Dark Hearts

One man's obsession with lonely hearts ads of a century ago, and his abuse of the false trust they engendered.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're listening to American Shadows, a production of I Heart
Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Minky, pudgy and short.
He was far from handsome. If he had one good feature,

(00:22):
it might have been his striking, pale blue eyes. Some
thought he was charming, though, and he knew it. Herman
Drength had immigrated from the Netherlands with his father in
and they settled into American life as farmers in Iowa.
But the rural existence wasn't his thing. He had big
plans and the open roads and growing cities had much

(00:43):
to offer. As soon as he was able, Herman enlisted
and ended up serving in World War One. After the war,
he used his charm for a profession far more lucrative
than farming. He became an Oklahoma oil stock promoter, while
a funny one anyway, and a bogus career required a
new identity to match, So Herman Drength soon became Harry Powers,

(01:05):
and also a r weaver and Cornelie's pearson. We'll just
stick with Harry Powers. Maybe the work was too difficult,
or there just weren't enough people to con especially in
nine during the Great Depression. Whatever the reason, he switched
to a more attractive con job, matrimony. Some would say

(01:26):
that love and personal connection are the fires of the soul.
People will do anything to find it and even more
to keep it. For most of us, love is a fundamental,
basic need. For others, that intimate connection is an opportunity.
Sometimes we're so busy looking into the light in our
hearts that we ignore what lurks in the shadows of

(01:48):
a partner's soul. We'll dismiss the signs that ignore the
red flags. The alternative, after all, is too painful or
too frightening to accept. But if we're honest, the truth
is much dark her than would like. Even when it
comes to romance. Here there may be monsters. I'm Lauren Vogelbaum.
Welcome to American Shadows. Before the era of dating apps,

(02:20):
people looking for love might place personal ads or lonely
hearts ads in their local newspaper. But Harry Powers took
a different route. He chose to seek out a Lonely
Hearts club, a member's only group where men and women
found potential partners for a fee, and Harry chose the
most successful of them all, Detroit's American Friendship Society, which

(02:40):
had opened for business. In annual membership fees were a
bit more for the men than the women, four dollars
and cents as opposed to but he shelled out the
cash and placed his profile. He exaggerated, of course. His
profile stated that he was wealthy, worth a hundred and
fifty thousand dollars an income of two thousand dollars a month.

(03:02):
In case you're wondering, that's a net worth of over
two million dollars today. Powers didn't stop there. No, he
had studied his audience well. He played the sympathy card,
enlisting himself as a widow, Knowing that ladies were looking
for someone smart too. He put down his profession as
a civil engineer, and next up was security. I own

(03:23):
a beautiful ten room brick home, his profile read, completely
furnished with everything that would make a good woman happy.
My wife would have her own car and plenty of
spending money, would have nothing to do but enjoy herself.
But she must be a one man woman. I would
not tolerate infidelity. Now, if some of the women reading
that had heard the old adage, if it sounds too

(03:44):
good to be true, then it probably is, then they
wouldn't have responded, but they did in droves. In fact,
soon enough, Powers was receiving twenty letters a day. But
there's one thing he left out of his profile. His wife,
his real living wife. You see, Harry Powers was already

(04:04):
married before he had placed his ad. He had answered
someone else's a Lonely Hearts ad placed in ninety six
by a woman named Luella Struthers. She was part owner
of a small grocery store in Clarksburg, West Virginia, as
well as a farm in nearby Quiet Dell. After a
brief courtship, they had married in nine seven and then
settled down in West Virginia to run the grocery store

(04:25):
and manage the farm. I know. I said that Harry
wasn't the farming type, but considering his newly created dating profile,
he wasn't the monogamous type either. It helped that Harry
traveled a lot and without his wife too, and all
the while he continued to receive letters from plenty of women.
Later on, the Postal Service would report that delivered hundreds

(04:47):
of letters to another of his aliases, Cornelius Pearson. Harry's
extracurricular lifestyle carried on without a hitch for a few years,
right up until late August of ninety one. Then, on
a hot summer day in Park Ridge, Illinois, one William
oh Boyle stopped by his former landlady's house to pick
up his tools, which he had left behind after his eviction.

