Sympathy for the Devil: The Emmanuel Baptist Murders of Old San Francisco

On the day before Easter Sunday 1895, the stabbed and strangled body of twenty-one-year-old Minnie Williams was found in Emmanuel Baptist Church in San Francisco?s Mission District. A search of the church yielded another grisly discovery in the belfry: the decomposing body of another young woman, reported as missing ten days earlier. She, too, had been strangled. But unlike the victim in the library, Blanche Lamont was lovingly laid out as if for burial. Clues led the police to suspect a friend of both victims, a medical student who was also the assistant superintendent of the church's Sunday school. But those who knew Theo Durrant denied that this highly respectable young man could have had anything to do with these horrible crimes.



Virginia A. McConnell demonstrates that Durrant was exactly what he seemed to be: a genuinely good man whose life went terribly wrong because of the biological, genetic, and mental problems from which he suffered?problems of which he was not even aware. McConnell also examines the extensive and sensational press coverage of the case and the effect of the murders on San Francisco.