On August 4, 1941, a twenty-six-year-old waitress named Evelyn Anderson was found strangled in an alleyway in New York. Her watch was missing, and within days it turned up in a Bronx pawnshop, hocked by a man named Charles Woolfolk. Woolfolk said he had it from a woman friend, Hazel Johnson. She said it had been given to her by Jarvis Catoe, a thirty-six-year-old chauffeur from Washington, D.C. Catoe was arrested on August 29. He admitted killing Anderson and then confessed to seven more murders, most of them in Washington, along with assaults on other women.
Jarvis Theodore Roosevelt Catoe was born on November 2, 1904, in Kershaw County, South Carolina, the eldest of a preacher's eight children. By the accounts of his life he behaved normally until he suffered a head injury in 1925, after which his conduct turned strange. In 1929 he moved to Washington to live with his brother. He piled up arrests for traffic violations and other offenses, and in 1935 he was twice convicted of indecent exposure, on two counts each time, serving four months after the first case in May and five more after the second in December. He told police he had "spells" in which he could not resist the urge to kill, and that they tended to come on after he had been reading detective stories.
By his confession the first victim was Florence Dancy, sixty-five, killed on April 11, 1935; some accounts spell her name Darcy. A man named James Matthews Smith was arrested for her murder that August, and in 1937 he was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life. He was already serving five to seven years for a rape committed in 1935. After Catoe confessed, the police said Smith might have been wrongly convicted, but once Catoe withdrew his statements Smith's appeals were dismissed.
Four years passed before the next killing Catoe admitted, that of Josephine Robinson on December 1, 1939. Lucy Kidwell followed in September 1940 and Mattie Steward in November, then Ada Puller on January 2, 1941. All four were Black, as Catoe was, and their deaths drew little attention. His method, he said, was to call on landladies offering his services as a handyman and to strangle them once they had taken him to the room that needed work; at other times he posed as a cab driver and picked up women caught out in bad weather. Investigators suspected him of other killings in Washington after 1929 that he never admitted.
Rose Abramowitz, twenty-five, had been married a month when she hired Catoe to wax the kitchen floor of her Washington home. On March 8, 1941, he raped and strangled her, left her lying on her bed and took twenty dollars. She was white, and her murder raised an outcry that the earlier deaths had not. On June 15, in a downpour, Jesse Elizabeth Strieff, a secretary at the War Department, got into his car believing he drove a cab, and he killed her too. Evelyn Anderson, in August, was the last.
The prosecutors chose the Abramowitz case. An indictment filed on September 4, 1941, charged that Catoe had raped her and, in the course of the rape, fastened his hands around her throat and strangled her. Before the trial he took back everything he had told the police, saying he had been sick and weak and that detectives had badgered him into making up stories. The jury was out for eighteen minutes before convicting him of first-degree murder and rape and fixing the penalty at death. The case went up on appeal as Catoe v. United States.
He was electrocuted at the D.C. Jail on January 15, 1943, at thirty-eight; one account dates the execution two days earlier. He walked into the death chamber singing.