Harry Powers

Harry Powers Paunchy, middle-aged vacuum cleaner salesman Harry Powers used a fake name to make contact with a string of widows, divorcees, and spinsters through a midwestern “lonely hearts” club. But instead of giving them romance, in the summer of 1931, he lured two of these women, Dorothy Lemke and Asta Eichler — along with Mrs. Eichler’s three young children — to a remote cabin in the rural hamlet of Quiet Dell, Virginia, where he starved, tortured and murdered all five victims before disposing of their bodies in a drainage ditch.

Convicted in December of that year, “The Bluebeard of Quiet Dell” (as the tabloids dubbed him) was hanged three months later. The exact tally of his victims is unknown, though Powers ultimately suggested that he had slain as many as 50.