"We Make Thousands Happy"

Advertisements in cheap, pornographic ("love" and "art") magazines conform to the standard of their fiction and illustrations but often fall a step lower. Pages are packed with announcements of "red hot" photographs, vigor tablets ("Glow of Life"), bust developers, sex secrets, aphrodisiacs ("Essence of Ecstasy"), contraceptives. Plentiful also are the advertisements of so-called matrimonial bureaus which will furnish lists of lonely men & women, object matrimony. Stressed in the advertisements, prominent on the lists are Wealthy Widows. Sample advertisements:

"LONELY HEARTS--Join the world's greatest social extension club, meet nice people who, like yourself, are lonely (many wealthy); one may be your ideal. . . . We have made thousands happy. Why not you?--Standard Club, Box 607, Grayslake, Ill."

"MARRY! New big directory, photos, descriptions, sent sealed, 10 cents.--Cozy Darling, Dept. 10, Kansas City, Mo."

"LONELY HEARTS--Let us arrange a romantic correspondence for you. A club for refined, lonely people. Members everywhere; strictly CONFIDENTIAL, efficient and dignified service--Eva Moore. Box 908. Jacksonville, Fla. I HAVE A SWEETHEART FOR YOU."

"WEALTHY LADIES, RICH WIDOWS, LOVELY GIRLS, want to marry. ('Write for free sealed list)--Mary E. Hill. Monon Building, Chicago, Ill."

"LONESOME FOLKS, DANDY LITTLE LADIES, many wealthy, will marry --Mrs. Budd, Box 753-L, San Francisco, Calif."

"There are more people starving for love and companionship than there are starving for bread," red-inked the American Friendship Society of Detroit, which offered "ABSOLUTELY FREE" lists of wealthy widows to anybody who had the price of a two-cent stamp. In four years the "society" had collected more than $100,000 in "dues." Its president, a Mrs. Olga Plater, and her husband, Albert Browel Plater (who in 1917 had been ac cused of impersonating a Russian count, a U. S. Army captain), lived in a $50,000 home near Detroit. Last week the American Friendship Society was involved in a sordid, hideous mess. In a shallow grave beside a garage in Clarksburg, W. Va., were found the bodies of two women and three children. In Clarksburg jail cowered a fat, beady-eyed, flabby little man, battered and bruised into a confession of his sadism. Police in many States followed clues to other crimes, other murders, all linked to Clarks burg's "Bluebeard" and the matrimonial societies through which he operated. From his papers it was apparent he had conducted at least 115 mail-order "court ships" with lonely, foolish women. Relatives of Widow Asta Buick Eicher, 50, in Park Ridge, Ill., became suspicious when Harry F. Powers, with whom she and her three children had left home after a mail-order courtship, reappeared to claim her house. Letters from Powers postmarked Clarksburg, W. Va., were found in the house. Clarksburg police went to Powers' home (not far from where famed Lawyer John William Davis once lived) and beside a windowless, cell-like garage dug up the bodies of Mrs. Eicher and her children. The two girls, 9 and 14, had been strangled; the head of the boy, 12, was beaten in with a hammer. The police arrested Powers, pounded a confession out of him. Convicts still digging in the foul trench found the body of Dorothy Pressler Lemke, a grass widow who had withdrawn $1,533 from a bank and left Northboro, Mass, with Powers a month earlier.

Killer Powers was rushed for safety from the city to the county jail while police began to investigate the activities of Luella Struthers, a wife whom he had not killed, who still lived with him and who had paid for construction of the garage. They learned she had been divorced by a man acquitted of murder in 1903, had met Powers through a marriage agency. They sought to connect her with a check forged on Mrs. Eicher's account and with a letter written to relatives of Mrs. Lemke. Police elsewhere, investigating Powers' courtships, learned he had been about to marry yet another woman when he was arrested, that he had stolen from many others. They sought evidence to accuse him of a Washington, D. C. murder.

The police also learned that a Detroit widow, mother of three, had found a husband through the American Friendship Society, had been murdered by him just before he committed suicide. While investigation of the "society" was being pressed, unexpected aid came to Killer Powers. One Barratt O'Hara, a Chicago criminal attorney, flew to Clarksburg and aroused the ire of the townspeople by announcing he would defend the prisoner. He refused to tell who had sent him. Clarksburg authorities, fearing an insanity plea, imported Alienist Edward Everett Mayer from the University of Pittsburgh, had him examine the prisoner.

Dr. Mayer's report: "Powers is a psychopathic personality ... of the hypo-pituitary type--squat, pig-eyed, paunchy, with weakened sexual powers. He is not insane, but he has been a borderline case all his life. Powers is capable of knowing right from wrong."

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