More details were revealed during McParlan’s second day of riveting testimony, as Gowen took full advantage of the opportunity to place not just individuals but the entire AOH on trial. Despite defense objections, Gowen elicited how McParlan became a member of the order; how the elaborate signs, passwords, and toasts—the “goods”—were distributed quarterly; and how a mysterious Irish group known as the Board of Erin controlled the AOH on an international level, a fact known previously to only very few in the courtroom. Much more damning was McParlan’s testimony that the primary function of the Schuylkill County AOH was to avenge its members. He described how men went to their bodymaster to demand vengeance, how they were assigned to carry out such illegal tasks for others, and that the defendants were all members of—as would regularly be stated thereafter—“the Ancient Order of Hibernians, more commonly called the Molly Maguires.”5
McParlan’s meticulous presentation was matched only by the dramatics and rhetoric of Gowen, and by the end of the detective’s initial testimony, they had so confirmed an overwhelming conspiracy by the Molly Maguires that newspapers throughout the northeastern United States condemned every member as guilty by association.6 Such a rush to acknowledge and punish a conspiracy had not been seen since the previous decade during the investigation and trial by military tribunal of the conspirators in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.7 In the aftermath of those events, many accounts and transcripts of the trials were widely distributed, helping create a public acceptance of the concept of conspiracies in which every member of an organization was equally guilty of a crime as those who actually committed it.8 This preconception allowed Gowen’s runaway attack on the AOH to be carried along as much by precedent, the highly charged atmosphere, and a desire for vengeance as by any underlying logic to his arguments.9
Realizing that McParlan was the key to the entire case, the defense attorneys did all in their power to discredit his character, impugn his testimony, and destroy the fabric of his charges. For two grueling days they searched his past life for evidence of wrongdoing but could only find that he had changed jobs numerous times. They claimed his testimony was being given in exchange for financial profit but could not show that he earned anything above his weekly salary, which he emphasized was all that he was permitted by Pinkerton’s. Bartholomew tried to lessen the detective’s credibility by pointing out that he had lied to the members of the AOH, but the wind was taken out of the lawyer’s sails when McParlan openly agreed:
Q: And these stories you told were untrue; they were all lies.
A: Certainly they were lies; I swear to that.10
Bartholomew also tried to catch McParlan out by confusing him about specifics, such as dates. Initially, McParlan had checked his reports to refresh his memory. These reports had been brought into the courthouse in a protective metal box and put in a conspicuous place in order to satisfy the jury that McParlan’s testimony was based strictly on the facts recorded at the time.11 Now, demanding he respond without looking at his reports, Bartholomew grilled him about conversations at Carroll’s tavern on August 4 and 24 the previous year. McParlan refused to be confounded, and responded: “[Y]ou keep between the 24th and 4th all the time. It does not shake the evidence a bit. You cannot change dates like that.”12
Indeed, the defense lawyers, who rode roughshod over some witnesses, discovered they would get as good as they gave from the Pinkerton’s operative. “Confine yourself to answering my question,” Ryon snapped when McParlan attempted to explain a point. “I am answering the question,” the detective responded. “If you propound it in a different shape it will be answered in a different shape.”13
Ryon also challenged McParlan on why he claimed to remember some parts of conversations but not others, but was foiled by the detective’s cool, deliberate, and carefully considered responses:
Q: Then do you recollect the conversation, independent of what you have in your reports, or are you detailing to us what you have committed to memory from your reports or anything else?
A: I am detailing to you what I have been committing to memory from that day to this. I have not examined the reports about it.
Q: If you are speaking from memory, why cannot you tell me what you said as well as what Campbell and Kerrigan said?
