Nothing Is Strange with You: The Life and Crimes of Gordon Stewart Northcott

By James Jeffrey Paul

A young man kidnaps his own nephew and makes him his servant and sex slave. He abducts young boys, has his way with them, and, if they know too much, kills them. He forces his nephew to participate in his crimes and to consign these little victims, sometimes still living, to their graves.
His father is afraid of his own son. His son mocks and abuses him, falsely accuses him of incest and child abuseand still he supports his son.
His mother loves her boy and will do anything to help himeven commit murder.
The Gordon Stewart Northcott casea part of which is fictionalized in the major new Clint Eastwood film CHANGELING, starring Angelina Jolieis still, eight decades later, one of the most nightmarish in American criminal annals. This booknearly two decades in the research and writingtells the whole story for the first time.


Disclaimer: It should be noted that the film CHANGELING is not based upon this book, nor this book upon it. Both are entirely separate works, and one had no influence upon the others creation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 11, 2008
• ISBN: 9781462803590

James Jeffrey Paul

JAMES JEFFREY PAUL was born in 1963. He is a native of Orlando, Florida and a graduate of Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His play about Jack the Ripper and his last victim, Miller’s Court, has been produced professionally and is available as an audio CD from Actors Scene Unseen. He spent nearly two decades researching and writing Nothing is Strange With You. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina

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Copyright © 2008 by James Jeffrey Paul.

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Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

For MT

This Book’s Truest Believer

And For My Dad

With Love

missing image file

Stewart with feminine, painted lips, courtesy of photo retouching

by the Los Angeles Evening Herald. Hearst Corporation

PROLOGUE

PAINTED LIPS

The story was beyond comprehension.

On a tiny chicken farm in Riverside County, California, a young man had established a terrible despotism. He had kidnapped his own teenaged nephew and forced the boy to wait on him hand and foot. He would beat his nephew regularly and savagely with any weapon that came to hand. Whenever the urge took possession of him, he would sodomize the boy, thus committing incest as well as what was termed the most infamous crime against nature. The young man would regularly prowl the streets and byways of southern California, looking for small boys. He would bring them back to his chicken ranch, have his way with them, and then—most of the time—let them go. Sometimes, if they knew too much and had stayed at the ranch for too long, he would hit them over the head with an ax and kill them. He would force his nephew to hit the boys with an ax as well, and then to help him consign the children—sometimes still living—to their graves.

But there was more. The boy’s doting mother—who had apparently never harmed a flea in her entire life—loved her son so much that she helped him commit his crimes. When her son wanted to shoot one of his victims, she advised him that using an ax made less noise. She told her son and grandson that they must all strike a blow in this affair so that if they were caught, they would share equally in the guilt. When her son wanted to kill a mother and father so that he could enslave their sons (a project that failed), she helped him every step of the way.

When the young man was finally caught, he presented a bizarre picture to the public—or rather, a bewildering kaleidoscope of pictures. He was a perfectly normal—and presentable-looking young man, but his face constantly changed. One moment it wore an insufferably smug grin; the next a thoughtful, mature look; the next a childish smirk that some people found girlish; the next the truly terrifying, hollow-eyed look of a predator who has scented blood. His behavior, too, was similarly malleable. One moment he would huffily deny his crimes and assert that he had been framed, and the next make confessions so lurid and bizarre they were almost laughable. He could dissolve into hysterics or adopt an aura of learning and dignity beyond his years. He defended himself in court (for the most part), and adopted a double-pronged defense—he was innocent, yet crazy. He blamed it all on his father, a harried, frightened, cowed person, claiming that this harmless-seeming old man had sodomized him when he was young. Furthermore, he alleged, he was the product of an incestuous union between his father and his older sister! This was an obvious lie, but his mother backed him up on it—and the father continued to love and assist the wife and son who had libeled him so shamelessly.

The young man—whose name was Gordon Stewart Northcott—scarcely seemed human; perhaps he wasn’t. He was covered with body hair, a seeming throwback to man in his primordial, bestial state, and so they called him the Hairy Ape Man and the Hairy Ape Boy.

