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Pulp International - San+Pedro
The Naked City | Vintage Pulp Apr 30 2009
SURELY YOU DON'T MEAN ME?
Criminals of yesteryear were every bit as brutal as those today.


You learn something new every day. For one, we never knew police height identification charts went as low as two feet six, but even Tom Thumb is probably capable of murder. We got curious today whether the cases referred to on the covers of these true crime magazines we like to post are factual. After a little deep background we found sources confirming two of the three cover blurbs from this issue of Police Files. Reading the stories was informative, and also made us question whether the past was indeed gentler, as is widely believed. We agree there is more crime now, which follows from the simple fact that there are more people. And we also agree we hear bloodier details about crimes than in the past, mainly because journalists and editors stretch the envelope a little more every year to shock people. But have we really gotten more brutal? We’re not so sure about that. Jaded, we agree. Brutal? Ultimately, to kill you have to spill enough blood, and we think it takes just as much brutality now as it did in the past. But don’t take our word for it—read on.

“Nude Nurse in the Seabag” refers to the case of Virginia Covel, who was beaten to death in Los Angeles by her ex-boyfriend Hilding Fridell on July 4th, 1957. Upon realizing he had killed her, Fridell took an overdose of sixty sleeping pills, but did not shuffle off this mortal coil. Instead he awoke July 5th next to her stiff corpse, whereupon he opted for plan B, which involved wedging her in a canvas bag along with rocks and barbell weights, hauling her out to berth 233 in San Pedro, and consigning her to the deep blue sea. We don’t know if she sank temporarily and was buoyed up later by decompositional gases, or if she never sank in the first place, but in any case, the bag was spotted on July 12th floating right where Fridell had dumped it. A Los Angeles Times article from the next day tells us the corpse had a cord tied so tightly around its neck and beneath its knees the body was folded in half. Virginia Covel became known as the Sea Bag Victim, and Fridell the Sea Bag Murderer.

Meanwhile across the U.S. that same summer in Vineland, New Jersey, the story referred to by the header “Voodoo Love Kill” was reaching a climax. It had begun the previous autumn, when a farmhand named Juan Aponte fell in love with his boss’s fifteen year-old daughter. Aponte was a believer in the Caribbean religion of santería—voodoo to us squares—and decided he needed supernatural help to make the girl reciprocate his feelings. He located a love spell that required multiple ingredients. Bat wings—check. Lizard entrails—checkeroo. Powdered skull of an innocent boy—um. While sane men might have abandoned the gory enterprise, Aponte went ahead with his plan, so consuming was his lust for the teen girl. The boy he picked to kill was 13 year-old Roger Carletto, who was chosen not so much for his innocence, which was a given, but because he was Italian and Aponte had a thing about fascists. Aponte snatched the boy up as he returned from a movie. It was October, and nobody had a clue what happened to Roger Carletto until the next summer.

Aponte was a simple man, a farmer. He didn’t know much, but
he knew the trick to powdering bone was it needed to be dry first. So he buried Roger Carletto under a hen house and waited. Finally, on July 1st he dug up the body and took most of the skull, along with a few other pieces. But he was drunk, and consumed with horror over his actions. In the final stages of manufacturing his love potion, he simply cracked. He became catatonic, and when police were called, he admitted to them that he had killed someone. He led police to the hen house of horror, where they found Roger Carletto, minus a hand, a foot, and most of his skull. Aponte never completed the spell, so it’s impossible to say whether it would have worked. But he believed it until the end. He told a cellmate, just before being transferred to state prison, “I know that it would have worked. I would have had the power to have any woman I wanted.”

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History Rewind
The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
March 28
1910—First Seaplane Takes Flight
Frenchman Henri Fabre, who had studied airplane and propeller designs and had also patented a system of flotation devices, accomplishes the first take-off from water at Martinque, France, in a plane he called Le Canard, or "the duck."
1953—Jim Thorpe Dies
American athlete Jim Thorpe, who was one of the most prolific sportsmen ever and won Olympic gold medals in the 1912 pentathlon and decathlon, played American football at the collegiate and professional levels, and also played professional baseball and basketball, dies of a heart attack.
March 27
1958—Khrushchev Becomes Premier
Nikita Khrushchev becomes premier of the Soviet Union. During his time in power he is responsible for the partial de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, and presides over the rise of the early Soviet space program, but his many policy failures lead to him being deposed in October 1964. After his removal he is pensioned off and lives quietly the rest of his life, eventually dying of heart disease in 1971.
March 26
1997—Heaven's Gate Cult Members Found Dead
In San Diego, thirty-nine members of a cult called Heaven's Gate are found dead after committing suicide in the belief that a UFO hidden in tail of the Hale-Bopp comet was a signal that it was time to leave Earth for a higher plane of existence. The cult members killed themselves by ingesting pudding and applesauce laced with poison.
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