CLEWS Your Home for Historic True Crime

The Sort of Thing That Happens When Fifty Marries Twenty

I find wives hard to keep -- but I am going to hang on to this one until the end.

-- Frederick G. Nixon-Nirdlinger, on his marriage to Charlotte Nash

An aging millionaire, a beauty queen, a bottle of whisky, a loaded pistol, an accusation of infidelity -- put them all in one room and someone is bound to die to spectacular tabloid effect.

The story actually began eight years before that fateful booze-fueled night; it started the moment a pair of dimples framed by spun-gold hair strolled across a stage in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the autumn of 1923. The sash draped across her teenage bosom identified her as "Miss St. Louis," though she usually answered to Charlotte Nash. She was seventeen years old, barely out of high school, and extremely pretty, and her one ambition was to become Miss America.

At least one of the judges thought her blue eyes and corn-fed cheeks warranted the title. He was Fred Nixon-Nirdlinger, world traveler and wealthy 47-year-old owner of a chain of theaters in Philadelphia. But he was ultimately outvoted; the crown went to a young lady from Ohio. Nixon-Nirdlinger was furious and vowed that if he could not make Charlotte Nash into Miss America then he would at least make her a famous actress. She was a "diamond of purest water," he said, just needing "a touch of polishing here and there."

Charlotte was trotted off to finishing school at Nixon-Nirdlinger's expense, where she learned the niceties of deportment, to rise, sit, and carry herself with dignity, to soften her western Rs. A few months into Charlotte's polishing regimen, Fred decided that his public, long-lasting search for The One Woman had finally come to an end. He withdrew her from finishing school and married the 18-year-old beauty in a sensational ceremony in Hagerstown, Maryland. Alas, he neglected to tell his young bride the not insignificant fact that he was already married to someone else.

In fact, Fred Nixon-Nirdlinger had been married for the better part of twenty years to a woman by the name of Lura Mckenna. He was also expecting a child by his mistress, and he had been recently sued for alienation of affections (i.e., he had played the role of 'the other man' in a divorce story). All of these errors and omissions came to light while Charlotte and Fred were on a trans-Atlantic voyage to their Paris honeymoon. Once she recovered from the dizzying bad news, Charlotte left him in Paris and returned to the United States.

Fred couldn’t let his perfect woman get away. He nearly melted the cable lines imploring her to return to him. Charlotte caved in and put herself on a ship back to Paris. Quite the honeymoon followed; jealous quarrels between bouts of lovemaking left Charlotte pregnant -- and divorced. But they weren’t done with one another. After her first child was born, Charlotte married Fred again.

The second marriage was no better than the first. Fred, it seemed, was intensely jealous of his young and beautiful wife. According to the couple’s friends, he hired detectives to follow her every move. The cycle of nasty confrontations between bouts of gentler interactions resulted in another child and a move to Nice, France, where, in March, 1931, Mr. and Mrs. Nixon-Nirdlinger would become household names.

The survivor of the disaster would later give this account of the fatal evening: Fred was drinking. Charlotte was sitting, studying Italian. Fred asked her what she was doing and from her answer he surmised that Charlotte must be interested in an Italian fellow, and he said so. She denied this. He accused her of trafficking with gigilos. She denied this. The ensuing argument lasted for hours, turning ugly, resulting at one point in Fred wrapping his hands around Charlotte’s throat and threatening to choke her to death.

At some point Fred went into the kitchen for more whisky. Charlotte used the opportunity to flee to the bedroom, where she slipped a loaded pistol under her pillow. Fred’s last words to her were, “I will kill you rather than let you have an Italian lover.” Charlotte beat him to it, and as she lay on the bed she retrieved her pistol and fired. The first bullet entered just under Fred Nixon-Nirdlinger’s left eye and lodged at the base of his skull. A second bullet hit him in the chest. Two other shots went wild. Fred crumpled in a pool of blood.

Mrs. Nixon-Nirdlinger stood, dropped her pistol, and slipped in her husband's blood. Picking herself up, she stumbled into the hall, her arms and nightgown streaked with red stains. She ran downstairs for the janitor, crying "I have killed my husband." Then she fainted.

Charlotte Nixon-Nirdlinger soon found herself in a French jail, where she relayed her story of the evening to the police. They noted vivid red marks on her throat that deepened to bruises and came to the conclusion that she had been severely handled as she claimed, but this did not stop prosecutors from holding her on a charge of “murder with excuse of provocation.”