At any rate, the young man’s paper-thin bravado did not last. When Stewart was taken to the gallows for his crimes, he dissolved into hysterics and asked for a blindfold—the only time in the history of San Quentin Prison that a prisoner had walked to the scaffold blindfolded. The mother, Sarah Louise Northcott, served a decade in prison for her role in one of her son’s crimes, then lived out her days in pastoral obscurity with the husband she had betrayed. The nephew, Sanford Clark, who had been subjected to treatment befitting a Nazi or Soviet concentration camp, vanished into obscurity, seemingly condemned to a lifetime of terrible memories, and nothing else.

Such was the story, and men struggled to understand it. They had to make sense of it—but how?

Society offered them several choices.

In the preceding century or two, science had made extraordinary breakthroughs. It seemed as if scientists could understand and change everything—including human nature. In the early years of the last century, the science of eugenics was incredibly popular. Most of man’s ills could be improved, eugenicists said, if science could regulate man’s breeding habits: salvation through selective reproduction, insuring that only morally and intellectually fit babies would emerge from their mothers’ wombs. Criminals were victims of their genetic inheritance, throwbacks to man in his earlier, primitive state.¹ Other scientists and thinkers did not go that far. They propounded the compromise notion that man’s nature and actions were determined by a combination of his genetic inheritance and the circumstances of his environment. Clarence Darrow, the great progressive thinker and criminal defense attorney, held this view. In 1924, when two wealthy and intellectually gifted young Chicagoans named Leopold and Loeb kidnapped and murdered a young boy for the hell of it, and to prove Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Superman, Darrow defended the youths, presenting them as victims of genetic malfunction and dysfunctional home environments. The judge who presided at the boys’ sentencing hearing was moved by Darrow’s plea and spared them the death sentence, but (so he said) solely because of their youth, not their attorney’s defense strategy.²

This was a compelling philosophy, one that seemingly explained a societal plague. The Leopold and Loeb case helped get the American public and mental health professionals talking about motiveless murder, a catchy but meaningless oxymoron for those murders committed not for conventional motives, but for the sheer pleasure of killing. Contrary to what many people think, the phenomenon is not new—in the first decades of the last century, there was a veritable epidemic of such crimes, and not just in America. In the 1970s and 1980s, a new and even bigger epidemic of multiple murder would break out, and as Philip Jenkins explains in his classic book Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) would greatly exaggerate this threat and posit itself and its army of so-called criminal profilers as the only solution. The FBI’s efforts brought it a pile of federal dollars and an avalanche of publicity—and the public precious little.³

Thanks to the Bureau, however, another catchy phrase—serial killers—entered the popular vocabulary. (The phrase, or something similar, had been in existence since the 1960s.)⁴

Gordon Stewart Northcott represented a new and most terrible addition to the roster of motiveless murderers. Perhaps Darrow’s theory applied to him. Perhaps he too was a victim of his genetics and environment. After all, he was allegedly the product of an incestuous union—that wasn’t true, but never mind—and he had an overly loving and protective mother. And if the American public feared one thing more than motiveless murderers in the early decades of the twentieth century, it was the domineering, overprotective mother.

As Western society progressed and became more affluent, more oriented toward the individual and less bound by traditional societal arrangements, a slowly-growing feminist movement sprang up that, by the 1920s in America, was beginning to bear fruit. The public was anxious about this new, unorthodox development—but then it was anxious about the traditional family structure, too. The emerging science of psychoanalysis warned the public about the dangers that could be wrought by the Mother, that icon of Victorian thinking. As Ann Jones noted in her seminal book Women Who Kill, By mid-century psychiatrist Marynia Farnham and writer Ferdinand Lundberg, warning readers that [Adolf] Hitler was his mother’s son, could identify four kinds of bad mothers: the rejecting, the overprotective, the dominating, and the overaffectionate. All of them ruined their sons… The overaffectionate mother produced ‘sissies’ or ‘passive-homosexual males,’ while the rejecting, overprotective, and dominating mothers ‘produced the delinquents, the difficult behavior problem children’ and ‘some substantial percentage of criminals.’ ‘Momism’ had become a major social problem, and Mom, when not a criminal herself, the mother of criminals.⁵

