Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (9 page)

E R A S E D

Unfortunately, no one at the time was able to shed much insight

on what would make an intelligent and well-connected man kill

his pregnant lover and simultaneously attempt to wipe away all

connection to her— a connection well known to many other people.

Instead, our understanding of the crime was reshaped on a grand

scale when the up-and-coming novelist Theodore Dreiser based his

magnum opus,
An American Tragedy
, on the Gillette case. And in

Dreiser’s view, Chester Gillette was nothing like an eraser killer

because he himself was just as much a ‘‘victim’’ of events and forces

outside his control as was his dead girlfriend.

Just like Dreiser, many today still find it hard to believe that there

are people among us who seem normal and upstanding but who are

so devoid of any genuine human feeling that killing a loved one is no

different than throwing away a worn out sweater.

The similarities between Scott Peterson and Chester Gillette are

striking, beginning with the fact that both were such seemingly ordi-nary all-American boys. Like Peterson, Gillette did not look like what

anyone imagined a killer should look like in 1906. He had never been

arrested for any crime, nor had he had any encounter with the police.

Twenty-year-old Grace Brown believed that Chester was at his

core a good man, but she had no illusions that the handsome

coworker two years her senior would be the perfect husband. His

endless philandering was the talk of their small industrial town, and

the increasingly desperate letters she had written him from the city

where she had taken refuge in order to hide her pregnancy were filled

with pleading and despair.

It was not a casual or commonplace matter to be an obviously

pregnant young woman without a husband in 1906, and in a very

short time her pregnancy would become visible to everyone. Britain’s

Queen Victoria had died just five years earlier, and the widely shared

standards of morality and propriety that bear her name had not been

seriously challenged on either side of the Atlantic.

In the small towns and tightly knit rural communities of upstate

New York, religious conservatism prevailed. There had been so many

waves of revivalism and evangelism in the previous century that

the region in which they lived was known as ‘‘the burned-over

district’’— viewed as a place where there were no more unsaved souls

left to be saved.

Grace Brown’s parents may have already felt a certain amount of

shame that their farm was not prosperous enough to support their

The Real American Tragedy

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nine children, that their middle daughter had left home at eighteen

to get a job in the new skirt factory owned by Chester’s uncle some

thirty miles away by muddy road in the growing town of Cortland,

New York.

Grace’s hard work earned her a promotion to inspector, examining

the finished skirts to make sure they had no defects. Chester’s job in

the stock room was ostensibly not much grander than Grace’s, but he

was clearly being groomed for a position of authority. Although he

lacked the fortitude to stick out college, he hoped his uncle’s largesse

would lead to a more prosperous life than the hobolike existence he

had been living as a railroad brakeman. It had already provided him

entrée into a social world whose trappings he coveted, which would

never include a girl as unsophisticated as Grace Brown.

The trip that she and Chester had embarked on a few days before

was a very special event for Grace. In all the months her suitor had

been courting her, he had never taken her out in public—never

brought her to the colorful parties and social events he himself loved

to attend. Instead, he would spend time with her in the parlor of her

rooming house—and eventually in a secret rendezvous spot where

she had, after months of pressure, yielded to him sexually.

Not long after that, she discovered, much to her chagrin, that she

was pregnant.

But when she stepped into the rowboat and sat down on the

wooden seat at the stern, she hoped against hope that Chester

Gillette, who had impressed everyone with tales of his adventures

living and traveling to places far away, might finally be ready to

settle down and accept the responsibility of rapidly approaching

parenthood. The man who faced her in the boat that afternoon was

the person with whom she wanted to share her life.

Tragically, the long boat ride of July 11, 1906, was not the beginning

of a life together, but instead the last day in the life of young Grace

Brown. It sparked one of the most sensational police investigations

and, later, murder trials in American history.

Around six in the evening, Chester rowed the boat into the only

secluded part of the lake—a little bay away from other boaters and

out of view of any of the handful of lodges that dotted the lake.

