THE MURDER OF JULIA MANGAN
Julia Mangan and Lon Chaney weren’t acquainted. In fact, the two never came into contact with each other during their lifetimes. Nevertheless, when Mangan was murdered, Chaney’s name was uttered at the trial even more than the defendant’s. Today, you can’t find anything online about Mangan’s life that doesn’t mention Chaney as well: a person whose onscreen face her assailant claimed had driven him insane. This week on Out of the Past: The Murder of Julia Mangan.
On the night of October 23, 1928, near the north entrance of London’s Hyde Park, Robert Williams, a 28-year-old unemployed Welsh carpenter, was discovered on the ground by a policeman on patrol. Williams was bleeding profusely from the neck, and had a razor blade beside him. The policeman knelt down to help him, and heard him say the chilling words: “I did it. She has been teasing me.” The confused officer followed Williams’ finger with his eyes, and was horrified to see the limp, unconscious body of a young woman.
It didn’t take long to see that Julia Mangan, an Irish housemaid/waitress who lived (or possibly just worked) in Stanhope Gardens in nearby South Kensington, was in much worse shape than Williams. He was able to speak, whereas she lay there bleeding out onto the fashionable glove with which she was clutching her neck wound. The medical examiner would later state that Williams had to have had a lot of pent-up anger towards Julia to attack her so brutally. They rushed her to the hospital where she died the next day. She was only twenty-one.
At first it looked like Williams might meet the same fate, but once it became clear that he would recover, a clearer picture began to form of what had happened. It emerged that Mangan and Williams weren’t strangers. According to Julia’s brother Patrick, the two had been seeing each other for three or four weeks. Williams had behavior problems, and Patrick, who never cared for him, reported that he had forcibly removed him from Julia’s home at one point when his drunken antics got out of control.
Williams told the court he’d been seeing Julia for about a month, and over the course of that month, his mental health began to deteriorate. For three days before the crime, Williams admitted, he had carried around the razor blade, prepared to use it to end his own life. He claimed that he had never intended to hurt Julia; he adored her, and wanted to marry her (though, for an unexplained reason, he had used a false name when he first met her).
Williams was charged with murder and attempted suicide, and his case was tried twice: first in the Marlborough Police Court, at which time the jury was unable to reach a verdict, and then a couple of months later at the Old Bailey courthouse. Over the course of the two trials, the defense argued that Williams, like other members of his family, suffered from mental illness. A chaplain from his home town was brought in to validate this claim. A London doctor who examined Williams testified that he suffered from neurasthenia, and that he would classify him as “abnormal” but not insane.
Dr. James Cowan Woods, an expert who was often called upon in criminal cases, testified that Williams murdered Mangan in a state of “epileptic automatism.” For years, people have argued that this isn’t even a thing, and the notion is actually offensive to people with epilepsy. Epilepsy is a controllable disease. The judge found the suggestion as foolish as any rational person would find it today. “You have said,” he remarked to the defense, “that many people of high intelligence are going about their work, although they are suffering from epilepsy. Are you suggesting that they might commit murder tomorrow?” In truth, it’s not clear from the available records that Williams was ever actually confirmed to be epileptic.
On Williams’s own account, he had attacked Mangan in a sudden state of delirium which precipitated his alleged epileptic fit. He testified that around ten in the evening that night in Hyde Park, he had proposed to her. We don’t know whether she accepted or refused his offer of marriage. She did tell him that he needed to stop drinking, but it’s not clear whether that was earlier in the conversation or in direct response to his proposal. The last thing he claimed to remember before losing touch with reality—and then waking up in the hospital, where a nurse was washing his feet—was a dreadful hallucination. First, he reported, he heard Julia whistling, and then he lost it. “I felt as though my head were going to burst and that steam was coming out of both sides. All sorts of things came to my mind. I thought a man had me in a corner and was pulling faces at me. He threatened and shouted at me that he had me where he wanted me.”
The man “pulling faces,” Williams went on to say, was Lon Chaney, all made up for his role in the popular screen thriller London After Midnight.