The shooting death of the American millionaire became an overnight news sensation. Journalists from the United States visited the beautiful widow in jail and wired detailed reports to their editors. Said the United Press correspondent: “She was a pitiful figure in the dark prison dress, deprived of powder and lipstick, and faced with the task of defending herself in a foreign court room.” The careful descriptions of her appearance continued when her trial began a little over a month later. As she came to court, the reporters noted that she “was attired in a smart tight-fitting, low-cut frock and wore a black coat with the collar turned up... a black cloche hat also shaded her face.”

A jury of businessmen was selected to hear from a variety of witnesses who told stories of the dead man’s jealousy. The couple’s French friends testified that the slain man was “insanely jealous,” never letting her out alone, reading every letter she wrote or received. The fact that the deceased was Jewish was also whispered.

A critical witness was a Swedish nanny who contradicted the prosecution’s efforts to paint Charlotte scarlet. The nanny insisted that Mrs. Nixon-Nirdlinger was as pure as Caesar’s wife. “Mrs. Nirdlinger never flirted and never had any love affairs,” the nanny said. “I would have known it if she had.”

Then the self-made widow testified between sobs and gasps. “He came into the bedroom and said such disgusting things to me that I cannot repeat them. I fired – I did not mean to kill him.”

On cross-examination, Charlotte denied the prosecutor’s accusations that she danced and flirted with other men. She denied rumors of an affair with a swimming instructor. When all was said and done, the prosecutor came up with two pieces of evidence that she was a wandering wife. One, he had a photograph of her in a fashionable bathing suit. Two, he read from a letter Charlotte wrote to a friend in which the unhappy young lady said -- “There are nothing but constant rows. But I’ll be damned if I’ll stay home and sit in a corner reading. I am still young. Maybe when I’m his age I’ll do that.”

But there was more evidence against her; there was the physical evidence. There was the fact that she purchased a handgun two months before she shot her husband -- clearly a sign that she was planning the scene. There was the fact that she shot four times and missed twice -- so he couldn't have been standing all that close to her at the moment and probably wasn't posing the imminent threat that one would expect to accompany a claim of self-defense. The prosecutors insisted that she was never in danger of death.

But her lawyers were adamant. "It's a clear case of self-defense," said her lead defense attorney. "The fact that my client bought two months ago the revolver with which she shot and killed her husband does not indicate premeditation.... She simply purchased the weapon for use in case of extreme emergency to defend her life. How prudent this action was." Her lawyer summed up his closing argument with the now famous declaration that "she is too beautiful to be bad."

The jurors -- seven of whom were bachelors -- apparently agreed; they acquitted Charlotte in nine minutes. The judge released her with the final thought that though the investigation of her morals was favorable, she was still to be chastised for being "flighty in your thoughts, too much occupied with pretty dresses and dancing."

And thus Charlotte Nash Nixon-Nirdlinger was acquitted on charges of adultery -- umm, manslaughter. The spectators cheered and crowds gathered in the courthouse square to see her restored to liberty.

She may well have been better off to remain in France; the verdict was largely attributed (by the American newspapers at least) to French attitudes toward beautiful women and marriage in general. But she returned to St. Louis; learned that her husband's will left her nearly penniless; and tried to find acting jobs in Hollywood only to be snubbed Lizzie Borden-style, as Hollywood would have none of her. In the end she would declare, "Sometimes I'm sorry that I was ever considered beautiful. It brought me more trouble than joy."

Presumably her husband had similar sentiments in his last moments.

Last Letters

If you knew you were at death's door -- facing assassination or execution or some other involuntary end of life -- and had in your possession a single sheet of paper on which to write your final thoughts, what would you write, and to whom would you write it?

The last letters of many famous people have found their way to publication and even to television. Mary, Queen of Scots, informed mere hours beforehand that she would be executed, chose to write a mournful letter to her brother. Anne Boelyn pleaded her innocence and begged her husband for a fair trial. Rasputin wrote to his liege:

Tsar of the land of Russia, if you hear the sound of the bell which will tell you that [I have] been killed, you must know this: if it was your relations who have wrought my death then no one of your family, that is to say, none of your children or relations will remain alive for more than two years. They will be killed by the Russian people....

Rasputin's predictions were correct in all particulars.

The day before he was gunned down in a barroom, Wild Bill Hickok, hired gunman, professional gambler, and Army scout under Custer, also had a premonition of his own death. In a last, one-sentence letter to his wife, all the more poignant because of its brevity, Hickok wrote:

Agnes Darling

If such should be we never meet again, while firing my last shot, I will gently breathe the name of my wife -- Agnes -- and with wishes even for my enemies I will make the plunge and try to swim to the other shore.

