by Corey Mead
“When I was awakened by the shooting, my first thought was to protect myself and Chubbie,” Lancaster confessed to Hawthorne. “So I wrote the notes and then tried to revive Clarke to get him to sign them. When it was clear that he couldn’t, I signed them myself.”
In his official statement at Hawthorne’s office, Lancaster took care to point out that his forging of the notes was an isolated event: “The incidents connected with the writing of the two notes are the only incidents which I feel were unworthy, foolish, and cowardly of any part I may have played in the investigation,” he declared. “The fact weighed heavily on my mind from the start.” He attempted to absolve himself by explaining that he had told Lathero, his lawyer, the true story, but Lathero had advised him to keep the matter to himself. In Lancaster’s telling, he’d explicitly informed Lathero that he would “not leave Miami without telling Mr. Hawthorne the entire truth.” Lathero, he claimed, would verify this.
Lancaster outlined for Hawthorne what exactly had occurred on the night of Clarke’s shooting. “When I switched on the light and found Haden Clarke had shot himself, I suppose I was a little panicky,” he said. “I had been awakened out of a deep sleep and may have been befuddled. I spoke to Haden, I shook him, and the only noise that came from him was a sort of gurgling noise. His body was twitching violently and his legs moved. When the full seriousness of the situation sank in, my first thought was: Chubbie will think I am responsible. I did not know how seriously Haden was injured. I thought he might be dying. I sat down at the typewriter and typed the two notes. I typed them as I honestly thought Haden would type such notes. I used expressions he had used to me that night in a talk we had earlier in the evening. I picked up a pencil which was by the side of the typewriter, and I went back to the bed where Haden Clarke was lying. I spoke to him. I begged him to sign the two notes I had written.”
Lancaster claimed he shouted for Jessie but received no reply. “The doors of the sun porch were open. Her door was shut. . . . Uppermost in my mind was the thought of what Chubbie would think. At that time it never occurred to me what other people would think. I then took the pencil and scribbled ‘Haden’ on one note and the letter ‘H’ on the other.”
Once Lancaster had woken Jessie and rang for a doctor, he realized that the notes “would weigh heavily against me were I suspected,” he said. “I can only say I wrote them in the first place with honesty of purpose, as, had Clarke recovered sufficiently to sign them, it would have had the effect of setting Chubbie’s mind at ease concerning the wound.” The notes had been intended for Jessie’s eyes only, Lancaster professed, but through “events over which I had no control, the contents of those notes became common property.”
Lancaster proclaimed himself “pleased” to “have been able to make this statement, as it is the only thing I have done that is not strictly honorable in connection with the death of Haden Clarke. I did not kill him. In no way have I willingly been a reason for his death.” In a bit of possibly wishful thinking, Lancaster said he trusted that his statement would convince the State Attorney’s Office of his innocence.
But an undeterred Hawthorne pressed on after Lancaster finished speaking, inquiring in detail about the potentially incriminating elements surrounding the affair, including the gun Lancaster had purchased in St. Louis and his bald awareness that Clarke had betrayed his trust. Lancaster ardently denied that he’d possessed “malice in his heart” toward Clarke, declaring, “If I had come to Miami and found that Haden Clarke had behaved toward Chubbie in a manner that was dastardly, I would have borne malice, but when I arrived at Miami . . . I found nothing to indicate this.”
Hawthorne acted as if he believed Lancaster’s account, but this was likely just for show. Appearing almost regretful, Hawthorne informed Lancaster that, given the circumstances, he was charging him with murder.
The State Attorney’s Office immediately made public the fact that Lancaster had admitted to forging the suicide notes. Hawthorne’s statement noted: “We took every precaution to make certain [the notes were forged] before charging Captain Lancaster with the murder of Haden Clarke, for the evidence was at first entirely circumstantial.” Hawthorne’s office, the statement went on, had initially developed five potential theories: that Clarke committed suicide; that he was murdered by Lancaster; that he was murdered by Jessie; that he was murdered by Lancaster and Jessie together; that he was murdered by someone else. Given the lack of incriminating evidence, Hawthorne said, he had employed the world-renowned handwriting expert J. V. Haring, who had determined that the notes were “palpable forgeries.” This was when Lancaster had admitted his wrongdoing.
