It was an October night in 1928 when a patrolling police officer found a man lying face down near the Fountain Gate of London’s Hyde Park.
The man was an unemployed, 28-year-old Welsh carpenter named Robert Williams, and he was bleeding from an apparently self-inflicted wound in his neck, a bloody razor on the ground nearby.
As the patrolman bent to offer aid, however, Williams made an utterance that added a chilling new dimension to the already grisly tableau.
“I did it,” he said, pointing to the body of a young woman lying nearby, her throat brutally slashed. “She was teasing.”
“He had me where he wanted me.”
The body belonged to Julia Mangan, a 21-year-old Irish housemaid and waitress from Stanhope Gardens. It seems that Williams and Mangan had been seeing each other for about a month.
“I wanted to marry her and I told her so,” Williams later said at his trial. Yet, during the time that he had been seeing Mangan, his mental state had also been deteriorating, and he testified that he had been carrying the razor he used to kill her for days, intending to use it on himself.
So, what happened on that tragic night of October 23, 1928? According to Williams’ testimony, he and Mangan had been sitting in the park, talking.
She may have been encouraging him to give up drinking, as her brother had once previously tossed Williams out of her home after a particular drunken episode.
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Photo Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-MayerIn the course of the conversation, however, something strange happened.
“I felt as though my head were going to burst and that steam was coming out of both sides,” Williams said.
“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.”
Williams’ defense in court was that he had slain Julia Mangan during a fit of “epileptic automatism.” The strangest aspect, however, came in the form of the man he had seen “pulling faces” at him.
“Do you remember whose face it was?” his defense attorney asked, and Williams proceeded to describe the face of Lon Chaney, specifically as he had appeared as the “Beaver Hat Man” in London After Midnight, which had been released the previous year.
London After Midnight and the Legacy of Lon Chaney
Today, London After Midnight is possibly the most famous and sought-after lost film in the world. The last known copy was destroyed in a fire at the MGM vault in 1965.
In 1928, however, London After Midnight was still a recent release, and Lon Chaney was virtually a household name. When someone saw a spider, they were said to quip, “Don’t step on it; it might be Lon Chaney.”
The plot of London After Midnight involves a detective using hypnotism to recreate an earlier crime to solve it.
To set the stage for his hypnotic denouement, the detective dresses himself and an accomplice up as vampires to “haunt” the scene of the crime.
Chaney plays the role of both the detective and the vampire, who wears a beaver-felt hat and is credited as “The Man in the Beaver Hat.”
Though the film itself is lost, Chaney’s Beaver Hat Vampire is one of his most famous and unmistakable roles.
With his pointed teeth and staring, dark-rimmed eyes, almost everyone has seen Chaney’s Beaver Hat Vampire, even though almost no one alive today has ever seen London After Midnight.
Director Tod Browning—who also helmed Universal’s Dracula in 1931—essentially remade his own film in 1935, when he released Mark of the Vampire, which was basically a talkie remake of London After Midnight.
Lon Chaney had been dead for years by 1935, however, and the vampire in Mark of the Vampire was instead played by a mostly unspeaking and somnolent Bela Lugosi.
“Enough to terrify anybody.”
“I do not know whether you have been to see any film in which he acted,” the judge in Williams’ second trial said to the jury. “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.”
The question before the jury, however, was not whether Lon Chaney was terrifying, but whether Robert Williams had been responsible for his actions when he slew Julia Mangan.
Williams’ defense argued that he wasn’t, due to an attack of epilepsy. At least one expert witness agreed, while another held a different opinion.
Ultimately, the jury in Williams’ first trial was unable to come to a verdict.
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Broadmoor
Photo Credit: Wikimedia CommonsA retrial took place at the Old Bailey in January of 1929, where the jury found Williams guilty. The same judge who had declared Lon Chaney “enough to terrify anybody” sentenced Williams to hang. Not everyone was convinced, however.
The Home Secretary himself, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, apparently took an interest in the case, and was sufficiently swayed by the evidence of Williams’ mental state to order a reprieve.
Instead of hanging, Williams would serve out his sentence at what was then known as the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.
What became of Robert Williams after that has, unfortunately, been lost to history, just as the film that ostensibly influenced his crime has been lost. What we do know is the fate of Lon Chaney himself.
The legendary “Man of a Thousand Faces” may never have known of his own involvement in a murder trial on the other side of the world, but he was facing his own problems.
Diagnosed with bronchial lung cancer, Chaney died of a throat hemorrhage in August of 1930, after his condition was exacerbated when fake snow lodged in his throat during filming.
He was laid to rest in Forest Lawn Cemetery by honorary pallbearers including Tod Browning, Irving Thalberg, and Lionel Barrymore, as well as a U. S. Marine Corps Honor Guard.
Movie studios and all MGM offices observed several minutes of silence to mark his passing.
