The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  Muybridge’s defense required that he be sketched in a pitiful light. It meant his friends and supporters had to make him look unstable, while Pendegast cultivated sympathy for his crime. From the moment William Rulofson took the oath, he described his friend and client Muybridge as a weird and unbalanced mess.

  “I know all the parties in this case,” said Rulofson, “and I knew the deceased lightly. About Mr. Muybridge, I have often noticed peculiarities in him, which led me to believe he was eccentric.” Rulofson dropped into and out of the past tense, as though the defendant was not present in the room. “Mr. Muybridge used to take violent dislikes to people in my employment,” Rulofson said, “and he possessed an utterly causeless aversion to some of them. He also could not keep a deal, although he was strictly honest. Muybridge and I would make a business arrangement, to sell one of his series of photographs, for instance, to which we would both agree, and we would write it out. And yet the very next day he would want an entirely new bargain made, as though nothing had been agreed. This happened thirty or forty times.”

  Pendegast did not have to coach Rulofson, who seemed to know his assignment: to make Muybridge look as difficult and changeable as possible.

  “Another eccentricity about Muybridge was that in his work he would not take a picture unless the image suited him. He would go to the place he had in mind to photograph, or to a scene requested by a client, and if he thought the view would not be artistic, he would re-pack his camera and gear and come back to the studio, no matter what price was being offered. I found this truly strange.”

  To save Muybridge, Rulofson exaggerated the photographer’s behavior. He apparently did not know, or did not mind, that the more he talked, the more he alienated Muybridge, the most successful artist in his gallery. Later on, Rulofson would have to pay for the insults he had heaped from the witness chair onto the head of his most profitable client.

  “I saw Muybridge two or three days after the homicide, in the Napa jail,” Rulofson went on. “He wept bitterly for a time, and then, recovering himself, he would declare indignantly that he was perfectly calm. These back-and-forth transitions continued throughout our meeting.”

  Under cross-examination by the prosecution, Rulofson stuck to his story that Muybridge was “mad,” and not merely unusual. “I could relate a hundred instances of his peculiarities,” he said, “a hundred reasons other than those I have stated for believing that Muybridge was insane.”

  Wirt Pendegast picked up a photograph from the defense table. The picture was the one Muybridge had taken of himself in Yosemite Valley, perched on a rock, his legs dangling over a precipice, a giant drop below him. Pendegast introduced the picture as evidence of the photographer’s pathology.

  “This is one of the strange, freak behaviors that Muybridge committed. He sat on a cliff at Yosemite, where a biscuit, if slightly tilted, would have dropped 2000 feet to the floor of the valley,” said Pendegast. And although the lawyer had only recently met his client, he said, “In my opinion, for years he has been subject to fits of insanity.”

  On the third day of the trial, February 5, at 9:30 a.m., the defense put Muybridge in the witness chair.6 Pendegast asked Muybridge nothing about the crime, or about his wife, Flora. Instead, the lawyer had the photographer tell the story of his stagecoach accident, fifteen years earlier. He hoped the story of the concussion could help prove the fragility of his mind.

  “I remember taking supper at a stagehouse on the road,” Muybridge began. The photographer told the whole long tale—about the “six wild mustang horses,” about his being thrown from the cab and waking up, nine days later, in a small-town hospital 150 miles away. “When I recovered I found that each eye had its own vision, that in looking at a man I would distinctly see two men. I found that I had neither taste nor smell. This state of things continued acutely for three months and to a lesser extent for a year,” Muybridge finished.

  It was the only time Muybridge spoke during the case. “His demeanor on the stand was quiet, cool and reserved,” one paper said. “He gave his testimony in a straightforward manner, and betrayed none of the nervousness which has marked his presence during the trial.”

  Pendegast ended his questions. Judge Stoney of the prosecution decided not to cross-examine. Too much sympathy already existed for the defendant—as a wronged husband, as a “madman,” and now as the survivor of a near-fatal accident. To shore up this last story, Pendegast called witnesses to testify that the accident had changed the photographer.

