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When Henry Clay Beattie’s wife Louise died under what turned out to be mysterious circumstances in 1911, the trial of the century began. Figuring out the circumstances of her death would lead to a million lines of newsprint all over the country — and end with the electric chair.
• “Midlothian Turnpike: A Sensational Murder Case that Captivated the Nation” in the Richmond Times-Dispatch
• “Famous Murders in Chesterfield County Pt. 2” in the Chesterfield Observer
• “No Trail to Be Found” in the New York Daily News
• “Woman Shot Dead Riding with Husband” in the New York Times
•The Body in the Reservoir: Murder and Sensationalism in the South by Michael Ayers Trotti (University of North Carolina Press, 2014)
•The Trunk Dripped Blood: Five Sensational Murder Cases of the Early 20th Century by Mark Grossman (Exposit Books, 2018)
•A Full and Complete History of the Beattie Case, Most Highly Sensational Tragedy of the Century by Anonymous (Phoenix Publishing Co., 1911)
• “Begin Beattie Trial To-day; Defense May Use Insanity Plea If Other Defenses Fail” in the New York Times, 1911
• “Beattie Murder the Most Talked of Crime Since the Thaw Shooting in New York City” in the Washington Times, 1911
• “Beattie Hears Knell, Cousin Opens Heart” in the San Francisco Call, 1911
• “Binford Girl Says Beattie Is Innocent; Admits Circumstances Are Damaging, but Declares He Did Not Kill His Wife” in the New York Times, 1911
• “Beattie Tells Tale of Wife’s Death; Sticks to Story That She Was Killed in Auto by a Highwayman” in the New York Times, 1911
• “Murder in the First Degree Verdict in Beattie Case” in the Colorado Herald Democrat, 1911
• “Beulah Binford Sleeps While Henry Clay Beattie Is Put to Death for Wife Murder” in the Sandusky Star-Journal, 1911
• “The Real Beulah Binford” in Style Weekly: Richmond’s Alternative News
• “Papers Indicted by Grand Jury” in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, 1911
• “Street Wise: Newsie Battles, the Legalized Sin District and the Child Gangs Who Ruled Richmond’s Turn-of-the-Century Streets” in Style Weekly: Richmond’s Alternative News
• “What Makes Eraser Killers Different” by Marilee Strong author of Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives
•Exploring Roots Music: Twenty Years of the JEMF Quarterly edited by Nolan Porterfield
Kelly Harrell’s biography on AllMusic
•Kelly Harrell biography on Bluegrass Messengers
• “Remembering the Old Songs: Henry Clay Beattie” by Lyle Lofgren (originally published in Inside Bluegrass, May 2011)
It was the dead of summer in Richmond, Virginia. Henry Clay Beattie Jr. and his wife, Louise Owen Beattie, needed a break. They were newlyweds with an infant trying to make it through the heat of July back in 1911, when air conditioning wasn’t an option. So they set off in search of a cool breeze with a drive on the Midlothian Turnpike — known these days as Highway 60.
Henry was late to pick up Louise that night. They were visiting her uncle’s house, and he was supposed to be there early in the evening, but he didn’t arrive until 10pm. By then, it was dark. Louise wanted to have some time away after a few months with a new baby. So they drove anyway. When Henry returned to the family home later that night, Louise was dead.
The story Henry told her family, and then the police, was horrific. He said that as they drove back towards town a tall, bearded, and white highwayman jumped in front of the car. Henry swerved off the road to miss him. Then the highwayman stood in front of their car, and yelled that Henry almost killed him. Henry yelled back, and tried to drive off. That’s when the highwayman drew a gun and pulled the trigger. He killed Louise with one well placed shot to the head.
An angry Henry erupted from the car and fought the highwayman. He was smacked in the face with the stranger’s gun during the tussle, scratching his nose. Henry finally wrestled the gun away, but when he took aim at the killer, the highwayman ran off into the woods. Henry returned home with Louise’s body in the car and covered in her blood.
Louise was buried two days later. Her funeral service was held in the same church where she got married just months before.