(05:09):
The house seemed oddly deserted, though in fact she had
evicted him specifically so her new fiance could move in.
And that's when O'Boyle heard the footsteps. As he watched,
a man slipped out a side door. Oh Boyle gave
him chase, but the man ran into the nearby garage
through the door. Oh Boyle asked the stranger where Asta

(05:29):
and her children were, but the man inside wouldn't answer. Frustrated,
he tried the door and found it locked from the inside. Suspicious,
oh Boyle stuck around, attempting to wait the intruder out,
but after a couple hours it was clear the man
was neither coming out nor talking. Suit yourself, boil muttered.
He locked the door from the outside and headed to

(05:50):
the police department to let them deal with the situation.
When the police arrived later that day, they discovered a pudgy,
blue eyed man busily removing for an sings from the house.
A boil identified him as the man had seen earlier.
Apparently the man had escaped to the garage's rear window. Naturally,
the police wanted to know who the man was and

(06:11):
why he was removing items from the home Cornelius O.
Pearson of the Fairmont Hotel in Fairmont, West Virginia. The
man replied, according to him, the ikers had moved to Colorado,
and he was simply helping them pack up their things.
It must have sounded a bit strange to the officers,
but without any real evidence to the contrary, they let
Piercing go, taking his word that he would show up

(06:34):
at the police station the next day, and oddly enough,
he actually kept his word. When he arrived, he repeated
his story to the officer on duty that he was
helping sell the house, and then left as quickly as
had come. Just to be sure, though, the officers sent
a telegram to the Fairmont Hotel, and wouldn't you know it,
the manager there had never heard of Cornelius. But by

(06:57):
then it was too late. Harry Power a k a.
Cornelius Pearson was gone. The Parkridge police found fifty four
love letters and asked to Kea's home. All from Cornelius Pearson.
Every single one of them had been postmarked from Clarksburg, Virginia.

(07:18):
Let me see you alone. The most recent letter said,
I will come in the night. Do not let the
neighbors know I'm coming. Leave all business transactions to me
till Monday, dear. They also found a receipt on it
was a new name, Harry Powers. Intrigued police Chief Harold
John made a call to the authorities over in Clarksburg,
West Virginia, and, just like at the Fairmont Hotel, Detective

(07:41):
Southern had never heard of Cornelius, but he had heard
of Harry Powers. Detective Southern stopped by the local post
office and quickly discovered that a man named Pearson had
given his address as one one one Quincy Street, the
very same address it turned out as that of Harry
and Luella Powers. We're quickly Southern got a warrant for

(08:02):
the man's arrest. The detective intercepted Powers during his next
post office pick up, assert revealed four stamped and addressed
letters ready to send to unsuspecting women. Harry also had
a list of names and addresses of over a hundred
and fifty women and a form letter he used when
contacting them. It seemed Harry Powers was quite the pen pal.

(08:25):
The police arrested Powers on possible kidnapping charges. Next, they
searched his residence in Clarksburg, questioning both his wife and
his sister in law, Ava, who also lived with them.
They found women's clothing with name tags stitched at them,
none of which were Luella or Ava. Some of Asda's
clothing and even her silver flatwear were found there. Luella, meanwhile,

(08:47):
staunchly told the officers she had no knowledge of the
other women nor how the items had come to be
found in her house. Harry also insisted his wife knew
nothing of his philandering, but they detained his wife and
her sister anyway. After extensive questioning, they were released. Harry
refused to talk, not without a lawyer anyway. He never

(09:08):
denied the affair, but he swore that had last seen
Asta and the children at the Chicago train station. Had
the wealthy widow tricked the con man, was she hiding
in Colorado under an assumed name, waiting for Powers to arrive,
or had Lluella and her sister discovered Harry's affair and
sought to eliminate Asta. It took a bit of detective work,

(09:29):
but slowly the pieces all came together, but not before
things got just a little weirder. According to the letters found,
Asta had been only one of the hundreds of women
responding to Powers ad She was a widow with three children,
Greta fourteen, Harry twelve, and Annabel nine. After a long

(09:50):
romance by mail, Powers, under the alias of Cornelius, Pearson
wrote Asda that final letter that the police had found.
He had then driven to Asda's home in Park Rid,
and after spending the night, the lovers departed on a
trip together, leaving the children with the family nurse, Elizabeth Abernathy.
Five days later, Abernathy received a letter informing her that

(10:11):
Pearson would be coming to pick up the children on
July one. The morning after his arrival, Powers sent one
of the children to the bank with a note instructing
the bank clerk to fill in the check with the
entire bank balance and return it to the child. The
bank refused, believing the signature had been forged. When the
child came home without the check, Pearson packed the car,