A: I never cared to tax my memory by carrying what I said as well as what other parties said, because it was more of a burden than I believed I would be able to bear, and I left that go.14
The theme the defense really hoped would offset McParlan’s testimony was that the detective both instigated crimes and failed to prevent others that he knew about in advance. However, although McParlan acknowledged knowing about the assault on Thomas and the murders of Sanger and Jones, he never deviated in his explanation that he did not take action because he was concerned each time about being killed himself. In addition, prior to the attempted murder of Thomas, “I had not got out of my boarding house for two days. I was sick and not able to go out.” Further, that he had been told by Linden that “Jones was aware of his danger and was trying to take care of himself” and also that he was being constantly guarded. Finally, in the case of Sanger, that not only did he have Hurley with him the whole time, but “I was satisfied that the murder had been committed” and that he “[d]id not know the boss’ name, as there were several collieries there, I did not know what boss.”15
Although his report for August 31 showed that McParlan did know Sanger’s name, that remained unknown during the trial. Meanwhile, the men in the jury—each possibly worried by the specter created in the press of a Molly Maguire uprising—could well understand being frightened for their lives. In consequence, the detective “created an ineffaceable impression.” When, after four days, he left the witness box, after having maintained his evidence despite hour upon hour of intense cross-examination, reporters proclaimed, “By his coolness, deliberation, carefulness and positiveness he had proven himself the sharpest and best witness ever on the stand in that Court room.”16
• • •
The prosecution was not finished, however, and Kerrigan soon began two days of testimony. Changing his supposed role from ringleader to pawn, he admitted involvement in the Yost and Jones murders but attributed the motive to Duffy, and he claimed that his participation had been brought about by intimidation from Carroll and Campbell. Although it was obvious that his testimony was selective—and had been adjusted from that at the habeas corpus hearings—he corroborated McParlan and stuck close enough to the perceived truth that the defense was unable to make him contradict himself. He also offset any potential damage from his wife and Mary Ann by addressing in advance the stories they had planned to tell.
Gowen also planned for such fabrications, writing to Archbishop Wood that he expected certain women to provide false alibis that “will inevitably lead to the arrest & punishment of these poor misguided women for perjury”—and therefore asking Wood to instruct the parish priests to go to the trial, as their presence might prevent the women from perjuring themselves.17
Gowen’s plea did not fall on deaf ears. The month before, the archbishop had forwarded a list of outrages in the anthracite region—which Franklin had sent him in November 1875—to at least three Pennsylvania bishops, in order to gain their support against the Molly Maguires.18 Now he complied with Gowen’s request, and two priests appeared in court, although, Gowen wrote in a follow-up letter: “their presence has not had the effect of restraining three or four witnesses from testifying to an alibi.”19
These women were not the only ones providing alibis. The primary defense strategy was to produce enough conflicting evidence to make the jury doubt the McParlan and Kerrigan testimony. Inexperienced witnesses were no match for Gowen, however, as shown by his victory over the defense’s star storyteller, Mrs. Kerrigan. Although she told the tale that had been developed at the Higgins house, Gowen deftly drew out the admission that she had turned against her husband not after the
Yost killing, but only when he turned informer. Slowly he wore her down, and as the overwhelmed woman hesitated longer before each successive answer, Gowen asked why she was pausing. Trying to think on her feet, she replied that it was heart trouble, but Gowen immediately aroused raucous laughter in the courtroom by asking, “Why is it, can you tell me, that you never get the heart disease when Mr Ryon asks you a question?”20
Even the opposing lawyers were no match for Gowen: When the defense objected to the way he referred to the AOH, he snatched the opportunity to assert that “enough has been proved in this case, in the Court, in the last ten days, to convict of murder in the first degree every member of that organization in this county, for every murder that has been committed in it.” In fact, he continued, “every member of that organization is, not only in the court of conscience, but in the eyes of the law, guilty of every murder as an accessory before the fact and liable to be convicted and hanged by the neck until he is dead.”21
But suddenly, with Gowen ascendant and the defense reeling, everything stopped. Levi Stein, one of the jurors, fell ill, and the trial was suspended. During the next week, his condition deteriorated, and on May 25, he died of pneumonia. To the consternation of the prosecution, the judges declared a mistrial. Clearly the Commonwealth would retry the men in the next term of court, but to some the advantage seemed to have passed to the defense, which, knowing the prosecution’s strategy, might have time to devise new tactics and develop new alibis.
