by Brad Ricca
On July 27, six hundred people came to the Delmar Theater in Medina to hear about Charlie Stielow. They came in wagons, buggies, and on foot from all points within a radius of ten miles. Grace, who had been on the trail of some leads in Shelby, arrived during the day. Sophie got reports at her bedside.
When the lights dimmed and the clapping stopped, Misha Appelbaum walked to the microphone. “For the sake of the spirit of 1776,” he shouted, “we must save this great, dumb giant in the shadow of death!” Dr. Frederick Parsons was next. He was an alienist who worked out of Sing Sing to evaluate, when necessary, the mental state of prisoners during their appeals. Parsons had examined Stielow at length and wanted to share his conclusions.
“He is little more than a clod of earth,” Parsons said of Stielow.
Parsons was followed by Kohn, who, without any variance of tone or emotion, gave a step-by-step description of how Charlie would die in the electric chair. He told them all how Charlie would be strapped in, the skullcap placed on his head, and the switches flipped to unleash searing volts of lightning through his body. The crackling current, blue and wide, would stop his heart cold after two or three pulls.
The room was silent when Grace then walked up the wooden planks of the stage, dressed in her customary black. She told the audience a few facts about the case and how she hoped that they would be convincing to the governor. But when Grace realized that she was speaking to the people, and not the governor, she took a breath, and started telling a different story. Grace told that dark theater how she had visited the Stielow family home that afternoon. When Grace walked in, their mother dried her hands on her apron as Grace was immediately swarmed by the Stielow children. In the theater, Grace then held up the letter she borrowed from Charlie, written by Ethel, his eleven-year-old daughter. Grace read the words in a trembling voice. When she got to the end, she explained how Ethel signed it with fifty kisses and the message “May these be a blessing to your heart.” With that, Grace gestured to her left. There, in a private box, was the Stielow family, all of them except their father, who was far away, locked in a cell. Grace motioned for Ethel to come up to the stage. The little girl stared out at the crowd. She looked out at all the faces behind heavy glasses. She said, in a very small voice, “I know Papa is innocent,” and her words became water. Grace helped her off the stage to applause.
Inez then alighted on the stage as if on a breeze. “My friends, you are your brother’s keeper,” she sang out. She said that the only man she had brought with her on the trip from New York City was the most powerful man she knew—her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. The crowd thundered their approval. Everyone knew who she was. She was married now, to a Dutchman named Eugen, but Inez still stood for suffrage, “avid for life and impatient for a world fit to live in.” Inez loudly accused Governor Whitman of treating this case, with his endless indecision, as a stepping stone to some greater political office. He was a notoriously deadly government servant and had even sent NYPD lieutenant Charles Becker to the chair for killing a small-fry casino owner in front of the Hotel Metropole. “Have mercy on us, dear Jesus,” Becker had cried, as the black helmet covered his face. When the current flowed and Becker pushed against the groaning leather straps, his lips pulled across his teeth as the crucifix he held in his hand dropped to the cement floor.
“Society is the better,” Inez shouted, “the kinder, for the distillation of the milk of human kindness. The worst that can happen is that a murderer should receive life imprisonment instead of death.” When she finished, her chin high, the deafening cheers seemed to press against the wooden floors and walls.
As Sophie sat by the phone that night in nervous anticipation, the team finished gathering over five hundred signatures. Inez was the first to call and tell her how well it went. The Stielow family retired to the nearby Hart Hotel. They had never been to such a place before and ate a meal there as a family. Or the closest to one they could be. They wore plain blue summer clothes. Roy, the youngest boy, who didn’t understand where his papa was, grinned behind his shiny spoon. It broke his mother’s heart.
The plan was that the Stielows would travel with Kohn and Applebaum to Albany to make one last plea to the governor. After that, they would go on to Sing Sing and take Charlie home. Alive or not. When a newspaperman asked Ethel if she was looking forward to the trip, she said, “We’ll be awfully glad to see Papa.” The Stielows’ trip was completely paid for by a collection taken up by the other fifteen residents of the Death House at Sing Sing. The warden couldn’t remember a stranger, or more telling, invitation.