Lancaster followed up with his own statement: “It comes as a great shock to me the fact that a technical charge of murder has been made against me. I am absolutely innocent, and I know that the outcomes will prove this. I have been treated with utmost fairness by State’s Attorney Hawthorne, but there is a certain amount of circumstantial evidence against me. At the right and proper time an explanation will be made. . . .”
Late that afternoon, Jessie emerged from the Dade County Courthouse following her own hours-long interrogation. She was just walking down the steps when she heard street hawkers bellowing the news of Lancaster’s arrest for murder. That night she released a statement: “I am absolutely confident everything will come out all right. I know the truth will be learnt and Captain Lancaster will be cleared. He is innocent and I know it. My faith in him remains unshaken. It has never wavered in the past, or now, and it never will.”
In a metaphorical sense, Jessie and Lancaster were back in the Red Rose on their scrappy journey from England to Australia five years earlier, when it was the two of them against the world, and the only thing that mattered was their survival. Regardless of the intervening years, the intensely unique bond that they had forged during those earlier brushes with mortality had now powerfully reasserted itself, and even Jessie’s shock over Clarke’s death was, it appeared, subsumed by her instinctive desire to protect Lancaster at any cost.
16
THE SCARLET WOMAN
Jessie may have insisted on Lancaster’s innocence, but the details released by Hawthorne’s office painted a convincing portrait of Lancaster’s seeming guilt. The forging of Clarke’s suicide notes was the obvious clincher, but the bruising on Clarke’s body and the account of Lancaster’s untouched pillow proved damning, too. (These latter points were later revealed to be inaccurate.) But if the public judged Lancaster a guilty man, many also felt that his actions were perfectly justified, given how fully Clarke had betrayed him.
Speaking with reporters from his jail cell, Lancaster cast aside any notion that he might plead guilty, insisting: “I know I can convince twelve reasonable men, if I am indicted, that I am innocent of the boy’s death.” He cabled his father in England for money to aid his defense.
For Happy Lathero, Lancaster’s lawyer, proving Lancaster’s innocence required building a convincing portrait of Clarke as suicidal. Why, a grand jury would ask, would a talented young man like Clarke want to take his own life? After close consultation with Jessie, Lathero wrote up a list of reasons why Clarke might have committed suicide. Lathero’s list, which Jessie signed as if she had written it herself, looked like this:
Reasons why Haden Clarke killed himself
1. Remorse at the situation he had created, after his promise to Bill Lancaster.
2. Doubt of himself and me. Fear that the past five years would prove too strong a bond and I would return to Bill.
3. Financial worries.
4. Doubt of his ability to write the book and make money with his writing. He talked constantly of this; his writings were all returned.
5. Intense sexual life over many years, suddenly discontinuing.
6. The fact that he was very young and I had placed too much burden and responsibility on him.
7. Physical condition.
8. The fact that he was very temperamental and emotional; that he rose to the heigh
ts of joy, and sank to the depths of despair.
Jessie hand-delivered the list to the State Attorney’s Office in the hopes that it would influence the Dade County Grand Jury, which was meeting the following week, to refuse Lancaster’s indictment. Neither Jessie nor Hawthorne released the document to the press because they were still hiding from Clarke’s mother the fact of her son’s syphilis.
But with all evidence pointing to Lancaster, Ida Clarke announced on May 7 that she was requesting an autopsy for her son, especially because Dr. Deederer’s report of bruising on Clarke’s head led her to believe that he had been beaten before he’d been shot. She also claimed that she was “perfectly attuned” with the “after-life personality” of her son, and while she had “no particular reason for expecting a spirit message” from him, she would “not be surprised at a communication of that sort.” Clarke himself had been a “student, not a disciple,” of spiritualism, she said, and he’d believed even more strongly than she did “that spiritual communications are possible between strong personalities who are mental affinities.” They had both “believed in a life after death.”
