The High Price of Beaver: the Fatal Beauty of Pearl Beaver Odell, Part 2 (1920)

Part 2

Leave it to Beaver

Love and Weidenmann took James Odell’s statement to the second floor cell where Pearl sat on a cot. Pearl’s mouth dropped open when Love read James Odell’s confession.

Pearl insisted the crime was a joint effort. “If my husband goes to the electric chair,” she wailed, “I want to go too.” Then, in a lame attempt to shield James, she added, “I did it alone.”

Pearl went on to narrate a lascivious tale of a lustful tryst gone bad. According to her, she met Edward Kneip when she was sixteen. Five years older, the lusty Kneip wouldn’t take “no” for an answer and raped her.

“We didn’t intend to murder him,” Pearl explained, “we meant to take him to police headquarters and have him arrested when my husband first got the man. When the car we were in broke down, we got the taxicab. And then we started.”

According to Pearl, they simply wanted to humiliate Kneip. They cuffed him to a tree, and she began taunting him. Remembering the rape, she lost her temper and attacked him with a long file. “When I hit him on the head with the file out there, I said to him, ‘You are to blame for my downfall. You would have made a woman of the streets out of me.”

In a frenzy, Pearl repeatedly slashed Kneip. She hacked away slices of flesh from his face and forehead. Somehow, Kneip managed to moan, “Pearl! Pearl! You’re killing me.”

Pearl shrugged. “I don’t know why we did it—I can’t tell! I know my husband was crazed with anger when Kneip admitted to him that he had been intimate with me before I was married.” District Attorney Love was astonished by the absense of emotion in Pearl’s tone. Here was a woman confessing to a barbaric crime and she apparently lacked remorse.

“Of course I had told my husband,” Pearl continued. “I had told him of the things Kneip had done and the things he tried to do, and that no man who calls himself a man would attempt. We left the cab up in the county. I struck Kneip across the face with the file. Even in the darkness I could see the mark the blow made, and the flow of blood that followed.” Her tone of voice was even and unbroken. She paused for a few seconds, her long, thin, bony fingers toying with a handkerchief she gripped in her hands.

As Kneip slumped down, Pearl said, she stepped back. She began dancing—a demonic whirling dervish—while James unlocked the cuffs. At this point, Kneip came to his senses and threw himself at James.

Pearl then described the fight between her husband and Kneip. She said that Kneip, battered and bloody, had James by the throat and was squeezing so tightly that his eyes bulged. She then bashed Kneip over the head. He fell to the ground, striking his head, which Pearl insisted must certainly have been the cause of his death. The newlyweds stripped him, dragged him to the train trestle, and threw the battered body over the side.

Love smirked and shook his head. James had admitted to finishing off Kneip with a piece of hickory, but now Pearl was attempting to shield him by making Kneip’s death appear to be an accident. It was an absurd, almost laughable claim. It was unlikely Kneip could even stand after sustaining the injuries he had, let alone muster enough strength to attack Odell. The evidence suggested that Pearl or James—or both of them—inflicted Kneip’s wounds while he was handcuffed to the tree, and then the heartless Pearl danced a jig while her alleged rapist died a slow and agonizing death of a thousand cuts.

“And you didn’t cut him with a knife?” Love asked in an attempt to catch Pearl in a lie.

“No, I didn’t. He died, I tell you, when his head struck something hard.”

Love had doubts that Kneip raped Pearl in the first place. He had interviewed Pearl’s sister, Eva. Until she married Odell, Pearl lived for a time with Eva and her husband.

Eva described her younger sister as a wild child. “She was always rather wild and we could never do anything with her. She got to going out every night and my husband and I used to try to keep her home, but she would never mind us. We finally had to tell her to leave the house.”

Other aspects of Pearl’s confession didn’t add up. By the murder tree, police found broken pieces of .32 that were streaked with blood. The massive skull fractures Kneip sustained, they believed, resulted when his assailants pistol-whipped him so savagely that they broke the weapon over his head.

Although there was an area of footprints that lent some credence to the possibility of a pitched fight, Love believed that the killer couple perpetrated a cold-blooded, premeditated murder.

Corroboration

Love found corroboration for his theory from Odell’s step-parents, Ellen and George Arnold, with whom the young couple lived.

The elderly couple stood outside the dining room and eavesdropped as James began grilling his “suspect.” They heard him ask, “Did you wrong her?”

The Arnolds then heard a muffled “no” from Kneip, who asked to be taken to the courthouse to tell his side of the story. They left at approximately 6:30 on the evening of Wednesday, January 7, 1920.

Ellen Arnold told police that James and Pearl returned home at about one-thirty on Thursday morning. James immediately began scrubbing blood from his hands and Pearl burned up her shoes.

