, he was able to reach another lake miles

away that evening and check into a lodge— using his own name

for the first time during the trip. Traveling from lake to lake, by

steamboat and canoe, he joined up with the two young women with

whom he had chatted so engagingly on the train out of Cortland. At

no time did he appear to his friends to be upset, distracted, depressed,

or in any way emotionally unsettled. He never mentioned anything

at all about Grace Brown, whose ‘‘tragic suicide’’ he had so recently

witnessed—although he creepily mentioned to his friends during a

card game at the second lake hearing ‘‘terrible’’ news of a woman

drowning nearby.

Q

Much to his shock, Chester Gillette was arrested and charged with

Grace’s murder. His trial and subsequent execution became one of the

most intensely covered murder cases in American history—reaching

Peterson-like proportions in terms of public interest for its time.

What riveted the public about Chester Gillette was the same

question that would draw millions to follow the Peterson case a

century later: Could a seemingly upstanding young man, someone

who had no previous history of any kind of violence at all, commit

such a horrible crime?

Several factors made the murder of Grace Brown seem more of

a mystery than an obvious homicide: a perceived lack of any clear

motive (few at the time could actually imagine anyone wanting to

purposely kill a baby); the fact that virtually all the evidence assembled

in the case was circumstantial rather than direct; and the complex

planning and deception that had to have gone into the crime, if it

was indeed intentional.

Most confounding to those who followed the case was the inex-plicable notion that a man who had been brought up in a strongly

religious family (his parents were dedicated full-time workers in the

strongly evangelistic Salvation Army and, later, members of another

devoutly religious sect) and who seemed to have a promising life

ahead of him could murder a defenseless pregnant woman in cold

blood and abandon her body so casually.

Other aspects of the crime quickly became subjects of more

salacious public interest, such as Grace Brown’s affair with the

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attractive but incorrigible womanizer, her secret pregnancy, and the

scores of painfully intimate letters the two had exchanged.

Grace’s letters to Chester—large portions of which were published

by newspapers that were competing with each other in search of every

scandalous tidbit on the case—detailed her every emotion on an

almost daily basis, revealing a sensitive and vulnerable soul. Chester’s

letters to Grace, sent with significantly less regularity, were far more

perfunctory, exposing very little of the man behind the mask.

If nature abhors a vacuum, the media abhors a crime without a

motive it can understand. The search for motive is natural enough:

after learning who, what, when, and where, people want to know

why
. The crime occurred just when one of the greatest newspaper

circulation wars in U.S. history was in full sway. William Randolph

Hearst’s
New York Journal
was competing ruthlessly with Joseph

Pulitzer’s
New York World
in an epic battle that involved, quite

literally, war and peace and, of course, money. Just a year before the

trial, Hearst had egged on his editors to crank out ever more sensa-tionalistic stories so that the newspaper’s headlines would ‘‘bite the

public like a bulldog’’— giving rise to the term ‘‘bulldog’’ journalism.

Veracity was not merely low on the list of journalistic priorities but

seen as an impediment to telling a good story.

What the mass circulation newspapers wanted was not simply a

good murder mystery, but ideally one that contained other elements.

Eventually, the idea that the real motivating factor behind the murder

was a love triangle—and not just a love triangle but one that had a

young man choosing between a ‘‘Miss Rich’’ and a ‘‘Miss Poor,’’ as

the tabloids put it at the time—was the kind of formula that editors

of the day knew they could milk endlessly.

So a myth was born, a myth that rapidly took on a life of its own.

At least part of the myth had a factual basis: Chester Gillette had

been born to a poor family, though the poverty was to some extent

self-imposed in a religious climate of strict self-denial. As evidence

of his yearnings for upward mobility, he began to date a number of

young women in Cortland from high-society circles, including one,

Harriet Benedict, whose name became inextricably linked with his

when some reporters picked up on the fact that Chester had taken

Harriet herself out for a boat ride just one week before his deadly trip

with the ‘‘factory girl.’’

In reality, there was no love triangle. Chester and Harriet were

only acquaintances, and she did not even count him among her

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friends. But when the newspapers discovered that Chester’s prized

camera still had film in it containing pictures of Harriet Benedict, she

quickly became known as ‘‘the other woman.’’

The insistence that Chester killed Grace Brown so that he could

pursue ‘‘rich girl’’ Harriet Benedict was proclaimed as fact elaborately

and with great imagination by many newspapers—especially the

large-circulation New York papers that were each trying to outdo the

other in sensational coverage.

One newspaper even invented out of thin air a second set of letters,

which ‘‘Miss Rich’’ was supposed to have secretly sent to Chester

while he was being held in jail.

Q

Dreiser wanted his novel to center on a crime story, but also to

evoke the social complexities he saw in the world around him and that

he had experienced in his own life. When he settled on the Chester

Gillette case as the raw material from which he would carve out his

fictionalized story, he had his own recollections of the crime and

the trial as newspapers in New York had reported it at the time. But

he relied primarily on clippings from just one newspaper, the
New

York World
, where Dreiser had briefly worked many years earlier.

The
World
was one of the original ‘‘yellow journalism’’ newspapers,

which had, for example, run stories stating how and when Chester

Gillette had completely confessed his crime after his conviction— a

confession the paper’s ‘‘journalists’’ completely made up.

