Lady Killers Page 18

  Tillie led a peaceful life in prison; she told Forbes a few years later that she was all caught up on her spring sewing and enjoyed the prison food. She spent thirteen years in jail while the public zeroed in on bigger, sexier murder cases, and then died in prison on November 20, 1936. The newspapers listed her age as four years older than she actually was. In death, as in life, nobody cared much about making Tillie look good.

  Despite whatever mild domesticity Tillie displayed in jail, she still harbored a secret or two. After all, her alleged lover “Meyers” was never found. And a few years after the trial, when her last husband finally passed away, the doctors reported that he had succumbed to tonsillitis. But when they cut him open and examined his insides, they found that Joseph Klimek’s weakened body was still absolutely full of arsenic.

  SORCERESS OF KILKENNY

  Alice Kyteler

  Are you hoping to destroy a woman in pre-Enlightenment Europe? You’ve got a few convenient options. You could accuse her of sexual misconduct—always an effective tactic. You could claim that she killed her baby. Or you could bundle all your allegations into one dramatic package, dripping with sex and superstition, and call her a witch—then dust off your hands and let the mob take over as you settle down to enjoy a warm bowl of sheep’s head broth.

  The woman at the heart of Europe’s first real witch trial may have actually been Europe’s first documented female serial killer, but the theatrical accusations thrown at her—sleeping with demons! Cooking with the brains of unbaptized children!—quickly obscured her real crimes. Dame Alice Kyteler was a quadruple husband-charmer, a fearless social climber, and a dangerous enemy. She was charming, powerful, enterprising, and good with cash. If you look closely at her life, you’ll start to notice patterns, like the fact that she left a number of dead husbands in her wake, but these patterns have faded from the annals of history. What people remember about Alice, when they think of her at all, is that she may or may not have ridden on a greased broomstick.

  Centuries after Dame Alice was accused of being the “mother and mistress” of a witch’s coven, it’s easy to read the documentation of her case and feel smugly confident that no, the woman did not offer up nine raw peacock eyes to some dark demonic force nicknamed Robin, Son of Art. She was falsely accused because she had too much money, because society found powerful women dangerous and/or annoying, and because people wanted to steal her land. Her society’s reaction to her was nothing new, either. A thousand years before Alice came along, the Roman poet Juvenal was already muttering that “there is nothing more intolerable than a wealthy woman.”

  Outrageous, right? Then again, there were all those dead husbands to consider.

  Maleficia

  It was nearing the end of the thirteenth century, and the Irish city of Kilkenny was a wonderful place to live. The surrounding countryside was lush and green. An attractive castle loomed nearby, radiating protection, power, and order. And the city was overrun with marriageable men.

  Through the streets of this fair city strode Alice Kyteler, sometimes called Dame, sometimes called Lady, proud descendent of Flemish merchants. As a young lady, Alice had plenty of social clout already, due to the fact that she owned land, was related to the Kilkenny sheriff, and boasted a smattering of friends in high places. Her stock continued to rise when she married a rich banker named William Outlawe around 1280; his relatives included people like the lord chancellor of Ireland. The two had a son, William Jr., and Alice lavished her attention and resources on the boy. He would always be her favorite.

  After about twenty years of marriage, Outlawe died. Conveniently, William Jr. was now old enough to take over his father’s lands and the family banking business, and Outlawe’s generous will meant that both Alice and her son would be just fine in a pinch. More than fine, actually—they were suddenly richer and more influential than they’d been before his death. It was almost as though losing dear old Dad was a good thing.

  Alice rapidly moved on to a new man: Adam le Blond, who came from a powerful landowning family. The newlyweds made a formidable pair, with connections in the very highest social circles; at one point, they even loaned the king, Edward I, five hundred pounds to help finance the Scottish wars. Le Blond was apparently enamored of his stepson, because he had no problem lending William Jr. three thousand pounds, which the young man promptly buried in the ground for safekeeping. This was a massive amount of money in those days. To put it into perspective, a man might earn one penny (240 of which went into a single pound) for a day’s hard labor. A woman would earn half of that.