After watching the bizarre spectacle of Pearl incinerating her shoes, Ellen followed Pearl to her bedroom, where she watched the girl hastily throw bundles of clothes into an open suitcase. Puzzled, she asked Pearl what she was doing.

Pearl sat onto the edge of the bed and explained. They took Kneip to the woods in order to teach him a lesson, but Kneip got free and was choking James. At that point, Pearl attacked Kneip, battering him over the head. In the melee, she said, she stabbed and kicked Kneip with such ferocity that she broke the heel of her shoe. James, she insisted, played no part in the attack. “Mother, I’ve done it. I did it alone.”

Pearl’s bedside admission didn’t play with the district attorney; Love charged both James and Pearl with first-degree murder.

James the Mental Giant

James Odell’s trial came amidst a growing controversy over his mental age. When he left the Navy after a three-year hitch, his commanding officer jotted “Mentally deficient” on his exit papers. Psychologists who examined him said that he did not have an aggressive personality but rather a passive one that made him putty in the hands of a beauty like Pearl.

Nonetheless, James Odell faced a jury for first degree murder. Pearl testified, but since she faced indictment, she stopped her narrative at the point Odell’s car stalled. She would provide no help for her husband’s defense. If he was to beat the rap, he would need to convince the jurors.

Odell took the stand and recited essentially the same story he gave to Love and Weidenmann with one exception. When Kneip unexpectedly regained consciousness and throttled Odell in the ensuing melee, Odell lost consciousness. When he came to, Kneip was dead, his skull caved in by a large piece of hickory. Pearl had finished the job.

“He [Kneip] fell down and kicked at me. He grabbed me. He had me part way down and was squeezing me by the throat with all his might when Pearl came up behind him. I don’t know whether she hit him or not. I did not know what was going on. When I recovered myself Kneip was lying on the ground. Pearl was fixing her collar. Then we cut off his clothes to hide his identity.”

“I swear to God that I never intended to kill him.”

The jury, however, didn’t believe a word of it. They found Odell guilty. The twenty-three-year-old was headed to the electric chair.

The young lovers had a chance for one, final conversation before James entered Sing Sing’s death house to await his execution date. With two officers flanking the now-convicted slayers, and the teary-eyed Arnolds looking on in stunned disbelief, James embraced Peal. “Well, Pearl,” he said in the flat tone of a man who had lost all hope, “I did as you told me to, and now look what I got!”

Pearl returned to her cell, fell on the cot, and sobbed.

Critics of the trial’s outcome, and Odell’s death sentence, included Rochester Chief of Police Joseph Quigley. For the cop who had followed the case from investigation through trial, Quigley believed that Pearl used her new husband to take revenge on a man that jilted her. “Odell will go the electric chair,” he remarked to the press, “but the wife—will she?”

Quigley voiced the question on everyone’s mind, but then a surprise twist in the case would take the death penalty off of Love’s agenda.

As she awaited her trial, Pearl began to experience periodic bouts of nausea. Dr. Max Morris confirmed her suspicions. For Pearl, news of her pregnancy came as a shock and a relief. The pregnancy would most certainly lead her away from the electric chair, but the baby’s father wouldn’t be as lucky. Besides, the expectant mother faced an excellent chance of spending the child’s first two decades behind bars.

Pearl’s Day in Court

Pearl’s day in court arrived on May 26, 1920 and became a media sensation. Many who followed the case predicted that Pearl would receive a hand-slap by a jury that wasn’t likely to send a pregnant woman waddling to prison for life.

They were wrong. After listening to the same, sad story that put James Odell on death row, the jury (which consisted of twelve men) agreed that the murder of Edward Kneip was a joint effort, although they went slightly lighter on Pearl. They found her guilty of second degree murder. For her role in the crime, Pearl would receive a life sentence of hard labor. Her sentence would potentially last until 1935.

Hard Labor

During her second week in prison, Pearl gave birth to a daughter she named “Gloria” (she later changed the name to Mildred Naomi at James’ request), becoming only the second woman in the State’s history (Gussie Humann, in prison for perjury, was the other) to deliver a child while incarcerated…sort of. Prison officials, following State law, transported her to a nearby hospital for the actual delivery.

Baby Gloria brought along a panoply of worries for her mother, who now faced the heart-rending fact that her daughter would one day call another woman—someone not a convicted murderess—her “mama.”

Bowing the increasing pressure of the reading public, prison authorities agreed to allow baby Mildred to remain with her mother for her first two years. Baby Millie would spend the first phase of her life behind bars while Pearl nursed her from her cell at Auburn prison.

This decision inadvertently sparked a battle between the Odell and Beaver families, both of whom wanted custody of the baby. New York authorizes faced the difficult decision of choosing a custodial parent from among the feuding former in-laws, or instead to place Mildred in foster care.