Literature as well as science railed against this terrifying specter. In one of the most famous American plays of the 1920s, Sidney Howard’s The Silver Cord, a victimized daughter-in-law assails her husband’s mother: You belong to a type that’s very common in this country, Mrs. Phelps—a type of self-centered, self-pitying, son-devouring tigress, with unmentionable proclivities suppressed on the side… Talk about cannibals! You and your kind beat any cannibals I’ve ever heard of! And what makes you doubly deadly and dangerous is that people admire you and your kind. They actually admire you! You professional mothers!⁶

Stewart’s mother Louise would, at first or second glance, seem to be an example of Momism taken to its nightmare extreme. It was whispered very loudly that she had dressed Stewart up like a girl and treated him as such until he was practically an adult. As we will see, however, Louise’s maternal sins were of a more passive—and perhaps more damaging-nature. Yet who could blame the public for thinking otherwise? Louise had produced a son who not only murdered children, but was a certifiable pervert.

And therein lies the third reason why this story resonated so with the public. Modern mental health professionals distinguish between the homosexual and the pedophile, even the pedophile who prefers children of his own sex. But to the popular mind in the 1920s (and even to some extent today), the two were the same. And by the late 1920s, the homosexual had become an increasingly public figure.

As the pioneering studies of Graham Robb and George Chauncey (among others) have demonstrated, Victorian-era Europeans and Americans may not have openly discussed homosexuality, but they knew it existed, and the effeminate homosexual and the mannish lesbian were recognized social types.⁷ By the 1920s, the liberalization of society and the advent of psychoanalysis had loosened tongues, and people began to discuss the topic with an almost comic eagerness. Novelists and dramatists leaped aboard the bandwagon and produced a stream of works on the subject that, eight decades later, has become a veritable flood. These works taught a clear lesson: Homosexuals were Nature’s mistakes, persons of one sex trapped in a body of the opposite sex. The homosexual was an effeminate man, the lesbian a mannish woman.

The type-tale of this genre was the British writer Radclyffe Hall’s bestselling 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness, in which the heroine, a congenital, mannish invert named Stephen Gordon, suffers mightily from her affliction: That night she stared at herself in the glass; and even as she did so she hated her body with its muscular shoulders, its small compact breasts, and its slender flanks of an athlete. All her life she must drag this body of hers like a monstrous fetter imposed on her spirit. This strangely ardent yet sterile body that must worship yet never be worshipped in return by the creature of its adoration… Oh, poor and most desolate body! . . . But she loved, and loving groped for the God who had fashioned her, even unto this bitter loving.⁸ In another work of the period, Blair Niles’s 1931 novel Strange Brother, the lead character, a tortured young man named Mark, laments to his female friend June, We are the modern witches—that’s what we are! . . . It’s as though I had the body of a man and the psychology of a woman! I’m what you might call a half-man.⁹

According to some, Stewart acted and behaved in a perfectly normal manner; according to others—some of those who chronicled his story, at least—he was a kind of androgynous freak, a medley of bizarre effeminate mannerisms, a girl in everything except (perhaps) gender. Whether or not Stewart actually behaved that way is open to some debate, but it didn’t matter. He had to act that way, and so the media, literally, superimposed a pair of painted lips on his face.

Journalists loved Stewart’s angular, striking, malleable features, and displayed them prominently in their newspapers. On 1 December 1928, on the third page of the Los Angeles Evening Herald, a photo appeared that, the paper claimed, revealed The Face of the ‘Ape Man.’ The caption claimed the photo strikingly depicts the face of Northcott, with eyes soulful, features finely chiseled, lips delicately molded and pursed like a girl’s, and hair sleekly combed. Offering two medical and social stereotypes for the price of one, the caption-writer went on, But this wistful face masks a heart that is the heart of an ‘ape man,’ according to captors at whom Northcott raged.

Stewart’s lips in this photo are indeed delicately molded and pursed like a girl’s—because a pair of painted, feminine lips has been superimposed over his actual lips.

Gordon Stewart Northcott’s story reveals much about the scientific and social theories—and prejudices—of his era. But it also reveals the limitations of those theories and shows how they were superimposed over the actual facts, distorting them, keeping the public from understanding them clearly.

