The sound of the surf pounding the sand of Long Beach, California, created an eerie, wild sensation on the morning of July 25, 1899, as Dorothy McKee and her friend Anna Scudder, peddled down the beach. Dorothy McKee enjoyed the panoramas offered by the Pacific and loved long bicycle rides along the shoreline. There was something about the ocean, something mysterious and exciting—even sinister—that attracted her.
The two women giggled as Anna playfully needed Dorothy about the previous night’s jaunt down the beach. The duo had invited Isaac Baker, the Long Beach Adonis, to accompany them. Baker had fallen for Dorothy. She had chocolate-hued hair that spilled over her shoulders when she unfurled her signature bun and a voluptuous figure. He began to consider proposing to the attractive, twenty-five-year-old.
A gust threatened to steal the sailor’s hat Dorothy wore, so she stopped and held the hat to her head until the wind abated. It was then she noticed Edward Methever peddling toward them.
Methever, an elderly cobbler with an estranged wife in San Miguel, shared a house with the McKee family. He operated a shoe business from his half of the building, while the McKee’s kept a “delicacy store” in theirs. Methever was an affable sort and a frequent dinner guest of the McKees. He had come to know the family well and listened to the most intimate details of their lives through the thin partition separating the two halves of the structure. Dorothy didn’t realize it, but somewhere along the way, the sixty-something Methever had developed a crush on the twenty-something that had quickly evolved into a runaway obsession.
Methever’s bedroom abutted Dorothy’s, the two night chambers separated by the same, thin membrane that partitioned the lives of the McKees from the heavy-drinking cobbler. Every night he went to bed listening to her humming her favorite tune. And his vivid imagination carried him into an erotic fantasy-land as he envisioned Dorothy, in her nightclothes, sitting in front of an oval mirror combing her tresses. Primping herself…for him.
The cobbler literally overheard, through the bedroom partition, every sound from Dorothy McKee’s life.
So on the evening of July 24, after Dorothy and Anna returned from their bike ride with Isaac, Methever overheard Dorothy gush about the handsome young man who had caught her eye.
Methever smoldered as he began to envision a different storyline for Dorothy and him.
The next morning, Methever found the opportunity he needed when Dorothy and Anna went for another bike ride.
Dorothy waved as Methever approached, but instead of slowing, he began to peddle faster and rammed into her tire. Her mouth dropped open and her eyes widened as he pulled a revolver from his shirt and pointed it at her chest. The first, fatal bullet passed through Dorothy’s heart.
While Dorothy stumbled backward, Methever fired two more times, one slug passing through her neck and another through her right lung. Anna yelped as Methever stood over Dorothy’s body and fired a fourth, insurance bullet into her forehead.
With a blank expression, he pushed the revolver into the scalp above his right eye and squeezed the trigger. The slug tore through his temple and exited through his right eye orbit, blowing his right eyeball out of its socket. He crumpled to the sand next to Dorothy, his right eyeball dangling from the optic nerve like a ball on a tether.
Furious, Long Beach residents would have lynched Methever on the spot, except they considered him already dead and dumped his near-lifeless body into a livery stable where he lay in a coma while the community mourned Dorothy McKee.
Then Edward Methever turned a corner. Except for a badly-mangled face and a missing eye, he made a full recovery.
One-eyed Jack: Rare mugshot of Edward Methever, c. 1899.
Three months later, he faced a jury and a possible death sentence for the distorted, final chapter he had authored for Dorothy McKee. He attempted to keep his head out of the noose by claiming temporary insanity brought on by the bottle. Dozens of witnesses testified to Methever’s habitual drinking; the local sheriff said that on the day Methever murdered Dorothy McKee, he reeked of whiskey.
But the jury didn’t believe that heavy drinking excused his violent actions. They found him guilty, sending him to San Quentin’s gallows.
During the appeals process, Methever received help from an unlikely person: his estranged ex-wife Lydia. In an affidavit, she described Edward’s off-beat behavior and the possible sources.
“In or about February, 1878, when said defendant and myself were returning from a trip to the mountains in Missouri, we got stuck in the muddy road and Mr. Methever took a rail to pry the wheels out, and the team started suddenly and the rail struck him on the head and knocked him senseless.” After the accident, Lydia said, Edward became violently sick for weeks. Ever since, he suffered from severe headaches and would sometimes tightly wrap his head with bandages to relieve the pain.
Lydia also claimed that Edward began drinking heavily, and after one particular bender, tried to kill her and their son. Later, when he sobered up, he had no memory of the event and was mortified when Lydia described it.
In 1889, Edward took the family’s life savings and vanished. Lydia later learned that he moved to Santa Barbara and had him brought back to San Miguel. Edward claimed he had no memory of his actions and cried like a baby.
But conscience and Lydia could not keep Edward’s wanderlust at bay. He walked away again in 1897, this time eventually settling in Long Beach.
In the affidavit, Lydia Methever explained that she did not bring any of this up before—in fact kept this past from Edward’s defense attorneys—because she wanted to spare her husband the shame.
Lydia Methever’s revelations, however, failed to save Edward. The court denied his appeal.
While on San Quentin’s death row, Methever grew despondent. He tried to finish the job he started on Long Beach by starving himself, prompting prison officials to force feed him, and he refused all visitors except one: a palm reader named Kathryn Case, who offered an alternate source of Methever’s homicidal tendencies.
The palm reader proclaimed that the “island” at the end of the life line on Methever’s palm indicated one of two eventual fates: the penitentiary or hanging. According to Case, the sinister mark on the “island” formed when Methever served as a private with the 31st Massachusetts Infantry during the Civil War.
Like many grunts, he fell victim to disease and suffered from a terrific fever—Madam Case estimated sometime around the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight—and spent a significant time in a hospital. After that point, he was prone to bouts of “temporary insanity.” It also left him with a personality marked by capriciousness and a quick temper.
“An architect’s plans are not more clearly drawn than are the life lines of the human hand,” gloated Mrs. Case about palmistry, “and much can be done to avert the misery of an ill-starred life by paying heed to the secrets hidden in a child’s palm.”
The Los Angeles Herald printed a reproduction of Methever’s palm so the reading public would be able to recognize these signs of sinister behavior and use them to measure up their friends, relatives, and neighbors.
Methever climbed the thirteen steps to the noose on Friday, May 10, 1901.
Just palm crazy: Mathever’s hand as reproduced in the Los Angeles Herald.
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