Two days later, on May 9, the grand jury handed down a first-degree murder indictment for Lancaster, meaning that he would have to stand trial. If convicted, he would be sentenced to die by the electric chair. But Lancaster’s cause hadn’t been wholly abandoned. The Miami Daily News reported that Jessie was preparing to repay the “debt of gratitude” she’d incurred when Lancaster had supported her after her forced landing on Andros Island, back when she’d made her disastrous attempt to fly from Havana to Miami. “Now the little Australian aviatrix finds her partner in trouble,” the News wrote, with more than a hint of sexism, and so she was “scurrying here and there” searching out “money, legal advice, and friends on which to lean.”
Happy Lathero told Jessie that the best man to defend Lancaster was James M. Carson, one of Miami’s finest and most-respected attorneys. When Jessie entered Carson’s office the following day, she was greeted by a looming figure with graying black hair, bushy eyebrows, thick lips, a fleshy neck, and an enormous head. She found him, at first glance, faintly terrifying. The forty-five-year-old Carson was a native of Kissimmee in central Florida, and he possessed two decades of legal experience. In addition to his practice, he was a professor of law at the University of Miami. The accomplished Carson had never lost a criminal case, and he didn’t intend to now. When Jessie asked if he would represent Lancaster, Carson peered at her through his tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses and instantly averred: “I wouldn’t touch it. He’s guilty as hell.”
“You’re wrong there,” Jessie insisted, with characteristic determination. “But all I’ll ask you to do is go down to the jail and see Bill and form your own opinion.”
At Jessie’s urging, Carson visited Lancaster in his jail cell, where Lancaster unspooled the entire five-year tale of his and Jessie’s relationship, culminating with the night of Clarke’s shooting. After consulting with Lathero and performing a quick investigation, Carson apparently decided that Lancaster was telling the truth. He agreed to take the case, but he also warned Jessie, in no uncertain terms, that “because of those damn notes, it’s not going to be easy. He’s in a very tough spot.” The public already believed resolutely in Lancaster’s guilt, Carson pointed out, and people’s inherent xenophobia only made matters worse.
Carson’s trial strategy would need to hinge on one thing to elicit the jury’s compassion: “I’m afraid I’m going to have to make you the scarlet woman,” he bluntly informed Jessie. The emotional and sexual details of her personal life would be splashed all over the world’s front pages, with a greedy public eagerly gobbling up the particulars. No detail would be too intimate to confess. For a woman like Jessie, who placed enormous value on her privacy, this prospect was excruciating.
“Will everything have to come out?” Jessie asked.
“Everything.”
“And there’s no other way of saving him?”
“In my opinion, no.”
That Jessie responded “yes” speaks volumes about her deep regard for Lancaster, even if she was no longer in love with him. Their connection, even in such an extreme situation, was indissoluble. Jessie knew that if Lancaster was declared guilty he would face the electric chair; sparing him from such a fate was, for her, worth any amount of humiliation. From Carson’s perspective, Jessie’s willing participation, despite its steep personal cost, would help sell the notion of Lancaster’s innocence.
Because Carson intended to argue that Clarke committed suicide, he was granted access to the materials the State Attorney’s Office had gathered, including Lancaster’s diary and the letters and telegrams sent during the Latin-American Airways excursion. He asked the court for enough time to thoroughly investigate Clarke’s and Lancaster’s backgrounds, so that he might develop a rich portrait of each as he weighed the evidence for suicide versus murder.
Lancaster had a wealth of friends who would testify to his character, but investigating the emotional and mental background of Clarke, in order to prove his instability, was a trickier matter for Carson and Lathero. The two lawyers decided to consult a competent psychiatrist who could guide their investigation so that it focused only on those parts of Clarke’s life that were material to the case. They chose Dr. Percy Dodge, a practicing physician who had decades of experience as a specialist in nervous and mental disorders.
