Flannery O’Connor, 1947
Photo by C Macauley
Cops were aware of the odd phenomenon of “wandering maniacs” that had emerged with America’s post-war love affair with the car. A mobile culture had emerged in which people were no longer as aware of their relatives and neighbors as they once had been, and isolated people on open roads were vulnerable. Predators knew this and exploited it.
In Missouri, for example, William Cook emerged from prison in 1950 to hijack the car of a family of five, shooting them all. He drove around with their corpses, unnoticed, before depositing them in an abandoned mineshaft. In their car, he headed to California. There, he killed a salesman and took two men hostage. Authorities grabbed him before he could harm them.
The post-war 1950s had been a decade of turmoil, and Americans struggled to stabilize their lives in the wake of the emerging Cold War, with Communism overseas and the rise of racial tensions at home. Communist governments controlled approximately one-third of the world’s population, so Western nations formed a capitalist bloc. In the U.S., Senator Joseph McCarthy exploited cultural paranoia to blacklist suspected communists who had infiltrated the American population. People were on high alert to the danger of “outsiders.”
American writer Flannery O’Connor absorbed this fear as she penned the disturbing story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” It features an encounter with “The Misfit,” a psychopath who has escaped from a federal penitentiary. In this story, a family of six traveling to Florida takes a detour and winds up on a dirt road, where their car gets stuck.
Flannery O’Connor, 1947
Photo by C Macauley
The grandmother flags down a car that has followed them and three armed men emerge. She’d seen a photo of The Misfit in the newspaper and recognizes him as the driver. She tries to appeal to his better nature, but as she chatters on and on, his companions lead the other family members into the woods to shoot them. The grandmother continues to plead with The Misfit until he shoots her three times in the chest. The other armed men return and comment on how chatty she was. Her appeal to goodness and decency had meant nothing.
It was just this cold, predatory attitude from random strangers that frightened the American people, and with good reason, as television shows, newspapers, and newsreels covered stories of demented killers.
In Wisconsin, Ed Gein was arrested in 1957 for killing two women and desecrating multiple female corpses in cemeteries. He’d preserved skin and body parts to act out a bizarre transgendered homage to his deceased mother.
Ed Gein
Mug shot
The following year, Harvey Glatman, under arrest, showed the Los Angeles police how he’d posed as a photographer to get potential models to allow him to tie them up. He took photographs of them as they began to realize that he would not free them. He killed three before a fourth escaped him and alerted the police.
Also in 1958, spree killer Charles Starkweather, 19, took to the road in Nebraska with his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. He’d killed her family before ending the lives of several complete strangers. Finally, he was stopped. His victim toll was eleven.
Charles Starkweather
Mug shot
These tales of demented neighbors and roving killers shook America. The sense of a cohesive, small-town community had eroded. Killers struck at good folks, even at families, as if to undermine the county’s very foundation.
Now it appeared that the mid-Atlantic region had its own Misfit.