Armed with his clippings and a brief trip to the scene of the crime,

Dreiser plowed onward to produce one of the longest novels ever

published in America, two fat volumes when it first came out in 1925.

Because almost nothing had been written about Chester Gillette’s

younger years, Dreiser filled the first half of the book with details

from his own rigidly conservative upbringing in a first-generation

German American household in Indiana, which included what for

Dreiser were the intolerable strictures of a Catholic school education.

He overlaid his experiences onto the framework of Chester’s roughly

parallel childhood and developed a growing empathy for him, feeling

as though he had a deep understanding of the forces that were

pushing and pulling young Gillette.

This artistic merging of elements from Dreiser’s own childhood

and formative youth with Chester’s life and his very real act of murder

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coalesced into one of the great American novels—but one that iden-tified the ‘‘tragedy’’ as the inevitable collision of economic and social

forces, which Dreiser believed drove all human events. In his view,

Chester Gillette was not a cold and calculating killer but the piteous

victim of a battle far beyond his control, in which the unfortunate

death of a woman and her baby was really just collateral damage.

The actual tragedy of
An American Tragedy
is that the premeditated

murder of a pregnant woman—whom Gillette viewed as standing

in the way of the life he wanted and believed he deserved— comes

across more as an act of nature or fate than a consciously planned

erasure. Dreiser, trapped by his own constructs and his identification

with his protagonist, could not see the killing for what it really was:

a man’s attempt to erase a ‘‘mistake,’’ the baby he created and the

woman he saw as dragging him down.

Literary critic Mary Gordon, herself an accomplished novelist,

explains in her book
Good Boys and Dead Girls
that ‘‘Dreiser wants

us to believe that Clyde didn’t mean to kill Roberta [the names

given to Chester and Grace in the novel]. . . . He only meant to

push her away [so] that he could get on with life,’’ unencumbered

by the pregnancy he didn’t want. But, as Gordon points out, ‘‘the

problem is that Dreiser has just spent a hundred pages showing Clyde

plotting the perfect murder. Clyde goes to his death believing himself

innocent, and we are sympathetic to him because in the context of

the corruption around him everywhere, he is the most pure.’’ In the

end, when Clyde is executed just as the real-life Chester was, ‘‘we

mourn his death as we don’t mourn Roberta’s. She was the heavy,

dull, clinging object.’’

Dreiser himself later reflected on the novel and the real-life murder

by saying that he had been noticing since the early 1890s, when he first

began working as a newspaper reporter, a pattern of ‘‘a certain type

of crime in the United States. It seemed to spring from the fact that

almost every young person was possessed of an ingrown ambition

to be somebody financially and socially. In short, the general mood

of America was directed toward escape from any form of poverty.

. . . Fortune-hunting became a disease.’’ Dreiser believed that it was

a craven grasping for material wealth that lay at the heart of this

particular killing. Gillette’s crime was caused fundamentally, Dreiser

argued, by his ambition.

Gillette had started out as ‘‘the young ambitious lover of some

poorer girl, who in the earlier state of affairs had been attractive

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6 1

enough to satisfy him, both in the manner of love and her social

station, [but] with the passing of time and the growth of experience

on the part of the youth, a more attractive girl with money or position

appeared and he quickly discovered that he could no longer care for

his first love,’’ he explained. ‘‘What produced this particular type of

crime . . . was the fact that it was not always possible to drop the first

girl. What usually stood in the way was pregnancy, plus the genuine

affection of the first herself for her lover, plus also her determination

to hold him.’’

What is disturbing here about Dreiser’s reasoning and his novel

is that the perpetrator of the crime is portrayed as an apparently

helpless pawn tossed about by ‘‘ambition’’ and drawn inexorably

from one woman to the next, always seeking the ‘‘more attractive

girl with money or position.’’ In fact, he comes close to blaming the

victim for her own death because of her efforts to hold on to the man

she loved.

In truth, the one character element entirely lacking from any

reading of the facts about Chester Gillette is ambition—meaning

a strong desire to achieve a particular end. Ambition is a quality

we usually attribute to people who exhibit its associated outward

manifestations: hard work, a drive to succeed, focused efforts to

achieve a goal, a willingness to sacrifice short-term pleasures for

long-term success.

When a man claims to want to better himself but isn’t willing

to put in the work and sacrifice necessary to achieve the lifestyle he

wants, when he merely believes he should be granted all the benefits

and trappings of success as some kind of divine right, he is exhibiting

not ambition but a sense of entitlement. That kind of narcissistic

entitlement, rather than true ambition, is characteristic of many

eraser killers, including Scott Peterson.

As Gordon put it, Dreiser’s protagonist is someone ‘‘who cannot

master his fate. He is never on top of the rules of the world’s game.’’

However, both Dreiser’s character and the real-life Gillette were never

greater masters of their fate, more on top of the game, more creative

and goal directed than when they were engaged in planning a ‘‘perfect

murder.’’ The same could be said of Scott Peterson.

Dreiser’s blindness in this respect is difficult to understand or

explain away. Before he settled on the Gillette case to use as the basis

for his novel, he researched the case of a young medical student in

New York named Carlyle Harris, who in the 1890s got a young woman

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