J.B. Hickok

That letter became a feature in the plot of HBO's Deadwood (a show that mines contemporary sources for dialogue true to the era and needless to say I am one big fan).

But the most remarkable last letter I have ever seen was penned by a now obscure convicted murderess writing to her lover on the eve of her hanging at the Old Bailey in London in 1848. The letter was printed in Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press by Judith Knelman. The letter-writer, Harriet Parker, had stolen the husband of another woman, Esther Blake, but that gentleman, Robert Blake, true to his nature, was untrue to Harriet as well. Harriet was so enraged that she committed what is undoubtedly the worst -- the absolutely most awful -- crime that anyone could ever commit: she suffocated his two children, ages four and six, solely to get back at their father.

Harriet Parker's stunning last remarks to Robert Blake, penned while she waited in Newgate for the executioner, were these:

Dear Robert -- This is the last time you will ever receive advice from me. My days are numbered: this day fortnight I shall be silent in the grave. Take therefore these few lines into consideration: never again trifle with a woman as you have with me. Promise to forsake all others, and cling once again to her who ought to hold the only place in your heart -- the wife of your bosom. This, Robert, I sincerely wish. I have deeply injured her, and so have you. Let her then, after this, have your best and purest affections.

And thus, after telling him what to do, the child murderess cast the blame on him:

Oh, Robert, had we parted long since, as I requested, my life, and that of those who were so near and dear to you would have been spared.... oh! may we yet meet in that land in which sorrow and misery will flee away. I only ask that you will sometimes shed the tear of pity and forgiveness over my unfortunate lot.

Just when one is prepared to conclude the lady a shockingly self-centered psychopath, she writes:

I wish you to pay some little debts for me, and I shall die much happier if you will. I owe the milk-woman 8d. Bridget did one half-day's work for me; and likewise Mrs. Washington a trifle; and the green-grocer, for coals, I think about 2s. 6d. ... Now, Robert, I must conclude; and that God in mercy may forgive, bless, and prosper you and yours, is the sincere prayer of the heart that dictates these lines. From the unfortunate

"Harriet Parker."

That letter, more than her acts alone and her confession and guilty plea, reveals a deeply disturbed woman. It is hard to argue that her public, shameful death was unwarranted.

May no one ever again have to write such a letter. May no one again receive one.

History Carnival and See, I Told You So

The current edition of the History Carnival (see my explanation) appears on Acephalous, and Clews is highlighted with delightfully left-handed compliments. Your correspondent had hundreds of new correspondents to enjoy The Lost Art of Writing Crime Headlines.

Anyway, other blogs highlighted in the Carnival led me to essays that reinforce my long-held belief (which counters our self-congratulatory modern thinking) that forensic science, which (in my words) is merely deductive reasoning guided by scientific principles, has been around for centuries.

Sharon Howard of the University of Wales writes a fascinating and well-regarded blog, Early Modern Notes, and one of her abiding interests is in crime and legal history circa 1500-1800. Some of her more interesting recent ponderings include an essay on A Seventeenth-Century Detective; the comments are fascinating as well.

Meanwhile, attorney Jonathan Edelstein has written an essay on 17th- and 18th-century expert testimony in which he gracefully explains the significance of early opinion evidence:

Investigative methods and the use of physical evidence ... are only two of the three legs of modern forensics, because physical evidence often makes little sense to a jury without expert testimony to explain its significance. What makes experts different from other witnesses in common-law courts is that they can testify, not only to what they saw and heard, but to their resulting opinions and interpretations. Without expert witnesses, the best detective work and the most damning material evidence may never translate into a conviction. It is not surprising, therefore, that expert testimony has roots as ancient as forensics itself.

Edelstein goes on to list several fascinating examples. And to that accumulation of evidence of the genius of our forebears I would add the case of Cecile Combettes, an 1847 murder case from France that featured the use -- though misuse is more accurate -- of trace evidence in the form of organic material that linked a young girl's corpse to the garden of a nearby religious institution and eventually to one brother in particular.

Someone ought to write a book.

Stories from Hither and Yon (or, I wish I'd written that)

I'm a sucker for a well crafted true crime essay with an historical subject or historical slant, have had the pleasure of coming across several recently in my web wanderings, and share them here with you for some weekend reading.

Steve Huff of The Dark Side crime blog posted an elegant essay yesterday titled "Mataviejitas." In it, he discusses an ongoing serial killer case in Mexico City with some interesting historical parallels culled from his encyclopedic knowledge of serial killers. His interpretation of the few clues in the case will shiver your spine.

