(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)
On this day in 1962, 30-year-old Henry Adolph Busch went to the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison in California.
Condemned for the murder of his aunt, he had in fact slaughtered three Hollywood women and nearly killed a fourth.
Busch’s childhood was about what you would expect for a multiple murderer. Born Charles C. Hutchinson, he spent the first six years of his life being passed around to various foster homes before he was adopted by his much older half-sister, Mae E. Busch, and her husband Henry.
He emerged from those first six years emotionally scarred, and physically too: emaciated and with a deformed jaw. (En route to his adult “rat-like” face, enormous ears, and scrawny physique “like a string bean.”)
Years six through adulthood were no treat, either. Schoolmates teased young Henry about his appearance, and he had serious problems with his adoptive mother: one evaluation noted that Mae was a cold parent and “usual maternal feeling between mother and son seemed totally lacking.”
The youth also had difficulty maintaining concentration and suffered from terrible headaches, so it’s no wonder he did badly at school. He joined the Army but was dishonorably discharged; after that he became an optical technician and was viewed as “an excellent lens polisher” and a good employee.
Busch blurs the line between “spree killer” and “serial killer” (the former being itself a poorly defined medium between serial killer and mass murderer). He knew all of his victims, which isn’t typical for a serial murderer. Four months passed between his first and his second murders, but he went on to kill two women and attack a third within the space of three days.
That first victim was 72-year-old woman named Elmira Myrtle Miller, whom Henry had known since he was a child. On May 2, 1960, he dropped by her house and they watched The Ed Sullivan Show together. According to Busch, during the TV program he began to have irresistible thoughts of killing the old woman.
So he did. When Miller turned around to cover up her birdcages for the night, Busch seized her and strangled her to death. He pulled her housecoat up over her waist and tore her underclothes in an attempt to make the murder look like a sex crime, but made no attempt to molest her body.
Elmira’s murder baffled the police; months passed, without any solid leads.
On September 4, the 29-year-old Busch was in his adopted mother’s apartment building when he encountered 65-year-old Shirley Payne, who also lived there. He asked her out on a date to see the hot new film Psycho.
They watched the movie, went to his apartment and had sex. As Payne was getting ready to leave, Busch, again, jumped her from behind and strangled her. He wrapped the body in a sheet and stowed it under the sink temporarily. Fluid was oozing from Shirley’s eyes and nose, so the next day he bought a waterproof sleeping bag and put the body inside it.
Now getting the hang of this murder thing, Busch drank the draught deeply. The very next evening, he went to visit his favorite aunt, Margaret Briggs … and brought along a knife and a pair of handcuffs. They watched television until the early morning hours. He wanted to tell Margaret about Shirley’s murder and ask for advice, but when he started to confide in her she told him that, whatever his problem was, she was too tired to talk about it tonight.
So he strangled her too. After her death, he cut the clothing off her body. The police would subsequently discover numerous bruises and some cigarette burns on the corpse, something Busch never explained.
Henry went to sleep in Aunt Margaret’s bed. The next day he drove her car to work, where he asked a co-worker, 49-year-old Magdalena A. Parra, if she’d like to grab a coffee with him before their shift started. She agreed and got in his car, and immediately he tried to throttle her.
Magdalena was able to fight him off, however, and her screams caught the attention of two truck drivers. Busch bolted from the car; the truckers gave chase. He only went around the corner before he gave up and allowed them to catch him. The police initially thought Busch had just been trying to steal Mrs. Parra’s purse, but, he immediately confessed to the attempted homicide as well as the murders he’d committed during the previous 48 hours. He would eventually cop to Elmira’s slaying too.
In the aftermath of his arrest, predictably, the newspapers suggested Psycho might have given Busch the idea to attack Mrs. Payne. But it’s hard to reconcile the blame-the-movie idea with the inconvenient fact that he had killed before the movie was even released. When asked for comment, Psycho‘s director Alfred Hitchcock said violence was ubiquitous in cinema and his movie wasn’t any more likely to cause someone to commit murder than any other film.
When a doctor, William J. Bryan, examined him prior to his trial, Henry Busch said he’d been wanting to kill someone for years, but had always kept the urges in check, except for one time in the Army when he killed a POW. He said he probably would have kept killing people if he hadn’t been caught in the act with Mrs. Parra, and that he’d had his eye on his landlady for his next victim.
Dr. Bryan (who, it should be noted, was an expert hypnotist but not a psychiatrist) diagnosed the defendant with a schizoid personality and said he didn’t think Busch was capable of forming the intent to commit murder. Bryan suggested Busch’s murders, all of women significantly older than he, were inspired by Henry’s mommy issues: “The killings themselves seem to represent an attempt to possess the desired maternal object, at the same time destroying the power of the object to hurt.”
The state argued that Busch knew exactly what he was doing and was motivated not by mental illness but by pure and simple sadism. The prosecution suggested Shirley Payne had been raped before her death, a contention unsupported by the medical evidence.
In the end he was convicted of attempted murder of Mrs. Parra, second-degree murder in the Miller and Payne cases, and first-degree murder in the case of his aunt. The sentence was death.
Dispute about Henry Busch’s mental state continued as he waited to die. His mother, who testified that he had never been normal, appealed on his behalf. Even his fellow denizens of death row sent a petition to Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, saying they thought Henry’s life should be spared because it was obvious to them he was mentally ill. But the governor decided to let the law take its course.
Henry Busch is buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale.
On this day..
- 1764: John Ives, spectator turned spectacle
- 1895: John Eisenminger, forgiven
- 1900: Guzeppi Micallef, Maltese felon
- 1730: Sally Bassett, Bermuda slave
- 1971: Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, Vietnam War photojournalists
- 1940: 32 innocent Poles
- 1884: Charles Henry, iced in the Arctic
- 1662: Potter, bugger
- 1879: John Blan, panicked
- 1671: Stenka Razin, Cossack rebel
- 1832: Not Javert, spared by Jean Valjean
- 1997: Henry Francis Hays, whose crime cost the Klan
I went to school with Henry Busch, Le Conte Jr. High. I don’t remembr if hw went on Hollywood High. He was teased alot we called him mousie, we would say “make like a mouse!” Henryy would sniff just like a mouse, showing his front teeth!