American Bluebeard: Lies and Dead Wives

By Alene Burnett-Reaugh

James P. Watson traveled throughout Canada, the Pacific North West, and California. He approached refined women with marriage proposals and promises of exotic travel. He ran lonely hearts ads in local newspapers. He married as many as 50 women altogether, and after extracting their money, killed at least 22, and abandoned many more. He got away with it for twenty years until one suspicious wife brought him down.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098312091

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Copyright © 2020 by Alene Lorraine Burnett-Reaugh

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced

in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the

case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2020

ISBN 978-1-09838-838-6

eBook 978-1-09831-209-1

In Memoriam

Beatrice Andrewartha and Alice Ludvigson

In Memory of my great-grandaunt Beatrice Maud Roscorla Andrewartha and Alice Maron Ludvigson, aunt of Myra Ludvigson Crettol. I dedicate this book to their memory and all of Watson’s victims, whether they lived, disappeared, or were murdered.

Watson confessed to killing twenty-two women; the first was Elsie Bowen, a young girl of sixteen whose only desire was to be married. He did not marry her; instead, he tricked her and, after killing her, buried her body in a shallow grave.

The others he married before, in his words, separating them from the living, were Olive Greenlee, Cora Macy, Arabella Benedict, Marie Austin, Mary Watt, Bertha Davis, Gertrude Wilson, Alice Ludvigson, Agnes Wilson, Eleanor Frazier, Beatrice Andrewartha, Elizabeth Prior, Bertha Goodnick, Nina Lee Deloney, Flora VanCamp Smith, Grace Milan, Olga Janowitz, Florence Sherrard, Marie LaRue, and two more whose identities are still unknown.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE: SUSPICION

Tis a Shame

Chapter 1: Apprehended

As It Should Be

Chapter 2: Investigation

Birth & Death

Chapter 3: Revelations

A Crushed Blossom

Chapter 4: Information Gathering

PART TWO: DAY IN COURT

Ethics

Chapter 5: His Day in Court

Chapter 6: Early Life

Chapter 7: Testimony

Broken

Chapter 8: Public Outcry

I Have Lost All

Chapter 9: To Prison

PART THREE: MEMOIR

Newport, Oregon

Chapter 10: Why I Killed My 22 Wives

Feigned Innocence

Chapter 11: Making a Living

Secure

Chapter 12: New Beginnings

Beware

Chapter 13: A Killing Spree

PART FOUR: SAN QUENTIN PRISON

Gloom

Chapter 14: Dr. Stanley, Watson’s Friend & Protector

Approaching the End

Chapter 15: A Measure of the Man

Victims Chart

Appendix

Epilogue

Bibliography

Notes

Acknowledgments

It has taken a village to get this book to print and there are so many people to thank including the wonderful people I met in writer’s groups and conferences, all my friends who encouraged me, and my husband Jim, thank you all for your support.

Evangeline Van Anderson, my Bonus Mother and my number one fan, has been with me every step of the way including a trip to the California Archives in San Francisco. Without her love and support this book may not have been written.

Bonnie LaDoe, who has been with me on this project since we met in 2003. Bonnie spent many hours reviewing my writing and correcting many issues from photo enhancement to fixing my commas and run-on sentences. She even offered re-writes and some are included in this book. We have become good friends, more like family.

Katherine Kat Wivell-Scott and I met in the summer of 2015 after she located me on Ancestry.com. Her husband, Robert Scott, was a cousin I never met, and now we are good friends. Kat is responsible for the beautiful chart itemizing all the victims and confirming and documenting the marriages.

Myra Crettol is the niece of Alice Ludvigson, one of the murdered wives introduced in this book. Bonnie and I located Myra on Ancestry.com and then met her in person. Myra’s father was Alice’s younger brother and Myra provided family pictures and stories. She encouraged me and offered helpful suggestions; she was instrumental in helping to locate Watson’s autobiography

Shirley Ewart— A proper English woman and author of several books. We met in 2004 when she was 83 and we became instant friends. She was always there for me even after she suffered a stroke. From her bed in the nursing home, I would read her chapters and she offered suggestions and critiques. Shirley died at the age of 96 before the book was completed.

