A LIVING JEKYLL AND HYDE.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LI, Issue 9067, 12 April 1906, Page 2

A LIVING JEKYLL AND HYDE.

Behind the bare of a little five-foot by four cell, in the county gaol of Dayton, 0., a long-limbed, loose- jointed, shambling figure, with a low retreating forehead and prehensile fingers, lies writhing on a pallet, wildly clawing the aiT or moving aad n moaning for want of the drug which has w made him a. murderer. He is Dr Oiver ® Crook Haugh, who in the days of five lI years ago, was celebrated throughout the a State of Ohio as an authority on the origin and composition of drugs, and their varying effects on the human system. Dr x Haugh lies in the county gaol of Dayton " becau&e, as the officials say, under the all- ° compelling power of a second personality, v created by hyoscine hydrobroniate, a drug v known hitherto only to scientists, he mur- s dered his father Jacob, his mother Mary, ~ v and his brother Jesse Haiugh; mutilated their bodies in a fantastic design, and committed them to the fire of his. own _ making. In him, too, the police believe, * with all reason, on an accumulation of cvi- x der.ce, they have found <t<he solution of the mystery of the four barbarous murders * of women which, for more than a year jj convulsed Cincinnati and sent a fear of death into the heart of every woman of that city. Dark and grim in accusing c portent arise memories of Mrs Mary Twohey, leaving her home at Lima, Ohio, ~[ in response to his pleading, only to die in the agonies of poison two months later ; of Mrs Annie Patterson, .the woman with whom he had lodged in Chicago, who, in * Iher death, mutely displayed the evidences < recognised by all physicians as those of * murder by drugs. Hyoscine, the poison which in the slow course of years had evolved within him the weird ingenuity of murder, was his willing agent in the 1 slaughter, born of the lust of blood and ' tile greed of gain, of /tlhe three beings who should have been nearest and dearest to . him. An examination of the bodies ' dtagged from the flames at the outbreak of the fire showed the presence of the drug in large quantities. And as this fiend lies in his cell, glaring at his keepers, alternating his cries for drugs with curses on those who have brought him to gaol, shak- '• ing and trembling in. every limb — a hideous creature, with torn, matted hair, bloodshot eyes, and a face showing .bluishwhite in the dim light of his cell— he supplies the besfb possible proof -for all alienists and criminologiste of the living realisation of Robert Louis Stevenson's imaginings of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. "I am at work on the. evolution of a drug which in its perfection will create a new era of science, a new order of thought, and a new race of beings," he said one day, five years ago. These were tihe days when all Dayton talked in fearful whisperings of the light in his little laboratory — a light that burned far into the night and set all tongues agog. "I will bring into the reality of day something more wonderful than Stevenson in his wildest dreams ever imagined. I will prove that which he only suggested — the certainty that two beings can exist in, one body, the one blotting out the influence of the otiher." This was the only explanation he ever vouchsafed as to tihe experiments over which his professional brethren sometimes wondered. In those days his pretty home, ruled by the confiding woman whom he had married six years before, and who looked up to him as the greatest and wisest of mankind, lay on the outskirts of the town. By and by the doctor secluded himself more and more from the public gazfe. and shut himself up in. his laboratory, so that presently his face, once so famous in the streets of Dayton, was seen no more. Then came whispers of sudden flights to Cincinnati; of unexpected absences lasting many days, and of equally sudden returns. Like the proverbial BOLT FROM THE BLUE the truth burst upon tie town when one day Mrs Haugh, in a veritable frenzy of terror, rushed into the house of a neighbor declaring that her husband, who was suddenly transformed into a fiend, had tried to kill W, The monster that, he had himself created ihadi captured him. From that moment — no one eouKl tell exactly why— it seemed that he gradually and insensibly drifted into the position of a pariah —the outcast of the town in which he had once been so much honored. Freed from the influence of the drug, he was the pale ghost of the man who had been pitifully weeping over tihe loss of all that life held dear, and seeking solace in the rear room of a drinking bar. In the presence of the drug, however, the whole being of the man was insensibly, mysteriously transformed. An inexplicable change- had fallen over smm. There was nothing in the outward semblance of the being to account for it. Yet, as it seemed, a different soul looked out of the window of the eye. It was noticed, too, that no could now approach him without a visible repulsion .of feeling. The explanation, perhaps, lies in this : that all humanity, as we know it, is composed in varying degrees of good and evil, while Oliver Hangh at that moment, alone in the ranks of mankind, was entirely evil. A SUCCESSION OF CRIMES. It- was one day in the month of April. 1904 that Haugh suddenly disappeared from Dayton. Reports reaching tlhe town by easy stages, said that he was in hiding somewhere in Cincinnati, and four days later, in the darkness of the morning of May 1, Mary McDonald was found lying under the trees in the pathway by the cemetery known to all Cincinnati •as "Lovers' Lane"— her face - beafen in, her life beaten out, by several terrific blows from the heavy brick wrapped in bloodstained cloth that lay at her side. Two striking features in the plan of the murder attracted the attention of those who, unlike the local police, goroping and stumbling through a routine line of investigation, exercised the .gift of imagination. First, the footmarks in tihe ground showed that the murderer had stolen on the woman from behind, swung round and "dashed" the brick in her face, stunning her at the first blow. Second, that six of the front upper teeth had been driven down her ftoroat, without causing even an