  All of this favoritism began to breed resentment in Kilkenny. William Jr. looked spoiled, and people didn’t exactly love the fact that Alice had profited from both her marriages. Even the sheriff, Alice’s relative, envied her privileged position. So one night in 1302, he crept over to William Jr.’s house with a group of townspeople and shamelessly dug up those three thousand pounds. The group claimed that since the money was discovered in the ground it counted as “treasure trove”—hidden valuables that had no owner—and, as such, belonged to the king. Alice and le Blond protested, but instead of returning the money, the sheriff accused them of homicide and threw them in jail.

  Homicide? Seemed like a charge pulled from the ether—and in some ways it was, designed to keep the sheriff from getting in trouble for stealing the money in the first place. But people had been whispering about Alice for a while now. They suspected that she was up to something.

  The couple was soon released, since they were rich and powerful and nobody had any real evidence against them, but the animosity toward Alice and William Jr. continued to grow. Out of thin air, it seemed, le Blond abruptly revised his will, making William Jr. his sole heir and simultaneously canceling all of the young man’s debts, which included the loan of the three thousand pounds. This was especially shocking because le Blond already had biological children, who surely met the news of their vanished birthright with horror.

  Then, with his affairs in order, Adam le Blond died. It was another convenient death, happening exactly when Alice and William Jr. stood to profit most.

  By 1309, Alice had found herself a very appealing third husband: the wealthy knight Richard de Valle. Like the husbands before him, de Valle must have been extraordinarily smitten with his bride, because even though he, too, already had biological children from a previous marriage, he decided that William Jr. was his favorite. De Valle began showering his stepson with money and various important business responsibilities; for example, William Jr. was granted powers of attorney to collect debts owed to the de Valle family.

  When de Valle died, Alice was owed one-third of his considerable lands—her widow’s dower—but one of de Valle’s sons tried to claim it for himself, possibly out of resentment at his stepmother, who was already a landowner many times over. Clearly, he failed to realize that his stepmother was not someone to be trifled with. Alice had an iron backbone (and an impressive Rolodex, so to speak), and instead of giving in to her stepson, she marched him straight to court—and won. Now, not only was she wealthier than ever, but she was officially a wicked stepmother in the eyes of de Valle’s newly orphaned children.

  Behind closed doors, Alice had clearly been encouraging her husbands to sign over their wealth to her and her beloved son. Maybe it wasn’t intentional, malevolent manipulation; maybe she was just so charming that they did it voluntarily. We don’t know exactly what she did to make all of her husbands change their wills, or whether she was stirring something noxious into their broth as they did so. All we can do here is recognize a pattern: Alice consistently turned a profit after each husband’s death, and then quickly moved on to another wealthy man.

  Now, patterns often point to something: a truth, a source, a secret. And this particular pattern would live a very long half-life; people will probably be killing their loved ones for profit until the end of time. When a woman does this, she’s termed a “black widow,” based on the largely-incorrect premise that all fe
male black widow spiders devour their mates after sex. If there was ever any forensic evidence implicating Alice in her husbands’ deaths, it crumbled to dust ages ago along with their bodies. But her next batch of stepchildren certainly suspected that she was a black widow, though they didn’t have a name for it yet. Instead, they called it like they saw it: magic.

  Alice’s fourth husband lived, but it wasn’t pleasant. His name was Sir John le Poer, and over the course of their marriage, his health began to deteriorate in odd ways. He grew extremely thin. He lost all the hair on his body. His fingernails and toenails began to drop off. To those familiar with the apothecarial arts, le Poer’s health problems would have seemed consistent with slow, gradual arsenic poisoning. But to everyone else, his sickness looked like the work of a witch.

