JUSTICE STORY: Skeleton found on upstate NY mountain leads to arrest of serial killer-rapist
The bones were picked clean, weather-beaten, and so small that the boy who found them on April 14, 1922, thought they were the remains of a large dog.
Later, the boy’s father climbed up to the spot near the top of Cheesecote Mountain, near Haverstraw, N.Y., and discovered a human skull.
The coroner determined that the victim was female, about 20, and less than 5 feet tall. A jagged rock that apparently crushed her skull lay next to the pile of bones.
Mary Hamilton, New York City’s famous policewoman, was assigned to investigate. She recalled a case in which another officer — Grant Williams — helped to identify a victim by reconstructing a face from an unidentified skull.
As in the earlier case, Williams used plasticine — modeling clay — to reconstruct the head and features. One feature offered a surprising clue. The girl had a receding chin, considered at the time to be a mark of “mental deficiency.”
This detail led investigators to the Letchworth Village Home for feeble-minded girls, which housed about 3,000 inmates at the foot of Cheesecote Mountain. During the past year, eight girls had gone missing. All but one — Lillian White, 24, of Brooklyn—had returned. A photo of the girl looked alarmingly like the face that Williams had fashioned.
Hamilton tracked down White’s nearest relative, a sister who lived in Brooklyn. She said that Lillian’s final letter, which came in September, told them she was pregnant and planned to marry the baby’s father, a Letchworth attendant named James J. Crawford.
This sister then had the grim task of viewing the plasticine head.
“It’s Lillian,” she gasped and fainted.
Interviews at Letchworth revealed details of the love story. A nearby cave, which Crawford furnished with blankets, cooking utensils, and other comforts of home, was their rendezvous spot.
As romances often do, the affair cooled off around September 2021. That was when a nurse—Ruby Howe—came to work at Letchworth, and Crawford turned his attention toward her.
Soon after Howe arrived, White vanished.
In March 1922, the institution’s superintendent accused Crawford of theft. Crawford quickly took off, leaving Howe, now his wife, behind. She was pregnant.
Howe left Letchworth a month after her husband, and shortly before White’s skeleton was discovered.
Police found Howe and her baby in Saco, Maine. She told them that her husband’s real name was Harry A. Kirby and that he had deserted her shortly after they arrived in Saco.
After that, the case went cold for three years, until on May 20, 1925 the “Biddeford-Saco Journal” carried this succinct front-page headline: “WOMAN SHOT, HOME BURNED, NIECE STOLEN.”
Around 2 a.m. that morning, a fire broke out at the summer cottage of Emma Towns, 60, at Lake Maranacook, near Winthrop, Maine. Her niece, Aida Hayward, 35, was staying with her.
Winthrop firefighters put out the blaze. There was no sign of any bodies in the charred wreckage.
But behind a nearby cottage, neighbors found Towns bleeding from two bullet wounds. She was alive and able to talk. She would later recover.
Towns said she and her niece had gone into Winthrop for the evening and returned to the cottage around midnight. As they opened the door and before they could turn on the lights, two bullets came from inside the cottage, hitting Towns.
“Your aunt is already dead,” she recalled a male voice saying. Then, later, she heard crackling and smelled smoke and dragged herself out of the burning building.
“He took her away,” Towns said when asked what happened to her niece.
Police, volunteers, aviators, and police dogs failed to find a clue.
Four days later, police received a tip that led them to Hayward’s corpse. She had been raped and strangled.
The body was in a cottage owned by a woman who had allowed an acquaintance to stay there while he was working at a nearby job site. His name was Harry Kirby.
She happened to have a photo, which police and newspapers widely distributed.
On May 23, a landlady in Newbury, Mass., glanced at her morning paper and realized, to her horror, that a man who had rented a room in her home was a dangerous fugitive. She immediately blocked his escape by piling furniture against the door and called for help. Three deputies arrived promptly and arrested her boarder.
In custody, Kirby first insisted he found Hayward’s body in the woods and brought it home for safekeeping. He stuck to that far-fetched tale for a few days before he confessed.
He said that he was drunk and had broken into Towns’ cottage looking for money. When the women returned unexpectedly, he shot Towns and kidnapped Hayward and brought her to his cottage. A day later, he raped and strangled his captive.
There was talk of bringing him back to New York for another look at White’s murder but that went nowhere. On Sept. 8, Kirby pleaded guilty to arson. But he recanted his confessions to Hayward’s murder and the attempted murder of her aunt. His trials for these crimes were set to start on Sept. 15.
A day before the trial was to begin, Kirby penned a letter to the sheriff.
“I have thought the matter over and have decided to sacrifice my life to the state of Maine rather than plead guilty to a brutal crime of which I am not wholly guilty.”
Later that day, guards discovered Kirby in his cell, bleeding from a slashed wrist and near death.
In his suicide note, he said that if his wife did not want his body, he would like to offer his remains to science.
Kirby was buried a few days later in a pauper’s grave. A few cemetery workers were there to witness the event.
