A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Of course, there were a large number of ordinary rapes, and no doubt it would be possible to
disinter these from the police court records of the time. But they were not recorded by writers of
crime (such as Major Arthur Griffiths, whose Mysteries of the Police and Crime is still the best
general introduction to nineteenth ceatury villainy.) Thomas S. Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases
of America is the American equivalent of the Newgate Calendar, and was published as late as
1910; yet among its hundred or so cases, there are only three sex crimes. In all three, we observe
this same ‘explosive’ element. One is the case of Jesse Pomeroy, already described. Another
concerned a ‘degenerate’ named Hadley, who lured a fifteen-year-old girl to a rented house,
claiming he needed a baby sitter; she was raped and ‘frightfully mutilated’. The crime was
obviously carefully planned - the house had been specially rented - and Hadley was never caught.
The third case is in some ways the most typical. In 1895, twenty-four-year-old Theodore Durrant
was a Sunday school superintendent and a prominent member of the Emanuel Baptist Church in
San Francisco. He was also in his final year at the Cooper Medical College. He was deeply
interested in pretty, twenty-one-year-old Blanche Lamont, a highly religious girl who ‘seldom went
to places of amusement’. On 3 April 1895, Miss Lamont left her cookery class and accompanied
Durrant to the Emanuel Baptist Church on Bartlett Street. He had the church keys. There he
strangled her, and dragged her body up to the belfry, where he stripped and, presumably, raped her.
(When the body was later examined, decomposition made it impossible to be specific about this.)
He placed two small wooden blocks under her head as a pillow, crossed her hands on her breasts,
and left her. He had been alone in the church with her for more than an hour. Downstairs he
encountered the church organist, nineteen-year-old George King, a close friend. King observed that
Durrant looked pale and shaken. Durrant explained that he had been searching for a gas leak, and
had been almost overpowered by escaping gas. King sympathetically went off to buy a bottle of
bromo-seltzer; but the story of the gas leak puzzled him, for he could smell no gas, and he knew
that plumbers had checked all the fittings recently.
Blanche’s disappearance caused wide excitement; but no one suspected Durrant, whose piety
seemed to place him above reproach. Durrant confided to Blanche’s aunt and uncle - with whom
she lived - that he suspected she had allowed herself to be lured to a ‘house of ill-repute’; he even
made sure he was seen travelling to outlying areas, searching for her.
One week after the murder of Blanche Lamont, Durrant persuaded twenty-year-old Minnie
Williams - another regular churchgoer - to accompany him into the church library. What happened
next can be tentatively reconstructed from medical evidence. Durrant went out of the room, and
reappeared naked. Then he grabbed Minnie, pulled her skirt over her head, and rammed the cloth
into her mouth to choke her screams. He raped her, then took a knife and slashed and stabbed her
so violently that blood spurted over the walls. When the blade broke off in her breast, he raped her
again. Then he went to a meeting of young church members - which Minnie had been due to attend
- arriving two hours late. At midnight, after the meeting, he went back to the church again; what he
did there will never be known.
Early next morning, Durrant left San Francisco to do some training with the state militia. Women
who went to decorate the church for Easter Sunday found Minnie’s mutilated body in the library;
the dress had been rammed down the throat so violently that the medical examiner had difficulty in
pulling it out. Police searched the rest of the building and found Blanche Lamont’s body, looking
‘white as marble’; but downstairs in the church, it quickly turned black and began to decompose, so
the doctor was unable to say whether - or how often - she had been raped.