Just when you think there's no more ink left in Lizzie Borden's well, a writer with a fresh and interesting perspective pens something on the case that makes you think. An anonymous website has an essay, "She's Famous But Is She New England?" that you don't have to be a Borden-phile to enjoy.

The unsolved murder of Jennie Cramer in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1881 sparked intense public interest and led to a sensational murder trial -- but no firm answers. An essay in The New Journal, a publication managed by students at Yale, has a succinct view of the fascinating case (scroll to the bottom for "The Lady Vanishes").

The website for the Stanford Journal of Legal Studies has posted a fascinating academic paper, Yellow Justice: Media Portrayal of Criminal Trials in the Progressive Era by law student Shannen Petersen, which posits that yellow journalism led to "yellow justice." But, oh, the headlines!

And from The Olden Times:

Mrs. Nobles Took An Axe....

A note: I recently swore off telling historical true crime stories on my blog here, disgusted by the fact that other websites are stealing my stories, cutting and pasting them onto their own websites with nary a link to say where they came from, including pornographers (don't ask) and many others. Unsolvedmysteries.com is one of several websites that have stolen my work. And then, at the bottom of the stolen post, it advises: "All stories are copyright protected and may not be reproduced in any form, except by specific written authorization." Oh, the irony.

But I can't help myself. There are some stories begging to be told. But I won't include my sources any more and feel compelled to impart a word of warning: I am losing my patience with thieves and rascals, so kindly take note that all stories on this website are copyright protected and may not be reproduced in any form, except by specific written authorization, and I'm prepared to take drastic action the next time my copyright is violated.

The crime itself was not particularly remarkable. Mrs. T. Elizabeth (Scarborough) Nobles of Danville, Georgia, tired of her husband -- an old story. So she hired another man, Gus Fambles, to help her rid the earth of William H. Nobles. Mrs. Nobles and her ten-dollar accomplice snuck up on Mr. Nobles with a hatchet. It was never perfectly clear which one of them wielded the instrument, but it did take several hacks to accomplish the deed.

It was sloppy work, and the guilty parties were handily caught and put on trial for premeditated murder. During the two-day proceeding, which was quite well attended, it was noted that Mr. Nobles' life was insured. Elizabeth Nobles was quoted as saying if she'd known they were going to raise that much fuss about it, "I wouldn't have killed the old man." Both defendants were convicted and sentenced to death.

But it was 1895. The ladies of Georgia were appalled. A murder conviction -- a death sentence -- for a woman? It could not be countenanced. A movement began, meetings were called, committees formed, petitions drafted, appellate counsel hired, and letters to the editor poured into the offices of newspapers across the state. "Never has the fate of a criminal caused such widespread interest," said one journalist. Prominent men were quoted as saying that it was shameful to hang a woman, no matter what she'd done, and the state brought disgrace upon itself by contemplating such an action.

But the husbands of Danville -- surely alarmed by the female reaction to the case -- wanted to see her hanged, so they responded with special meetings and committees of their own. The group passed a resolution pressing for the execution, chastising "those unacquainted with the horrid details of the crime" whose effort to save her "was induced by mawkish sentiment rather than a desire to promote the ends of justice." They pointed out that there was never the slightest doubt of the guilt of this murderess who was polluted with the life blood of her husband.

So the supporters of Mrs. Nobles trotted out what they believed to be mitigating circumstances. For one thing, they said, the poor, ignorant old woman had never seen the inside of a church until she was eighteen years old. She was totally illiterate, did not know even one letter of the alphabet. She did not even know what jailhouses and courthouses were until after she killed her husband.

Since the Georgia Supreme Court proved itself immune to sympathy, her case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds that Mrs. Nobles, after her conviction, had become insane and therefore could not be hanged.

The insanity defense was predicated upon her statement that she had talked to her dead husband. But in explaining her "vision," she undermined her claim of illiteracy (if the heavy use of adverbs is any indication of literacy). She was quoted in the Atlanta Constitution as saying:

Last night he stood right in this cell by my cot. I saw him distinctly and heard him speak plainly. He looked perfectly natural and asked me about our children. He inquired especially about our oldest son, Archie, who is in the Indian Territory. He also asked about our son-in-law... he made no allusion to the killing and only talked about our children... there was no sign of blood.... I knew he was dead, for I had seen his corpse myself, and this was only his spirit that had come back to earth."

Well. Given that statement, she must be insane, or at least entitled to a jury trial on the question of her sanity, per the "Save Mrs. Nobles" clubs that had sprung up across Georgia. But the U.S. Supreme Court also proved itself unassailable. Mrs. Nobles and her accomplice were scheduled to be hanged in April, 1898.

