Read Online Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of by Harold Schechter - Free Book Online Page B

for her murder. He was acquitted for lack of evidence but promptly indicted for bigamy, found guilty, and sentenced to two years in Sing Sing. By the time he emerged, his first wife, Polly, had become the central figure in the country’s most sensational crime.
    S ITUATED ON THE North Shore of Staten Island, Granite Village (later rechristened Graniteville) derived its name from the extensive rock quarry that operated nearby. In 1843, the entire community consisted of “one church, a tavern, several stores of various kinds, and about forty or fifty private dwellings.” One of the latter was home to Polly Bodine’s parents, Abraham and Mary Houseman. Another—“a pretty cottage scarcely more than a stone’s throw away”—belonged to her brother, George.
    A “big, bluff, good-natured” schooner captain, George had a pretty young wife, the former Emeline Van Pelt, who had borne him a daughter within a year of their marriage. Partly because Emeline’s health had been fragile since the baby’s arrival—and partly because he distrusted banks and kept all his savings in his house—George was reluctant to leave his wife alone when he was away at sea. To keep her company during his absences, he often relied on his sister Polly. During the winter months, the three females—Polly, Emeline, and baby Eliza—slept in a corner of the kitchen near the stove.
    On the afternoon of Sunday, December 24, 1843—while George was heading home from a month-long voyage to Virginia—a young neighbor of the Houseman’s, fourteen-year-old Matilda O’Rourke, paid a Christmas Eve visit to Emeline. She had been there only a short time when Polly arrived to spend the night with her sister-in-law. Before Matilda left—as she would later testify—she saw Emeline place her silver teaspoons, dessert spoons, and sugar tongs in a cabinet and “twice take her gold watch out of a drawer to learn the time.” Matilda also observed that the baby, then twenty months old, “had on the string of coral beads and gold locket which it usually wore upon its neck.”
    A T AROUND SIX o’clock the next morning, Christmas Day, Polly returned to her parents’ home from her overnight stay with Emeline. Though her voluminous clothes kept her condition concealed from the world, she was eight months pregnant at the time and possessed of a ravenous appetite.
    She devoured a substantial breakfast. Then—telling her mother that she was off to spend the holiday with George Waite at his apothecary shop in lower Manhattan—she put on her cloak and bonnet, loaded a large wicker basket with some pies, and headed outside again.
    As she emerged from the house, she spotted a neighbor boy named John Thompson pounding on the kitchen door of Emeline’s house. “If you knock much harder, you’ll knock that door down,” Polly called to him. The boy explained that he had been sent by his ailing grandmother to borrow some liver pills from Emeline. Polly told him that Emeline had gone to spend Christmas with her parents, the Van Pelts, and would not be home all day. As John turned to leave, he saw Polly walk to the corner and board the stagecoach to the ferry.

    A FEW HOURS later, at roughly 9:00 a.m., the ferry docked in Manhattan, where Polly was met by her sixteen-year-old son, Albert, who worked as a live-in apprentice at George Waite’s pharmacy. Albert took the wicker basket from his mother and the two proceeded toward the store. On their way, they stopped at a milliner’s, where, for 50¢, Polly purchased a hood and a green veil.
    When they arrived at Waite’s place on Canal Street, Albert immediately went to the basement to finish stacking some boxes, leaving Polly and her lover alone in the store. A while later, the boy came back upstairs and found the two adults deep in conversation. Handing Albert some money, Waite told him to go out and buy a leg of mutton for Christmas dinner. Albert expressed surprise. Waite—as the boy later testified—“had never