The Prostitute, The Prophet, and the Lost Continent: Part I
Betrayal, Obsession, and Death in Old L.A.
You love history, well, so do I! Our Belated Past is your home for stories from the past. Served up to you every month.
In the buildup to the release of my upcoming book, Lemuria: A True Story of a Fake Place (out Jan. 9 PREORDER IT NOW!), I’m releasing this deep dive into a story from the book about Frederick Spencer Oliver, the author of A Dweller on Two Planets, and his obsession with a sex worker who murdered her husband in the L.A. City Hall. It’s a mixture of true crime, cults, and lost continents! Literally everything that is good.
Los Angeles. December 30, 1898.
Each second was an injustice to the heart of Teresa Kerr. She, the one leaning against a pillar on the 2nd floor of City Hall. Clammy hands clutching the grip of a .32 Smith & Wesson for hours. The same kind of gun that’ll kill McKinley. A little gun for small hands. She shifts it from hand to hand underneath her cape. Tightening her fingers around it. Loosening. Hours of waiting, with nothing but a gun and her thoughts. Eyes searching the hall, every door, but one in particular, the City Engineer’s office.
4 P.M.
The thrumming growing in her ears. Pounding now. Coughing out all other sound. Tightness spreading across her chest. Her heart broken and on the brink of explosion. The anticipation growing. Too much so.
5 P.M.
George Bloom King. That was his name. He had promised her so much. His love. A life together. A way for her to escape her life. Promises mean less the further from them you get. And the more they are broken the easier it is to lie to yourself until the pain becomes too great.
Two days and he has successfully avoided all contact with Teresa. Not from lack of trying. Letters delivered and calls placed but King ignored all of her attempts. Two years! Two years they had spent together all meaning nothing to him. It meant everything to her. Like the marriage contract, they signed meant nothing. “I, George B. King, take Teresa Kerr to be my lawful, wedded wife before God, and I promise to love and protect her through life.” Nothing but ashes in their fireplace. Those waiting hours, thoughts of the past two years played through her head.
6 P.M.
“Slight, thin, flat-chested little woman with a skin as white as marble and deep sunken, burned-out blue eyes” is how the papers describe Teresa. Accentuated by tightly ringleted auburn hair.
She was born in New York to Irish immigrants in the summer of 1874 and orphaned at 10, or so she says. There were some kind of relatives living off in Ohio, again so she says, but her past is as fraught as her present. Struggling ever since to make it on her own. By her early-20s, she fell into sex work at parlor houses, brothels, and other disorderly abodes around Los Angeles.
She had lived and worked at Madame Van’s brothel on N. High Street under the name Mabel Bowen. Where in March 1897 King made her acquaintance and became smitten. Night after night he’d patronize the place, and Teresa. Weeks would go by before the ultimate consummation of the relationship as she claimed to be too sick, but that did not stop King’s infatuation from growing.
In the beginning, she managed to keep a professional distance from the eager young engineer, who had 10 years on her. After months of badgering and declarations of love, she allowed her guard to be lowered and accepted King’s proposal of marriage.
She continued on at the Madame Van’s, King unwilling to fully commit to her, claiming lack of funds to provide for them both. The life wore her down to the point she left Los Angeles for the Pacific Northwest (Seattle, New Whatcom, and Vancouver). Months passed there, King sent desperate telegrams and letters pleading for her to return. “Precious Darling” he called her, “Darling Sweetheart”, “I thought once when I was a boy that I loved, but I know now that it was nothing compared to the affection which I feel for you, which is composed of the heart’s purest affection and the ties of the closest intimacy.”
Dozens of those followed Teresa around while she continued working in the brothels up north going by the name Viola Ross unable to truly get away from that life. Until the fall of ‘98 when she found herself back in Los Angeles and back with George.
For two months it was nice. They lived together as man and wife, though under assumed names for he didn’t want anyone to know about their relationship.
Early in December fissures formed. The warnings of friends not to marry someone like Teresa. A common chippie they called her. Someone with aspirations, political aspirations, couldn’t have a prostitute for a wife.
That’s when he started laying the groundwork for getting out. Staying out late at night after playing cards. Then he came begging on his knees to get the marriage contract back, and when she handed it over promptly it went into the fire. Another night he told her she might need to go back to sex work because they were low on money. A revelation that prompted Teresa to pawn a ring and use the $5 to buy a pistol telling King that she’d rather kill herself than go back to prostitution.
Then, the day after Christmas, King kissed her goodbye and she hadn’t seen him since.
Days she spent waiting to hear from him. Pacing the floor of their boarding room. Not eating. Not sleeping. Where was he? Was he hurt? Could he have died? Did he leave me? What to do? What to do? Anxiety wrecked hours dripping away, the only salvation being the knowledge of what she came here for.
He ghosted her with the hope it would all blow over. Teresa wrote to him. No response. Called the office. No response. But one thing she couldn’t do was go back to Mrs. Van and go back into sex work.
The thoughts pulsing through her head. Three days of them. Over and over running around terrorizing her. Crippling her until now. She can’t. She just couldn’t. Not anymore. Not after all this. And that’s what drove her to City Hall. Drove her to wait for George. Drove her to holding that pistol.
7 P.M.
King exits the City Engineer’s office.
She eyes him.
Follows him down the hall.
To the steps.
“You don’t know how sick you’ve made me.” She says to him.
The gun comes up.
Stay tuned for Part II next week!
The sources for Part I come from a wide variety of newspapers from the period that cover the shooting of George King and Theresa Kerr’s trial culled from the California Digital Newspaper Collection and Newspapers.com.