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DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 3, No. 19 |
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THE MANIAC  The Real Effie Mosher |
 He stood at the top of the staircase, holding a razor dripping with blood |
He looked as if he'd just
crawled up out of Hell
of TheColumnists.com
In the fall of 1931, the police brought a crazy man to the hospital on the hill. He was on a gurney, all wrapped up in a straitjacket and his feet were chained together. His eyes were rolling wildly and he was foaming at the mouth. Effie had never seen anything like him in her eighteen years as a practical nurse in Santa Cruz County.
She had seen a few shellshocked doughboys back from the trenches in France, but they seemed nothing but frightened young men, scared so badly by cannon fire that they shook constantly and cried for their mothers. This man was different. He wasn't frightened; he was frightening.
It wasn't just his madness that filled you with fear. The flesh of his face looked as if it had shrivelled up, then been stretched and stretched to barely cover his bony features. His teeth were so broken and jagged that they resembled fangs and his sunken eyes glowed hot in his skeletal face. He might have just crawled up out of hell for all Effie knew about him.
"His name is Ransom," said the police officer who brought him in with two other men in white uniforms. "He's been over at the nuthouse in Milpitas for the last two months, but he has to appear in court here tomorrow for a preliminary hearing. They say he's a murderer."
Phyllis Parmeter, the head registered nurse on duty, was staring at the man, her eyes filled with terror.
"H-He's the one who set his wife on fire!" she stammered. "I remember him! They brought him here that night."
Effie stepped forward for a better look herself. She squinted and studied what was left of his face. "Yes, Ransom," she said. "I remember him, too. He was the burned man I stayed with all through the night. They thought he would die, but he fooled them. The poor man! Look at him!"
Ransom turned his head and gazed at the two nurses--tall, skinny Phyllis and short, buxom Effie--with eyes that burned with hatred.
"I will kill you all," he said. "I will cut you to pieces."
He lunged forward and the three men grabbed him and held him tightly. Nurse Parmeter moaned, then turned and ran from the room, but Effie took another step forward and looked Ransom in the eye.
"You will do nothing of the kind, Mr. Ransom," she said. "You are going to get well again and you're going to start doing it tonight."
Ransom looked at her the way a dog might have done, tilting his head to one side with a perplexed expression. She thought she saw a flicker of recognition in those eyes for just a moment, but then it was gone and he was glaring again. He didn't even see Dr. Schultz slip up behind him and stick a needle in his neck until it was too late to do anything but cry out, then groggily collapse back on the gurney.
"Lady, you better learn to stay your distance from maniacs like this," the police officer told Effie as the two in white uniforms wheeled Ransom up the corridor to the room they'd made ready for him. "You can't talk sense to this guy. He's straight from the loony bin."
Effie gave him a look that was more pity than anything else. "He's a sick man," she said, quietly. "He needs help."
She remembered him from that horrible night nearly a year ago. She had never had that sort of burn victim before. They drugged him, but they couldn't drug him enough to stop the pain, not without killing him. He writhed in agony under the tubular metal frame they'd place over him to keep the bedcovers off his burned body. They'd lathered the burns thickly with ointment, but she saw that much of his flesh had been scorched away. His face was particularly bad. His ears were gone, his eyelids and part of his nose. But his eyes still showed an intelligence, an awareness of the hell he was burning in. They seemed to plead with her that night. All he could do was moan, but she stayed with him, leaning over to talk soothingly to him. Her shift was over, but she stayed on without pay. The RN's were busy with patients that needed constant care, so they assigned Ransom to the practicals because they knew he couldn't survive long in that condition--and there was nothing you could do for him but pray for his soul. But none of the other practicals wanted to have anything to do with the man they said had burned his wife to death, then accidentally set himself ablaze. So Effie stayed.
Ransom lived three days on the edge of certain death, then began to improve. It was a miracle he didn't take an infection because they had no drugs to stop infections. When the doctors saw he actually had a chance, they quickly moved him from the little hospital on the hill and put him in a big, modern hospital in San Jose, where they had a program for burn victims and plastic surgeons who could go to work on them immediately.
Effie stayed with Ransom most of the three days he was in her hospital, but he never spoke a single word to her. He couldn't. His lips had been burnt and cracked and his tongue was so swollen that they had to leave a tube in his mouth for him to breathe. Still, she felt he knew she was there, that his eyes watched her when he was awake. And when they took him away, she could swear his eyes were blinking back tears of gratitude.