Stewart’s body was covered with hair; criminals were evolutionary throwbacks; therefore Stewart was an Ape Man. Stewart was a pedophile; therefore he must be a homosexual; homosexuals were effeminate; therefore any feminine mannerisms that Stewart displayed must be very effeminate. Mothers made their sons perverts and criminals; therefore Stewart’s mother had made her son a pervert and a criminal. She had to have raised him as a girl and dressed him in girls’ clothing; how else was a homosexual made?

All of these theories are like the painted lips that someone superimposed on Stewart’s picture—they impede a clear view of this fascinating, repellent, troubling man and his acts. How much better it is to look at all of his actual faces, and try to craft a composite portrait. His is the classic story of the transgressor, the man who chooses to do evil. We cannot know precisely just who he was and why he did what he did, as we cannot truly know any person or his actions. But looking at his story can cast some feeble light on the eternal problem of evil. It can leave us shaken with alternating waves of fascination, repulsion, and even a strange kind of pity, as such stories always do.

But this is not simply a tale of darkness. It is also the tale of a triumphant journey into the light.

History amply records the sufferings of young Sanford Clark, Stewart’s nephew, and the unbelievable cruelties that he suffered at his uncle’s hands. But as for what happened to him afterward, history has been silent—until now. Sanford’s life story—all of it—has been uncovered, and it is a heartening tale of one man’s triumph over suffering, a welcome and necessary counterpoint to the other, darker half of the story. After eight decades, it is past time for both stories to be told in full.

missing image file

Sarah Louise Northcott gets hysterical.

San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

missing image file

Cyrus George Northcott.

Herald-Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library

CHAPTER ONE

HE IS HER GOD

Attempting to reconstruct Gordon Stewart Northcott’s early life is complicated by the fact that he was a pathological liar. Riverside County Deputy District Attorney W. Earl Redwine may have been stretching matters when he called him the worst pathological liar in the United States,¹⁰ but not by much. When one adds to the equation Stewart’s endlessly doting and protective mother Louise, whose talent for lying nearly surpassed her son’s, then the truth of the story becomes like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, surrounded by a forest of seemingly impenetrable thorns.

To make matters worse, Stewart’s early life is poorly documented. A stray document here, an insightful comment hidden in a trial transcript or news story there—this is nearly all the material we have with which to reconstruct our subject’s early life. And most of that material, even when it involves such simple matters as birth dates, is fuzzy or contradictory. So what are these few, tenuous facts?

According to his death certificate, Stewart’s father, Cyrus George Northcott, was born on 18 September 1866 in London, Ontario, the son of a Canadian citizen named James Northcott and a woman of whose name there is no record.¹¹ Luckily, information about his parentage is available from another source. The death certificate of George’s brother Ephraim reveals that he (Ephraim) was born on 7 February 1870 in London, Ontario (George’s birthplace), and that his parents were Augustus Northcott and the former Caroline Marshall, both Canadian citizens.¹²

George grew up on a farm¹³, but beyond that, we know nothing about his early life except that he had at least one additional brother, Thomas, who became a doctor like Ephraim, and moved to New York.¹⁴

Information about the early life of Sarah Louise Northcott is even harder to come by. Louise’s death certificate, drawing on information that the senile woman gave to her physician before her death, claims that she was born on 26 August 1869 in Strathroy, Ontario, the daughter of William Carothorpe (possibly Cawthorpe) of Lincolnshire, England and Diana James of Devonshire, England.¹⁵ Since we do not know the names of the parishes in which Louise’s parents supposedly were born, it is virtually impossible to confirm this information.¹⁶ It is certainly not unheard of for a native-born Canadian to have British parents, but any information coming from a pathological liar—and a senile one at that—must automatically be viewed with suspicion.

Even the date of Louise’s birth is controversial. When she was deported back to the United States from Canada to stand trial, Louise apparently gave her birth date as 26 August 1867¹⁷, but this information comes from a newspaper story and may be a misprint. One report on Louise, prepared while she was serving a life sentence for murder, claims that she was born on 26 August 1868!¹⁸ Nevertheless, in her application for executive clemency of 26 March 1940, Louise says that she will be 71 years old in August,¹⁹ and the California Department of Penology’s Advisory Pardon Board stated in a document of 10 December 1940 that Louise was 71 years of age at the present time.²⁰ This correlation of dates from two different sources would seem to fix 1869 as the year of Louise’s birth.

