Christmas Slay Ride: Most Mysterious and Horrific Christmas Day Murders (2 page)

Spontaneous human combustion, otherwise known as SHC, is a mysterious and a rare phenomenon. For centuries, scientists and medical professionals have tried to understand exactly what causes a man or woman to suddenly explode into flames before burning rapidly to ashes, often without igniting flammable objects in their vicinity.

The first documented account of spontaneous human combustion took place in 1663. Thomas Bartholin, a Danish anatomist, wrote about a Parisian woman who “went up in ashes and smoke” while sound asleep. Her body was consumed, but the straw mattress beneath her only experienced minor scorching. Ten years later, an actual collection of SHC cases entitled
De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis (
Arson Spontaneous Human Body)
was published.

The hundreds of SHC accounts that have been reported since the Parisian incident have had basic similarities. The victim burns to death (although there have been some survivors), usually in their homes. Police investigators often report a smoky yet sweet odor in the room. The heads and bodies are reduced to ash and bone, but the extremities remain intact, and in some cases their internal organs do not burn either. The only signs that a fire occurred, other than the body, are occasional burning of the floor or rug beneath the victim and a sooty, greasy residue on the walls and furniture.

On December 24, 1885, one of the most bizarre cases of death by SHC occurred in Seneca, Illinois, a town situated around fifty miles southwest of Chicago. The event was so far beyond the comprehension of nineteenth century Americans that the newspapers reported it as the result of a deadly brush with a candle flame.

On December 27, the
St. Paul Daily Globe
ran the following story, which it titled “Burned to Death While Drunk”:

Patrick Rooney and wife, an aged couple living near Seneca, LaSalle County, were yesterday found dead at their residence. Mrs. Rooney had been burned to death. The coroner’s jury gave a verdict of accidental death. The supposition is that Mrs. Rooney’s clothes took fire from a candle while she was winding the clock, and that in the absence of any help in the room she was burned into a crisp. Mr. Rooney was in an adjoining room and was suffocated by the smoke and flames. A hired man in another portion of the house knew nothing of the affair until morning. The coroner’s inquest developed the fact that Rooney and his wife were under the influence of liquor.

Two people were killed by fire in the Rooney household late Christmas Eve, or possibly early Christmas Day, in 1885. However, as for the circumstances, the newspapers had it all wrong.

******

December 24, 1885

It was getting late, but farmer Patrick Rooney and his wife were still sitting at the kitchen table, sharing a bottle of whiskey with their hired man, John Larson. They were in no hurry to go to bed. That year, Christmas Day had been declared a federal holiday in the United States, and there would be no business matters to attend to in the morning.

Finally Larson got up and told his employers that he was going to bed. He was only slightly inebriated, but a long day’s work had lowered his stamina, and he pleaded exhaustion. Mr. and Mrs. Rooney chuckled and kept drinking while Larson proceeded to his upstairs bedroom, glancing at the clock as he went. It was nearly 8:00 p.m.

Early the next morning, Larson awoke feeling nauseous and disoriented. He rolled out of bed, groaning at the throbbing in his skull, and stumbled down the stairs to the kitchen for some water and fresh air. There was an unusual burning in his nose and throat, making him wonder if he was coming down with some kind of illness.

At the bottom of the small staircase, the hired man thought he could see and smell a smoky haze. It was still too dark to be sure, so he entered the kitchen and tried to strike a match on the range to light the kerosene lamp. To Larson’s surprise, a dark and greasy film covered the stove, causing the match to slide across its surface.

More confused than alarmed, he moved carefully in the dimness toward the Rooneys’ bedroom, which was next to the kitchen. The door was ajar, so Larson pushed it open. Inside, he found Patrick Rooney lifeless on the floor, coat and boots lying neatly on a chair. The farmer had clearly been preparing for bed when he suddenly collapsed.

Reeling, Larson yelled for Mrs. Rooney, but there was no answer. Shock giving way to dread, Larson dressed, saddled a horse, and rode to a nearby farm, where the couple’s son, Todd, lived.