Meanwhile, Pearl went back to her life of “hard labor,” which meant stitching garments on an assembly line in the prison factory.

Death Row

Although Odell would never hold his baby, prison authorities did allow him to receive a photograph pasted to a cardboard backing. He propped up the picture and stared at it, musing about his daughter’s future—a future he would not live to see.

On April 28, 1921, James Odell took the “long walk” from Sing Sing’s death house, through the “little green door,” to the electric chair in the death chamber. Even at the eleventh hour, he maintained his innocence, telling the prison chaplain that “We only took Kneip out there to punish him.”

James Odell went into his coffin with the photograph of Millie placed on his chest.

Bye, Bye Baby

After two years with her mother, prison authorities removed Mildred and placed her with a foster family. To avoid entanglements, they refused to disclose the identity of the child’s guardians.

Enraged, friends of Pearl began a campaign for her parole so she could begin life anew with Midred. They gathered 10,000 signatures on a petition and brought it to New York Governor Miller, requesting a commutation. Miller, however, couldn’t bring himself to free the slayer.

Over the next seven years, Pearl labored away stitching clothes in the prison factory, where she dreamed about Mildred and what her adopted parents had bought her for each Christmas. She imagined an airy, arts-and-crafts house on a street peopled with playmates for her young daughter, and she hated herself for missing it all.

Baby Ruth

Then in 1929, the Arnolds—Mildred’s step-grandparents—attempted to press government officials to disclose the identity of the guardians. The Arnolds evidently believed that Mildred had been adopted by none other than baseball legend George Herman “Babe” Ruth and his wife, who had recently died in a house fire and had left a sizable inheritance of $50,000 to Gloria Ruth. They cited as evidence photographs that, they believed, exhibited an uncanny resemblance between Mildred and Gloria.

Their belief fueled a media frenzy as reporters delighted in the possibility that the Babe’s adopted child may have been born to an infamous murderess.

The Arnolds filed a writ, but a Rochester judge denied it based on the argument that they, as step-grandparents, had no legal standing in court.

Auburn Warden William S. Jennings quashed speculation once and for all in a statement issued to the press on February 7, 1929. “Babe Ruth’s daughter positively is not the child of Pearl Odell. Pearl Odell’s child was placed in the comfortable home of a childless, middle-aged couple in another state. She is there now and is happy.”

An Early Christmas Present

Eight years had passed when, on December 23, 1930, Pearl Odell received an early Christmas gift from Governor (and future U.S. President) Franklin D. Roosevelt: her freedom.

Roosevelt commuted Pearl’s sentence of twenty-to-life, explaining that the death of Mildred’s guardian had swayed him; “it would be advisable,” he told the press, “to parole this inmate so that she may take care of her child who is now ten years of age.” In a generous mood, Roosevelt commuted the sentences of eighteen others, but Pearl was the only woman to receive executive clemency

Pearl, still a stunner as she approached thirty, would spend the Christmas of 1930 with her ten-year-old daughter.

The High Price of Beaver

In summarizing the case, one reporter noted, “No murder so strange, so ferocious, so stamped with woman’s unleashed vengeful fury as this Rochester tragedy is on the records of the American police. It is true, after all, as Kipling wrote: ‘The female of the species in more deadly than the male.”

He might have been right. If Pearl wanted vengeance against Kneip for some slight real or imagined, she knew how to load the weapon that James Odell became under her tutelage. By discussing her sexual history, she tapped into an emotion that evokes powerful feelings in some men: a sense of sexual ownership over the ones they love. The unanswered question, then, is did she know what she was doing?

According to Rochester Chief of Police Joseph M. Quigley, she did. In an interview with the press just after Odell’s conviction, Quigley outlined what he believed to be the true motive behind the murder.

“I believe that this young woman murdered her former sweetheart because she still oved him and wanted revenge for being jilted and because she did not love her husband. Her love for Kneip, I believe, was so great that she did not want anyone else ever to have him. She was angly because he had jilted her and married because she had decided she would never be married to the man she loved. But she did not forget him.”

“I think that is a peculiarity with women—they do not easily forget those with whom they were first in love. She found that she did not love her husband and then she told these stories which enraged him. And when Kneip was taken out in the county Odell told her that if Kneip had ever done anything wrong to her she might do with him as she desired.”

Quigley rambled on a bit about the evils of telling a partner about “past sins,” and then summarized his argument.

“I cannot conceive such a thing being possible as the theory that Pearl Odell killed this young man because her husband was bitter and sought revenge for what had been in the past lives of the two. Crimes of this nature are not committed for any such purpose. Its fiendishness can be accounted for by me in no other way than that she loved him, was jilted and was after revenge and his life because she wanted no other to have him. If she had loved her husband she would not have cared what happened to Kneip, but she found she was not happy with him [Odell].”