  Le Poer apparently held no suspicions against his bride, because soon enough he was happily making revisions to his last will and testament. This shiny new version provided generously for Alice and William Jr., ensuring that they would be comfortable long after le Poer’s spirit left his emaciated, hairless body.

  The revised will infuriated the le Poer kids—Alice’s new stepchildren. First they had to witness their father marry this wealthy, arrogant widow, and now they had to watch him sign away their birthright? In 1324, they marched over to the nearest bishop and told him that Alice had bewitched their father, muddled his mind, and poisoned her previous three husbands. They were basing their claims on a prevalent belief in maleficia—spiteful acts performed by witches against the community—which was often used to explain things like sickness, death, and natural disasters.

  Do something, said the stepchildren. Arrest the witch.

  The le Poer children could not have brought their fears to a more sympathetic listener. His name was Richard de Ledrede. He was an Englishman and the bishop of Ossory. When he heard “witch,” he thought “heretic,” and he hated nothing more than heretics.

  Heresy

  Richard de Ledrede was a foreigner from England and a moral legalist and not very good at the interpersonal aspect of his job. He was probably a brilliant scholar; he had no political connections—and certainly no social ones—that would have helped him score the bishopric of Ossory in 1317. When appointed bishop, he was praised for the rather dry virtues of “respectability” and “clean living.” What this description failed to mention was his religious zeal, his single-minded passion for rules, and his knack for making enemies.

  Ledrede’s education took place right as a wave of witch-hunting hysteria swept across France, a hysteria that was encapsulated in the sensational trials of the Knights Templar. The Catholic Church was just beginning to articulate its changing stance on the issues—and intersections—of sorcery, witchcraft, and sacrilege. Witchcraft was no longer just characterized by magic and acts of maleficia. It was now seen as something in direct opposition to the church itself: heresy.

  The pope at the time, John XXII, was a paranoid man. He had convinced himself that his enemies were constantly trying to assassinate him through dark, sorcerous means: by sending him a devil trapped inside a ring, by melting tiny wax effigies of his body, and so forth. On February 27, 1318, he launched the first important papal bull against witchcraft. It didn’t officially state that witches were heretics, but by the time it was written, the correlation between the two was fully formed in the mind of the church. This bull, and the pope’s paranoia, effectively paved the way for what was to come: inquisitions, persecutions, and burnings all across Europe.

  Ledrede’s attitude toward witches and heretics was nourished in this frenetic broth, and he began his career “armed with a religious zeal which made [him] rapidly unpopular” with his Irish parishioners. They wanted to sing bawdy songs; he wanted them to sing Latin hymns. They were proud of their land of saints and scholars; he saw evil all across Ireland. These parishioners were accustomed to obeying both the rules of their Irish king and the rules of the church, and the best bishops were able to tactfully walk this line, but Ledrede couldn’t do it. He was “totally lacking in any practical diplomatic sense” and would have thrown out the king’s rules in a heartbeat if the church demanded it. He also built himself a “lavish palace” in Kilkenny, which did nothing to endear him to the populace.

  His diocese quickly grew to hate him and did everything they could to make his life miserable. By 1320, the pope was forced to compensate Ledrede for all sorts of grievances: he’d been locked up by his own parishioners, he’d been falsely accused of various crimes, his servants were abused, he was denied tithes, and someone stole a hundred shillings from him in a violent fashion.

  Though they grew to loathe each other, Dame Alice and Ledrede actually had a lot in common. They were both ambitious, tough, and absolutely unwilling to back down. They were despised by many of their contemporaries, but this hatred never stopped them from doing whatever they wanted. Both seemed possessed of a certain slightly psychotic, single-minded purpose: Ledrede lived to enforce the law of the church; Alice lived to accumulate wealth for herself and her son. In another life, they could have been co-conspirators, but here they were separated by too many unalterable dichotomies: woman vs. man, king vs. church, Ireland vs. England, the fluidity of social connections vs. the intransigence of the law.