Rebecca Knuth, PhD, I met Becky in 2018 at the Oregon Writers Conference at the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, Oregon. She is a professor emerita from the Univ of Hawaii’s Library Program & author of several books.

She took me under her wing & offered advice in many phases of my project. From a chance meeting we became friends.

elle fournier— A freelance editor referred to me by Larry Lehnerz, writing instructor in Newport, Oregon. She said she swooped in at the eleventh hour and delayed the publication of this book by several months due to her obsessive attention to detail and absurd commitment to the Chicago Manual of Style. She was able to take my manuscript, root out the missed punctuation, identify inconsistencies in names, dates, and places, and combine the different parts of the book to make one complete manuscript. The book is what it is today because of her and I’m glad we met and are now friends; I thank her for helping me get this completed.

Preface

MYGREAT-GRANDAUNT BEATRICE

I would like to introduce you to my great-grandaunt, Beatrice. She disappeared under strange circumstances long before I was born and put me on a journey of twists and turns that became the story I am about to tell.

My grandmother’s aunt Beatrice was born in 1885 in Cornwall, a duchy in the southwest of England. She was the youngest of nine children born to Thomas and Eliz Schollar (later changed to Roscorla) and the last child to leave home, after all eight of her brothers and sisters had married or immigrated to Canada and America.

A strikingly beautiful woman, 5′6″ tall with radiant black hair worn short and tightly curled, Beatrice had expressive gray eyes framed by stylish glasses. Her sophisticated demeanor revealed an intelligent woman living an illustrious life. Her dressmaking skills learned from her mother in Cornwall, and now her trade, were evident in the quality of her clothing and her choice of fashionable jewelry. In the family, she was known as a beautiful and talented dressmaker. To those who encountered her, there was no doubt that Beatrice Maud Roscorla Andrewartha was an elegant woman.

Introduction

THE FAMILY SECRET

I eavesdropped on a whispered conversation between my grandmother Lorraine and my mother. Over a cup of tea, they were discussing family secrets never intended to be shared with the children—certainly not with me, a ten-year-old girl. The one word I heard as I entered the room was Bluebeard . When I asked, what is a Bluebeard? Grandma reminded me that children were to be seen and not heard. About twenty years later, at a family dinner in the mid-1970s, I heard them talking again in hushed tones and felt it was an excellent time to learn about this family secret. This time Grandma agreed and spoke about her Aunty Bea. Beatrice was a beautiful young woman who met a gentleman on a train and fell in love.

My aunt Vonnie wrote it out as Grandma Lorraine told us the story. She said she was living in Michigan and just twelve years old in 1914, the oldest of the three girls still at home. Her mother, Bessie Hosking, became ill, and my great-grandfather, Joseph, wrote to Bessie’s sister Beatrice Andrewartha in Cornwall to come to America and take care of her sister and the children. Beatrice’s husband, Henry Andrewartha, had died March 21, 1914, from gold miners’ disease, leaving Beatrice a wealthy widow. Beatrice booked passage for New York and, upon her arrival in Michigan, took over. When Bessie died four years later, Beatrice felt it was okay to leave the family, as the oldest daughter was sixteen and could help her father with the younger ones.

Beatrice’s brother John and two other sisters, Martha Grace and Emily Jane, had immigrated to Canada many years before and she was anxious to see them. Beatrice left Michigan and endured the exhausting two-day train trip across the United States alone. She caught a connecting train from Spokane, Washington, to take her to Rossland, British Columbia, a short ride of three or four hours, and a reunion with her family. As she took her seat on this train, she met a man named Harry M. Lewis and they enjoyed the trip together. When they got to Rossland, he asked if he could call on her. Grandma Lorraine said that they courted for a few weeks, and on February 5, 1919, Beatrice married Harry M. Lewis in Tacoma, Washington.