  Silas Selleck, the daguerreotype artist who had known Muybridge since they both were in their early twenties, living in New York, said that before Muybridge took the Butterfield stagecoach, “he was active, energetic, and strict in all his dealings, as well as open and candid.” Selleck claimed that when Muybridge came back to California several years after the accident, “He was eccentric, peculiar, and had the queerest of odd notions, so much so that he seemed like a different man.”

  Another witness, one J. D. Eastland, said that he had known Muybridge for sixteen years, “and pretty intimately, but after the stagecoach accident the change was marked, and he became strange in manner and speech.” A man called Matthias Gray said that prior to the accident Muybridge was genial and affable, but after it “there was a marked change in him”—not least in his hair, which had been dark but had fast turned gray.

  Stoney tried to rebut the madness claims. The prosecutor called back as a witness James McArthur, who had taken Muybridge’s gun after the shooting. McArthur said, “I observed nothing unusual in the way he carried himself. When I took his pistol from him at the time of the shooting I noticed that his hand was unusually steady.” Stoney called as another rebuttal witness George Cramwell, the sheriff at Calistoga, where Muybridge was brought from the scene of the shooting. “I had him in my immediate custody most of the time from 1 o’clock Sunday morning until the train came down to pick him up and bring him to Napa,” Cramwell said. “During that time, he was very cool—much cooler than I should be if I had just killed a man. He showed no excitement whatever.”

  Mental health, in 1875 on the California frontier, appeared on no one’s list of advanced branches of medicine. Nevertheless, to answer the madness argument, the prosecution called the state expert, Dr. George Shurtleff, the most prominent specialist in mental illness in the West (also one of the only ones). Shurtleff, fifty-six, had helped establish the first state mental hospital, the Stockton Asylum for the Insane, and had run that place for ten years. A replacement for that institution was being built outside Napa, designed to house five hundred inmates, and Shurtleff would be appointed to run it, too. He was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and president of the Medical Society of California. Shurtleff had a wide, scowling face, a swirl of white hair combed straight back, and a long white goatee.7

  “In forming an opinion of a man’s sanity, great excitement would be an element in determining the question,” Shurtleff said. “If he was calm just afterward”—as Muybridge had been—“that fact would weigh against him.” Judge Wallace, who had been silent most of the trial, questioned Shurtleff himself.

  “Supposing the defendant killed a man on the night of the 17th of October,” Wallace asked. “Would his conduct the following day form a constituent circumstance in determining his sanity at the time? Suppose he were calm after the commission of such an act. Would that fact aid you in forming an opinion?”

  Shurtleff: “If it was testified by the common observer that he was calm, I would have to take that as so much evidence going to show he was not insane.”

  Dr. George Shurtleff—who had, coincidentally, lately written a paper called “Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity”—was skeptical of the defense’s claims.

  “I have heard nothing to convince me that he was of unsound mind. The prisoner exercised his reasoning faculties in fulfilling his purpose. I think he thoroughly understood the nature and consequences of his act and knew it was unlawful. The evidence shows passio
n, not insanity.” Shurtleff went on, dismissively. “If he were insane he would not recognize his own responsibility. Insane people regret the act and consider themselves innocent. If a man avows and justifies the act afterward, as the defendant has done, then it was a voluntary act on his part.”

  If that was not enough to put away Muybridge’s “insanity,” Shurtleff then turned to the story of the stagecoach accident. “The accident does not account for the defendant’s eccentricities,” he said. “The changes in his manner can be accounted for irrespective of the accident.”

  Cross-examined by the defense, Shurtleff didn’t budge. Pendegast’s partner, the lawyer Cameron King, read aloud from several case histories, but Shurtleff said none resembled the Muybridge case.

  “In each of these examples, the patients were delirious—Mr. Muybridge was not. Yes, severe blows on the head can produce insanity. However, premeditation and design of the kind the defendant carried out are proof not of insanity, but self-possession and reason. Further evidence of Mr. Muybridge’s state of mind can be found in at least one aspect of his behavior with regard to his wife’s infidelity. When people take punishment into their own hands they seek publicity, because the publicity is a part of the satisfaction. If disgraced publicly, they seek public vindication—whereas an insane person feels disregard for the opinion of the public.” Muybridge, while in jail awaiting trial, had taken pains to tell his story to the newspapers.