Dr. Dodge informed Carson that most cases of suicide possessed explicit physical indications of the act. If the pistol’s muzzle was held directly and tightly against the scalp, for example, there would be no outside powder burns. But because the gases generated by the explosion needed someplace to escape, the typical result was that the scalp was torn loose from the skull and ballooned, and the powder stains appeared between the scalp and the skull. If the pistol was held to the skull by someone else, however, there would be enough flinching, even in sleep, that some gas would escape and external powder burns would appear. Thus, Dodge concluded, if powder burns were found between the scalp and the skull, the indications of suicide were practically conclusive, simply because no other person except the one shooting could or would hold the pistol tightly enough against the scalp to produce those results. These findings directly contradicted the theories that Hawthorne’s office had promoted.
After consulting with Dr. Dodge, Carson and Lathero found themselves dissatisfied with the county physician’s report on Clarke’s body, and with the newspaper statements of Dr. Deederer, Ida Clarke’s physician. Neither doctor had performed the kind of scientific examination for which Dodge advocated. An autopsy was clearly needed—and yet, what if the autopsy indicated that Clarke had not shot himself? Carson and Lathero decided the best way forward was to put the proposition directly to Lancaster, telling him that an autopsy would show whether or not Clarke had committed suicide. Lancaster’s response seemed that of an innocent man: he insisted his lawyers apply for an autopsy, which they did. The state attorney concurred.
Because Carson had heard that Clarke’s body was not embalmed—meaning it was subject to quick disintegration—he requested the soonest possible disinterment and autopsy. The trial’s appointed circuit court judge, Judge Henry F. Atkinson, promptly granted the motion. To oversee the autopsy, Judge Atkinson appointed a medical commission consisting of Dr. Dodge for the defense, Dr. Donald Gowe for the state attorney, and Dr. M. H. Tallman for the court. The autopsy was set for May 31. Carson and Lathero announced that they “eagerly” awaited the report, which would take weeks to prepare.
As the suffocatingly hot days limped by, and May turned into June, Lancaster languished in his jail cell, his world constricted to a grimy, foul-smelling eight-by-ten-foot room. He placed two pictures of Jessie, who was only allowed to visit him for sixty minutes a week, in prominent view, and he depleted countless hours pacing the perimeter of his cell in a useless attempt to stay fit. With little else to occupy his time besides reading and radio-listening, Lancaster also opted to
write a private letter to Pat, his elder daughter, who was now ten years old. Because there is no record of Lancaster having seen or communicated with his young daughters since 1927, nor does he mention them in his letters or journals, the letter seems a clear attempt to establish himself, at least in his family’s eyes, as a sympathetic figure, a loving father and upright gentleman, and thus someone incapable of cold-blooded murder. (“I used to ask, ‘Where’s my daddy? Why isn’t he here?’ ” his daughter Nina Ann remembered decades later, when she was in her eighties. “I was a bit—I’d better choose my words carefully here—peeved that he’d left us. Deserted us. I thought, ‘How could a father do that?’ ”)
Dated June 21, 1932, the letter to Pat read as follows:
My Dearest Pat,
I want you to understand a little of the thoughts and actions of “Old Bill” during the five years that have passed since you waved goodbye to a small aeroplane on the aerodrome at Croydon.
At the present time my small kingdom consists of a room ten feet by eight in a gaol. Not a nice place, in spite of it being on the twenty-second floor of the Town Hall, and commanding a view of the sea, and the beach, and the boats. The gaolers are not inhuman people, and treat me very well. Fortunately some friends still remain, and I have my food brought to me from the outside world. I have . . . a radio which I can turn on and imagine I am far away. Sometimes when certain strains of old songs or operatic music come from the loudspeakers I lean back and conjure up memories of those days that have gone before. India, Australia, New York, and England.