“What matters it how far we go?” his scaly friend replied.

“There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.”

Some authorities on the subject of criminology, in general, and, in particular, serial killers, consider there to be only two well-documented cases of “authentic” mass murderers dating from the 1920s. Earle Leonard Nelson, popularly dubbed “the Gorilla Killer” and “the Dark Strangler,” was a necrophile who killed more than twenty people (including an infant) between early 1926 and June of 1927. The notorious cannibal and pedophile Albert Hamilton Fish (also known, variously, as “the werewolf of Wysteria,” the “Gray Man,” and “the Brooklyn Vampire”) may have been far more prolific, if one trusts Fish’s own outrageous claims, which would place the number of children he murdered and/or sexually assaulted near four hundred by the time he was arrested in September 1930.

However, I have found no book on the phenomenon of serial killers that records the events at the Wight Farm between 1922 and 1925, even though they were reported at the time in local papers and are easy enough to verify by recourse to police and court records. And yet there seems to be a sort of cultural amnesia at work regarding the affair, and I have been unable to locate printed references to the bizarre murders committed by Joseph Fearing Olney (1888–1926) published any later than April 1927. The final accounts concern his suicide by hanging while awaiting trial for the killings, and the general consensus seems to have been that by taking his own life, Olney, in effect, confessed to the crimes and proved his guilt beyond any reasonable doubt. What follows here is merely an overview of the case, and the reader is referred to Appendix C for a much more complete account. [Of course, keep in mind Harvey never got around to writing those appendices. — SC]

Born in Peace Dale, RI, to the recently widowed wife of a Presbyterian minister, it is difficult to learn much about Joseph Olney’s life prior to his arrest by police in Foster on December 12, 1925. However, we do know that he was an exemplary student hoping to pursue a career in medicine, and that he briefly attended college in Boston before he was forced to leave school for financial reasons. Afterwards, Olney returned home to Peace Dale, where he worked in the same mill that had employed his paternal grandfather, and he remained with his mother until her death in 1918. Olney received only a very modest inheritance, primarily his parents’ small house on High Street.

In the winter of 1919, at the age of thirty-one, Joseph Olney sold the house and took a train west, first to Denver, then on to San Francisco, and then south to Los Angeles, living in cheap boardinghouses and occasionally working at odd jobs. An examination of his personal effects shortly after his arrest indicated that he’d spent part of this time attempting to write an obviously autobiographical novel about the life of a bright young man condemned by circumstance to follow in his father’s unremarkable footsteps. It is unclear whether any portion of this manuscript survived at the time of Olney’s arrest, and the title is not known. But he did manage to finish and sell two short stories during his years in California, both crime tales placed with the successful pulp magazine Black Mask(“Midnight in Salinas,” March 1920; “The Gun in the Drawer,” August 1920). He’d written several other stories in this vein, none of which were to see publication.

During his time in Los Angeles, Olney had what was apparently his first and only romantic relationship. His frequent letters to family members back east report his having met a twenty-four-year-old stenographer and would-be painter named Bettina Hirsch, whom he described as “a beautiful, talented, and educated woman who, like me, finds herself at odds with the world.” There was even talk of marriage, before Hirsch apparently took her own life on Christmas day in 1920. Her body was discovered by a roommate, after she used a straight razor to open both her wrists. The degree to which Olney was affected by his girlfriend’s death is evident in a number of surviving poems and letters he wrote at this time, and in the fact that it abruptly ended his infatuation with California.

He [Olney] returned to New England in 1921, having, with the help of a maternal aunt, managed to find employment as an office clerk for the Ocean State Stone and Monument Company, then operating the granite quarry which would, decades later, flood and become known as Ramswool Pond. And it is at this point that his involvement with the “Red Tree” begins. Joseph Olney was living in a rooming house in Moosup Valley when he heard tales of the locally infamous tree from coworkers. He appears to have first visited it himself just after Easter in ’21, and, thereafter, returned to the site almost weekly; he also began collecting and writing down the history and folklore associated with the tree and the strange occurrences on the Wight Farm. Many of his papers are deposited in the collection of the Foster Preservation Society, and I have had the opportunity to read most of them. To his credit, Olney carefully interviewed dozens of residents of Moosup Valley, Coventry, Vaughn Hollow, et al., regarding the oak, using techniques not dissimilar from those now employed by professional anthropologists and folklorists. He speaks, in his journal, of desiring to write a book detailing the history of the tree, and, here, his mood seems generally upbeat, despite the fact that he must still have been mourning the loss of Bettina Hirsch. There is evidence that he may even have written query letters to publishers in Manhattan, gauging the potential interest in such a volume.

Then, during the summer of 1921, his disposition suddenly changes, and his writings on the tree become darker and less organized. This period seems to have been triggered by a series of nightmares wherein he encountered the “ghost of my dear lost Bettina” at the tree and “in which she led me beneath the rind of the earth, into a fantastic and moldering rat’s maze of catacombs accessed by a secret doorway below the Indian altar stone.” Olney wrote of witnessing “grisly, unspeakable acts performed underground by demonic beings, and, somehow, Bettina was a willing party to it all, and she wished nothing so much as to initiate me into that ghoulish clique.” Still, he continued his research, and his visits to the tree, though it was noted that his work had begun to suffer, and his supervisors complained that he “seemed always distracted, his mind rarely on the job.” Fortunately, most of Olney’s research and writings on the tree are extant (having been seized as evidence for the prosecution).