"Good riddance," Nurse Parmeter said as they wheeled him out the door. "May he burn in hell!"
Effie turned to her, sadness in her eyes, but firm resolve in her voice. "That man is no killer," she said. "But what difference does it make anyway? He's already burning in hell, don't you think?"
Effie didn't know why she thought Ransom was innocent of killing his wife. Her feelings were purely instinctive. She just felt there was something in his eyes that said he wasn't capable of such a crime. The newspaper articles said their neighbors had heard the Ransoms arguing and throwing things around in their upstairs apartment on Ocean View Avenue before they saw the flames leaping out of the windows and called the fire department. A friend of Mrs. Ransom told the police that he suspected her of having an affair with another man and had threatened her about it. Ransom also was known to be a drinking man.
But the speculation about the case faded the longer Ransom hovered near death under police guard in another town. Effie didn't even remember reading that he'd been released from the hospital and put in an asylum. If he did commit the crime, what punishment could they give him that could possibly be any worse than the one he was suffering now from the severe burns that had left him a monster?
The vision of the grotesquely scarred Ransom as he looked a year later stayed with Effie all night. She tossed and turned in bed until Grant woke up and held her in his arms, talking quietly to her until she finally relaxed enough to sleep a few hours before her next shift started. Grant and their son, Clifford, were up, having coffee and toast when Effie woke to her alarm. Her daughter, Evelyn, had already left for school.
"You look like you seen a ghost, Ma," Clifford told her when she dragged herself to the table.
"I think I did," she replied, but she didn't feel like explaining any further. She knew she wouldn't get any toast down if she started thinking about Ransom again.
When she parked her Durant in the hospital garage, Effie could tell something was wrong. Police were all over the place--and they were carrying shotguns.
"Ransom escaped!" Duty Nurse Nellie Flynn blurted out the minute Effie walked into the nurse's station on the main floor. She was young and inexperienced and she was terrified. Right away she began to cry. "They think he's somewhere out on the streets right now! I'm afraid to go home!"
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that she began to cry. |
Effie learned they had taken his straitjacket off and unchained his feet after he'd been asleep a few hours. Though they strapped him to the bed, he had somehow cut the straps cleanly, stolen a pair of shoes and an overcoat, then climbed out a window and dropped into the bushes around the hospital. They now believed he'd been faking sleep all along and had armed himself with a straight razor some idiot had left in the top drawer of the night stand next to his bed. The sheriff's office was bringing in a dog team to hunt for him, but, for the time being, the "maniac" was on the loose in sleepy Santa Cruz.
"They'll find him, all right," Nurse Parmeter observed. "But I'm staying right here at the hospital until they do!"
The hunt went on all day with several police jurisdictions helping out. The operating theory was that Ransom would try to find Del Jackson, the man who had been seeing Ransom's wife on the side, and try to kill him before being captured. Nobody seriously thought Ransom would try to make a getaway. Where could he hide anyway with a face like that?
Del Jackson was a housepainter without an office, so nobody knew for sure where he was working that day. His friends thought he had a job somewhere out near Rio del Mar, but nobody could remember exactly where. If Ransom really was after Jackson, then he probably couldn't find him either. And even if he found out where he was working out in Rio, he couldn't very well thumb a ride out there, could he?
By the time Effie headed out to the hospital garage to start for home, it was past 6 o'clock in the evening. The last she'd heard, the police were hiding out all over the neighborhood where Del Jackson lived, hoping Ransom would show up there that night to pay his respects to his wife's former lover. She had just about reached the Durant when Dr. Schultz came running up to her, his heavy jowls shaking in rhythm with his several chins.
"Effie, Effie!" he called. "Hold up will you please?"
With a sinking heart, she saw he was carrying his black medical bag.
"I'm sorry to ask this," he said, "but could you come with me on a house call? It's Mrs. Lubkert over on Seabright Avenue--the diabetic. She's passed out and I can't get any of my nurses to meet me there."
Effie was tired, but she didn't mind. Dr. Schultz was a kindly man who always seemed on the verge of a heart attack himself. She also knew he was the clumsiest doctor in medical history and really needed a nurse's help most of the time for even the most routine treatments. She followed him to his Packard and they went quickly to the Lubkert place, where they found Mrs. Lubkert conscious, but in danger of passing out again. She needed a shot of insulin and lots of sweet talk. Since Dr. Schultz could talk better than he could handle injections, Effie gave her the shot while he talked strudel recipes with Frau Lubkert.