But Grace was not going to Albany. She was going back to work. The rally was a nice gesture, perhaps even necessary for the press, but it was not going to stop Charlie Stielow from going to the electric chair. Grace knew that. They needed to work for some luck. The next day, Grace got a call from Mrs. Voorhees, a woman who lived on a farm near the Phelps place. She told Grace that five days after the murders, a hobo had come to see her. Grace had been looking for a ragman for weeks. Mrs. Voorhees said that this man had said something very puzzling.
In Albany the next afternoon, Charlie’s legal team, fresh from the rally the night before, emerged from their long meeting with Governor Whitman with grim looks and long faces. In the governor’s office, their evidence had consisted of affidavits, forensics that the bullets contained marks that proved them not to have been fired from a pistol found in the barn, and the words of three physicians—including Dr. Bernard Glueck, one of the leading alienists in the world—that Charlie Stielow did not commit the crime.
Whitman said his decision was final.
Appelbaum called Sophie and told her that the governor had said no. Sophie was devastated. Kohn had shown him the Dictaphone records, but the governor said it didn’t change the actual facts of the case itself, especially given the evidence from the bullets. Loeb called Inez and begged her to go lobby Whitman herself. Inez took the train to Albany, but was told the same thing. Afterward, Inez called Sing Sing to tell the prison officials that Charlie Stielow was not going to be pardoned. After a silence on the line, the prison operator said that they could still get a stay, but only from a justice of the state supreme court. At the Albany train station with the rain pouring down, Inez called Sophie immediately, but the line was busy. Knowing that Sophie was probably working the case, Inez knew it could be busy all night. Just then, Inez saw that her train had arrived. She knew that if she got on the train, she wouldn’t be able to talk to Sophie for several precious hours. But Inez would be closer to home, where she might need to be for this new plan—if it even was one—to work at all. So Inez got on the train, a prayer on her lips.
At Sing Sing that night, Charlie’s last meal was potatoes and chicken, followed by a piece of ice-cold strawberry shortcake. Stielow was then moved to the Last Dance, the final cell on the Last Mile, as his last earthly possessions were cleaned out of his cell and divided among the rest of the residents. John Hulbert, the bald executioner (who was mostly just an electrician), got very nervous as he checked switches, wires, and volts.
While in Albany, Grace stayed at the Ten Eyck, going over her new evidence from Mrs. Voorhees. Her story was that her family had taken in a hobo one night as a boarder and fed him some supper. This man had strangely brought up the Stielow murders a full day before the papers reported on it. She was sure of it. Mrs. Voorhees also remembered that the man had strange dark spots on his clothes. She said that his name was O’Connell. He was quiet but smiled a lot, Mrs. Voorhees said. At one point, he cracked some kind of odd joke about the last old man who had served him dinner. Mrs. Voorhees didn’t very much feel like laughing.
Grace looked around for tramp haunts under bridges and near fire pits. But she couldn’t find O’Connell. She heard a rumor that he had supposedly shot his own favored buckskin yellow horse with a .22 the morning after the murders. She kept looking on the road but could find no sign of him. Then, she realized that she had not found him because he might not be free. No
t too long after that, Grace located him in an Auburn prison. O’Connell had been convicted for a murderous assault, having shot at a man named Lewis Brown. O’Connell was known in the trade as a “gun man.”
Clarence O’Connell came from Medina. His family were what the locals called swamp angels. His father had been an unlucky gambler of poor character. Last year, O’Connell’s mother left her boyfriend for his best friend—Erwin King. The three remained friends, all three of them, and lived a gypsylike life around the fuzzy Pennsylvania border with Clarence and his own small family for the better part of last year. They traded horses and committed crimes.
Clarence smiled when he said that he had no idea where Erwin King was. They had a falling out, he said. Had she come all this way for nothing?
Grace had to find King right now.