Alarmed to hear that his father was dead and his mother missing, Todd Rooney and a neighbor accompanied John Larson back to the farm. It was now daylight, so when the three men entered the kitchen they saw that soot covered everything, even the walls. They were also able to see a wide hole measuring approximately two and a half by three feet in the wooden floor near the table.

Todd Rooney shone a lamplight into the pitch-black opening. He, Larsen, and the neighbor were horrified to see a human foot, a section of a vertebra, and a charred skull amid a heap of cooling ashes on the cellar floor.

One account says that Mrs. Rooney had weighed over 200 pounds, while another logged her weight at 165. Whatever the actual number, she had been burned down to a mere 12 pounds’ worth of ash, bone, and fragmented body parts. Nothing else had been burned except the floor, although the greasy soot coated the kitchen.

The authorities were notified, but the only conclusion they could reach was that Mrs. Rooney’s clothing had caught fire somehow, burning her to death and causing her husband to die from smoke inhalation. A burned-out candle had been found on the kitchen table, so the police assumed she had brushed against it while winding the clock before bedtime.

Because the law required an inquest into violent and suspicious deaths, coroner Dr. Floyd Clendens ordered one. The jury concluded that Patrick Rooney had been asphyxiated by the smoke from his wife’s burning body and that John Larson had escaped the same fate because he slept on the second floor and closed the door to his bedroom. Upon awakening he had suffered from a headache, nausea, and slight disorientation, all symptoms of smoke inhalation, but compared to the fate of his employers, he had gotten off easy.

Dr. Clendens was at a loss to explain Mrs. Rooney’s bizarre death. Given the condition of the remains, he determined that only a fire burning at over 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit for several minutes could have done such damage. But why didn’t the entire house burn down? Except for the hole in the kitchen floor, a few scorch marks on the table, and the sooty film everywhere, there was no sign that a deadly fire had taken place. It was mystifying.

The policeman in charge of the case submitted a written report stating,
“Mrs Rooney disappeared in a fire of fantastic heat and of an unknown nature, which, curiously did not extend farther than the immediate vicinity.”

The coroner had heard of spontaneous human combustion before. As early as 1825, newspapers had published the theories of a Dr. Trail, who claimed to have discovered a flammable oil in the human blood. “This oil,” an editorial in the
Manchester Guardian
explained, “is chiefly observed in the blood of persons who have been addicted to drinking ardent spirits.”

The same article made an observation that sounds just as applicable to combustion deaths today.

“It is truly remarkable that the fire that consumed the bodies does not appear to have been sufficiently intense to communicate to the linen and furniture.”

Dr. Clendens explained the theory of spontaneous human combustion to the jury. If any of them read Charles Dickens, they were acquainted with the concept. In his bestselling novel
Bleak House
, the aptly named villain Mr. Krook was found reduced to a pile of ash. There was soot everywhere in the room, the air was acrid and suffocating, and only the floor area surrounding the ashes was charred. Dickens would later say that he based this dramatic scene on his study of over 30 well-known combustion cases.

It was noted at the inquest that Mr. and Mrs. Rooney often drank, fitting the contemporary belief that drunkards accounted for the majority of mysteriously burned victims. However, the coroner’s jury wasn’t comfortable bringing in a verdict of death by spontaneous combustion, so they simply stated that the Rooneys perished in a fire.

Under ordinary circumstances, John Larson might have suspected of murdering his employers, but rising soot from the first floor had created an outline of his head on his pillow, indicating that he had been in bed asleep during the disaster.

Although freed from suspicion, Larson ultimately became the third casualty of that terrible night. He continued to deteriorate physically, and two weeks later he was dead, his lungs and system having suffered progressive damage from the smoke and grease in the air.

******

Even now, people find it hard to believe that a human being can burst into flames without being ignited by an external source such as a candle, lighter, or open fire. But police and fire department officials are more willing to consider the possibility when they arrive at the scene of a suspicious death and find charred corpses with the surroundings intact.

