It was supposed to be just another routine delivery after a long overnight haul when truckers Elmer Mayhew and Charles McCauley pulled up to a chemical plant in Manhattan on a mild and misty predawn morning in December 1928.
The men had driven all the way from Baltimore with a cargo of tear gas for the Guggenheim Brothers laboratory on 202nd St. and 10th Ave. But as a lone security guard opened the gate and waved them into the lot, the men had a strange feeling something was amiss. Even in the dark, they recognized the guard as one of the lab assistants and wondered aloud why he was working the graveyard shift.
The reason became immediately clear.
The "guard," a short, broad-shouldered, steely-eyed man in his mid-twenties, suddenly pulled a revolver, ordered the terrified truckers out of the rig and marched them into a small room inside the unoccupied building.
After tying them up, he relieved them of their cash — $24 in total, adding to the twenty bucks the robber had already filched from a cash box.
Still, he wasn't satisfied.
"I'm gonna let both of you have it," he snarled, and the look in his eyes, the cold and distant stare of a killer, convinced the men they were done for.
It was only after Mayhew, a married father of two, made a tearful plea for their lives that the gunman decided to spare them.
The trussed-up truckers had no idea how close they'd come to the abyss. In a nearby room lay the body of Henry Gaw, 29, a lab employee who'd worked the overnight shift.
It was obvious he had died horribly — his mouth and gums were badly blistered. On a table was a container of coffee and sandwiches. Police deduced the gunman had forced Gaw to drink a lethal cup of joe laced with cyanide.
The killer also left a bizarre calling card. After watching Gaw die in agony, he tore a phonebook in half and scattered the pages on top of his body.
With the help of the truckers' description, detectives quickly honed in on a suspect: 24-year-old James Baker, a lab assistant who'd quit his job a few weeks earlier. Like Gaw, he was a Navy veteran and the pair seemed to be on good terms. Coworkers couldn't recall them ever having exchanged a cross word. The motive was a mystery.
A fingerprint on a coffee cup confirmed Baker's identity, and the New York papers splashed his photo across their pages. The Daily News tabbed it "one of the most fantastical murders in the history of the police department," and a frantic search for the killer spread across the city.
But Baker had vanished into the mist that morning. A raid on his tiny flat in a Bronx tenement came up empty, though it did give cops a better sense of the kind of criminal they were chasing.
Among his meager possessions were small bottles of cyanide crystals and other poisons — enough to make police surmise the killer "had contemplated slayings on a large scale," The News wrote.
There were also reams of saucy love letters from women the world over he'd met during his days at sea, along with kinky drawings of nude women he'd sketched.
More shocking was a journal Baker kept that not only boasted of his carnal conquests but chronicled at least a half-dozen murders he claimed to have committed across the globe.
All of his victims were men, poison the weapon of choice.
He'd also given himself an outsized monicker while detailing his heinous exploits. He dubbed himself "Texas Jim" despite his never having set foot in the Lone Star State.
Authorities weren't sure if the journal entries were twisted fantasies or true confessions, but they now knew this was no run-of-the-mill, disgruntled ex-employee who killed a coworker after the poor sap likely stumbled onto a burglary.
The slayer was clearly a sadist who satisfied his bloodlust by watching his victims suffer a slow, painful death.
The manhunt for the Manhattan murderer known as Texas Jim was now a nationwide operation — but ended more than a year later in a Michigan farm town only because of a lucky happenstance.
In February 1930, an NYPD detective picking up a prisoner in Detroit was tipped off by local police about some self-professed tough guy with a big mouth who was bragging about being wanted for murder all over the world, including New York.
It turned out to be Baker, who was living with a 17-year-old girl in a nearby suburb when the detective, backed up by a dozen Detroit cops, raided their farmhouse and apprehended the killer after 14 months on the lam.
Back in New York, Baker not only relished his notoriety, he openly embraced the fact he was destined for Sing Sing's electric chair. In front of dozens of detectives invited to witness his interrogation, he copped to Gaw's murder, telling how he broke into the Guggenheim lab that night to steal more cyanide but instead ran into his former colleague.
They had a nice talk about their Navy days over coffee, until Baker grew bored and forced his fellow gob to drink a poison-laced cup at gunpoint.
For the hell of it, he tore a Manhattan phone book in two, a trick he often did to show off his strength, and spread the pages over Gaw while he was in his death throes, bile and blood bubbling up through his seared lips.
As Baker fled he encountered the two truckers, whom he then bound, gagged, robbed — and mercifully spared.
The press ate it up, and Baker gave them what they wanted and more. Like many serial killers, he padded his death toll. First it was 8 murders, then 11. Soon it was 25 bodies the savage seaman claimed to have left in his bloody wake.
Baker, originally from Pittsburgh, told of shooting his abusive stepfather when he was 17, then running away and joining the Navy — during which he poisoned at least six men at various ports of call and watched them suffer. Three of them were fellow sailors who died the same day after Baker spiked the ship's coffee urn with cyanide.
He also confessed to fatally shooting a railroad yard watchman who gave him lip and a Detroit cabbie he robbed while he was hiding out in Michigan.
"I got a chunk of money once in a while," Baker later wrote in a tell-all story syndicated in papers across the country, explaining what drove him to murder. "But sometimes I was just sore at the people."
Eight of the murders were eventually confirmed, but Baker was only sentenced for Gaw's death. In May 1930, he was shipped off to Sing Sing, but not for the hot date with Ol' Sparky he was hoping for. Much to his bitter disappointment, Baker was slapped with 40 years behind bars and didn't get to play the part of the Death Row tough guy.
Months later, a prison psychiatrist diagnosed the obvious: Baker was bonkers. He was transferred to Clinton State Prison for the Criminally Insane. After 17 years there, he was declared fit to rejoin society, and the perverse poisoner with a lengthy body count was released in 1947.
But Baker, not wanting to stretch his luck chose to keep a low profile this time. He faded quietly into the mists of time, to ports unknown.
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100 Murder Cases
Mystery / Thriller100 murder cases that are either solved or not solved
