By Joe Livernois
THE MYTH OF AMOS VIRGIN, the sainted church mouse turned vicious criminal from Pacific Grove, sold newspapers back in the day. Virgin was the region's own Jekyll-Hyde story, a mild-mannered family man by day who terrorized the good citizens of the Monterey Peninsula by night during a high-profile crime spree in the mid-1890s.
It didn’t take much to embellish Virgin’s story to make it even more sensational than it really was, and the imaginative reporters at William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner milked it for all the sensational titillation they could. It was the heyday of Yellow Journalism, and there was no story too sordid or too mawkishly sentimental not to tell. Grieving-widow tragedies were always fodder for front-page coverage. Socialites in distress were favorites. So were the cautionary fall-from-grace tales, and the Amos Virgin story fell into that category.
Prior to Hearst and newspapers owned by Joseph Pulitzer, newspapers were gray and stodgy, full of boring facts, political speeches and accounts of local industry. Hearst and Pulitzer recognized that a new breed of readers — working class people — preferred the entertainment that comes with sensational headlines, melodrama, romance and hyperbole. Hearst, influenced by Pultizer's World newspaper in New York City, replicated the sensationalism when he took over his father's newspaper, and years later he jumped into the New York market to go head-to-head with Pulitzer. The Hearst-Pulitzer rivalry ramped up the melodrama, and historians point to the Spanish-American war as the first press-driven war, as Hearst reporters dispatched dozens of heart-wrenching stories about the Cuban situation in the late 1890s.
But local stories were always popular. Every day and every page of the Examiner were filled with shocking and appalling news stories, as paid stringers fanned out across Northern California to find juicy new scandals. The tale of Amos Virgin was right in its wheelhouse.
The yellow journalists of San Francisco wrung pathos and sappy sentiment with story after story of Virgin’s inexplicable fall from grace. He had been an upstanding, church-going young citizen who seemed to transform overnight into a crazed maniac who robbed, assaulted and violated women.
And after he was hunted down by Sheriff John Matthews, Virgin readily admitted his guilt. He quickly understood he had a role to play in Hearst’s circus act, so Virgin was more than willing to blab about his life and his crimes for the amusement of San Francisco Bay Area readers. Amos Virgin became one of the more notorious criminals of his time in California. At least for a moment in history.
By the accounts of the day, Virgin was an industrious carpenter who helped establish the Congregationalist Church in Pacific Grove. An Examiner reporter described him as a “mild young man with good brown eyes and the look of a dreamer on his fresh healthy face.” Virgin was in his late 20s, married and with a child. Virgin himself said “no man had a better mother than I, and no man had purer surroundings.”
Famously, Pacific Grove was a Christian compound founded by Methodists in 1874. The Pacific Grove Retreat became the primary conference headquarters for religious, temperance and education meetings on the West Coast. Its reputation as the center of squeaky virtue is best represented by the fact that it was the last city in the state to legalize the sale of alcohol. In 1969.
There was no reason to link Virgin to a string of reckless home burglaries that had gripped the Peninsula in fear starting in 1893. The targets of the crimes were older people or young single women. An old man, Henry Bach, was beaten insensibly with a gunny sack filled with metal, then dragged out of his home and left on the train tracks. Three young women in Pacific Grove were accosted; in one case, the woman was bound and gagged. Then, in early February of 1894, an older couple surprised their intruder when he broke into their home; shots were fired and 80-year-old J.D. Carless was injured in the exchange. The masked assailant was also struck in the leg by a bullet. It was, according to one newspaper account, “a season of horrid crimes.”
A day after the last shooting, Amos Virgin showed up at the Carless house to check on the old man’s condition and to offer to chase down the man who shot him. Carless noted that Virgin walked with a limp. Later, Virgin went to the doctor for treatment, saying that he’d inadvertently stabbed himself with a pitchfork. But the doctor pulled a bullet out of the wound, and he alerted authorities.