There, according to the theory advanced by the prosecution at trial,

he struck her, probably with the tennis racket he had insisted on

bringing along with him in the boat. Either before or between the

barrage of blows—on autopsy, wounds were found on both sides of

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E R A S E D

her head, including one that penetrated into her brain—Grace was

able to emit a single piercing scream. Her cry was loud enough to be

heard by a woman on another boat far across the lake, but she could

not see the rowboat with the defenseless woman tucked into a cove.

Gillette then tossed Grace, unconscious but still alive, into the lake to

drown.

He had done it! He had solved the problem of this girl and

her incessant pleas, her daily letters pouring out her anguished

ruminations on the state of their relationship. Most important, he

had solved once and for all the looming problem posed by her

increasingly brazen threats to ‘‘go public’’ with the news of his callous

disregard for her honor.

He tossed his own jaunty straw hat into the water, having already

removed the sewn-in tag from the store from which he had purchased

it, knowing that a straw hat would float on the calm surface of the

lake. An experienced swimmer, he probably hopped into the water

and intentionally overturned the otherwise quite stable boat. As a

final touch, he placed atop its upturned keel the distinctive silk cape

Grace had taken off earlier.

Then Chester swam to shore and fled the scene following a clever

plan he’d charted out with maps and a railroad time schedule, after

changing to dry clothes from the suitcase he had also conveniently, if

suspiciously, brought along with him on their rowing outing. Within

two days he joined a group of vacationing friends at another lake,

betraying no sign that he had killed his pregnant girlfriend a short

distance away.

What happened between Chester and Grace that fatal day on

Big Moose Lake was no rash act, no sudden murderous impulse.

Chester had crafted an elaborate scheme that included the creation

of a make-believe persona, registering at the hotel at Big Moose Lake

under the name Charles George of New York, New York, and as Carl

Grahm of Albany, New York, when he rented the boat—both names

that conveniently matched the initials on Chester’s monogrammed

luggage. However, he signed Grace into the hotel register under

her true name and parents’ hometown because he wanted her to

be identified, wanted there to be an explanation for her sudden

disappearance.

His doppelganger, Grace Brown’s fictional boyfriend, did every-thing possible to leave a convenient trail of fabricated evidence that

would lead anyone investigating Grace’s disappearance to believe

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that the young woman had been traveling in the company of another

man—a man no one else would know or be able to trace, and that

the two seemed to be traveling as intimate partners, thus drawing any

suspicion away from Chester.

He also attempted to orchestrate the murder scene to make it

appear that Grace and her mysterious male companion both met

their deaths in a tragic boating accident, using his discarded hat to

make it seem that although Grace’s body floated to the surface, the

man’s body might be lost at the bottom and irretrievable.

A boating accident, in an area with hundreds of lakes, where

accidental drowning in the summertime was not an infrequent occur-rence and where the local sheriff’s department had scant resources,

was not likely to be investigated very thoroughly. Two young peo-ple apparently dead, one just a factory girl, the other an unknown

stranger—just the kind of unfortunate event Chester assumed the

authorities would quickly accept as an accident even if a few details

did not appear to fit.

With this too-clever-by-half ruse, Chester believed he would turn

any suspicion away from himself and, in fact, never be associated with

Grace’s death. Both he and his pregnant lover would disappear—she

to an unceremonious death by an apparently accidental drowning,

and he back to his increasingly active life in the society circles of

Cortland.

And who knew where he might go beyond that small factory

town? He had other rich relations he could prevail on. There would

be plenty of time to figure that out.

Or so he thought.

Sheriff’s deputies became suspicious when they called the factory

to find out more about the dead young woman they had quickly

identified, and also about the mysterious Carl Grahm.

‘‘But surely you mean Chester Gillette,’’ the factory manager

stammered, as Chester’s fondness for Miss Brown was all too well

known at the factory.

