New York, 1915: accounts of "ripper" murders of children

[Pcdunn]

Details on the open web are scarce...

Were there more murders of children in 1915 in New York? I googled but coudn't find much information.

From what I 've found out in the newspaper archives, there were at least two murders of young children in New York, between March and May of 1915. The victims were named Leonore Cohn, five years old, from a Jewish family; and Charlie Murray, four years old, from a Catholic family. Both lived in tenement buildings. Both were found in their tenements. Letters signed "Jack the Ripper" were sent to the mother of at least one victim.
Additionally, there was an unsuccessful attempt on another girl, named Louise Neideig or Neidig (? spelling might be variant), which I need to track down the details about. I'm not yet sure if additional victims followed Murray.

I came about this while searching the term "Jack the Ripper", and that is when I realized that for some time following the Whitechapel murders people around the world seemed to use the term "ripper murders" to describe a particularly horrific crime.

Like you, I failed to find much about the Cohn and Murray murders on the general Internet. It seems like we must dig into newspaper accounts for more details. I gather these child murders and the "Ripper" moniker led to a good deal of panic among mothers and children in that time and place, as well as a huge police investigation.
Why are they forgotten now? Inquiring minds want to know...

[Ausgirl]

pc, here's some interesting info on serial killers in general around 1915 - seems there was a bit of boom, that way, and it mentions your NY cases as well as another 'ripper' in Atlanta.

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=p2Yh6HQKecsC&lpg=PA34&ots=8O3LF8v5hS&dq=1915%20child%20murder%20new%20york&pg=PA35#v=onepage&q=1915%20child%20murder%20new%20york&f=false

[sdreid]

Michael Newton's book Still at Large covers the case. Also, I wrote a brief account of the murders for America's Most Wanted News Magazine back about 15 years ago.

[Pcdunn]

pc, here's some interesting info on serial killers in general around 1915 - seems there was a bit of boom, that way, and it mentions your NY cases as well as another 'ripper' in Atlanta.

https://books.google.com.au/books?id...20york&f=false

Interesting, Ausgirl, thank you. That book by Jenkins is published by a scholarly publishing company, and is likely to be well researched. I will try to find a review of it among my library resources.

[Pcdunn]

Michael Newton's book Still at Large covers the case. Also, I wrote a brief account of the murders for America's Most Wanted News Magazine back about 15 years ago.

The Atlanta Child Murders are still quite a frightening case.

[Pcdunn]

Review of Jenkins book

pc, here's some interesting info on serial killers in general around 1915 - seems there was a bit of boom, that way, and it mentions your NY cases as well as another 'ripper' in Atlanta.

https://books.google.com.au/books?id...20york&f=false

http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol2is4/umurder.html

Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular CultureCopyright © 1994 Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture
All rights reserved.
ISSN 1070-8286

Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 2(4) (1994) 87-92

Review of Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide

Author: Jenkins, P. (1994).
Publisher: New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Year: 1994

When the film, Silence of the Lambs, was popular it seemed as if every criminology student wanted to learn about profiling and eventually to work in the Behavioral Sciences Unit at the FBI Academy. They were understandably chagrined at my portrayal of profiling of violent criminals as voodoo science. If only Philip Jenkins' solidly supported thesis in, Using Murder, was available then, I might have better disabused students of their apolitical view of social control agencies, particularly federal law enforcement. The importance of Jenkins' work is that it places the issue of multiple murder, or serial homicide as the FBI has coined it, in a political context. Jenkins shows how the issue was appropriated by specific political, cultural, and bureaucratic groups and manipulated to enhance their interests. Using Murder is an excellent example of the constructionist approach to social problems. Constructionism assumes that behaviors are not merely objective realities (if at all). Rather, they are defined and explained before they become socially real, and this is indeed as true for publicly recognized social problems as it is for face-to-face interactions. Furthermore some groups, by virtue of their superior power, finances, status, organization, technology or access to the mass media have greater control of information and resources to make their constructions appear legitimate, to make their version of reality stick or to take ownership of an issue. The ideological position of an influential group is often bound to the definition of a social issue as Stephen Pfohl (1978) discovered in how future dangerousness is predicted in mentally ill patients; as Bruno Latour (1986) found in how scientific facts are determined; as Judith Long Laws (1977) discovers in how female sexuality has been defined; and as Donileen Loseke (1992) has found in the treatment of wife abuse. Philip Jenkins finds these same processes operating in the public identification of the serial homicide "problem."
Jenkins organizes his work into three main areas. The first addresses the reasons for the rising public concern for serial homicide and the role that political and bureaucratic interests played in defining and fostering the issue. The second looks at the popular cultural imagery as depicted particularly in the mass media and how mythic the image became, and how influenced it was by the Justice Department. The third discusses how the issue was used by political [End page 87] interest groups to legitimate their ideological perspectives.