In 2010, 76-year-old Michael Faherty was found burned to death in his home in Galway, Ireland. There was no other fire damage in the room, so the coroner ruled that he had been killed by spontaneous combustion. The announcement, the first of its kind in Ireland, generated controversy, with many medical authorities refusing to accept it.

So what causes spontaneous human combustion? No one knows for sure. Among the proposed catalysts are excessive alcohol consumption, obesity, bacteria, and static electricity, but science has yet to substantiate any of it.

In August, 2012, Brian J. Ford, a British biologist, announced in
New Scientist
magazine that he had experimented with combustion triggers and believed that acetone buildup in the body, which can be caused by diabetes or alcoholism, could cause the human body to spontaneously combust. His hypothesis was heralded as the solution in some quarters while others refuse to believe that spontaneous human combustion even exists.

Something killed John Rooney and his wife in their farmhouse on Christmas Eve, 1885, but there may never be an official consensus on exactly what it was.

On Christmas morning 1900, 14-year-old Moses “Cooney” Houston shot and killed Delia Green, who was the same age. It was a senseless crime that shocked and saddened the residents of Yamacraw, a black neighborhood in Savannah, Georgia, where the murder occurred. However, when the years that followed resulted in even bloodier crimes, the death of Delia Green might have been forgotten were it not for a song.

When folk music boomed in the 1950s, a ballad about Delia’s murder emerged. Since then, it has been performed by dozens of folk singers, and recorded by icons like Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. Despite the success that greeted the song, the true story of that happened that Christmas morning remained buried by time. People who were directly involved with the case and its ensuing trial died off, and the facts that survived were embellished until they bore little resemblance to what actually occurred.

In 1928, when early versions of the song were still circulating, a folklorist named Robert Winslow Gordon traced its origins back to Savannah. He interviewed Delia Green’s mother and the policeman who arrested the girl’s killer, but for some reason never published his research. It wasn’t until a ballad historian named John F. Garst did his own investigating that the true story was resurrected from old court files and yellowing newspapers.

That story now appears here.

******

On the night of December 24, 1900, Delia Green and Moses “Cooney” Houston attended a party at the home of a man named Willie West, who employed Delia as a scrub girl. The two teenagers had been seeing each other for several months, and despite their young ages, the relationship appears to have been sexual.

By some accounts, the Christmas party was a wild one, with loud music, drunken carousers, and laughing women. Others later swore that only a small group had been in attendance, with everyone being sober except Houston. They said that the only time the party grew noisy was when everyone assembled around the Wests’ organ in the parlor and sang “Rock of Ages.”

Houston’s lawyer would claim that West’s place was a “rough house,” which was a contemporary euphemism for bordello. Savannah historians describe the Yamacraw neighborhood at that time as being “poor, black, and violent,” so it’s possible. Sean Wilentz, author of
The Rose & the Briar
, speculated that Delia may have been one of the place’s younger prostitutes, and Cooney was jealous of her johns.

Cooney grew drunk enough to become belligerent, and it wasn’t long before he and Delia started arguing. At around 3:00 a.m. on Christmas morning, he taunted her in front of everyone, saying, “My little wife is mad with me tonight. She does not hear me. She is not saying anything to me.”

Delia scowled and turned away, to which he responded by declaring, “You don’t know how I love you.”

She lost her temper. “You son of a bitch! You have been going with me for four months. You know I am a lady.”

Cooney hooted. “That is a damn lie. You know I have had you as many times as I have fingers and toes!”

“You lie!” she shouted back.

At this point, Willie West, Delia’s employer, intervened and told the boy to leave. He stomped to the door, scowling. Then he stopped suddenly, pulled out a pistol, and shot his girlfriend in the groin. She screamed and sank to the floor, blood pooling rapidly across her lap.