  Fi, Fi, Fi, Amen

  When Ledrede heard that a rich older woman was terrorizing Kilkenny, killing husbands left and right, the case seemed like the perfect outlet for his religious zeal. Plus, it would be a great way to please the pope. So despite the fact that the le Poer children were simply bringing a good old-fashioned charge of witchcraft against their evil stepmother, Ledrede decided that he was dealing with a “diabolical nest” of heretics. He dashed over to Kilkenny to investigate, and soon enough he had “uncovered” a veritable cult of eleven witches, led by the dreadful Dame Alice Kyteler herself.

  With Ledrede on board, the charges against Alice suddenly swelled. The original charge, made by the le Poer stepchildren, declared that Alice had bewitched and killed her first three husbands and was currently murdering her fourth. But the new charges had far more heretical implications: Alice was said to have denied the Christian faith, sacrificed animals, sought advice from demons, and twisted church ceremonies into demonic parodies of themselves (i.e., lighting candles and excommunicating her husbands, all while shrieking, “Fi! fi! fi! Amen!”). She was also charged with boiling a ghastly stew in the skull of a beheaded robber that was comprised of ingredients like rooster intestines, “certain horrible worms,” the brains of unbaptized children, and the nails of dead men. Finally, she was accused of sleeping with a demon named Robin Artisson, or Robin, Son of Art, who was supposedly the source of all her wealth. He would appear to her as a cat, a black dog, or a dark-skinned man with two companions—and lest anyone think sleeping with a spirit was an incorporeal act, their lovemaking was so stickily tangible that Alice’s maid Petronilla had to clean up after them.

  These charges, melodramatic as they are, have all sorts of interesting implications. They indicate not just a subversion of the Catholic Church, but a subversion of wifehood and motherhood, what with all the excommunicating of husbands and the boiling babies’ brains. Romping around with Robin was probably the most glaring of Dame Alice’s alleged subversions: in the first place, she was having sex (out of wedlock) with a shape-shifting demon (not exactly husband material); in the second place, the fact that Petronilla had to clean up after them implied the “spilling of seed,” which according to the Catholic Church was a sin, since it meant sex without the possibility of pregnancy.

  Ironically, these colorful accusations provided a nice big smoke screen that distracted everyone from the initial accusations against Alice. If she had killed her previous husbands and was currently poisoning Sir John le Poer, as her stepchildren swore she was, then she had been subverting her roles as a wife and mother (or at least stepmother) all along—like, really subverting those roles, by intentionally widowing herself and ruining her stepchildren’s futures. But other
than the stepchildren, nobody was paying much attention to that far more realistic possibility. There were demons to discuss and women to burn!

  Though Ledrede’s anti-Alice zeal stemmed from his hatred of heresy, the local sentiment against Alice was informed by more prosaic irritations. Alice was, quite simply, a thorn in their side. She had been for quite some time. Everything about her was a menace to the Kilkenny patriarchy: she was an heiress, she was strong willed, she was independent (even though she was still technically married, it’s hard to imagine she felt tied down by the ailing le Poer), and she’d been at this game for at least forty years. Nothing was more intolerable than a wealthy woman!

  It’s not that she was just a threat to the male egos of Kilkenny. It was a far more literal threat than that. Alice was an economic threat to her stepchildren and to anyone else who had a vested interest in any of that sweet Outlawe/le Blond/de Valle/le Poer wealth. She was a living example of the dangers of female inheritance, a subject that weighed heavily on the minds of the Irish at the time. And the witchcraft charges against her reflected this fear and resentment of her affluence. They were designed, wrote the historian Norman Cohn, “to show that Lady Alice had no right to her wealth, that it had been wrested from its rightful owners by truly diabolic means, that it was tainted at the source.”

  But though wealth was what got her into trouble, wealth was also what got her out of it. Ledrede could accuse her of defying the Catholic Church all he wanted, because Alice was backed by the secular gods: money and power.