The glorious Dr. Bowers

EDMUND PEARSON

Californians assail me with bitter words.

Why, in my surveys of crime, must I stay) on the Atlantic seaboard? Come out, they cry, come out to the golden West, where the hatchet stroke's a little truer; where the cyanide is administered in a glow of sunshine unknown to the East. Have 1 never heard of l.aura Fair, or of Theodore Durrant and the church belfry? Does not the unknown slayer of Nora Fuller beguile my fancy? Or Clara Phillips, the lady of the hammer? Have done with the pallid homicides of New England! As Stoddard King wrote:

Go, follow the rules of the sun hist schools Set forth in these wanton rhymes—

We want more lecherous Super-treacherous California crimes !

Now, the trouble with these gaudy affairs is that they are upon such a colossal scale their historian needs not the narrow limits of a magazine article, but an encyclopedia. As soon as someone commits a really good murder in California, a great part of the community rushes upon the stage; all the queer ducks and odd fish in town (and in a California town that is no inconsiderable number of persons) all these folk begin to make strange gestures and utter cryptic remarks.

For instance, consider only a few episodes from the career of that physician with the musical name: Dr. J. Milton Bowers.

Over the deaths of Miss Fanny Hammet (Mrs. Bowers, the First) and of Miss Theresa Shirk ( Mrs. Bowers, the Second I we will not linger. In later years, people said unkind things: that these first two wives of the doctor died ''very mysteriously". (One of the disadvantages of poisoning your third wife --or husband—is that it leads to uncharitable remarks about earlier deaths.) The second Mrs. Bowers died some time in 1881 at the Palace Hotel, San Francisco. She had been an actress and dancer, but she interests me chiefly because she anticipated Dr. Havelock Ellis by writing a book which she called The Dance of Life. It was, however, a poem,—an impassioned defence of the waltz, which at that time was under attack.

But the death of Mrs. Bowers, the Second, author of these unexceptionable lines, gave Dr. Bowers so little grief that in less than six months he had charmed a lady called Cecilia Benhayon Levy into becoming Mrs. Bowers, the Third, and with her came a flock of trouble. There was, somewhere in the background, a Mr. Levy. There was a little daughter, Tillie. And there were a swarm of Benhayons—all militant enemies of the doctor.

The third Mrs. Bowers, yielding to the doctor's overpowering fascination, insured her life in his favor for $17,000, quite neglecting to provide for little Tillie. Then she began to suffer from strange and distressing symptoms. It was true that her complexion became wonderfully clear and beautiful (as with arsenic eaters) but the poor lady s face was swollen to twice its natural size.

"Unknown men" and "mysterious strangers" now came upon the scene. In the offices of the American Legion of Honor, one of Mrs. Bowers' insurance organizations, (the doctor himself belonged to the Knights of the Golden Rule) there appeared one of these birds of evil omen, with the warning that a member of the Legion lay dying-by foul means. The Coroner of San Francisco received a call from another inconnu, who remarked that Mrs. .1. Milton Bowers had just been murdered. Off dashed the Coroner, and sure enough, found that Mrs. Bowers' earthly troubles were past, while the doctor was preparing, with a sort of solemn gusto, for the funeral.

His third wife had died, said he, from an affection of the liver. He called upon two other doctors to corroborate this. Six other physicians laid the blame to poisoning by phosphorous. The police looked for some sample bottles of this poison, which, they had reason to believe, the doctor possessed, but found that these had been whisked away. This little task had been performed, they strongly suspected, by two other members of the household: Mrs. Zeissing, a nurse, and Miss Farrell, the housekeeper. These ladies were vigorous partizans of the doctor. Whether their names were entered on his matrimonial waiting-list, I do not know. If so, they might have had to stand in line for a while: it was a lady from San Jose, so the law asserted, who was then preparing her trousseau to become Mrs. Bowers, the Fourth.

For some years, however, the doctor had to abstain from marriage. A jury found him guilty, and a judge sentenced him to lie hanged. Then all proceedings ceased, and the Courts took a year or two to think it over. The doctor was cheered, in his dungeon cell, by an occasional call from Mrs. Zeissing and Miss Farrell. The latter, by the by, in order to while away the long summer days, had become married to a certain Mr. John Dimmig.

One gloomy Sunday, more than a year later, when everyone in San Francisco had forgotten whether Dr. Bowers had been hanged, or not, the police received a call from an extremely irritated landlady of Geary Street: Mrs. Higgson. She complained that there was a man in one of her rooms, and that he was not only a total stranger, but that, what made it worse, he was dead. Mrs. Higgson was upset. Five days earlier, she said, a young man came to rent this room. Next day, another man did rent it. Now, a third man, whom she had never seen before, had gone, or rather, come, and died in it.

There were three bottles beside the dead man: one had contained whiskey; one, chloroform liniment; and one, cyanide of potassium. The victim of this orgy was Henry Benhayon, none other than the brother of the late Mrs. Cecilia Benhayon Bowers. Among other documents. by the dead man's side, was a note to Dr. Bowers. In it, Mr. Benhayon asked the doctor not to "molest" Mother; to understand that Tillie was "not responsible" for his acts; and to be on guard against certain friends who had been unnecessarily intimate with Cecilia. He created something of a stir by naming seven of these gentlemen. Then he closed with the remark that Cecilia hud lost her money in stocks, and exchanged her diamonds for paste. In another letter, addressed to the Coroner, he confessed that it was he who had murdered his sister, the third Mrs. Bowers. Thus, apparently, was the Doctor, still languishing in jail, exonerated of the ghastly deed.

But the police found that John Dimmig, husband of Dr. Bowers' housekeeper, had been one of the men inquiring about the room. Dimmig admitted that lie had taken the room —for the purpose of "selling books". Then he changed his mind, and shyly admitted that he wanted it in order to keep an assignation with "a young lady from San Jose". The police also discovered that Mrs. Zeissing, the efficient nurse, lived in close proximity to the scene of the suicide—or murder.

■ The Bowers-Zeissing-Dimmig faction held that here was a case of self-destruction, and clear proof of the doctor's innocence. The Government, nevertheless, maintained through two long trials, that Dimmig had lured Benhayon to the room, and beginning with the whiskey, and leading up, perhaps, through the chloroform liniment to the cyanide, had encompassed the man's death. That he had then planted the forged letter and "Confession"—all for the obvious purpose of setting free jolly old Dr. Bowers. The handwriting experts for the prosecution were sure that Dimmig wrote the letters; those for the defense were equally sure that they were the work of Benhayon. The first jury could find no verdict; the second jury acquitted Dimmig.

In the meantime, Dr. Bowers had been granted a new trial. Considering the outcome of the Dimmig case, despairing of the possibility of getting another conviction for the doctor, and heartily sick of the whole fantastic gang, the District Attorney nol-prossed the indictment. Thus the record stood: two murders, endless perjury, skulduddery and monkey business, and nobody punished for anything.

Dr. Bowers came blithely out of jail and returned to medicine and matrimony. Turning his roguish eyes toward San Jose—where all the lovely ladies seemed to dwell he saw one of whom the historians say nothing except that she was named Miss Bird. With her he married, and lived happily until (as the Arabians sav ) they were visited by the terminator of delights and separator of companions.