With Louise in the ground, the police searched for a man who matched Henry’s description. As is typical, then and now, a Black man found in the area was arrested and questioned — even though he looked nothing like the man Henry described. Police and citizens scoured the area for any sign of this mystery highwayman, but they came up empty handed. Bloodhounds were brought in, but couldn’t find a trail either. Then a Black woman named Mandy Alexander found the gun that was used to kill Louise.
At first, the police believed Henry’s story. Everyone did. But his case started to fall apart when forensic evidence from the scene of the crime didn’t match Henry’s version of events. The blood found on the scene didn’t match the story he told. The gun was found far from where it should have been. And Henry just wasn’t acting right.
Eventually, Henry was charged with killing Louise. By the time his trial started, the prosecution for the State of Virginia had a theory about what happened that hot summer night. Henry hit his wife with the butt of the rifle, rendering her unconscious and leaving a dent in her forehead. Then...well, then he shot her in the face.
He did it, they said, for the “love of money and his desire to be with Beulah Binford…” His mistress. Suddenly there was a motive that made it clear why Henry might kill his nice, young wife.
Papers across America billed it as the trial of the century — even though the century was only 11 years old. The public couldn’t get enough.
Naturally, the story became a song. Despite the scandalous nature of the crime that inspired “The Ballad of Henry Clay Beattie,” it was recorded only a handful of times. You probably haven’t heard it. But you should.
I’m Courtney E. Smith, and you’re listening to Songs in the Key of Death, a show about murder ballads and the true crimes that inspired them. This is the story of Henry Clay Beattie, the playboy turned murderer.
Henry and Lousie were from well-respected Virginia families who orchestrated their match. They both grew up in Manchester, the sister city to Richmond on the south side of the James River. Henry’s father was a well-to-do merchant and banker, right when dry goods shops were becoming department stores. And that meant the Beatties were movin’ on up.
As a former city councilman and an elder in his church, Henry Clay Beattie Sr. was a pillar of the community, and Henry Jr. was his favorite child. The press reported at length on Henry’s upper class life and the support he got from his father. The papers asked the questions that everyone was wondering: Why would this young man, who looks so normal, who is so much like us, who is loved, and who has money, do something so heinous?
So many column inches were devoted to Henry’s crime that Western Union had to take over a store next door to the courthouse where reporters filed their stories. They broke a record, filing over a million words in three weeks by telegraph — that’s a lot of fucking dots and dashes! The papers published word-for-word transcripts of what was happening. They did it because what was said in the courtroom was sensational enough that reporters didn’t need to embellish. Newspapers were turning towards facts after decades of yellow journalism.
In contrast to the treatment Henry got, the papers hardly mentioned Louise’s life at all. She was a little less well off than the Beatties. Her father, Robert Owens, had a white collar job as a bookkeeper for a lumber company, but his salary didn’t stretch far enough to take care of five kids. The family had a border to help cover their mortgage. Just before she married, Louise’s parents and siblings moved to Delaware for her father’s new job. Louise, who at that point was engaged to Henry, stayed in Virginia at his father’s house — noted as one of the nicest in South Richmond.
Contrary to what Louise was told, it turns out Henry was not quite ideal husband material. He liked drag racing and attended baseball games — believe it or not, America’s pastime was once a déclassé affair. And speaking of affairs, before he married Henry had been with several women of ill repute. At the trial, it was made known that Henry did not give up his playboy ways just because he had a ring on his finger.
While Louise was pregnant, Henry resumed an affair with a girl he met in Richmond’s red light district. Before prohibition, Richmond was one of many cities trying to control the spread of drinking, gambling, prostitution, and other unseemly behavior. So they made it all legal — for a few blocks, anyway. If that sounds like the beginning of an evil villain’s backstory to you too, buckle up. It only gets worse from here.
Somewhere in that few blocks is where Henry met Beulah. He was 23. She was 13. Yeah. Like so many men throughout history who have slut shamed, Henry claimed at his trial that, “no one in the world would have taken her to be a girl of 13 years, with the reputation she had.” Beulah was forever on the brink of being disowned by her family for her indecent lifestyle, which started well before she met Henry.
