Sympathy for the Devil

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.