Such would not prove the case, however. Although no verdict had been reached, the detailed testimony of McParlan and Kerrigan and the brilliant rhetoric of Gowen had convinced the press and the public of the guilt both of the defendants and the AOH as a whole. Soon the convictions would follow one after another, because this trial had already laid the foundations for the success of the prosecution—and above those foundations would be constructed a gallows.
• • •
For the next month, while the prisoners languished in their hot jail cells, the prosecution prepared for upcoming cases in both Schuylkill and Carbon counties. Linden was “busy under the direction of District Atty Kaercher in looking up corroborative testimony in the Munley case . . . also tracing as far as possible the fugitive murderers now at large.”22 The nine most important of these featured in a list distributed by Pinkerton’s: Hurley; Doyle; Friday O’Donnell; James McAllister; William Love; John Flynn, wanted for the murder of Thomas Devine in October 1875; and three men charged with conspiracy to murder: Jerry Kane, Frank Keegan, and William Gavin.23 Hurley, whom Linden termed “No 1” because he was the highest priority, had kept in touch with McParlan until the detective disappeared. At that time Hurley had also made himself scarce. At the beginning of April he had been reported working in Carbon, Indiana, under the name of John A. Simson. The same month, a man keen on the Pinkerton’s reward wrote to Kaercher: “All the birds we want are in that [Luzerne] County. . . . If left to me . . . you will have Hurley for certain and others possibly.”24 However, no one was brought in.
During the opening days of the Yost trial, Linden learned that Hurley was more deeply involved in the Raven Run murders than he’d previously realized. A man named Pat Brennan confirmed that after Doyle had “flunked” by not doing his job as one of the killers of Thomas, “five men had been drawn to kill the men at Raven Run, & that Hurley had one of them withdrawn to substitute Mike Doyle as he (Hurley) had doubts of Doyle’s courage & wanted to test him & if Doyle did not stand up to his work he (Hurley) would shoot him himself.” Shortly after this discovery, Hurley was seen in Harrisburg en route to Pittsburgh, and Linden telegraphed ahead for his arrest. Once again, however, he proved elusive.25
Linden did continue to make progress, finding that McGehan’s landlady, who had previously claimed he had been home all night before the murder of Jones, had, pressured by her priest, admitted that he had “left his boarding house at 6 pm and did not return until 6 am. This kills completely McGehan’s hope of an Alibi.”26 Several days later, while Linden was taking Kerrigan on the train to Mauch Chunk for Alexander Campbell’s upcoming trial, the little bodymaster told him that Campbell, “Yellow Jack” Donahue, and Matt Donahue had killed Morgan Powell in 1871. Campbell “had put Powell out of the way” because he had not placed Campbell in charge of his own breast in a mine.27 Hughes immediately recommended the arrest of Matt Donahue, but Kaercher and Albright overruled him because “for the present we must not saddle anymore on either Mac or Kerrigan, as a false step now would be fatal.”28
In early June, Linden pulled McParlan’s reports out of a Pottsville bank vault, hoping to confirm various statements. One of these reports led to a visit to Fenton Cooney, but Linden found that the wife of McParlan’s erstwhile landlord disputed the operative’s account by stating that Doyle did not sleep there the night before the Sanger and Uren murders. Further, she did “not remember Hurly being there talking to Doyle the morning of the day previous to the murder. Doyle and McParlan never slept together and McKenna’s testimony to that effect is wrong.”29 Not surprisingly, the prosecution did not call her as a witness.