It looked as though the governor would not budge. “I am in sympathy with any unfortunate, especially a woman,” he said. “Sympathy, however, is not to be obeyed, and I cannot interfere with the law unless some good, strong reasons are presented to me.”

Therefore, her supporters made the following points in an effort to save her neck:

• A Georgia Congressman begged the governor to at least spare Mrs. Nobles the shame and disgrace of being hanged alongside her accomplice, whom he described as “a negro wretch.” The newspapers picked up the theme: “a woman, destitute, depraved, guilty though she may be, yet still the image of the most sacred form the eye of man can contemplate, can be executed upon a scaffold by the side of a negro felon… the scene does not belong to this end of the nineteenth century.” (Never mind that this was the fellow whom she chose as her accomplice.)

• One editorial opined that since women are not full citizens, they had no say in the formation of the criminal law, and therefore no woman could be held to a statutory standard of conduct. (An oft-cited argument for women’s commutations which, if carried to its logical conclusion, would seem to exclude anyone outside the Legislature from punishment for anything.)

• In the final analysis, women should never hang, ever, it was believed, because the manhood of Georgia simply couldn’t tolerate such an outcome (because it afforded women an equal footing on the scaffold?).

The governor never cited the specific argument that finally moved his pen, but days before the execution, he commuted her sentence. An immediate complication arose in that it suddenly seemed unfair to hang the other fellow when the woman escaped the noose, so his sentence was commuted, too.

Mrs. Nobles eventually died in prison at the age of 71 in 1916. For many years, the women of Georgia looked back with pride on the outcome of her case and the fruit of their efforts to have her treated as a Southern lady ought to be treated. Never mind the blood on her hands.

Women and the Death Penalty in Ohio, An Historical Review: Proving Pearson's Theorem

Folk have no need to agitate themselves about the throngs of innocents hounded to the gallows or the electric chair by brutal police, hectoring district-attorneys and corrupt judges. If they would read a few trials, in place of mystery novels; or attend some court sessions instead of crook plays, they might recover their peace of mind. It is a long and hard process to get a murderer convicted, much harder to get him executed. With a woman, she needs must poison an entire orphan asylum before anybody dare suggest anything so harsh.

From "The Man Pays--Sometimes," in Instigation of the Devil, Edmund L. Pearson

The State of Ohio has hanged, shot, bludgeoned, or electrocuted more than 450 convicted killers from 1792 to the present day, and this grand total of executed persons has, very occasionally, included a murderess.

The first woman known to have been executed in the Buckeye state -- known because these matters were handled by county governments, and for all we know, some records are missing -- was Esther Foster. She was a prison inmate (why, I couldn't ascertain), a black woman who was found guilty of killing a fellow white female inmate by beating her to death with a shovel. Though her defense raised provocative questions as to whether the killing was premeditated (and thus whether the ultimate penalty was appropriate), it was the second murder at the Ohio penitentiary in the span of a few weeks.

Ms. Foster was executed in Columbus on Feb. 9, 1844, by hanging. Strung up alongside her was another condemned, a white man named William Clark, an inmate who'd killed a prison guard. The crowd attending the execution was so massive that one man was trampled to death.

A newspaper that studied her case sixty years later had the following to report: "The Foster woman was not mentally bright and the chronicles of those days tell that she sold her body to a surgeon for all the candy she could eat from the time of the making of the bargain until she was hanged."

Over the course of the century, many more women would hear a judge pronounce a fatal sentence, but rarely was the rope invoked. In 1889, a white woman named Mary Garrett of Spencer was sentenced to die for killing her two "imbecile" or "idiotic" stepdaughters by burning down the house around them. After her condemnation, the public was aroused, the Pardon Board begged the governor to release her, and in 1899, after serving ten years in prison, she was given a Christmas pardon. In 1890, "Big Liz" Carter, a black woman, was convicted of poisoning her lover. The generosity of the age was extended to Big Liz, whose sentence was commuted, and she was eventually paroled.

In 1931, Julia Maude Lowther came close to being the second woman executed in Ohio when she was found to have arranged the murder of the wife of her paramour. But the appellate court overturned the trial court, and during a second proceeding, she was sentenced to life.

It would take a brutal string of crimes by a poisoner to break the chain. Anna Marie Hahn was the subject of intense inquiry and grim headlines when she fell under suspicion for the murders of several old German pensioners. The death of her last victim, 78-year-old Jacob Wagner, was originally attributed to heart trouble, but someone close to the family had noticed a pattern and insisted on an exhumation. Arsenic was discovered. Her husband found a bottle of said substance and to his credit he gave the bottle to the police. Following one of the longest trials in Ohio history, in which a reported 99 witnesses testified to the death of Mr. Wagner and several other old men who were under Mrs. Hahn's care, a jury of one man and 11 women convicted the 31-year-old blonde of murder for gain. She was electrocuted in 1938.