(10:31):
gathered the children and left town. Now you might think
Harry Powers had his hands full, what with the wife
of fiancee and over a hundred and fifty other women
to write to, But Powers somehow found time to court
another woman in person, Dorothy Lemky. Three weeks after leaving Illinois,
Powers showed up at her Northborough, Massachusetts home, where she

(10:53):
lived with her sister and brother in law. He and
Dorothy had been corresponding rather passionately for quite some time,
and so on the day after his arrival, Dorothy said
goodbye to her sister and left town with her new fiance,
the man she believed to be Cornelius Pearson. The couple
made two stops on their way out of town. The Bank,

(11:14):
of course, was the first, where Dorothy took out four
thousand dollars they needed it for their wedding. The second
stop was a railway station where Powers shipped Dorothy's trunks
and suit cases not to Iowa, though no Dorothey's belongings
were shipped to his post office address in West Virginia.
Several days after that, Powers returned home to Clarksburg alone,

(11:37):
where he picked up Dorothey's belongings and the letters that
landed him in a jail cell after the arrest, everything snowballed.
The local paper printed the story, and reader Louise Watson
couldn't believe her eyes. She immediately called the sheriff's department.
She had recently been to visit her mother in the
town of Quiet Dell, where she and her mother noticed
that a neighbor, Harry Powers, had built a garage his

(12:00):
wife's property. It was strange, because who would need a
garage when there wasn't even a house. Quiet Dell's sheriff,
Wilfred Grimm, thought so too. You see, the Powers home
in Clarksburg was just twenty five miles away from the
farm in Quiet Dell. Grim immediately filed for a warrant
To complicate things, the farmland belonged solely to Luella and

(12:22):
her sister Ava, but the garage was in Harry's name. Only.
Not long afterward, Sheriff Grimm, along with the deputy State Police,
Chief of Police, and Detective Southern all converged on the farm.
The door was locked, but the deputy found a matic
farming tools similar in shape to a pickaxe, and after
a few wax he busted the lock and everyone stepped inside.

(12:46):
The men, however, weren't prepared for what they found. No
one was Powers sat across from the investigators. What's the
juicy love letters? One of the masked just good friends?
Harry replied, maybe she went off to marry another man.

(13:07):
Officials had discovered otherwise. At first, the found nothing at
the garage, no oil spills, no tire marks, not even
a single tool. Well, almost nothing. They found four hairpins,
and in a darkened corner they found a trap door
underneath it. Stairs led to a basement with four rooms.

(13:30):
In one they found bloody fabric and hair. Another contained
trunks full of clothing, jewelry, ribbons, and a blood soaked dress.
In the third a child's bloody footprint. All three of
those rooms had also been fitted with gas lines, and
the fourth one had windows looking into the others an
observation room. Desperate for a confession, police took a handcuffed

(13:55):
Powers to the scene. When they showed him the bloody footprint,
he coolly replied, it isn't this horrible. By one pm,
over three people had arrived to watch the officials comb
the farm for Asta and her children. While that took place,
a fifteen year old boy stepped forward and mentioned that
had recently helped Powers dig a ditch. Officials grabbed shovels

(14:19):
and began digging. Within minutes, they came across a burlap sack.
Inside the unearthed the decomposing body of a woman, her
hands bound in front of her. The crowd, sickened by
the view in the stench, retreated. Later that day, search
crews found the bodies of Askeda's daughters, each wrapped in
a sheet, their hands tied behind their backs. Like their mother,

(14:43):
they had been strangled. Asked his son suffered a different faith,
though for him, Powers had used a hammer. A bank

(15:05):
book from the Merchants Savings Bank of Western Massachusetts was
retrieved from a fire pit the name Dorothy lem Key
in it. Lucester Police confirmed that yes, they did have
a missing person's report for that name. Later, Dorothy's sister
positively identified the body. Powers smug attitude incensed the good
citizens of Quiet Dell and Clarksburgh. On September, a mob

(15:30):
of some five thousand angry people surrounded the jail, demanding
his release so they could deliver their own brand of justice.
It took two hours to end the standoff, and eight
members of the mob were arrested inside the jail Harry
Power's wept not for his victims, though no. He claimed
he was worried that the crowd outside might turn their

(15:51):
rage on his wife. The police continued to interrogate him
about asked his personal effects, sobbing, Harry placed a hand
on a nearby bibel, swearing that he knew nothing about
Asta's belongings. But after several hours and an accidental fall
down the stairs, a black eyed Powers confessed to the

(16:11):
murders of Dorothy Lemki. Asked to Iker and asked us
three children, but the police suspected more, upwards of fifty more. Actually,
how many? One officer demanded to know how many others
did you kill? I don't know? Powers replied, you've got
me on five. What good would another fifty do. While