On their way back across town to the hospital, they saw flashing lights at the top of Broadway hill and slowed to find a police barricade across Ocean View Avenue.
"It must be Ransom!" she gasped. "His old apartment is just a couple of doors down from Broadway."
Schultz parked the Packard in someone's driveway and they both walked up to the policeman manning the barricade. He confirmed it was Ransom, all right. He had gone back to his old apartment, which had been repaired after the fire and was now occupied by an elderly woman named Sousa. Someone had heard Mrs. Sousa screaming and called the police.
"I'm a doctor and this woman was Ransom's nurse," Schultz said. "Better let us through. Maybe we can be of some help."
The officer complied and pointed out Captain Ainsley, who was in charge of the police action.
"I don't know what you could do for us," Ainsley told Dr. Schultz, ignoring Effie. "The man is armed with a razor and we think he's already killed Mrs. Sousa. We're going to send in a team of six men with shotguns as soon as we're sure nobody else is left in the building."
"Have you tried talking him into surrendering?" Dr. Schultz asked.
"The man's a maniac," said Ainsley without much patience. "He's already killed once and probably twice, if Mrs. Sousa is dead. The best way to put an end to that sort of thing is to go in there and get rid of him as fast as we can."
Effie heard all that and made up her mind to try and stop the killing her own way. While Schultz tried to reason with Ainsley, she just turned and started toward the doorway to the apartment. She was carrying the doctor's medical bag and walking so calmly toward the door that none of the policemen paid any attention to her until she crossed their line of fire and opened the door.
"Hey, lady, are you crazy?" one of the armed officers shouted at her. "You can't go in there!"
Dr. Schultz and Capt. Ainsley whirled around to see Effie close the door behind her.
"Oh my Gott!" said Schultz. "That's Effie Mosher!"
"What the hell's she trying to do--get herself cut in half by that lunatic?" Ainsley asked.
The armed officers all were looking to Ainsley for direction. Should they rush the staircase now or what?
"I'll bet she's trying to get him to come out on his own," the doctor said. "Poor Effie!"
"I'm sending my men in right now," said Ainsley. "It's her only chance. She can't be more than five feet tall and that madman's a six-footer, armed with a razor."
"No, don't!" Schultz pleaded. "She's not afraid of him. And he may remember her. But if those armed men go charging up those stairs..."
The men waited on Ainsley's word, but he held back.
"All right, we'll wait a minute or two," he grumbled. "But if anything happens to that little gal, it's on your conscience, Schultz!"
Effie put down the medical bag, took out a hypodermic and filled it with a powerful sedative. Holding the hypo behind her back, she started up the dimly-lighted staircase. When she'd gone just three steps, she stopped and listened for sounds from the apartment above, but it was as quiet as a graveyard.
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with a powerful sedative. |
"Mr. Ransom," she called softly. "Mr. Ransom, are you there?"
She heard movement, but no answer came. She felt along the wall, found a light switch and flipped it. Light flooded the top of the landing and she saw the body of a woman lying at the top of the stairs. She sucked in her breath and took another step upward. Then she heard a loud creaking noise and suddenly Ransom loomed into view at the top of the stairs. He was carrying the razor and it was dripping blood onto the carpet.
"Mr. Ransom," she said calmly. "It's me. Effie Mosher. Do you remember me?"
He stared down at her without making a sound. Light gleamed on the razor and winked back at her as he slowly turned the blade.
"Go away, Effie," he said. His voice was like a creaking door. "I'm a dead man, can't you see?"
"You're not a dead man," she said, "and I don't think you're a madman either. Are you, Mr. Ransom?"
He didn't answer. He just stood there, the blood dripping onto the carpet, staring down at her, two burning eyes in that ruined face.
"I'm coming up to look after that woman," she said. "Is that Mrs. Sousa? Did you have to kill her, Mr. Ransom?"
"I don't know who she is," he said. "And she's not dead. She just fainted dead away and knocked herself out. She's breathing fine."
"I'll just check her over and make sure," Effie said, taking another step up.
"Don't come any closer," he warned her. "I don't want you hurt, Effie. You were good to me."
"You're not going
to hurt me, Mr. Ransom," she said, taking another step up.