The third and fourth executions of females would follow in quick succession; 1954 saw the electrocution of Mrs. Dovie Smarr Dean, 55, who poisoned her husband, and Betty Butler, 25, who bludgeoned and drowned another woman.

The succeeding decades saw the conviction and condemnation of another nine women. Before the state could go on a tear, each sentence was reversed by an appellate court or commuted by a lame duck governor. But Ohio may once again break its streak. Donna Roberts, convicted of murdering her ex-husband in 2001, received the ultimate sentence in 2003 (after reportedly asking for it during her trial) and may become Ohio's fifth Dead Woman Walking. Her case hasn't aroused much attention, not even from death penalty opponents who often set up websites dedicated to obtaining mercy for this or that condemned female. There isn't a website called "Free Donna Roberts" -- no photos, either, from what I could find, which may not be an unrelated fact.

For the time being, she has the women's death row in Ohio all to herself.

--

UPDATE: Some kind Clews visitor sent a photo of Donna Roberts. This comes from The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction http://www.drc.state.oh.us/OffenderSearch/Details.aspx?id=W055276&pg=xlink

For more interesting Ohio reading, see a nicely written history of the Ohio Penitentiary, "Inside the Pen," by David Lore for the Columbus Dispatch, Oct. 28, 1984, which can be found online at  http://www.drc.state.oh.us/web/histop1.html.

Victor L. Streib, a professor of law at Ohio Northern University, has a book in the works that will detail all these stories in full. Condemned, Ignored, Forgotten: Life and Death Stories from Ohio's Death Penalty for Women will come out next year from Ohio University Press.

The Lost Art of Writing Crime Headlines

The most famous newspaper headline ever written in the U.S. of A. was DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. But that's rather cheap, isn't it, since the joke was on the man who wrote it. The better headlines have imparted intended humor or double meanings, but the art of writing a newspaper headline seems to have gone the way of quillwork and macrame. Current journalism school advice sucks all the sass out of modern headlines. These days, any overly creative headlines are likely to earn their authors a bonk on the head. And thus we might never again see such gems as:

CAPERS CRAPS OUT. (announcing the murder of one Tom Capers during a dice game)

HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN TOPLESS BAR

JUVENILE COURT TO TRY SHOOTING DEFENDANT

MAN STRUCK BY LIGHTNING FACES BATTERY CHARGE

STEALS CLOCK, FACES TIME

WORLD'S IN AN AWFUL MESS (the all-encompassing work product of a journalist who was having a particularly bad news day)

Okay, OKAY, it's not so easy to walk that fine line and come up with a decent headline for a crime story. I once had the privilege of working a brief stint as a copy editor for the Lapeer County Press in my home state of Michigan, and headlines are not easy to write, let me tell you. Only one of my headlines garnered any notice; as soon as I wrote it and sent it back to the composing room, I heard laughter. The next day, readers called in to thank us for the chuckle. I never did figure out what was so ticklish about MAN IN PINK NIGHTIE FLASHES ATTICA WOMAN.

Anyway, my regular readers -- the four of you -- if I count all of my sisters -- are probably wondering where I'm going with this. So the other day I was casually perusing an 1894 edition of the Olean Democrat from New York state when I happened upon:

REMARKABLE FEMININE FREAK.

Well, that'll stop your eyes, won't it? The subhead read,

Alleged Murderess Who

Smokes, Shaves and

Wears Men's Attire.

The city of Toronto furnished this tale of a black woman named Clara Ford, dubbed a "remarkable specimen of femininity" -- because she disguised herself as a man, carried a revolver, played the coronet and kettle-drum, read works relating to love and murder, drove a hack for two years, was a choir boy in an Episcopal church, and joined a Socialist group solely for the purpose of haranguing men who held socialist views. Her sex was discovered accidentally when she was tied to the murder of one Frank Westwood, a young, white, well-to-do man from a prominent family who was shot dead at his front door. Per the press coverage, she confessed to shooting him out of jealousy.