Louise was not an only child. She had two sisters, but by the time of her arrest only one was still living—a widow now known as Rose Humphries, living in Strathroy.²¹

George and Louise met and were joined together early in life. Both fixed the year of their marriage as 1886, with Louise adding that the ceremony took place on 12 August.²² Within several years their first child, a daughter named Winnifred, was born. Louise said during Stewart’s trial that before Stewart came along years later, she gave birth to five children in all. Of these, only Winnifred and a boy named Willie survived. (One child apparently lived long enough to be named Gilbert.)²³ George would later tell the sad story of Willie’s short life, and of his wife’s desperate love for the boy: "Several years before her Boy [Stewart] was born she lost a six year old boy. Like most mothers she idolized her little boy lavished all her love lived for him he was her very life almost. [B]ut with all that she still loved me and her daughter I encouraged her in her love for her boy. When he died she very near went with him[.]"²⁴

Did Willie, and later Stewart, fill a void in Louise’s life? As her brother’s trial neared its end, Winnifred—despite the slanders that her mother and brother had heaped upon her—tried to help Stewart’s case by offering to reveal information about her family’s disputatious home life. As a news account paraphrased her 3,000-word telegram to Stewart’s former attorneys, George was a man of highly nervous temperament, of a violent, uncontrollable temper, and suffered from severe headaches. She said that he was an avowed atheist while Northcott’s mother came from a very religious stock, even religious to a point of fanaticism, very romantic, and had a most vivid imagination… When children were coming, [George and Louise] both rebelled at thoughts of [the] trouble and restrictions that parenthood would impose upon them. They were separated after five years of married life, but came together again when Willie, the second child, died of pneumonia. [Louise] was deranged at this time and cried continuously, ‘I will curse God and die! He has taken my baby!’ When later, Mrs. Northcott discovered that she was again an expectant mother, her rage knew no bounds. Her husband advised her to destroy the unborn child at all costs. This Mrs. Northcott tried to do by violent jumping, excessive horse riding, and many other measures. Two months before the child was born, Mrs. Northcott was kicked by her husband in a rage, which injured her spine. When Gordon was born his mother at first refused to look at him, then suddenly became obsessed in her devotion to him. He had everything he wanted and no discipline was ever exercised over him. The consequence was that the slightest discipline threw him into a paroxysm of rage. He lived in a world of dreams and was a world unto himself.

The Northcotts’ family motto might have been When one of us is in trouble, lie about everyone else. It is impossible to disprove Winnifred’s story, but it is impossible to give it much credence, either. It is perfectly plausible that Louise could have gone hysterical with grief or reacted to pressure with violent, seesawing mood swings, as future events will demonstrate. And the notion that she swung from excessive loathing of her new child to obsessive love for him is fascinating psychologically. But the tyrannical, violent father of Winnifred’s imagination bears no resemblance to the George who emerges from official records and news accounts. That man, whose actions can be verified, sometimes briefly erupted in anger at his son and his son’s accusers, but then he was under a horrible strain. Still, he did everything possible to save his son, although Stewart had accused him of molesting both of his surviving children and fathering a child from an incestuous union. He displayed an almost doglike passivity, allowing his son (and to a lesser extent, his wife) to dominate him completely. And when he did venture to criticize his son, as we shall see, he put his life in jeopardy.

Perhaps Stewart should have the final word on this notion. He reacted to Winnifred’s story with the comment, She’s crazy, and threw her telegram onto the floor.²⁵

As with so much of the Northcott family history, the date of Stewart’s arrival is a matter of dispute. At the time of his trial, a record of his birth could not be found in the Saskatchewan Archives.²⁶ His death certificate lists his date of birth as 9 November 1907—and, incidentally, lists Cyrus Northcott and Winnifred Clark as his parents.²⁷ However, Stewart’s prosecutors seemed to possess documentation that he was born in 1906; in his opening statement, Earl Redwine described Stewart as a young man twenty-two years of age. He was born in Canada at the town of Bladworth in the province of Saskatchewan.²⁸ Later on, one of the prosecutors would let slip the following bit of information while trying to break down Louise’s assertion that she was not Stewart’s mother, and hadn’t even been present at his birth:

When and where was he [Stewart] born?

