San Francisco Jekyll and Hyde: Patrick Collins, Wife-Slayer (San Francisco, CA, 1895)

Collins pulled the straight-blade out of his pocket and plunged it into his unsuspecting wife’s stomach. She pawed at the blade as he inched it upward.

Sarah Collins fell to the floor, blood dribbling from the corners of her mouth. Patrick knelt down, pulled the knife from Sarah’s midsection and thrust it into her chest. He ripped it out and plunged it down again. And again. Each thrust was faster and harder than the previous. When he stopped to catch his breath a few seconds later, Sarah Collins curled into a ball, her torso gouged with over three dozen stab wounds, and began to moan. Somehow, she was still alive.

Patrick fished through Sarah’s purse until he found five silver dollar coins. He pocketed the coins and darted out of the school wearing the evidence of his savage crime; blood flecks dotted Patrick’s shirt up to the neck, and his sleeves glistened red.

Sarah Collins lived long enough to identify her attacker to a constable who heard her moans.

“Who cut you, madam,” he asked as he gently touched her head.

“Collins,” she whispered.

“Did Patrick Collins do the cutting?”

Sarah didn’t have the strength to answer. She closed her eyes and moaned. She would die later that morning.

Two police officers collared Collins stumbling about the streets still wearing his blood-specked trousers and boots (he had discarded the shirt, which was later recovered in an ash barrel).

*****

Friday the thirteen of October, 1894, would be Patrick E. Collins’ unlucky day. On that afternoon, a coroner’s jury accused him of murdering his wife, Sarah. He sat, stony faced, and listened as witnesses scraped off the scab covering his domestic life. Even with his life laid open for all to see, he remained stoic and apparently unmoved.

A profligate and alcoholic, Collins drank up his paycheck as soon as he received it. When it was gone, he bummed a drink from whomever he could. When that failed, he turned to Sarah, who had taken a job as the caretaker of Adler Elementary to help make ends meet. Except Patrick was an angry drunk, so Sarah moved out and avoided him at all costs.

Sarah apparently feared her inebriate husband so much she begged bartender Michael Flannery for protection. Flannery rehashed the story in front the coroner’s jury, explaining that he warned Collins to stay away from Sarah just the day before the murder.  Mrs. Collins’ tattered and blood-spattered dress, Mr. Collins’ blood-encrusted shirt, and now blood-streaked knife illustrated the savagery of the attack and convinced the members of the jury that Collins murdered his wife, probably after she refused to give him bar money.

*****

The jury in Collins’ trial unanimously agreed that he murdered Sarah for bar money. They sent the now-convicted slayer to San Quentin’s gallows. He would be the third of three to hang on the morning of Friday, June 7, 1895, following Emilio Garcia, who cut an old man’s throat for sport, and Anthony Azoff, who murdered a cop.

Collins gripped his Bible as guards escorted Garcia from his death cell to the gallows. From his cell, he could hear their footsteps as they slowly climbed the thirteen steps to the gallows. “Goodbye, adios,” Garcia managed to utter through trembling lips. Seconds later, Collins heard the slamming of the trapdoor as the sandbag counterweights pulled it from beneath Garcia’s feet. Then he heard nothing but the rope as it slowly swayed.

Minutes later, the guards escorted Azoff from his death cell. “Good bye boys,” he shouted as he climbed the steps, “here goes a brave man.”

The slamming of the trap was followed by several minutes of muffled sounds as the rope danced. The drop failed to snap the cop-killer’s neck, and for thirteen minutes his body writhed convulsively.

By the time Collins ascended San Quentin’s thirteen stairs to heaven, he was too nervous to speak. The priest gave brief statement in his behalf, stood aside, and Patrick Collins disappeared from sight. Unlike Azoff, he died well.

As well as expected, that is.

In the year after Collins’ hanging, a macabre stereo view containing his prison mug shot was manufactured by an unknown publisher. The caption captured the gist of his crime:

“Pat Collins—Executed at San Quentin for the murder of his wife, whom he stabbed thirty-seven times for her refusal to give him money to drink with. His wife was employed as janitoress of a kindergarten in San Francisco, where the murder was committed.”

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