Beatrice returned to Canada to tell her brother and sisters that she and her new husband would be honeymooning in South America. She looked happy as she boarded the train and waved goodbye to her family. A few days later, her older sister, Emily Jane, received a telegram from Lewis in California, apprising her that he planned to meet Beatrice in Honolulu. Emily was surprised that Beatrice had not written to her about the change in plans. She became worried that something was wrong and notified her brother-in-law, Joseph Hosking, now living in Tacoma, and he too became concerned. But no one pursued it any further. Beatrice’s disappearance was considered a smudge on the respectfulness of the family, a disgraceful blemish on the family’s reputation. Secrecy was the easiest way to handle the matter because the family feared people would hear of the scandal.

After Grandma Lorraine died in 1984, I was searching through pictures and papers and was excited to find a carbon copy of a letter dated San Quentin, Cal. June 19, 1922. It was addressed to Dr. Stanley and signed Watson 33756. It was a convicted murderer’s account of his marriage to Beatrice, and he wove quite a tale. This story intrigued me, but who, I wondered, was this man—and did he kill my great-grandaunt?

I first looked for Harry M. Lewis, the name of Beatrice’s husband, but each step of the way, I was disappointed when I found nothing. Next, I tried looking for him under the name of Harvey Watson—a name my family thought might have been used by Beatrice’s second husband—and spent hours in the Tacoma library meticulously looking through the newspaper’s archive for 1919. There was no notice of their marriage, nor of any missing woman or unidentified bodies. The librarian told me that it was quite common in the first part of the twentieth century for women to be missing; it was not news. If I had only gone one step further and looked at the papers of 1920, I would have found an abundance of information early in my research. The librarian was wrong; there were articles about many missing women. I wondered how many other families had heard a story of a loved one who disappeared without a trace and never learned their fate.

My next step was to look in California for any record of Watson at San Quentin, and I contacted the San Francisco Public Library for help. Greg Kelly, the history librarian, forwarded materials from the archives, including Watson’s mugshot, the formal indictment, and the Order of Commitment to State Prison.

I could barely contain my excitement at getting these records and seeing what my query looked like; I had his dates of birth and death and his full description. However, there was more. On January 7, 2004, Greg wrote that he found forty-five newspaper articles about Watson referring to him as a Bluebeard, a man who marries several women and kills them. He sent copies of the reference cards and advised me to request the microfilm through interlibrary loan. I began immediately, and it took months to review all the microfilm at the library and copy all the articles. It was exhilarating to learn new information every day, but hard to keep up with all the twists and turns in this man’s life.

I discovered the California State Archives had boxes totaling eight linear feet of documents from Leo L. Stanley, MD, the prison doctor at San Quentin. Dr. Stanley was a prolific writer. Two of those boxes also represented the writings of Watson, who wrote poetry, a novel, and his autobiography while in prison.

With good friend and research assistant, Evangeline Van Anderson, we made a trip to the archives in San Francisco. We checked into Kensington Park Hotel, an elegant Gothic-style grand and fashionable hotel in the heart of the city. The next morning, we made our way to the Mission District to find The California Historical Society Museum and Archives and proceeded to the research library in the back room. This beautiful library consisted of volumes of historical books and large tables where one could review the materials. Two boxes from Dr. Stanley’s collection were available when we arrived. We soon located photos, a formal portrait of Watson, and one of him with Dr. Stanley. Two large, bound books held 163 pages of Watson’s poetry, stories, and letters, plus his 200-page unpublished novel, Tangled. Van read the novel in two four-hour days while I copied the poetry and other stories. Van told me that Watson’s book was about two men, probably representing the two sides of Watson’s personality, both after the affection of one woman. Dr. Stanley described Watson’s book as a romanticized story of the glamour-boy’s life¹. I had hoped for his autobiography, but it was not among the documents.

The letters and poetry written by Watson granted a glimpse into his mind and revealed intimate parts of his early life and the years leading up to his imprisonment. The poetry was about his wives and special people in his life, including his grandparents and Lucille, a real person though this