  The prosecution called George W. Smith, the reporter who had interviewed Muybridge in jail for the San Francisco Chronicle. After the story ran, Smith had received a letter from Muybridge, and Judge Stoney had subpoenaed both Smith and the letter. The interview with Muybridge was read aloud in court. In it, the photographer said that he disagreed with his lawyers’ plan to plead his insanity because he knew what he was doing at the time. Muybridge’s letter was also read out—it included a polite thank-you to the reporter for being fair and a single minor correction. These things were evidence of Muybridge’s clear mind, said Stoney.

  The rebuttals sounded good, so by the end of the day, the sense in the media gallery was that the insanity defense would collapse.

  “On the street corners knots of men were gathered,” one reporter put it, “excitedly discussing the merits of the case. There seems to be a general impression that the attempt to prove insanity has utterly failed and that the jury must acquit the prisoner by justifying his deed or not at all.”

  Summary arguments, starting with Judge Stoney for the prosecution, came on the trial’s fourth day. Despite his apparent victory in the quarrel over Muybridge’s state of mind, Stoney knew sympathy flowed to the photographer. People in the West, or at least men, perhaps more than elsewhere, took the view that a husband could dispose of his sexual rival, if necessary, by killing the man, and that he could be excused for it. The prosecutor knew this, so Stoney began by feigning compassion for the defendant, claiming how unfortunate it was that he had to convict the poor man.

  “I represent the people of California,” he said, “and I have sympathy for the prisoner—however guilty he might be, or however much he might have violated the laws of God or man. But duty to country, to ourselves, to conscience, compels me to show the act of the prisoner in its true legal light.”

  In cases of adultery plus murder, the tendency of Western juries was to acquit. Stoney said that the jury had an obligation to see the laws enforced, but that he knew of the “unfavorable precedents,” the tendency of courts to let a husband get away with killing his wife’s lover. Nevertheless, said Stoney, he thought too highly of the jurors to believe that they would forget their duty to law. Stoney nodded to the tradition of husbands who got away with it. “It is customary for men to kill seducers, because juries are in a habit of acquitting them. But, gentlemen, juries can’t make laws. Many cases of this kind have been decided incorrectly, in defiance of the law.” The prosecutor brought up an infamous case. “This prisoner is ambitious of standing with Daniel Sickles and wants to compare with him in history.”

  In 1859, in Washington, D.C., a forty-one-year-old congressman from New York, Daniel Sickles, discovered that his wife, Teresa, age twenty-two, was having an affair with the city’s district attorney, Philip Barton Key, the quietly sexy son of poet Francis Scott Key, who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.” On a day in February, Sickles saw Key outside his window, waving to get the attention of Teresa, who was upstairs. Sickles left the house with two pistols and shot his rival in the groin and chest, killing him.

  Sickles had the sympathy of Washington society, and in a three-week trial, his lawyers pushed the argument that his wife’s infidelity had caused him “temporary insanity.” The jury agreed—the first time such a defense prevailed in a murder case. In the aftermath, to the astonishment of many, Sickles reconciled with Teresa, and the two resumed married life. The congressman went on to become a Union general in the Civil War and lost a leg at Gettysburg.

  “It is the view of this office,” said Stoney, “that the enormity of the defendant’s act in taking the law into his own hands has only been equaled by the enormity of the acts of juries in saying that certain defendants are justified in homicide, when they are not. You have sworn not to decide in that way, but to decide according to the law and the evidence.”

  He turned to the insanity question.

  “The defendant is a man of culture and intelligence, I admit,” Stoney went on. “Muybridge’s intelligence even rises to genius. He knows what he is doing. But this allowance of eccentricity for insanity is a dangerous principle, because the law requires a man to control his passions.