Though I will not here detour into the grisly details of each murder that Joseph Fearing Olney is alleged to have committed beginning in May of 1922, I will provide a brief summation, as the case has received so little attention. It is important to note that less than one month before the date of the first murder, Olney purchased a used 1915 Model T Ford from a farmer on Cucumber Hill Road, having borrowed $175 from a relative. The automobile would allow him the freedom of movement needed (so the State would argue) to seek his victims from towns a safe distance from his room in Moosup Valley. Olney, it seems, killed by the maxim “Don’t shit where you eat.”

On Saturday, May 14th, a seventeen-year-old girl named Ellen Whitford vanished from her home in Tuckertown, west of Peace Dale. Four days later, fishermen discovered her mutilated and decapitated body floating in the Saugatucket River. A scar allowed the girl’s parents to identify the nude body. The next headless corpse was also found in the Saugatucket, only two weeks later, on May 29th, however this one remained unidentified for several months, until the woman was determined to have been a mill worker from Peace Dale. A third body was found on Saturday, June 17th, caught in a logjam on a bend of the Chipuxet River, east of Kingston Station, just north of the Great Swamp. By this time, newspapers as far away as Boston and New York were carrying stories of “the Rhode Island headhunter,” and after the discovery of the fourth victim — Siobhan Mary Dunlevy, also a Peace Dale mill worker, also found in the Chipuxet River — the killings (or at least the discovery of corpses) halted until the fifth body turned up in September. The badly decomposed remains of twenty-three-year-old Mary Wojtowicz, the daughter of Polish immigrants, was discovered in the weeds at the northern end of Saugatucket Pond. Identification was facilitated by a birthmark on the woman’s left ankle.

For almost a year no additional bodies were discovered, and we know from Olney’s journals, that he killed no one else until the next spring, when “the South County ripper” resumed his activities on the anniversary of the death of Ellen Whitford. Between May and August, six bodies were found, all decapitated and having suffered other mutilations, all of the victims women between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one, and all but one of them mill workers. In each instance, the bodies had been dumped into a river or pond after the murder, and none were found nearer to the rooming house in Moosup Valley where Olney was still living than that of Joanne Leslie Smith, recovered from the Wood River near Barberville, a good fifteen miles to the southeast. At summer’s end, the waterways of southern Rhode Island once more stopped yielding these gruesome revelations.

I will pause here in my catalog of Olney’s victims to discuss his journals, which more than his suicide, surely stand as undeniable proof of his guilt. The man was exacting in his description of every one of the murders he perpetrated, describing such details as the time of day each girl was killed, the weather, the clothes she was wearing, and the place where he disposed of the body. Every victim’s name was provided, which, in many cases, allowed identifications that might otherwise have been impossible, given advanced decay and/or mutilation. In most cases, Joseph Olney even recorded snippets of his conversations with the victims, and graphic particulars of each death. However, what is most interesting to the problem of the “red tree” are the passages he wrote seeking to explain, to himself, his motives in these crimes, and what psychologists would now refer to as his “delusional architecture.”

The nightmares that he had begun to suffer after his first visit to the tree grew more intense, and, in his writings, Olney claims that it was in the dreams, during his sleeping reunions with Bettina Hirsch in a cavern he believed to exist beneath the oak, that he was instructed by “dire beings” to commit the murders. He writes, on November 5th, 1922, following the first series of slayings:

“I cannot say what they are, these bestial men and women I have glimpsed in that hole. I cannot be sure, even, if they are beast or human beings, but suspect an unholy amalgam of the two. At times, I think they look like dogs born of human mothers, and at others, the human offspring of wolves. Below a high ceiling formed of earth and stone and the knotted, dangling roots of that evil tree, these crossbreed demons caper and howl and dance about bonfires, singing songs in infernal tongues unknown to me. Their eyes burn like embers drawn from those same fires, and she [Hirsch] insists that I watch it all, in order to see and fully comprehend the horrors of her captivity. They have their turns at her, both the male and female horrors, raping her, slicing her flesh with their sharp teeth, torturing her in ways I cannot bring myself to write down even by the light of day. And she tells me, again and again, that her freedom may be gained in only one way, by my making certain sacrifices of flesh and blood to these monsters. In exchange for the fruits of my sins, in time they will release her, and we can walk together beneath the sun. They require only the heads and, occasionally, other organs of the poor wretches I am driven to slaughter. As I have said already, I do not deliver these foul offerings during the dreams, of course, but in my waking hours. All must be buried about the circumference of the great oak, at a depth of not more than three feet. From these shallow graves, the demons retrieve their prizes, and then, during the nightmares, I have watched what they do with my gifts. Bettina says I must not waver in my determination, that I must remain strong, if she is to be given back to the surface, like Persephone after her abduction to the underworld by Hades. I understand. I do understand. I tell her this always. But I can see the fear in her face, and I can see, too, that she is becoming like her jailors, that she is slowly taking on aspects of their terrible form. She says this is because they force her to join in their feasts, and so she has become a cannibal. I tell her I am doing their awful work as quickly as I dare, but that I must be cautious, lest I am found out. If I am caught, she will never be freed.”