(16:31):
Powers refused to discuss other murders, he did agree to
tell officials the details about asked to Iker and Dorothy Lemki,
and his accounts were nothing less than chilling. He told
them he drove Askeda to his farm, where he locked
her up before returning to Illinois for her children. Then
he hanged them one by one before turning on the

(16:52):
gas to finish them off. He didn't say how long
it took them to die, but he did tell the
investigators that watching them gave a much pleasure. Thanks to
the investigative work near the garage, we know what happened
after that. Powers wrapped his victims up, dragged them to
the ditch, and then dumped the bodies and murder weapons
inside it. Dorothy Limkey arrived a day later. He continued.

(17:16):
He claimed he took his time with her before hanging
her eight hours, he bragged, and he admitted to depleting
both women's bank accounts, leaving little doubt about his true motive.
Authorities did eventually find Dorothy's body, but no one else's. Still.
Women from all over the country began to step forward,
and their stories were all the same. He had proposed

(17:38):
to them, stolen their money, and then disappeared, leaving them heartbroken.
At this point, all the authorities needed was a written confession,
but Harry refused to give it. On December seven of
ninety one, the first day of the trial, a number
of boys stood on the courthouse steps holding up books
Love Secrets of West Virginia's blue Beard. The title red

(18:00):
referencing the long ago folk tale of a woman who
stumbled upon her husband's grizzly secret of murdering his wives.
The Clarksburg courtroom couldn't hold the crowds, so the officials
moved to the trial to the one thousand, two hundred
seat opera house. Their Powers alternated between yawning and chewing
gum before openly weeping. On the stand, He tearfully told

(18:21):
the courtroom that his miserable marriage had forced him to
seek out other women. Then he recanted his previous verbal
confession and complained that his trial was an unfair spectacle.
Unswayed by his dramatics, the jury unanimously found him guilty
and immediately sentenced him to death by hanging no less.

(18:42):
On March eighteenth, Yo Powers made his way up the
gallows steps. A deputy placed a noose around his neck
fitting I suppose he even had a crowd. Do you
have anything to say, an official asked no. He replied,
his voice firm as his blue eyes raked over the

(19:03):
crowd before him. At exactly nine o'clock am, the floor
he stood on opened up, dropping him through. Eleven minutes later,
Harry Powers, the blue Beard of West Virginia, was pronounced dead. Hindsight,
as they say, is today we can look back at

(19:27):
these events and see the cracks, those red flags that
we think we had never fall for. But the victims
of Harry Powers did so. Why didn't they see it?
A lot of it probably comes down to trust. People
are hardwired to trust others. Our hearts want to believe
that the people we love are trustworthy. Even when we're fooled.

(19:48):
We try to make sense of it. After all, love
makes us do strange things. Sometimes it's easier to look
at the light inside of the shadows. We know there
might be monsters in the dark, but all we occasionally
peek under the bed and sigh in relief that there's
nothing there. We rarely look right beside us. Exactly how
many women Powers killed? As an answer, that he took

(20:10):
to the grave, and while he said only a single
word the day he died, he had much more to
say afterward. Shortly after Power's body had been removed from
the gallows, Wardens Scroggins received an envelope. Inside was a
note from the late serial killer that contained eight haunting words.
There are more in West Virginia than Wisconsin. Another question

(20:35):
that's lingered is why Powers hadn't killed his wife Luella.
He claimed their marriage was miserable, and like his other victims,
she had a bit of wealth, so why not just
kill her, take the money and move on. Officials had
a theory. When Luella married Harry, he signed a will
making Luella his beneficiary. Had also drawn up another document

(20:58):
giving him exclusive rights to his wife's property, but Luella
never signed that one, nor would she sign a will.
Apparently his charm only went so far with her, not
for lack of trying, though, Luella and her sister inherited
their property after their mother died from an unknown cause
two months before Luella's marriage to Powers. Neighbors would later

(21:20):
mention to the authorities that they suspected Powers had been
involved in his mother in law's death, but unfortunately, no
exhamation was possible as the body had been cremated. Convenient
to say the least. Perhaps Luella remained alive because in
some twisted way, Powers believed she gave him the perfect cover.