"And I'll bet you didn't kill your wife either. Now put
that razor down and come down with me."
"I'm not going anywhere with anyone," he said. "I
want it to end here."
"Don't you want to prove your innocence?" she asked, taking another step up. They were now only about 10 feet apart. She could see the old lady starting to come around.
"What's the point?" he said. "Look at me! I'm dead already. Why should I keep walking around? Dorothy threw a coffee pot at me and hit the kerosene lamp. She set herself on fire trying to put it out--and this happened to me when I tried to save her, not kill her. But nobody saw it but me. Who's going to believe me now?"
He had a point, she had to admit. But why not at least try to clear his name?
"Effie, I beg you," he pleaded. "Please run back down those stairs and tell them I've killed the woman and I'm coming to kill them next. I want them to kill me.I don't want to spend another day like this. I'll never have my life back, so I want it over with now."
Effie finally figured out what he was trying to tell her. The "maniac" was his way of committing suicide. He played the part and the police had bought it. They were ready to execute him on the spot--and he'd never harmed a living soul! She might have argued with him over making the policemen do something that would haunt them the rest of their lives. But there was no time for argument. The old woman at Ransom's feet suddenly woke up and screamed in terror. Ransom leaned down with the razor. Would he really slit her throat? She couldn't take a chance. Effie lunged forward and grabbed his front leg with her left hand, jerking it with all her might. Down he came over her with a huge crash. His body rolled past her and came to rest on the staircase, the razor still in his hand.
Turning quickly, Effie shifted the hypo to her left hand and grabbed him around the neck with her right arm, jerking him around until his throat was pressed against the edge of one stair. She was small, but she was a strong former Minnesota farm girl who had wrestled more than one male patient into submission in the past. Leaning on him, she put all her weight into the pressure on his throat and he immediately started to gag and struggle for air. When she finally saw the razor drop and felt him starting to go limp, she jabbed him with the hypo. In no more than a minute, he was out cold.
That's when Effie saw where the blood had been coming from: Ransom had slashed his own wrists. It had been another desperate attempt to end his life. If he didn't die from loss of blood, maybe it would make the police think the blood was from Mrs. Sousa--and they would finish the job by shooting him down. Quickly, she retrieved the doctor's bag and bound the wounds tightly, shutting off any further flow of blood. She thought he might survive, unless the police still shot him.
She had just finished tying off the wounds when the door below burst open and the police charged up the stairs with shotguns ready. They stopped in their tracks, seeing the little nurse sitting on the maniac's back, trying to stuff her hair back under her cap, while the "dead" Mrs. Sousa sobbed at the top of the stairs. When Captain Ainsley cautiously poked his head into the stairwell, Effie grinned at him.
"Will you please come and get your maniac, Captain?" she said. "He needs medical attention and I can't stay here any longer. My husband's waiting for his dinner and I haven't even gone grocery shopping yet."
Ransom did survive his slashed wrists, but even though Effie and others had become convinced that he was innocent of killing his wife, he was convicted of second degree murder. The district attorney was eager to prove how tough he was on criminals, so he conducted a merciless prosecution of the tormented man. When Ransom refused to testify in his own defense, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. Though Ransom asked for the death penalty, he was sentenced instead to 25 years in prison. But on the day he was due to be transported to prison, Ransom overpowered one of his guards and seized a handgun. He was shot down by other jail guards and died on the spot.
The district attorney gave a statement to the papers that Ransom's escape attempt proved once and for all that he was a dangerous felon and might have taken several guards with him on his "road to hell" if officers hadn't acted quickly and shot him to pieces. Effie knew better. She knew Ransom's "escape" was from this world and all its trials. She prayed he finally had found peace.
© 2002 by Ron Miller. The illustrations are from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. The photos of Effie Mosher are the property of the author. All rights reserved.
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work of fiction inspired by events in the life of the author's maternal grandmother, Effie Petersen Mosher. The real Effie did treat a horribly burned man like Ransom, but he did not survive his injuries. She did subdue a "maniac" armed with a straight razor exactly as she does in the story, but he was not an escaped murder suspect. |
 Effie with her husband, Grant Ulysses Mosher, shortly before his death in 1945. |
This is
the second in a series of stories inspired by the life of
Effie Mosher to appear on www.thecolumnists.com. To read the
first story, "Effie and the Christmas Indian," click
here: EFFIE1
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