The Ford-Westwood case has been the subject of two longer treatments, a 1945 book by Edwin C. Guillet, The Shooting of Frank Westwood: A Study of the Evidence in The Queen versus Clara Ford, 1894-1895. The tale has been updated only recently by Ontario attorney Patrick Brode, who wrote Death in the Queen City: Clara Ford on Trial, 1895 which is available exclusively from the publisher, Natural Heritage Books. That outfit promises to deliver "a bizarre story of romance and racism" and a "wildly unconventional" defendant. It sounds like a remarkable book, so I won't spoil it for you by revealing the outcome of Ford's trial.

Unless you have to know right now. **Spoiler alert** The accused proved an alibi during the trial -- or at least that's what the jury hung its hat on when it announced his/her acquittal. I'll leave it to you to come up with an appropriate headline for that outcome. All I can come up with is HE / SHE SET FREE.

UPDATE:

CNN has given us another for the books. From its website:

SEVERED HAND

FOUND IN NUDE

DANCER'S HOME

Via

Too Beautiful To Be Bad

One of my abiding interests is in women who commit murder, and I pick up all the books on this topic that I find. The last dozen years have seen the publication of Bad Girls Do It! and Women Who Kill and Mistresses of Mayhem and Wicked Women, among many others.

But what has disappointed me about these books is that they relay the same stories over and over and over and over -- the tales of women for whom barrels of ink have already been tapped: Lizzie Borden, Belle Gunness, Belle Starr, Bonnie Parker, Grace Marks, Jane Toppan, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, Martha Beck, Jean Harris, Aileen Wournos, Karla Faye Tucker, Dorothea Puente, Ruth Snyder, Susan Smith, Phoolan Devi, Kate Bender, Constance Kent, etc. etc. "Sheesh, aren't there any others?" I've often wondered.

That's the main reason I prefer to get my crime news by reading old newspapers and tattered old true crime paperbacks. And what I've discovered by doing so has really astonished me.

Some authors have asserted that women who commited murders received harsher punishment than their male counterparts. It's true. I have these books on my shelves.

After studying crime stories in the press for years, I've come to some interesting conclusions, and the most remarkable to me involves the treatment of women accused of murder. A certain class of women, anyway. And it defies the prevailing logic.

In 1931, a lawyer rested a light hand on the shoulder of an accused killer dressed becomingly in widow’s black. Turning to the men in the jury box, he declared, “she is too beautiful to be bad."

A deliberative interlude later, the jurymen agreed that the defendant was not guilty of shooting her husband, even if she did confess.

This story—-featuring a weapon, a corpse, a beautiful woman, and an acquittal-—played itself out in courtrooms across the globe for generations, on front pages around the world. I have found clear evidence that the double standard that kept women subjugated actually worked in their favor, curiously enough, in the criminal arena. The standard called for a heavier burden on any prosecutor who sought to convict a woman of murder. It altered the rules of evidence, turned incidentals into reasonable doubt.

This fact was common knowledge in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many men publicly railed against the routine acquittal of female murder defendants. “In the last two cases [featuring accused murderesses],” asserted an 1890s editorial from New York, “sympathetic juries acquitted the fair shootists with such promptness that it would not have created surprise if the jurymen had chipped in and presented the acquitted woman with a silver-mounted pistol, properly inscribed.”

And as a woman columnist, reflecting on the acquittal of 25 (yes, that's twenty-five) women in a row in Chicago, said in 1919: “The man who votes to acquit a woman of murder when he knows that she is a murderess, is usually the sort of man who has deep down in his heart an absolute contempt for women. He thinks of them as little, foolish, emotional, impulsive creatures, who can’t control themselves anyhow... he would no more hold her accountable than... he would hold his little pet poodle accountable because it can’t learn to read."

But for every lawyer, judge, or newspaper editor who decried the lenient treatment of women, another promoted it. Said the leading newspaper of Atlanta, Georgia, in the 1870s: “We never find a woman that is imbued with murderous instincts. Whenever she kills, it is in some terrible outburst of passion that is phenomenal and can hardly repeat itself.”

So they gave women little credit. And little blame.

While the criminal law made things light for women in general, this favoritism was more strictly applied to pretty women than ugly ones; younger women than older; fair-skinned than dark; thin than fat. Heaven help a homely woman accused of murder. Her fate was much more likely to be determined by the facts of the case than the fate of her pretty sister in crime.

I'll continue looking for more of these stories -- there are dozens, if not hundreds, of examples to be found. I've already written on Clews about some of these women, beautiful women who faced a murder charge and compelling evidence -- but who got off, or received a punishment so light that it amounted to the same thing.

Now, whether or not I'll post them on my blog here has become an issue. I would very much like to be paid (imagine that) for all of this research, and I'm kicking around the idea of trying to find someone interested in publishing it. At the same time, I continue to be royally ripped off by other websites who cut and paste my stories wholesale for use on their own websites. Ah, well. What to do. The thieving bastards are damn lucky that this is the 21st century.