Officers searched Virgin’s home and found a pair of blood-stained underwear with a bullet hole, but Virgin was gone. Sheriff Matthews tracked him down in Petaluma and arrested him without incident. That’s when the newspaper hullabaloo started. Word of his arrest spread quickly.
Matthews sensed the drama of the moment, and made certain to parade his cuffed suspect off the train at each whistle stop so that the crowds that gathered could see him. When the train reached the Castroville station, Matthews was handed a telegram warning him that a lynch mob awaited Virgin in Monterey, where the suspect was to be jailed. Forewarned, the sheriff waited for the train to Salinas.
Virgin was aware of his new-found fame and he understood his role in the public drama. He immediately admitted to his crimes. He granted jailhouse interviews and mugged for reporters who followed him from jail cells to courtrooms. He made a point of wailing loudly when weeping into his wife’s shoulders when she visited him in his cell, then excitedly turning his attention to the reporters after deputies had escorted her away.
“I can only say that I was influenced directly by Satan,” he told a reporter.
Meanwhile, the elders at the Congregationalist church quickly distanced themselves from Virgin, saying the newspaper accounts of his involvement with the church were exaggerated.
“It is a fact that he joined the church at Pacific Grove at its organization, but we have never before now heard him accused of being prominent in it,” according to the pastor, in a particularly sassy statement to the Monterey New Era. “In fact very few, even of the church members themselves, knew he was on the rolls, as he seldom or never attended the meetings, and to attempt to stab the cause of religion in the back by reporting to the great outside world that he was a ‘prominent’ member is all of a piece with hitting a man on the head from behind and leaving him on the railroad track — it isn’t the right thing to do.”
Virgin spoke openly about the motives for his crimes, with embellishments apparently meant to generate public sympathy. He told reporters he had wanted to buy a chicken ranch in Pacific Grove for his wife and child, but lacked the resources on his carpenter’s wage. He talked often about a stranger he had met along the way. The stranger helped him plan and commit his crimes, he said. Virgin told reporters and authorities he didn’t know who the stranger was, exactly. It was always dark, and the man was mysterious; he only referred to himself as “Joe Harris.” Matthews investigated but concluded there had been no accomplice. No one on the Peninsula had ever heard of a Joe Harris.
On March 18, 1894, The San Francisco Examiner published a 6,000-word story headlined “THE UNWISE VIRGIN” and with subheads that declared that “For Twenty-Six Years, as Boy, Youth and Man, Industrious, Plodding, Moral and Religious” who suddenly “Committed Acts of Heartless Violence on His Neighbors for the Purpose of Robbery.”
Most of the story was in Virgin’s own words, as he explained what he did and why he did it.
THE PRELIMINARY HEARING for Virgin was peculiar, even by the standards of the day, and it was likely staged to heighten the public drama. Because Carless was still mending from his injuries and was unable to travel to the courthouse in Salinas, the proceeding was moved to the Carless home in Seaside so the old man could testify. The judge, the prosecuting attorneys, the court reporter and Virgin were met outside the home by a crowd of people who craned to get a glimpse of Virgin. Inside, Virgin and court personnel positioned themselves around the bed where Carless reposed in recovery, and listened to him describe the exchange in placid terms.
Asked if he had anything to say in his defense, Virgin simply said “No.” He had already admitted to the crimes. He hadn’t even secured an attorney to fight the charges. He had resigned himself to the life sentence that would follow his inevitable conviction..
After the Carless testimony, the legal party then moved to the home of another victim, who testified briefly, then to a third victim’s home. In all, Virgin was charged with three felonies. AuthoritIes told reporters they could have filed at least five other felonies against Virgin, but they didn’t bother because they knew he was going away for life anyway. The trial itself seemed a circus staged only to satisfy newspaper readers.