Jenkins argues that the popular assumption, particularly during the middle 1980s, that the threat of serial murder was very large and growing and that it required the expertise and coordination of a federal agency such as a special unit in the FBI to control it was grossly exaggerated and misinformed. The actual threat of victimization from serial killers is at most 1% of all U.S. homicides, or 200 deaths per year. The belief in its danger and the reactions of law enforcement, government, mass media, and various interest groups far outstripped its actual lethality. Why? Jenkins maintains that three major factors were involved in setting the serial killer panic in motion.

First, from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s there was an actual increase in the number of multiple murders compared to the previous three decades. The mass media in news, books, and television specials picked up on the famous cases, among them being Charles Manson, Charles Starkweather, Juan Corona, Dean Corll, Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz (Son of Sam), John Wayne Gacy, and Wayne Williams. True crime books, biographies, novels, television specials and movies were beginning to create a stereotype of the serial killer as a white male who tended to kill young women or young homosexual males.

Secondly, the Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU) of the Justice Department at the FBI Academy in Quantico Virginia began to develop a research project on violent offenders (The Criminal Personality Research Project). Robert Ressler led the interviews of incarcerated killers and multiple killers so that "profiles" could be drawn of murderers at large. From the early 1980s serial homicide was opportunistically seized upon by the BSU as a way to expand its bureaucratic, law enforcement operations and its influence on the public, the mass media and the higher reaches of government--the Congress and the executive branch. The Justice Department lobbied for the creation of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCACV) and the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP). The BSU was responsible for circulating an inaccurate statistic, 4,000 deaths per year from serial killers, that was quoted by legislators, activists, news media, popular writers and even academics. The figure was derived from Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) that police file along with other information collected in the UCR. The BSU considered serial murder to be the killing of four or more people over a period of time for no apparent rational reason, arbitrarily excluding economically, politically, or other common personal reasons. Any SHR reports in which there was an unknown suspect and many in which there was a stranger involved were wrongly considered motiveless and thus [End page 88] potentially serial murders. It was estimated that 20-25 percent of all homicides fell into these categories, hence the 4,000 victims figure. However, Jenkins contends that the BSU eventually knew that this statistic was grossly exaggerated. The Justice Department data indicated that were about 50-60 active serial killers in the population in a year and that, during their lifetimes, they would kill an average about 10 victims each. Despite their own data the BSU did not correct the misconceptions of the crisis proportions of serial murder but rather benefitted from the argument that an expansion of the agency to link information from various local police departments was necessary to control the crime.

