Ep. 12 The Deadly Doll Collector
This is the astonishing tale of a most peculiar killer-- with a peculiar penchant for teddy bears.
Shortly before six o'clock on the morning of February 23, 1929, James Boyle of Newark, New Jersey, turned his car off the main highway to take a shortcut to the town of Cranford. He had traveled just a short distance when he saw flames on the snowy ground off the edge of the road. He pulled over for a closer look, and what he saw chilled the blood in his veins-- the burning object was the body of a woman.
Boyle raced into Cranford to report the ghastly sight he had seen, and Chief of Police James Hennessey decided to drive out and have a look for himself, convinced that Boyle's eyes had been playing tricks on him. But the chief of police had no difficulty finding the object-- it was still burning when he came upon the unfortunate woman on the side of the road. When other officers arrived, the had to roll the smoldering, smoking flesh in the snow before they could make an examination.
Although the body was severely charred, they could tell it was a middle-aged woman, her brown hair flecked with gray, wearing an inexpensive black dress, a coat trimmed with fake fur and cheap jewelry. Whomever had set the fire had doused the woman with gasoline before striking the match.
An autopsy was performed in Elizabeth, New Jersey, by Assistant County Physician George W. Horre and discovered that the victim had been shot in the head before being set ablaze. The bullet had entered at the top of the skull, coursing through her body until it came to rest near the eighth left rib. Horre was confident that, despite the damage to the body, a speedy positive identification could be made. The victim had extensive dental work, a crooked ring finger on her right hand, and her leather shoes, stamped with the name of a St. Louis manufacturer, contained arch supports of an unusual design. Plenty of clues for detectives to go on. Yet, after four days, authorities remained stumped over the woman's identity.
Union County Prosecutor Abe David knew that he needed outside help, and so he turned to the world-famous Pinkerton Detective Agency. It was the assistant superintendent of the New York City Pinkerton office, William A. Wagner, who took on the assignment. Wagner's first step was to take the dress to a local tailor, who determined that the dress had been altered by a professional seamstress. Next, he consulted with a dentist and showed him photographs of the woman's bridgework. he learned that it had been performed by a competent practitioner; it wasn't the best work he had ever seen, but it wasn't the worst. Finally, Detective Wagner turned his attention to the woman's shoes, a pair of black patent leather pumps. Fortunately, the Pinkertons had a branch in St. Louis.
As it turned out, the manufacturer didn't ship that particular style of shoe to New Jersey. Based on what remained of the serial number, the Pinkertons were able to narrow it down 36 possible pairs, but there was no record of where those 36 pairs of pumps had been distributed. After giving the case some thought, Detective Wagner made an educated guess that the the woman had come from Pennsylvania. He based this theory on the fact that the woman's features were Slavic in origin, and that the shoes were of a style particularly popular with immigrant women who lived among the coalfields of the Keystone State.
Armed with photographs, Detective Wagner and Detective Michael J. Tevnan of Union County visited dozens of mining towns in the coal regions of Pennsylvania, only to return empty-handed. Their only hope was that a relative would come forward in search of a missing middle-aged Slavic woman with a fondness for fake fur and jewels. Fortunately, this is exactly what happened.
On April 9, two women from Mercer County, Pennsylvania, Mrs. Dodds and Mrs. Straub, went to Chief of Police Harry Barber of Greenville in search of a woman they knew as Mildred Mowry. According to the two women, Mrs. Mowry-- a 45-year-old widow of Polish ancestry-- had eked out a living as a seamstress in Greenville after her husband's death in the mines ten years earlier. Mildred was thrifty, and she squirreled away the money she'd received from her husband's insurance, waiting for her luck to change.
And Mildred's fortunes changed in 1928, when she responded to a newspaper advertisement from a matrimonial agency and began corresponding with a handsome, middle-aged man named Dr. Richard Campbell. With the giddiness of a schoolgirl, Midred Mowry introduced her friends, Mrs. Dodds and Mrs. Straub, to the slim, distinguished-looking gentleman who claimed to operate a sanitarium in New York City. Never did her friends question why a man so cultured and educated as Dr. Campbell should fall in love with a Polish widow from the coal fields, and no objections were raised when Mildred and Richard Campbell left for Elkton, maryland, in August of 1928 to get married.
Neither were her friends overly concerned when Mildred returned to Greenville two months later and explained that Dr. Campbell had been called upon to provide his surgical skills to patients out West. He told her to return to Mercer County and wait for him to return. Months passed without the return of Dr. Campbell, and only then did Mrs. Dodds and Mrs. Straub sense that something was wrong with the picture. On February 1, 1929, Mildred suddenly left town. Apparently, Dr. Campbell had come back for her. Aside from a letter which Mrs. Dodds had received on Feb. 18, a letter sent from 607 Hudson Street in New York, nobody heard from Mildred again.