He was born in Canada, Louise said.

In what province?

Saskatchewan.

And when?

In November.

Ninth, 1906?

I don’t know.²⁹

Stewart himself claimed in a newspaper interview, I was born in Bladworth, [Saskatchewan], on November 9, 1906.³⁰ Until better evidence comes along (which it probably will not), we can feel reasonably secure in accepting 1906 as the year of Stewart’s birth. We cannot be certain if he was actually born in Bladworth or in the neighboring town of Davidson, where the local hospital was located. Over two decades later, Mrs. A. N. Rosenquist, the attendant at Stewart’s birth, would claim that she remembered the occasion well, but not why she found it so memorable. She could not remember the attending physician’s name, but was positive that Stewart’s mother was a mature woman of thirty to thirty-five (Louise was nearly forty), not a young woman in her late teens (as Winnifred would have been).³¹

After his birth, according to Stewart, We left Bladworth and for a time lived in Edmonton and Vancouver…³² While questioning his mother during his trial—for most of his trial, he represented himself—Stewart established that his family had lived in Vancouver from 1913 to 1924, at which time they immigrated to California.³³ (Strangely, the only Northcott listed in the Vancouver City Directory between 1913 and 1916 is a James Northcott.)³⁴

What kind of childhood did Stewart have? In his formative years, did he give any hint that one day he would do terrible things? All we have to go on are the echoes of a family voicing accusations and counteraccusations, searching for or running from blame.

George: "[A]fter a lapse of several years [following Willie’s death] her Boy came along she [Louise] gave him all the affection she had for the one who died and as much more for him himself naturally I encouraged her. [T]hey were fools their love was sublime."³⁵

Louise [speaking to Stewart at his trial]: There could not have been any person kinder or better in any way than you have been to me. You are the only one that has ever brought any joy or happiness in my old gray life and has always used me right and given me any love.³⁶

Stewart [in his summation to the jury]: I testified, gentlemen, about the relations—my relations to the other members of our family—not in an effort, gentlemen, to explain why I had committed these terrible—this terrible crime called sodomy. [B]ut when a child, a little boy of ten and eleven and twelve, as I was at that time, is taught those things by that man who should teach them everything that is right and good and decent, teaches you these things and you do them, do them from the first, they seem right to you—and they seem right to me now. I know it is the most terrible of all crimes, but when you commit these things from babyhood it takes a terrible shock to show you what is right and what is wrong, and I believe that shock has been brought to me. I testified how this woman [Louise] had proved herself more than a woman, had went [sic] above mother love, had went to greater heights than any mother love could ever carry a person. How she had only raised me as her own baby and child. She did that to give me a name, and how she lived with this man who had committed the most terrible crimes upon his own daughter. She did that, although she had lived all these years with the worst hate in her heart, which was only natural, for this man, she lived with him under the outward aspect of wife for the purpose of giving me a name and saving her daughter.³⁷

George: Stewart knows I am not his enemy and wouldn’t try to frame him. I gave the boy every cent of my money. I [have] lived with Mrs. Northcott for 42 years and happily until about five years ago [that is, 1923], when she developed this intense love for the boy.³⁸

The Los Angeles Evening Herald: From the cradle to the present, Northcott always was the pet of his mother, according to relatives, and was petted and pampered. He was given every luxury his parents could afford. His mother often would dress him in girl’s clothes and treat him like a daughter, giving him dolls to play with, investigators were told… From delicate, effeminate life, the boy swung [in early adolescence] to the other extreme, officers say. His father says he noted strange tendencies.³⁹