Then, in a strange twist of fate, another young man who also

worked at the skirt factory happened to arrive at Big Moose Lake,

which was about 150 miles away from Cortland by the roads of

the day—and walked close enough to the precise spot where local

lawmen were discussing the case to overhear their talk. Why, he

himself knew Chester quite well, the man explained. When he gave

the officers a detailed visual description, they immediately realized

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E R A S E D

that the mystery man they thought they were tracing did not just

share the same initials as Chester Gillette; he appeared, in all likeli-hood, to
be
Chester Gillette.

Their suspicions were mounting. A strange drowning on a calm,

quiet lake. A missing body. A mysterious young man who seemed

to have lied about his own identity, while encouraging his female

companion to use her own name. Then they found out that the

man raised eyebrows when he boarded the little rowboat carrying a

suitcase and a tennis racket—something the boat rental agent had

found even more peculiar than the usual silliness he observed in the

city folk who came to the Finger Lakes in ever larger numbers thanks

to the recent railroad expansion.

These incidental oddities were all that it took— then as now—to

turn a routine investigation of an accidental death into an aggressive

pursuit of someone who may have committed a heinous crime.

In less than twenty-four hours of their arrival on the scene, local

law enforcement officials believed they were probably investigating

a murder. Chester Gillette’s grand plan of deception was already

crumbling, although he didn’t yet know it.

Q

Aided by a few more lucky breaks, the police quickly picked

up Chester’s trail and realized that he was just a few miles away

at another Adirondack resort. Gillette was stunned when the local

district attorney and undersheriff suddenly interrupted his ‘‘vacation’’

frivolity. Ironically, they found him dressed for tennis—but without

the tennis racquet he had carefully hidden back at Big Moose Lake

after killing his paramour and which was later found by the police.

When they asked to question him, he tried to stave them off with the

protest, ‘‘but I have to play tennis.’’

Chester initially denied being anywhere near the scene of Grace’s

death. But he soon changed his story when faced with rapidly

mounting eyewitness identification and other evidence that made it

clear that there was no ‘‘other man’’ who happened to share Chester’s

initials, only Chester trying to create an illusion by traveling under a

pseudonym. He admitted he had brought Grace to Big Moose Lake

and had taken her out for a long boat ride, but claimed that a tragic

accident occurred.

The Real American Tragedy

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Gillette changed his story about precisely what happened several

times—at one point he claimed that he might have upturned the

boat himself when he bent over to pluck a water lily for Grace.

But the story he settled on and the one he told on the witness

stand at his trial was that Grace committed suicide.

For many weeks before she left Cortland, Grace had been dis-traught, bursting into tears at work, falling into deep depression as

her worries over the future mounted. Although it was not unheard of

for single girls from ‘‘good homes’’ in farm country to become preg-nant, the only socially acceptable outcome was for the father of the

child to take responsibility and marry the young woman as quickly

as possible. There were a host of polite euphemisms available at that

time for describing children born less than nine months following a

marriage.

Chester claimed under oath that he had suggested to Grace toward

the end of the day on the lake that the two of them go back to her

parents’ farm and tell them that she was pregnant and that he was

the father. Gillette wavered on the witness stand as to whether he

intended to marry Grace, stating yes, no, and ‘‘I can’t answer that in

that way’’ at various times in his testimony.

According to Gillette, Grace became hysterical at the thought of

telling her parents, exclaimed ‘‘I will end it here,’’ and threw herself

into the lake. Chester said he tried to reach for her but was not quick

enough and tumbled into the lake, too. In all the commotion, the

boat flipped over.

As soon as he surfaced and shook the water from his eyes, Chester

said, he grabbed hold of the boat—now floating bottom up—and

looked around. Surprisingly, he didn’t see any sign of Grace. By his

own testimony he stayed in the water for only ‘‘a minute or two’’

and, not seeing Grace, simply gave up and swam to shore. He neither

called out her name nor shouted for help, nor did he swim around

trying to find her.

Even if she had jumped into the water, it is difficult to imagine how

her body would have simply sunk or how she would have suppressed

the instinct for self-preservation that causes even people who don’t

know how to swim to flail about. Strangely, Chester did not report

seeing the telltale rising of bubbles that accompany a sinking person,

or the slightest sign of turbulence in the water. When her body

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