Thirdly, the political climate of the 1980s was ripe for the creation of a moral panic. The New Right gained preeminence during the Reagan era. The retributivist perspective of justice supplanted the rehabilitationist perspective. There was a greater desire to use social control and punishment over education and treatment. The New Right ideology blamed an overly permissive, antifamily, areligious liberalism for the problems of society. Jenkins maintains that the stereotype of the serial killer as sex crazed, pedophilic and homosexual fit the New Right's image of all that was evil in the world, or what could happen if traditional culture was ignored. But it was not only the New Right that seized the mythic serial killer for its ideological purposes. The children's rights movement, popular crime writers, television and movie makers, feminists, African-American groups, and gay rights groups also used the stereotypical image for their own purposes. Despite the fact that serial killers are proportionately African-American, sometimes female, do not disproportionately attack women and children, and are quite unlikely, if ever, to have a cult motivation, groups continued to treat the stereotype as real. Ann Rule who used Ted Bundy as the prototype for all serial killers, testified in front of Congress as to the widespread and growing nature of the problem and was quoted in criminology texts on the profile of a serial killer which uncannily looked and acted exactly like Bundy. Activists concerned about kidnapped and exploited children grossly exaggerated the threat of serial killers to children. Geraldo Rivera spread a completely false image of the serial killers as satanic cultists. Some feminists argued that patriarchal social structure was responsible for the "fact" that there were virtually no female serial killers and that "most" serial killers attacked women. Serial killing was viewed as "femicide." Some African-American groups argued that serial killing was a bias crime, that virtually "no" serial killers were black and that when victims are black or poor the police are indifferent in their investigation. Similarly some gay activist groups argued that police were indifferent to homosexual victims because of a belief that the subculture is [End page 89] violent and sado-masochistic. Jenkins maintains that, while there are very valid points to some of these arguments, each political and economic group reinforced the panic and the stereotype of the serial killer. Despite the differences in their causes, most of the groups called for more law enforcement and more federal help in tracking and catching serial killers. Jenkins believes that this emphasis on social control plays into the hands of the New Right. Social problems such as serial murder then can be personalized as a battle between immoral, evil individuals and moral crusaders who control them, rather than as existing in a social system with economic and political inequities that may contribute to them, and may be corrected through structural change.

Jenkins uses a "contextual constructionist" perspective, that is one which not only analyzes the claims made by various groups attempting to define an issue, but also one which attempts to assess the relative veracity of the claims. To do this Jenkins sifts through archival, newspaper and secondary accounts of multiple murders over the last hundred years, finding periods that resemble our own from 1911-1915 and 1935-1941. He also traces the history of multiple murders in true-crime books, magazines and popular novels. His tracing of how the popular cultural stereotype of the multiple murderer achieved mythic proportions is superbly done.

However, some questions can be raised about the author's analysis. For all the criticism that is leveled at the Justice Department and the BSU it is ironic that the author accepts the official definition of serial homicide as his starting point. Jenkins does not detach himself from the conventional notions of what is "rational" or "irrational," nor what is irrational with a known victim versus an unknown victim. The BSU thinks that it can clearly make all these distinctions, but the researcher, particularly a constructionist, cannot take the categories for granted. Furthermore, criminologists, myself included, have advocated the criminalizing of corporations' actions when they lead to the preventible injuries and deaths of consumers and workers. Could not a corporation be accused of serial murder if it knowingly produces a defective car that burns several people to death, or willfully exposes workers to asbestos from which they develop incurable, lethal cancer. It would seem that the avoidance of these actions, which produce in reality more fatalities than the version of serial murder that the BSU is peddling, is critical to understanding the political dimension of the social construction of crime.

On other matters, Jenkins emphasizes the point that serial murder produces far less of a threat than other kinds of risks. While it is crucial to identify the exaggerations as he does so well in the book, the actual number of victims [End page 90] or deaths may be less important to people than the degree of perceived unfairness in the death. If one dies of old age or an accident it is part of life, of "normal" risks, but stranger crime is seen as universally unfair. Even if there are "only" 200 deaths per year from "serial killers" the consequences may be more profoundly felt than other deaths. A woman who falls down a flight of stairs may experience more physical injury and pain than a woman who is raped on a date, but there is little doubt who will bear greater psychological consequences.