All the while Linden was doing this groundwork, McParlan was in New Jersey, where he had been sent with “two of our most trusty men, in order to get necessary rest and exercise, as well as to keep him out of all possible harm should any effort be made by his enemies to trace him”—efforts that had already been made, alluded Franklin mysteriously.30 McParlan was not the only one living dangerously, however. When Linden visited the courthouse in early June, Patrick Collins, the AOH bodymaster at Port Carbon, commented, “Are you alive yet?” Linden queried why he asked, to which Collins replied, “Oh it’s a wonder you aren’t shot before this.”31
• • •
On June 20, only days before the nation was seized by another startling event—the destruction of the main body of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at the Little Bighorn by Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors32—the original prosecution team again appeared at the Mauch Chunk courthouse, this time with Alexander Campbell in its sights. This was no ordinary member of the AOH, as Doyle and Kelly had been, but the secretary of the Storm Hill lodge and, more than that, a man portrayed as “a leader among leaders and a chief among chieftains.”33 The trial was also hugely significant, in that Campbell admittedly had not been at the shooting of John P. Jones, but was being tried as an accessory before the fact for planning the killing.
Campbell was represented by Kalbfus, Mulhearn, and an impressive orator from Easton, Edward J. Fox, all of whom he had retained himself, as the convictions had rapidly halted contributions to the AOH defense funds.34 Impaneling a jury with no previous knowledge of the case proved impossible, and numerous prospective jurors admitted they had already formed opinions. One, Fisher Hazard, not only had financial interests in the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, but, when asked if he had any conscientious scruples about capital punishment, responded: “Not the least, sir. There ought to be more hangings than there is.”35
The first key witness called was Kerrigan, and with damning detail the little Irishman tied Campbell to planning the murder and sending out the killers. He was followed by McParlan, who in the next two days repeated much of the background testimony he had given previously. He also recalled a remarkable series of confessions linking Campbell to the murder of Jones. According to McParlan, he met with Campbell on:
July 15, 1875, when Campbell first told him that the murder of Yost was a “clean job,” but that “they would not have bothered with it but it was done on a trade.”36
July 18, in Campbell’s saloon, where Campbell introduced him to McGehan.37
August 4, when Campbell said that “McGehan was the man that shot officer Yost,” that “he calculated for to start McGehan in a saloon for the clean job that he had done at Tamaqua; what he wanted now was a few good men from Schuylkill to go to Lansford and murder John P. Jones,” and that he had preven
ted Kerrigan from doing the killing on July 27.38
August 9, in Mauch Chunk, where Campbell was trying to get McGehan a liquor license.39
August 13, when McParlan stayed at Campbell’s house prior to McGehan’s opening, and during the evening Campbell described Jones’s house and mentioned the site “to have the men placed to shoot him just as he comes out in the morning and goes to his work.”40
August 14 and 15, when McGehan and Roarity confessed their roles in the Jones murder.
August 24, when Campbell “asked me to help to get men to shoot John P. Jones.”41
September 4, in Tamaqua, when Campbell “stated if Kerrigan had been any kind of engineer, he could have had them men at their homes in Mount Laffee before they were arrested. He stated it was the cleanest job that ever was done but the men were twisted by Kerrigan, and that he was going on the following day to Luzerne County to try to raise money from the organization there for the purpose of the defense of those prisoners. . . . He stated that on the night previous to the murder of Jones, that these men stopped in his house.”42
Campbell also allegedly told McParlan three different times (September 30, October 4, and October 18) about securing witnesses to provide alibis for Doyle, Kelly, and Kerrigan.43
This was an amazing parade of confessions, particularly to a man whom neither Campbell nor the others knew particularly well. McParlan stated that “I seemed to have his confidence from the first introduction in June, 1874 . . . [because] I was a member of the organization that he belonged to.”44 Nevertheless, so many confessions in such a short time—when added to those of Carroll, Kerrigan, the killers of Sanger and Uren, and others that McParlan claimed in subsequent trials—does raise questions about the likelihood of whether so many people would have chosen this one individual to confide in, or whether some confessions were fabricated.
Pinkerton’s Great Detective Page 18