Beulah was 16 when she had her first child, who she claimed belonged to Henry. He may or may not have been the father. Even Beulah later said she wasn’t sure. Still, it was Henry who paid her a lump sum at the baby’s birth, and promised to pay for the child’s expenses as long as she got the hell out of Richmond. Henry, and his father who held the purse strings, already had a long history with Beulah. They made sure she left town a few times, more for their reputation than hers. But then Henry reneged on his promise to take care of their child after she allowed the baby to be adopted. In case you weren’t already depressed enough, the baby died at 11 months old of infant cholera.
With Beulah banished from Richmond, Henry’s father insisted he stop carousing, accept his role in the family business, and get married. You know, basically grow up already. So he did. But when Beulah moved back to Richmond, the two rekindled their affair — even though Henry now had a pregnant wife.
Journalist Marilee Strong created a name for guys like Henry: an eraser killer. Strong coined the term in 2008, to help explain why Scott Peterson murdered his wife Lacey. She felt he fit into a subset of intimate partner killers who hadn’t been identified, that there were hundreds like him. Eraser killers don’t take lives out of passion, in a rage, or because of drugs and alcohol. They’re cold-blooded killers who have what Strong calls “the dark triad.”
Now that means they have narcissistic personality traits, a Machavellian disposition, and psychopathic tendencies. In other words, they think they’re more deserving of what they want in life than their victim, they’re cold and calculating, and there’s an extreme lack of empathy.
They’re killers who frequently stage their murder scenes in order to fool the authorities. It’s part of their M.O. to make up a story and send the people in power on a wild hunt for another suspect. They think they’ll get away with it all because they’re smarter than everyone...even though most of them don’t get away with anything. Their reaction, or rather lack of reaction, to the crime gives them away.
Henry’s behavior at his trial didn’t win him any public sympathy — despite his father’s attempts. Henry Sr. told the judge and jury that Henry cried inconsolably the night Louise died. But that might have been the last time anyone saw him get emotional about it. Just like an eraser killer, Henry was seemingly indifferent to the charges he faced. He wasn’t emotional over the death of his wife and didn’t inquire about his infant son, who stayed with Louise’s parents after he was arrested.
He was so hellbent on convincing everyone of his innocence that Henry’s own attorneys allegedly considered a defense of insanity. Rumor has it they brought in an alienist — that’s what psychologists were called back then — to interview Henry and search for a family history of mental illness.
After a murder, eraser killers come off as unemotional and detached because they don’t mourn. They kill because someone, usually a woman, has become inconvenient in their life. For Henry, continuing his affair with Beulah may not have been the whole motive. In fact, it may not have been about any one woman in particular. Henry might have just wanted to do what he wanted, when he wanted to do it and being married was a drag.
Speaking of, let’s turn back to the mistress. To keep Henry and Beulah from colluding on their story, the police put Beulah in jail. In a fit of melodrama, she told reporters from behind bars that she’d take the blame for killing Louise to make sure he went free, if she had to. Comments like those made Beulah an almost irresistible “other woman” for the press to cover, even though the public found her unsavory. There wasn’t too much concern that she was a teenager who’d been kicked out of her house and left to fend for herself after her reputation was ruined.
The trial itself is best described as dramatic. One particularly explosive piece of testimony came from his cousin Paul, who said Henry asked him to buy a rifle and ammunition a few days before the couple was “attacked.” Paul had a breakdown under police questioning before the trial and his nervousness to testify lead to him being picked apart in court. To make their point, the prosecutors insisted that Henry stand up and wear his coat from the evening of the murder to explain blood patterns that didn’t match up with his original story. It reminds me of watching OJ Simpson try on those gloves — what judge would let a stunt like that happen?
With so little information about Louise, it’s hard to know what she thought of Henry’s behavior while she was alive. It was inferred during his trial that Lousie knew what was going on and was distraught about it. Her mother testified that Louise showed her a pair of Henry’s bloodied underwear and said he contracted a venereal disease. The claim was backed up by a doctor who treated Henry for gonorrhea, and a pharmacist who filled his prescription.
In the end, Henry’s attorney made an emotional, FIVE-HOUR long closing argument to the jury. The jury...did NOT buy it. They found him guilty of first degree murder, and he was sentenced to death in the electric chair.