* * *
It was very late on Friday night, July 28. Justice Charles L. Guy of the New York Supreme Court was in the well-appointed library of his Convent Avenue home, selecting a book before bed. The phone rang. He answered it.
“This is Sophie Irene Loeb speaking,” said the voice on the phone.
“Oh, yes,” the judge answered. He paused, checking the clock on his mantel. “I assume that you would not call me up at this hour unless something urgent was at hand?”
Sophie didn’t stand on ceremony. She had a history with this particular judge.
“Judge Guy, you can save a human life!” Her voice wriggled a little, so she took a moment to bolster it.
“Judge,” Sophie said again, more firmly, “do you remember saying, not long ago, that I had the mind of a man and the heart of a woman, and that where an issue involving both heart and mind were concerned you would take my opinion against that of most men? Did you mean that?”
“I remember perfectly saying that,” the judge said. “And I should not have said it unless I meant it.”
He paused again.
“What can I do?”
“There is a man in Sing Sing,” Sophie explained, “condemned to die at a quarter to six o’clock tomorrow morning—this morning, for it is after midnight now—of whose guilt there is the gravest doubt. I know that no jury cognizant of all the facts in the case would ever have found him guilty! I am familiar with every bit of the evidence produced at the trial, and I have evidence that neither judges, jurymen, nor district attorneys have seen—parts of it I secured myself.”
Sophie told the short version of the story, especially of how Stielow had been before the courts nine times and been sentenced or resentenced to death in six of them. Three times notices went out to the necessary legal witnesses for his execution, and twice the executioner had made the trip to the chamber. He was there now. Sophie explained that new evidence was available only today, so Stielow’s only hope would be a stay of execution by a justice of the New York Supreme Court.
Judge Guy listened. Sophie could almost hear him thinking through the line.
“My dear Miss Loeb,” the judge finally said. “It is impossible for me to act unless I have sworn testimony before me. I must see his new evidence before I can sign a stay.”
Sophie was ready for this.
“The new evidence is on its way,” she said.
At that moment, Inez and her husband were en route from Westchester County with the documents that the governor had, on that same day, twice declined to act on. After Inez had told Sophie about finding a Supreme Court justice, Sophie immediately thought of Judge Guy, whom she knew and thought highly of. Sophie told Inez to get on the train for Manhattan. Sophie then called Stuart Kohn, who got in his car in Stony Brook and headed to the city. They would be there in two hours, carrying the Dictaphone transcripts that had failed to move Whitman.
“You must see Mrs. Boissevain and Mr. Kohn,” said Sophie. “They, with Mrs. Grace Humiston, have been working night and day to secure this new evidence. Mrs. Humiston is developing important clues at the sight of the murder right now.”
Another pause. Sophie swooped in.
“I should come to your house, Judge, only I am confined to my bed with neuritis and am so weak that my nurse is holding the telephone to my ear while I am talking to you.
“Promise me that you will take up the case tonight,” Sophie asked. “They will both be at your house by half-past two o’clock.”
Justice Guy didn’t hesitate any longer. “I shall hold court at any hour they may arrive.”
At three thirty that morning, Kohn finally drove up to the home of Judge Guy in Manhattan. It was a white-knuckle drive in the dark. Kohn was surprised to see two police motorcars already at the curb. Apparently, there had been reports of a suspicious man lurking around the judge’s home sometime past midnight. The cops produced the man from the shadows: it was Misha Appelbaum, who had been waiting for Kohn to arrive. He said the judge had gone to bed but would get up and hold court in his library when they were ready.
Inez arrived soon after, and they realized the brief they had prepared was not completely ready. So, at the suggestion of the policeman, the motorcars put off at full speed for the all-night Western Union telegraph office on 125th Street. As they spilled in, they saw only one typewriter on the premises. As Kohn finished up his last revisions with a pen, Inez dictated the final lines of the brief to Eugen, who plucked out the letters on the keys.
