Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives by Marilee Strong Page B

for material wealth that lay at the heart of this
    particular killing. Gillette’s crime was caused fundamentally, Dreiser
    argued, by his ambition.
    Gillette had started out as ‘‘the young ambitious lover of some
    poorer girl, who in the earlier state of affairs had been attractive

    The Real American Tragedy
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    enough to satisfy him, both in the manner of love and her social
    station, [but] with the passing of time and the growth of experience
    on the part of the youth, a more attractive girl with money or position
    appeared and he quickly discovered that he could no longer care for
    his first love,’’ he explained. ‘‘What produced this particular type of
    crime . . . was the fact that it was not always possible to drop the first
    girl. What usually stood in the way was pregnancy, plus the genuine
    affection of the first herself for her lover, plus also her determination
    to hold him.’’
    What is disturbing here about Dreiser’s reasoning and his novel
    is that the perpetrator of the crime is portrayed as an apparently
    helpless pawn tossed about by ‘‘ambition’’ and drawn inexorably
    from one woman to the next, always seeking the ‘‘more attractive
    girl with money or position.’’ In fact, he comes close to blaming the
    victim for her own death because of her efforts to hold on to the man
    she loved.
    In truth, the one character element entirely lacking from any
    reading of the facts about Chester Gillette is ambition—meaning
    a strong desire to achieve a particular end. Ambition is a quality
    we usually attribute to people who exhibit its associated outward
    manifestations: hard work, a drive to succeed, focused efforts to
    achieve a goal, a willingness to sacrifice short-term pleasures for
    long-term success.
    When a man claims to want to better himself but isn’t willing
    to put in the work and sacrifice necessary to achieve the lifestyle he
    wants, when he merely believes he should be granted all the benefits
    and trappings of success as some kind of divine right, he is exhibiting
    not ambition but a sense of entitlement. That kind of narcissistic
    entitlement, rather than true ambition, is characteristic of many
    eraser killers, including Scott Peterson.
    As Gordon put it, Dreiser’s protagonist is someone ‘‘who cannot
    master his fate. He is never on top of the rules of the world’s game.’’
    However, both Dreiser’s character and the real-life Gillette were never
    greater masters of their fate, more on top of the game, more creative
    and goal directed than when they were engaged in planning a ‘‘perfect
    murder.’’ The same could be said of Scott Peterson.
    Dreiser’s blindness in this respect is difficult to understand or
    explain away. Before he settled on the Gillette case to use as the basis
    for his novel, he researched the case of a young medical student in
    New York named Carlyle Harris, who in the 1890s got a young woman

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    pregnant, married her in total secrecy, forced her to have an abortion
    through a doctor he knew, then poisoned her with morphine, killing
    her after he had started an affair with another young woman.
    He also researched the case of one Reverend Richeson, a young
    Baptist minister in Massachusetts and a graduate of the prestigious
    Newton Theological Seminary, who was involved in a scandalous
    crime just a few years after the Gillette case. Rev. Richeson had a
    lengthy relationship with a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl named
    Avis Linnell, the daughter of one of his parishioners.
    The girl was attending a local teachers college, but as her feelings
    for Richeson deepened, she decided to apply to the New England
    Conservatory of Music to be closer to him and to advance her musical
    training as a talented young soprano. Richeson proposed marriage
    to her and gave her an engagement ring. But before the date of the
    planned marriage, Avis told the preacher that she was pregnant with
    his child. Richeson responded by