Pandemonium ensued. Cooney Houston tried to flee, but West chased him into the street, caught him, and turned him over to patrolman J. T. Williams. Williams would later testify that the boy admitted to shooting Delia because she had called him a son of a bitch, and would do so again if the opportunity presented itself. In the meantime, Delia was carried to her mother’s home at 113 Ann Street, where she died.

The murder made it into the
Morning News
, the
Evening Press,
and other Savannah newspapers. Although the future ballads overlooked the young ages of both Houston and Green, the contemporary press seized on their youth. The
Morning News
referred to the victim as a mere girl, “but 14 years old” and the
Evening Press
trumpeted, “Boy Killed Girl”.  Three months later the same paper blared “Boy Charged with Murder” in a front-page headline.

Despite his young age, Houston was tried as an adult in the spring of 1901, as Georgia had no juvenile justice system in place. To emphasize his youth to the jury, his attorney had him wear short pants at his arraignment. It was a clever move, although there was no guarantee it would have the intended effect. The state had executed minors for murder before. Barely a year ago, on April 6, 1900, sixteen-year-old King Goosby and his fourteen-year-old brother, Lewis, had been hanged in Appling County for a robbery that ended in murder.

If Houston was worried about the possibility of being executed, he didn’t show it. The
Morning News
reporter noted that the teenager had “the round cheerful countenance of many mulattoes,” and, in the racist mindset of the day, that he “seemed to be rather above the average of negro intelligence.” It was the reporter’s way of saying that Moses “Cooney” Houston did not look like a murderer.

When he took the stand, Cooney’s story differed from the one he had told the arresting officer back in December. With a straight face, he claimed that Willie West had sent him to a gun repair shop to retrieve a pistol. He obediently brought it to the house and left it on the table, hidden beneath a napkin. Later, when the Christmas party was in full swing, he and his friend Eddie Cohen got into a playful wrestling match over the weapon and it went off, accidentally hitting Delia.

Cooney’s friend Willie Mills corroborated this version, but Eddie Cohen disputed it furiously. He testified that he was not there when the murder took place and that he never wrestled with Houston over the weapon. Another witness told the court that Willie Mills had not been present either.

The jury found Cooney Houston guilty of murdering Delia Green, but recommended mercy. The boy’s elderly mother burst into tears, although he himself did not react. When Judge Paul F. Seabrook ordered him to stand, he did so calmly and politely.

“Houston,” Seabrook said, “you have been indicted and tried for the crime of murder. The jury has seen fit to accompany its verdict with a recommendation to mercy, and it now becomes my duty to impose the sentence directed by the law. I perform this duty with some pain and some reluctance. I dislike condemning one of your youth and apparent intelligence to life imprisonment. In so doing, I exhort you to be a man, even in confinement, to repent of your past evil deeds and strive to earn the confidence and respect of those placed in authority over you.”

Mrs. Houston continued to sob, but Cooney smiled and thanked Seabrook before strolling calmly out of the courtroom in a bailiff’s custody. Everyone who watched him leave had the impression that his fate did not bother him at all. The
News
commented that the boy’s age had “saved his neck.”

In a later petition for clemency, Houston’s attorney, Raiford Falligant, said that the youthful murderer had been “a mere child” when he shot his girlfriend. He had “got into bad company and so unfortunately committed the act that he now suffers for.” The killing had been a tragic accident, taking place when Houston “was crazed by drink in boisterous company for the first time in his life and … the crowd he was with and in got him drunk.”

Falligant’s appeal eventually worked. After serving only twelve years, Cooney Houston was paroled on October 15, 1913, by Governor John Slaton. Upon his release, he supposedly continued to have trouble with the law, so he left Georgia and went to New York, where he died in 1927.

Delia Green is buried at Laurel Grove Cemetery South, in Savannah. Her grave is unmarked and its exact location is long forgotten, although the songs inspired by her murder, such as Johnny Cash’s “Delia’s Gone” and “Delia” by Bob Dylan, continue to be sung.