Lon Chaney, remembered as the “Man of a Thousand Faces,” was a skilled actor and makeup artist who got his start in Vaudeville around the turn of the century and made his fame in the silent film industry. Back in those days, many actors didn’t wear makeup on camera, or if they did, they were responsible for applying it themselves. Lon Chaney was an artist, and made it his mission in life to transform into the most grotesque characters film audiences had ever seen. He was always experimenting with different kinds of makeup. Some of these cosmetics were so dangerous they put him in the hospital.
In 1927, director Tod Browning (who would go on to make Dracula and Freaks) cast Chaney in a project titled London After Midnight, in which he played several different roles. The most disturbing was “The Man in the Beaver Hat”: for this costume, he transformed himself into a ghoul. He looked terrifying with his hypnotic eyes and sharpened teeth.
Though the film met with lukewarm critical reviews, it was a box office hit, and some viewers had a hard time shaking particular images from their heads. Even Justice Travers Humphreys, who presided over Williams’ second trial, acknowledged the power of the images that Chaney created:
"I do not know whether you have been to see any film in which he acted. One of them, we are told, is The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and another, London after Midnight. If any of you members of the jury have seen the latter, or even the advertisements of what Mr. Lon Chaney looks like when he is acting in that film, you may agree it is enough to terrify anybody.
…If the accused saw that film you may not think it remarkable or as in any way indicating insanity that he should in a moment of emotional excitement remember the horrifying, terrible aspect of an actor in a part in which he was purposely being terrible. I can myself see nothing in the vision to suggest that the accused is an epileptic."
After all that, Williams was found guilty and sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted by the home secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, Viscount Brentford, and he was sent to the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.
How long Williams stayed in the asylum and whether he was ever released are things we’ll probably never know. The answers have been lost to time.
It’s noteworthy that it’s now been almost a century since this crime was committed, and although it is quite common to see arguments blaming the media for violence, this is still one of the very few cases in which the murderers themselves have blamed horror movie characters for their actions. In fact, I know of only one other case in the twentieth century with a similar defense argument. In 1982, a California handyman named Richard Delmer Boyer murdered an elderly Fullerton couple, Francis and Aileen Harbitz, after going to their house to ask to borrow money to pay off a drug debt. Boyer was strung out on several drugs at the time, including cocaine, PCP, and alcohol. He noticed a wallet sitting on their dresser, at which point, in his own words, he “started just freakin’ out.” He started hallucinating, and claimed to see a “foggy figure” standing in the hallway holding a knife. The figure, he said, was Michael Myers, the masked slasher from the Halloween movies. Boyer blacked out, and when he came to, the Harbitzes were dead. The film fiend, he said, “just took over.” His insanity plea failed, and he was sentenced to death. He remains on death row to this day.
Perhaps the only case in which a similar insanity defense has been effective is the widely publicized Slender Man stabbing of 2014, in which two middle-school girls lured the third member of their friend trio into the woods, where they stabbed her repeatedly in an attempt to kill her, saying that they did it to appease the fictional character Slender Man, a giant, skeletal “Creepypasta” character intended to scare online readers. The victim survived, and the assailants were both sent to mental institutions. The psychology behind this case is addressed at length in the 2016 HBO documentary Beware the Slenderman.
I think there are probably a lot of psychological similarities between Robert Williams, the Halloween killer, and the girls involved with the Slender Man stabbing. I don’t believe that Williams was epileptic, as one doctor said, nor do I think he was “abnormal, but not insane,” as another doctor put it. I think that Williams was dealing with psychological issues that they didn’t know how to recognize or treat at the time.
Mental health is everything. Williams said he had been carrying that razor blade around for days because he was suicidal. Perhaps if he had had a better support system and treatment for his mental illness, he wouldn’t have had the psychotic break that cut Julia’s life so short.
I want to make it clear that I’m not grouping all suicidal people together with homicidal people. In Williams’ case, he happened to have tendencies toward both. The fact of the matter is, everyone needs and deserves mental health care, whether they’re dangerous or not.
If you’ve ever had suicidal thoughts, remember you’re not alone. You can always call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255, or, if you have social anxiety like me and feel uncomfortable on the phone, you can text 741741, and someone will get back yo you immediately. There are real people out there who want to to help you and these services are completely free.
That’s all for this week. We’ll be back next week for our final entry for the season. Out of the Past will return in January 2020.