When they returned back to Convent Avenue, Justice Guy was waiting in his library. It was a quarter past four in the morning. Charlie Stielow was scheduled to die at quarter to six. Inez showed him the affidavits and evidence. The Justice read them thoughtfully, with no sense of anger. When he was done, he agreed that this new evidence must be considered and issued a stay of execution until eleven o’clock that night.
Justice Guy picked up the phone and asked for Sing Sing. Once the connection to the prison was established, Guy was informed that both Assistant Warden Miller and Warden Osborne had left in protest of Charlie’s pending execution, leaving Principal Keeper Dorner in charge. Justice Guy told him that the execution was to be put on hold. But Dorner replied that, unless the order for the stay bearing the justice’s signature was physically put into his hands, he must proceed with the execution as planned. Those were the rules.
Stielow was scheduled to die in a little over an hour and it was twenty-seven miles to Sing Sing.
Kohn, who was normally the quiet, matter-of-fact one, sprung to action. He had a fast motor and was positive he could make it. So, at twenty-two minutes to five o’clock, Kohn started off with the signed order for the stay in his pocket. The policeman called Central and told them not to interfere with a speeding car headed for Sing Sing.
Kohn had devoted his life to the absolute nature of the law. But tonight, as he barreled up the road in the dark, pushing his mechanical car past its limits, he was consciously doing the opposite in favor of what he perceived as the greater good. As he passed through Yonkers, a cop who had missed the order jumped out in back of him and shot at the back of his tires. Kohn kept going.
There was a hint of dark blue in the sky above Sing Sing by now. It was five o’clock in the morning when the thirteen witnesses were summoned to the Death House.
On the other side of a partition, the executioner was tinkering with the apparatus attached to the squat black chair. Stielow had already said good-bye to his wife and two little children earlier that night. The children were asleep as Laura Stielow waited on the veranda of the warden’s house, watching the sun rise over the blocky prison buildings, coming up behind the Westchester hills.
Dorner alone knew that a stay might be coming, but he didn’t tell anyone because it was still such a long shot. He had no idea if that had really been Judge Guy. Still, Dorner stood at the outer door of the prison, glancing at his watch and praying for time. Dorner knew Charlie Stielow and did not want to officiate his killing.
As the sky tipped to yellow, the honking of a horn was heard on the road. At twenty-three minutes past five, Kohn’s car turned the corner and flew toward Dorner, his hand outstretched f
rom the automobile’s window. Dorner ran alongside the car and snatched the letter. As he disappeared inside, Kohn’s car finally reached a halt, and he followed Dorner inside, running.
At home, Sophie Loeb was trying to stare at the clock and the telephone at the same time. When the phone rang, as she knew it finally would, she answered it. It was Kohn. He had gotten to Sing Sing with only fifteen minutes to spare. Charlie was saved.
That afternoon, Inez and Mr. Kohn finished up the full paperwork and submitted it to Justice Guy. He issued an order returnable in Rochester on the twenty-third of the next month to show cause why a new trial should not be granted to Charles Stielow. Justice Guy ordered a stay until after the hearing and determination of the motion. As both attorneys got some much-needed sleep, Sophie Loeb was visited by Mrs. Stielow and her children, who wanted to give their thanks in person. As they surrounded her bed with smiles and small hands, Sophie was overwhelmed by their bright-eyed gratitude. But she knew that Charlie was not wholly out of the woods yet. They had to find new evidence that would finally reunite him with his family, once and for all, outside of prison walls.
In a small room in the Little Valley sheriff’s office, Grace Humiston had her eyes finally fixed on Erwin King, the man whom she had been chasing around upstate New York for the better part of the summer. At two separate times over the past few months, she thought she had been fairly close to being shot in her pursuit of him. In the end, Grace had finally just gotten lucky. The sheriff found King working odd jobs at a hotel. They snatched him up right away and called Grace. The crowded room included Sheriff Nichols and his wife; the justice of the peace, Pratt; the surrogate, Larkin; and Martha Hughes, a stenographer. It was August 10, just over ten days since Charlie Stielow had come a quarter turn of the clock away from being killed.