(21:40):
And while Powers insisted his wife was entirely in the
dark about his activities, she was the one who paid
for that garage. Add in the strange hours and frequent trips,
not to mention items she found throughout their home, and
it seems odd that she missed so many red flags
and one last thing before her death in the nineteen fifties,

(22:03):
Luella lived out the remainder of her life as a recluse,
having been shunned by the community, and although the investigators
could never prove her involvement, they did discover something interesting.
Luella had been married once before, to a man accused
of murder. There's more to this story. Stick around after

(22:25):
the brief sponsor break to hear all about it. We
hear about serial killers all the time, movies, books, television shows,
even the news, so just how common are they well?
The estimate is that in the United States there are

(22:48):
roughly fifty to seventy active killers, of whom seven to
eight are women. It's also interesting to note that, according
to the statistics, women serial killers in the nineteen and
twenty centuries rarely killed strangers, and, like Harry Powers, some
of them prayed on romantic partners. Traditionally, men who kill

(23:10):
their wives are called bluebeards, a name pulled from the
dark French folk tale. Women who kill their husbands tend
to be referred to as black widows, hinting at the
way a black widow spider sometimes kills her mate, and
many women serial killers have had one other thing in
common with the venomous spider. A lot of them killed
with poison. Meet Nanny Doss, an Oklahoma housewife whose neighbors

(23:39):
described her as a happy, friendly woman, always smiling, often laughing,
and like Powers, they said she was charming. In Nanny
became a widow for the fourth time, she insisted she
had loved all her husbands, unlike Harry Powers, though she
didn't always kill for the money. No, it seems that

(24:02):
she had high expectations for her husband's and the life
she thought they'd provide. Reality disappointed her, and all her
men had failed to measure up to those in the
romance novels she had read, and Nanny had read a
lot of them. I guess you could say that Nanny
Doss didn't like how the script had gone so far,
so she killed her darlings eleven darlings in fact, four husbands,

(24:26):
two sisters, her mother, a nephew, two of her own children,
and one grandson. Some think that her fantasy world stemmed
from her childhood. She was conceived out of wedlock, and
although her mother had married her father and they had
had three more children together, Nanny hated the man, which
was justified. He was abusive to all of them, both

(24:48):
verbally and emotionally. Nanny married her first husband, Charlie, at
the age of sixteen, and they went on to have
four children together. Both suspected the other of infidelity, and
both were right. Then in ninety seven, two of their
daughters died of food poisoning, or so Nannie claimed. Charley

(25:10):
didn't believe her, and soon ran away with one of
their surviving daughters, while leaving the newborn behind. In addition
to her penchant for romance novels, Nanny began a habit
of responding to lonely heart dads. That's how she met
and married her second husband, Frank, in ninety nine. But
it turned out Frank had a drinking problem, and one night,

(25:32):
in a blind rage, he assaulted her. Nannie's solution she
added rat poison to his whiskey jar. Frank died that
very same night. After that, she quickly answered another ad
and married for the third time. This new husband, Arley,
was also an alcoholic as well as a womanizer. To
cope Nanny would disappear for days at a time, but

(25:54):
whenever she was home, she played the part of the
devoted wife. That is, until Arley died of heart failure. Eventually,
Nanny Doss joined a lonely hearts club, hoping for better luck.
There she met Richard, who became husband number four. And
while Richard wasn't a drunkard or physically abusive, he was

(26:14):
a cheat, perhaps related. Richard died in April of Ninette.
Still looking for true love and wasting little time being
a widow, Doss changed her tactics. Her husband number five,
she married Samuel. He was clean cut and an avid churchgoer,
but he's strongly disapproved of her romance novels. If only

(26:36):
he knew just how important they were to her. Just
months after their wedding, Samuel was admitted to the hospital
with flu like symptoms. After diagnosing him with a severe
digestive infection, he was treated and released. The very same
evening he returned home, Nanny poisoned him with arsenic using
twenty times her usual dosage. Samuel's doctor found the sudden

(26:59):
death suspicious, and after an autopsy, there was enough evidence
to have Nanny arrested. Not only that, but the bodies
of our previous husbands, as well as her two children, mother, sisters,
and nephew were all exhumed, and wouldn't you know it,
all were found to have been poisoned. When asked if
money had been the motive for killing her husband's nanny, Doss,

(27:22):
always cheerful, only laughed at the question. I married those men,
she said, because I loved them. American Shadows is hosted
by Lauren Vogelbaum. This episode was written by Michelle Muto
with researcher Robin Miniter, and produced by Miranda Hawkins and

(27:45):
Trevor Young, with executive producers Aaron Minky, Alex Williams, and
Matt Frederick. To learn more about the show, visit grim
and Mild dot com. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or where
every you get your podcasts. M