Henry was executed on an inauspicious day with very few people or reporters there to witness it thanks to an arcane Virginia law. Before his death, he confessed to the crime — SORT OF. In a written statement, he said:
“I, Henry Clay Beattie, Jr., desirous of standing right before God and man, do on this, the 23rd day of November, 1911, confess my guilt of the crime charged against me. Much that was published concerning the details was not true, but the awful fact, without the harrowing circumstances, remains. For this action I am truly sorry, and believing that I am at peace with God and am soon to pass into His presence, this statement is made.”
Henry’s death wasn’t the end of his indignities to Louise, though: He was buried right next to her for all eternity. Her son, Wellford, was raised by his maternal grandparents and, sensibly, changed his last name to Owen.
As for Beulah, she ran off to Philadelphia and New York with dreams of acting. She found a few small roles, but the National Board of Censorship decreed that Beulah wasn’t allowed to perform on any stage, either as a character or herself, due to her part in the Beattie murder. Beulah had no choice but to change her name and take up a string of menial jobs in New York City, before disappearing into an anonymous life. She served as a nurse in World War I and lived in relative obscurity until her death in 1973.
It may have been the trial of the century, but everyone involved seemed to quietly disappear when it was over. Henry and Louise were dead. Their son changed his name to escape the public eye. And Beulah, despite her best efforts to become a starlet, might as well have been dead too. Interest waned, and all those articles in the paper turned into dustbin liners.
Now, about that song. With a tale this salacious, you’d think the ballad of Henry Clay Beattie would have been one scandalous tune. Or even a sad song about a young mother, killed by a liar. It wasn’t. Instead of talking about his wife, the victim of his heinous crime, or recounting the sordied details like other murder ballads would’ve, the song focuses on Henry’s last hours, as he sat on death row denying his guilt.
The author of the ballad is unknown. It was recorded for the first time, 16 years after the crime, in 1927 by Kelly Harrell for Victor Records. And recorded very rarely after that. There are a few possible reasons that people weren’t clamoring to sing about and buy copies of this version of the song.
First of all, people didn’t need a song to hear about the murder. Everyone who cared to know about it knew everything about it.
Second, the song was about the wrong thing. Imagine if, 16 years after Scott Peterson killed his wife Lacey, some band released a song about what happened to Scott following his conviction. Twitter would lose its mind yelling that they missed the whole point, the person who deserved to be remembered was Lacey!
The third reason is, because the singer is yet another person who got involved in all this and then seemed to slip through the cracks, disappearing entirely. It’s kind of a pattern in the Beattie case.
Kelly Harrell was a country singer from Virginia described as “near legendary” in the 1920s. It’s likely he heard this song about Henry when it was performed by local balladers and decided to record it when he got an offer from Victor. The record was the victim of bad timing though, thanks to the Great Depression.
You see, Kelly didn’t play an instrument. That meant he needed a backing band. Strapped for cash because the American economy was tanking and banks were closed, his record label refused to pay for a band. Kelly wouldn’t — or couldn’t — pay for a band either. Out of options, Kelly went back to Virginia, playing until he died in 1942. After he was rediscovered by folk singers in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Kelly’s work became influential. Not this song, though. It’s still the country music equivalent of an import only Japanese b-side.
It’s interesting that everyone involved in this story faded into obscurity, by design or through bad luck, or ended up six feet underground. It’s almost like the murder of Louise Clay was a cursed event. If there is a curse, I hope I’m not next!
Thanks for joining us on Songs in the Key of Death. For more on Henry Clay Beattie and the murder of Louise Beattie, check out our show notes. Several texts were helpful in piecing together the timeline of this story and getting direct transcripts from the trial, including: The Body in the Reservoir: Murder and Sensationalism in the South by Michael Ayers Trotti; The Trunk Dripped Blood: Five Sensational Murder Cases of the Early 20th Century by Mark Grossman; A Full and Complete History of the Beattie Case, Most Highly Sensational Tragedy of the Century by Anonymous; and the New York Times archives. Marilee Strong’s writing on eraser killers was also invaluable. And information from Style Weekly’s write-up of “The Real Beulah Binford” was also utilized.
Speaking of people who are tempting fate by taking on “The Ballad of Henry Clay Beattie,” here are Bonnie Prince Billy and Nathan Salsburg with their version of this nearly-lost murder ballad.