Sure enough, Judge N.A. Dorn sentenced Virgin to a lifetime behind bars. Like everyone else with starring roles in this real-life drama, Dorn ramped up the melodrama during his sentencing remarks. The hearing had to be moved from his courtroom to a nearby Board of Supervisors chamber to accommodate the huge crowd that showed up. Dorn spoke to Virgin, but he seemed to be addressing the crowded chambers.
“You are a Christian,” he told Virgin, his voice rising at the word, “and you have undertaken to teach others how to follow a good and proper life. Your voice has been raised in song and praise to the Diety of Christendom and you have posed in the community as an example which the young might well emulate.”
He laid it on thick.
“While you drew about your character the vestment of a pure and religious life, and claimed for yourself honesty of purpose, charity to the needy, sympathy to the unfortunate and the aggrieved, kindness and cheer to the sorrowful, and love for your neighbor, you planned robberies and burglaries, in the execution of which you knew you could not hesitate at murder itself.”
Virgin was then whisked away to San Quentin Prison.
An editor for the Pacific Grove Review expressed the general relief of the city’s residents: “The public is satisfied, and the whole subject that has held our people almost to the utter exclusion of everything else will be forgotten, except by the ones who have received the whole weight of the crushing blow — his family. May God help them.”
A reporter caught up with Amos Virgin a couple of weeks after the public fuss had simmered down. Hearst's editors apparently thought readers would want to know what he was up to in San Quentin.
From his cell, Virgin freely described his crimes once again. This time he even admitted that he made up the part about Joe Harris, the mystery man who supposedly lured him into the crime spree. He also predicted he would someday be released from prison, that he would someday be pardoned, even though he “received exactly what he deserved.”
“I am a better man and a better Christian now than I ever was before,” Virgin told the reporter, “and the influence of Satan that has brought me where I am can never gain control over me again.”
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A DECADE AFTER Virgin’s incarceration, his wife Frances was granted a divorce on grounds that he had committed a felony.
Even with an intractable life sentence, Virgin spent his time in San Quentin trying to get out, and set about finding loopholes. With the help of an attorney, he returned to a Salinas court in 1909 and asked to be sentenced on five other charges with which he had admitted 14 years earlier but never sentenced for. The judge sentenced him to 95 years, which, according to the law at the time, allowed him to seek the parole he was denied because of his life sentence. It was a convoluted loophole, but it worked.
By then, according to a report in the Salinas Daily Index, Virgin’s “refined intelligence and polished manners and his gentle appearance have won him great favor in the eyes of the San Quentin authorities and the State Board of prison directors.”
Virgin was paroled and freed from San Quentin on July 1, 1909, after serving little more than 15 years of his life sentence. And on December 24, 1918, Gov. William Stephens issued a “Christmas clemency” to several California citizens, including Virgin.
Virgin returned to Monterey County and was hired as a foreman on a ranch in Aromas until his death in December of 1933. The San Francisco Examiner did not make note of his death.
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Postscript: The judge who sentenced Amos Virgin to life in prison, Narcissus A. Dorn, became the subject of sensational Yellow Journalism-like coverage by San Francisco newspapers a decade after he presided over the Virgin trial.
According to accounts in the Dorn family history and the Sacramento Bee, Dorn had been estranged from his first wife at the time of the Virgin trial and his wife was granted a divorce a year later. Because Dorn was the only judge in Monterey County at the time, a judge from Madera County was called in to preside over the divorce proceedings.
Not long after, Dorn married a rich socialite from San Francisco and was soon embroiled in a quarrel with partners involved in his new family’s business ventures. The San Francisco Examiner’s headline over the story about that case read: “Family Feud Disrupts A Home.”
A fictionalized account of the Amos Virgin story, written by George Francis, was published in 2007.
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Sources:
* The San Francisco Examiner
* The Salinas Californian
* The Chico Weekly Enterprise
* The Oakdale Leader
* The Sacramento Bee
* The Monterey New Era
* The San Francisco Call
* Pacific Grove Review
* PBS.org
* The Bowery Boys podcast