  “Here are the facts. The proof of the defendant’s determination to take life is incontrovertible. It is unnecessary to go over the testimony on this point. No one disputes it. The defendant even justifies the act, and he glories in it. He has made a statement, published in a newspaper, in which he says he went to kill a man, and claims that it was justifiable. His was a voluntary, deliberate act. He is guilty of deliberate murder, unless he can show that he was insane at the time. Yet there is no form of insanity that strikes a man like a flash of lightning, compelling him to commit an awful crime, and then passes away as in a dream, leaving no trace behind. If the defense fails to satisfy you of this man’s insanity, there is only one verdict you can render.”

  Stoney then threw a gamble at the jury. “This case is one of murder or nothing! I ask no compromise verdict. If he is not guilty, do not find him guilty of anything!

  “The defendant has received a wrong. It was a great wrong, and I have no word of extenuation for it. But the victim is dead. He has paid the penalty of his misdeeds! Larkyns’s character is not before the jury. An adulterer does not forfeit his life, even to the husband whose wife he may have debauched. The defendant here has counsel, court, jury, and the protections of law. Larkyns had no opportunity to show palliation or extenuation, or even the falsity of the charges against him. The defendant assumed to himself the rights of the judge, the jury, and the executioner. It is for this that he is on trial here.”

  Stoney’s oration continued for an hour—uneasily, because he was arguing against the mood of the crowd—and when finally he sat down, he shook his head left to right, because he knew that most if not all the men of the jury could put themselves in the shoes of the killer.

  It was a Friday night. The trial had become the entertainment of the townspeople of Napa for that weekend. At 7:00 p.m., Wirt Pendegast stood to begin final arguments for his client.

  Pendegast was tall and strongly built, with a large, handsome head. He had a mesmerizing effect on a room. “Few could resist the fascination of his presence,” said one lawyer who had opposed him. A reporter described Pendegast’s face as “chaste and terse” but said his manners, “easy and pleasing,” warmed up his aloof appearance. His summation stunned the courtroom.

  “I ask, at the request of the defendant, that the jury agree with the counsel for the prosecution, and either acquit my client of any crime whatev
er or send him to the gallows,” he began, throwing away the chance of a jail sentence for a lesser charge. “The killing is admitted, as are all, or nearly all, the attendant circumstances testified to. But who was Harry Larkyns? He was just one of a class of men—and that class of man, in seducing a man’s wife, makes a dreadful gamble. He was one of a class who stake their lives on moments of sensual gratification. Larkyns played that game and lost, and he was compelled to pay the penalty.

  “Edward Muybridge recognized the difference in tastes and temperaments between himself and his wife. The difference in their ages accounted for those, and he indulged his wife in all those innocent amusements that she loved—in clothing and in the theater, in a hundred small diversions—while he cared nothing for them. My client permitted his wife to go where she liked and to enjoy herself in ways that had no attraction for him. During their marriage he loved her deeply, madly, with all the strong love of a strong, self-constrained man. And all at once, like a clap of thunder from a clear sky, came upon him the revelation that his whole life had been blasted. The whole miserable, sickening, damning story was revealed to him by Mrs. Susan Smith, the nurse, when she set before him the picture in all its horrible blackness. Mr. Muybridge learned that his wife had been false in every way, false even to the extent of palming off upon him as his own the child of her libertine seducer.

  “Gentlemen, there is no statute in such cases that permits a man to slay his torturer. But, law or no law, every fiber of a man’s frame impels him to instant vengeance, and he will have it, even if hell yawns before him afterward. My client was driven—the prosecutor himself has showed that the prisoner did not halt from the time he left San Francisco until his object was accomplished. It is a shame of our law that there is no adequate punishment for such crime as that perpetrated by Harry Larkyns. The letters before you show that after the poor woman had escaped him, he was still plotting to get her back to California, or to join her in Oregon, there to renew these unholy relations. Muybridge was not only revenging his wrongs when he shot Larkyns dead, he was protecting his wife against him in the future! Because Larkyns was still pursuing his victim.