Legends of True Crime Reporting: Celia Thaxter

Celia Laighton Thaxter (1835-1894) was in her lifetime one of the most famous women poets in the United States. She grew up on an archipelago owned by her family which straddled the border between New Hampshire and Maine, and she took as her inspiration the stark beauty of the sea and rocky isles. Many of New England’s famous literati were drawn to the world she painted in words and summered at her family’s Appledore Hotel. Celia Thaxter also studied birds and gardening; in addition to her poetry, she painted and wrote a book celebrating her landscape design, An Island Garden, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1894. (Her garden on Appledore Island, characterized by poppies that drift from white to pink to coral to rose, still exists and is available for tours.) Her poetry also celebrated the residents of the islands, including the Norwegians who worked at the Appledore Hotel and rented homes on nearby islands from her family.

But in 1873, the poetess's world of beauty was stained with blood. On Smuttynose Island, two Norwegian women she knew were found murdered in their home while their men-folk were away. A third woman who escaped the abbatoir told the horrifying tale of a thief who broke into the house and, when discovered and recognized, responded with an axe.

Celia Thaxter was among the first people to visit the island and to speak to Maren (Marie) Hontvet, the lone survivor of the attack. Days later, she wrote a letter to a friend describing the people involved and what happened on Smuttynose:

Those dear, lovely Norwegian people had a settlement over there; there was John Hontvet and his wife Marie, and Karen Christiansen, Marie's sister, and Ivan Christiansen her brother, and Anethe his wife; the two had been married but a year and only came from Norway last fall. Anethe, everybody says, was a regular fair beauty, young and strong, with splendid thick yellow hair, so long she could sit on it. Both husbands, John and Ivan, were devotedly fond of their wives, and their little home was so bright and happy and neat and delightful they never ceased congratulating themselves upon having found such a place to live in.

She went on to describe the man arrested for the killings the next day:

Louis Wagner, the Prussian devil who murdered them, had lived with them all summer, but was in Portsmouth working at nothing in particular for the last month (those three women had been heavenly good to him, nursed him in sickness, and supposed him to be a friend). The two husbands went to Portsmouth Tuesday to sell their fish, leaving the three women, as they often had done before, alone, as we on this island have often been. In Portsmouth, they found Louis and asked him to come baiting trawls with them. He pretendcd assent, but knowing the three women had been left alone and thinking Karen, who had just left mother's service, had money with her, he took a dory and rowed twelve miles out here in the calm night lit by a young moon, landed on Smutty a little after midnight, broke into the house in the dark and hacked and hewed those poor women till he killed two of them by sheer force of blows, chopping off Anethe's ear and smashing her skull. She had twenty wounds where he had blundered at her haphazard, in the dark! Marie told me all about it.

Celia Thaxter went on in her letter to relay the details of the murders, the horror that all three women experienced at the hands of a slow and clumsy killer, and hints at the shock and sadness that would burden her for years.

The case would also cause a great deal of agitation throughout New England; Louis Wagner was eventually tried and convicted and hanged in Maine. But his would be the last execution in that state before the death penalty was banned there, and naysayers cast doubt upon his guilt despite the overwhelming evidence against him -- including, but not limited to, the testimony of the lone survivor of the attack, Wagner's lack of a credible alibi, his obliquely incriminating statements, and clear evidence that the unemployed layabout had come into a small sum of money that he spent the day after the murders that happened to exactly coincide with the sum stolen from the murder house.

In 1875, Thaxter wrote of the murders for the second and final time. Her essay, "A Memorable Murder," was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly. It has been reprinted many times and in many forums since then. Curiously, it has often been mistaken for a work of fiction and described as such when anthologized. The essay is the most famous ever written about the Smuttynose murders, and even Edmund Lester Pearson could not top it (though he tried, in Murder at Smutty Nose and Other Murders (Sun Dial Press, 1938)); indeed, Thaxter's is one of the most powerful essays ever written in the true crime genre.

Since then, the Smuttynose murders have actually been translated into fiction. Author Anita Shreve wrote an account of the case in her bestseller "The Weight of Water." Alas, she changed the identity of the killer in the novel with unfortunate and immoderate results. Louis Wagner was innocent in Shreve's version of the story, and the murderer, per Shreve, was the lone survivor of the attack -- Maren Hontvet. It was an unfortunate result because the truth should have been sufficient for dramatic purposes and immoderate because it is impossible to improve upon Celia Thaxter's moving account.