abrasion on either the upper or lower lip. The murder being completed, her body had been posed in decent order, her right arm resting aci-oss the breast. HYDE IX A CARNIVAL OF SLAUGHTEE. Octo'oei- had come, when Haugh onre more vanished from his home, and again was heard of in Cincinnati. The nrardei of Mary McDonald was already passing into the limbo of forgotten things, when again in Lovers' Lane, only a few yards from the spot where she had met her fate, Lulu Mueller was found lying dead, her right arm resting composedly across heT )wdy, her face beaten in exactly as that of Mary McDonald had been. Three weeks more, and two laborers on their way to work in the dawri of the morning stumbled over the- body of Amy Steinge_weg, a telephone operator. She lay within twenty yards of the place in which the body of Miss Mueller had been found. Again were the characteristic signs of the .handiwork of "him whom all people now recognised as the common murderer of •these women. Bu* in the latest deed the murderer, having smashed out her teeth, had torn her throat as though with claws. The next that was heard of Haugh was iti Lorain, Ohio, when the story of the death of Mrs Twohey was made public. Haugh had appeared in Lima, Ohio, where this woman, a widow, lived with her brother, Dr Herman. Haitgh had been married to her and settled in Loorain,. The nexfi that was known was that the woman had died ; that her brother had accused' Haragh of her murder by drugs. It was within six weeks of this time that Mrs Annie Patterson lay dying, with all the symp^ toms of poisoning by hyoscine, at her home in Chicago, and by her edde the physicians and relatives, summoned by tenants of the house, found Haugh, who only six weeks before had made his appearance in the .house in the- guise of a lodger, made hie court to the woman, and won her promise to many him. In th moment of consciousness before her deat she told how Haugh again and again ha< forced into her throat something "tha was like morphine, and yet not like it. 1 That was all she knew — all that her rela tivee ever knew, for the Chicago official made no attempt at investigation. The; came the summer of 1905, and' again b disappeared, and within twenty-four hour Cincinnati once more received evideno that the fiend who had killed Mar McDonald, Lulu Mueller, and Am; Steineweg was among them. Th© proo of his presence was> found in the body o aim old woman, Mrs Mary Reichar* slaughtered! as she lay asleep in her home Yet it would seem that no one in Dayitar connected' thie case with the coincidence o: , Dr Haugh's Tetuirn home on the following day. MURDERS HIS PARENTS. The friends of has father presently knew [ that Dr Haugh was hungry for his shaire f of the family estate; they knew of the } bitter quarrel one Sunday night, when the aged father, denouncing his son as a murderer and robber, had sworn that he should 9 have no past of the inheritance. This is why no one was particularly surprised L by the sight of flames from the burning cottage of the Haughs on the night of Sunday, November 5, or by the anmouncermient of the discovery of three muitilated t bodies, lying where they had been placed side by side, after Haugh, according to th< : police, had started the fire. THE MONSTER'S EXTRAORDINARY I CONFESSION. "I don't know.; it may be so. I know t hyoscine prompted me to mutilate theii bodies and commit them to the names," he said with a laugh. "They Bay that I murdered my father, my mother, and brother with hyoscine for the sake of the money. Then they say that when I have taken enough of the hyoscine the man within me disappears, and Hyde is in : power. It seems as though I must do something— destroy something. My only recourse is 'to get out into the street— out into the open country — away from men and women, lest I murder them. It is possible for me to have committed all the other murders of which they accuse , me, and in my normal condition! be in , ignorance, for in my .normal condition lam another man. All that Ido know ie, that if I die for these crimes, I shall at least have established the proof of the theory on which I have always insisted — . that two beings, one of good, the other of evil, may exist in the same man, and in ' that respect at leas* I shall have Tendered a distinct service to posterity."