Jenkins does not address the significance of the consequences of serial murder on the victims' family. More importantly he does not attempt to find what the public actually thinks of serial homicide as a problem. One of the ironies of the constructionist approach in this and other works is that the official definition of the problem is critiqued, but official and elite versions of the information are assumed to be uncritically absorbed by the public. Academics, activists, and officials may believe there exists a moral panic and may even obtain policy changes in government and law enforcement without much public concern or interest. Would not a constructionist want to know how salient this issue is to the public compared to the economy, health care, family violence, and other crimes? Again we cannot assume that official or conventional constructions are publicly adopted or believed. A survey of opinions might have bolstered Jenkins argument that a moral panic over serial killing indeed existed in the public.

My criticisms aside, this is a very important book. The author demonstrates how the growing menace of serial homicide was contrived out of very meager material, sensationalistic cases, and a federal law enforcement agency seeking to expand its purview. Jenkins convincingly shows how a social problem grows in the popular culture and becomes appropriated by political groups for their particular ideological purposes and interests. He also discusses how social control agencies gain in legitimacy and power by seizing on created fears. I recommend this book highly as a first-rate study of the social construction of serial homicide and intend to use it in my criminology classes.

Leo G. Barrile
Bloomsburg University
Department of Sociology and Social Work [End page 91]

References

Laws, J. L. (1977). Sexual scripts: The social construction of female sexuality. Hinsdale, IL: Dryden Press.
Latour, B. (1986). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Loseke, D. R. (1992). The battered woman and shelters: The social construction of wife abuse. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Pfohl, S. J. (1978). Predicting dangerousness: The social construction of psychiatric reality. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. [End page 92]

[sdreid]

The 100th anniversary of the Lenora Cohn murder is this coming Thursday. R.I.P. Lenora

[Pcdunn]

Memorial

The 100th anniversary of the Lenora Cohn murder is this coming Thursday. R.I.P. Lenora

That is very sad, indeed. I will try to post a few more links to articles about her case and the funeral the neighborhood put on for her. You will see what the book reviewer meant about these sort of cases attracting a lot of media attention...

[sdreid]

Interesting to think that it's possible that the victim of a 100 year old crime could possibly still be alive today had it not happened.

[Mayerling]

Apparently Leonore Cohn had a handful of short, grey hair. Which might narrow her killer's age group down somewhat. Putting it squarely in Albert Fish territory, hehehe.

Some articles, sorry if you already have them:

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9C01E6DD153EE033A25755C0A9639C946496D6CF

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9400E7DD1338E633A25757C0A9639C946496D6CF

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9B02E7DC1338E633A2575BC0A9639C946496D6CF

I doubt Cumonella had the language skills to pen any of those notes. I found a couple I hadn't seen before, in those articles.

They really damned well sound like Albert Fish though, same cockiness, taunting, cruelty. I'll go out on a limb here and say it'd be worth seriously checking out his general whereabouts in that particular year, keeping in mind that he also travelled between states a bit.

Hello Ausgirl,

You know, it's funny, but your reasonable suggestion of a possible link of Albert Fish to these murders reminded me of something that I put down on Wikipedia some time back. There is an article on a British murderess named "Louise Masset" who in 1900 was hanged for the 1899 murder of her young son Manfred (whose body was found in a lavatory in a train station in London). Masset had just taken him out of a private home care she paid for, claiming she was going away with him. Masset was unmarried, but was having a love affair with a younger man, and the police and authorities build up a case that she killed Manfred because the younger man did not want to marry a woman with a growing child.

Masset always claimed she was not the killer, but had just given her son into the custody of two women who promised to take of the boy and possibly find a family for his adoption. The British police claimed they looked into this but found no evidence to substantiate the story. And the accumulated evidence made Masset look like the likely killer.

Most criminal historians support this view, but I have a doubt and mentioned it in the Wikipedia article. A few years after Masset's execution, two baby farmers who worked as partners, Annie Walters and Annie Sacks, were tried and executed for murders of children. That was in 1903. I keep wondering if they might have been the ones who killed Manfred - that Louise had given the boy to these two thinking that it would benefit her and Manfred. I admit though that this is a minority view.