Chief of Police Barber searched the room Mildred had occupied in Greenville and found several letters from Richard Campbell, as well as a copy of thier marriage cerfificate, which listed Campbell's address as 3707 Yosemite Avenue in Baltimore. Chief Barber checked with the bank, and, sure enough, Mildred had withdrawn her life's savings right before she left town. He also checked with Baltimore City officials and, just as he had expected, there was no such address as 3707 Yosemite Avenue in Baltimore-- only a vacant lot. The return address on most the letters he had found inside Mildred's room were traced to a rented mailbox in an office building on 5th Avenue. Others had been mailed from a 42nd Street address.
Being familiar with the story of the burned body near Cranford, Chief Barber got in touch with Pinkerton detective William Wagner. Wagner interviewed workers at the New York office building and was told that Dr. Campbell's picked up his mail regularly. He had to, as his mailbox was overflowing with letters from women all over the East Coast. The detective also checked out the 42nd Street address, another office renting mailboxes, and learned that a woman had shown up there on February 10 in search of her husband. The secretary couldn't help her, and gave her the address of a YWCA hotel where she might find temporary accomodations. The address she was given was 607 Hudson Street, the same address from which Mildred had mailed her letter to Mrs. Dodds. Mildred had checked out of the hotel on February 20, unaware that she had less than three days to live.
Through tax records, Detective Wagner discovered that a house adjacent to the vacant lot in Baltimore had once been owned by a man named Henry Colin Campbell, who had since moved to Westfield, New Jersey. Henry C. Campbell, as it turned out, was a married father of 4 children, reportedly with a high-paying job as an engineer. But was this the same man as Dr. William Campbell? There was only one way to find out.
Wagner, along with County Detective Michael Tevnan and Assistant Prosecutor John Walsh drove to the Westfield address and found the house abandoned. However, a quick trip to the post office revealed that Campbell's mail was being forwarded to an apartment on Madison Avenue in Elizabeth. When they knocked on the door, it was the real Mrs. Campbell who answered. They were told that Henry was expected to return home around 8 o'clock. The men returned to their car and waited, and when they saw their man approaching his apartment on Madison Avenue, they made their move. Less than 90 minutes later, they had extracted a full confession which left them speechless.
Dr. Campbell was born Henry Colin Close in Dunellen, New Jersey, and had served time in prisons across the country for forgery, embezzlement and bigamy before making a name for himself in the field of engineering. In 1926, he quit his legitimate job and used $40,000 of this honestly-earned money to try his hand at real estate, but failed miserably. He moved his family out of the fashionable suburbs and into a small apartment, and not knowing what to do next, he instinctively fell back on his old familiar source of income. He thought he was in the clear after swindling Mildred Mowry out of her life's savings, but after she had managed to track him down, his plans had to change. As she slept in the front seat of his car in the early morning of Feb. 23, 1929, he put the gun to her head at point blank range and pulled the trigger.
But one thing Campbell was unable, or unwilling, to explain was the strange collection of dolls the police had found in the private den inside his apartment-- an entire room was strewn with porcelain dolls and teddy bears. Police also found a strongbox, and when it was opened they found even more teddy bears inside. But was this just one more of Campbell's ill-advised moneymaking ventures? Or some twisted and demented fetish?
Since none of the dolls and stuffed animals were particularly rare or expensive, psychologists leaned toward the latter explanation, and for a good reason. Throughout history, there have been many examples of murderers with the same type of infantile fetishism: Chicago's Dickie Loeb, who, with his partner Nathan Leopold, kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924, was also a collector of teddy bears. The notorious 15th century French serial killer of young boys, Gilles de Leval, the Baron of Rais, had a penchant for puppets, while Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, the serial poisoner of prostitutes-- kept his favorite dolls locked in a dresser drawer. Psychologists and criminologists have a name for this-- they call it a Cytherea Complex, after the doll which captivated the obsessed protagonist of Joseph Hergesheimer's 1922 novel, Cytherea.
At the time of his arrest, it was believed that Henry Colin Campbell may have been the killer of Margaret Brown, whose burned body was found in 1928 on a stretch of highway only a few miles from Cranford, though no attempt was made to prove that Campbell was the guilty party. When asked about the possibility, Prosecutor Abe David issued the now famous reply, "No matter how many crimes a man commits, you can execute him only once." And Campbell was executed only once, in the electric chair on April 17, 1930. Yet, it was not so much his crime, but his secret doll collection, which secured Henry Colin Campbell his 15 minutes of infamy.
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