Loyal Kelley, the co-prosecutor: Well, if there is one redeeming quality of Louise Northcott, if there is one thing that stands out in her character as human and normal—or rather, in this case, abnormal—it is her affection for this defendant, and I think her testimony upon this witness stand shows it. As Cyrus Northcott said here, he is her God. She would sacrifice herself, she would sacrifice her husband, she would sacrifice her other children for this defendant, and she has attempted to do so, and she has told you that Winnifred Clark is his mother.⁴⁰

Did the fact that his mother dressed him like a girl warp Stewart’s development? At the time, parents often dressed boys—very young boys, granted—in girls’ clothing.⁴¹ More important, is the charge even true? It is surely significant that in none of Stewart’s surviving childhood photographs is he dressed like a girl. If his mother always dressed him like a girl, then surely some pictures would have been taken of him in drag, and surely the sensation-hungry press would have gotten its hands on them and emblazoned them across the front pages.

As for the strange tendencies that so troubled George, this appears to have been the heavy growth of body hair that sprouted on his son during adolescence, a condition that the vain Stewart apparently hated and sought to cure with a prescription from his Uncle Thomas, the New York physician. According to George, the cure was only partially successful, and he would one day refer to his hairy son as the Ape Man.⁴² This nickname, modified to the Hairy Ape Man or the Hairy Ape Boy, was gleefully taken up by reporters. This is hardly surprising, for as stated earlier, in Stewart’s time criminals were commonly perceived as evolutionary throwbacks, regressive examples of humanity in its original, bestial state—in other words, apelike. An exact contemporary of Stewart’s, the rapist and serial killer Earle Leonard Ferral (popularly known under the name Earle Leonard Nelson), who claimed at least twenty-two victims in the United States and Canada, was known to the public as the Gorilla Man.⁴³

So Stewart grew to manhood, with (as his childhood pictures show) the same look of smug superiority and the same arrogant smile that he would display in adulthood already fixed upon his face. Only a few outward physical traumas threatened the growing boy’s security. He apparently contracted influenza during the 1918-19 epidemic, but survived.⁴⁴ While pleading for mercy for his son, George would make the following claim: In 1918, [as] the result of an accident, [Stewart’s] mind was unbalanced for a period of weeks as also in 1919 after an attack of the Flu, was ordered by Dr. Gray of Edmonton, Canada, to an entire change of climate and surroundings in an endeavor to restore the deranged mental condition. He bolstered this claim by pointing out the blood connection between the defendant and three cousins who died while in an insane asylum in Canada.⁴⁵

Louise agreed that Dr. Gray can verify that Stewart’s mind has never been just right. Also, after he got that severe fall on the ice, which left him with hemorrhages, he has been worse. Not dangerous, but [he would] just wander off and imagine all sorts of things. He grieved most terrible for several months, thinking I was dead, and I was his aunt he was living with, and he in her own home with me all the time.⁴⁶

There was also a little contretemps between Stewart and his niece that would come back to haunt them both.

When Stewart was a baby, Winnifred married a man named John Clark. Over the next several years they had two children who were destined to play significant roles in their uncle’s life: Jessie, born in 1909, and Sanford Wesley, born on 1 March 1913. (Two other children arrived later: Kenneth, who was probably born in 1915, and Edwin.)⁴⁷ Sometime during Stewart’s boyhood (George said that it might have been in 1917), he was visiting his sister’s family on their farm in Bladworth. While there, he apparently got into two altercations with Jessie. Under cross-examination by Earl Redwine, George described the events:

Did [Jessie]—how did she try to kill [Stewart] at that time?

Shoved him down through a hole in the loft of the barn.

And what other attempt did she make on his life?

She hit him with something.

When was that?

Well, I don’t know. I didn’t—I didn’t ask much—any questions. I just kind of laughed it off, because I didn’t pay much attention to it then because I thought it was just some kind of kids’ scrapes or something like that.

That is what you still believe, isn’t it?

No, I do not, because she was, she was in earnest about it, or seemed to be.

Did she tell you why she was going to kill him?

Well, she didn’t say—she never liked him very well, she said.

Is that the reason she gave for going to kill him?

Well, she didn’t give any particular reason for it at all. That is just the remark she made and now you can take it for what it is worth. I do not know whether it is worth anything or not.

"Did she disclose what she hit him with or tried to hit him with on the