Jeff

[Ginger]

Masset always claimed she was not the killer, but had just given her son into the custody of two women who promised to take of the boy and possibly find a family for his adoption. [...] A few years after Masset's execution, two baby farmers who worked as partners, Annie Walters and Annie Sacks, were tried and executed for murders of children. That was in 1903. I keep wondering if they might have been the ones who killed Manfred - that Louise had given the boy to these two thinking that it would benefit her and Manfred. I admit though that this is a minority view.

It is admittedly a most odd case. Killing the child outright and leaving the dead body in a public restroom seems out of character for professional baby farmers, but may have been the cheapest way to proceed had they been sure of not being seen or traced. At the same time, there seems no good reason for Masset to have murdered the boy, and even had she done so, most assuredly no reason for her to have simply abandoned the body where it was sure to be found.

It's interesting that the child's body was found at Dalston Junction about 6:30pm when Masset left London Bridge Station for Brighton at 7:22pm. She obviously had the time to make the trip from London Bridge to Dalston, commit the murder, then return to London Bridge for her evening train to Brighton. If she were intent on murder, though, why would she arrive at London Bridge so early in the afternoon (about 1:30pm), then spend time sitting with the child and chatting up the waiting room attendant while (as she said) 'waiting to meet someone'?

I'd be interested to know how the body was identified. I get the impression that Masset was the one who stepped forward and identified it, although it's not clear from the newspapers.

In the end, what turns me against Masset is that the child's clothes were found in a parcel discarded in Brighton station. I can't see any innocent explanation for that.

[Ginger]

Murderpedia has a quite thorough account of the Masset case, together with a picture of the victim taken on the day of his murder, as well as one taken post-mortem. He appears to have been beaten about the head rather more severely than the accounts suggest.

http://murderpedia.org/female.M/m/masset-louise.htm

[Pcdunn]

Some more links on the Lenora Cohn case & funeral

"Little Girl for Whose Slayer 10,000 Policemen are Seeking" -- caption above picture of Lenora Cohn, in The Evening World, March 20, 1915, page 1, image 1.

SEE ALSO, same paper and page: "'Ripper's' Victim Slain by Lunatic, Autopsy Shows / Reveals Assault Preceded Killing of Five-Year-Old Lenore Cohn / Mother is Desolate / To Devote Life to Aiding Hunt for Murderer of East Side Child."

Link:

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030193/1915-03-20/ed-1/seq-1/#date1=1915&index=2&rows=20&words=Cohn+COHN&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=New+York&date2=1915&proxtext=Cohn&y=0&x=0&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1

"Police Silent on New Ripper Clew / Intimate Find of Blood-stained Clothing in House where Child was Slain / Crowds at Funeral of Little Victim" -- from the New York Tribune, March 23, 1915, page 5.

SEE ALSO, same paper and page: "His Child Missed Cohn Girl's Fate / Father of Anna Quinn Tells of Attack Which Detective Dismissed."

Link:

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1915-03-23/ed-1/seq-5/#date1=1915&index=0&rows=20&words=Child+FUNERAL&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=New+York&date2=1915&proxtext=child%27s+funeral&y=0&x=0&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1

[sdreid]

Thanks Pcdunn, that's the first picture I've seen of Lenora.

[Pcdunn]

Thanks Pcdunn, that's the first picture I've seen of Lenora.

You're welcome, of course. Her name is sometimes spelt as "Lennora" and sometimes as "Lenore", which I put down to reporters' errors.

Apparently the finding of the blood-stained clothing in the same house led the police to concentrate on the building's tenants, especially Lenora's immediate family. Early interviews included the aunt and uncle, and a servant in their employ. I think they hadn't really thought much of "stranger danger" at that time.