by Bill James
Goebel, however, had yet more tricks up his sleeve. Forcing the resignation of the two election commissioners who had voted against him, he claimed that the remaining member of the commission had the right to appoint the other members to re-fill the board. This was patently untrue; the right to appoint members of the board belonged to the governor, who was, by now, Governor Taylor. But with both sides claiming the right to make the appointments the issue went to the Kentucky Supreme Court—which was controlled by Democrats. Goebel won in that venue, and the newly appointed board proclaimed that he had won the election.
Kentucky politics now split into two camps, with two different groups claiming to be the legitimate Kentucky legislature and two men claiming to be governor—one of them Goebel, who survived the shooting for a few days and took the oath of office to be governor. He died on February 3. His death probably prevented civil war in the state, as personal hatred for Goebel was one of the forces driving the state toward madness.
Sixteen people, including the “other” governor, Governor Taylor, were indicted for involvement in Goebel’s murder. An agreement was negotiated to abandon all prosecution for the murder in exchange for recognition of the Democratic governor (Goebel’s successor), but Taylor refused to sign the agreement and fled the state. One of the others accused was a lawyer and career politician named Caleb Powers, who had been Taylor’s Secretary of State. Powers was accused of masterminding the assassination, which was actually carried out by a man named Jim Howard.
Powers was put on trial three times over the next seven years, but the trials were as irregular as the election had been. Powers was tried by judges who had been Goebel’s close friends and political soldiers, in front of juries composed entirely of men who had been Goebel’s supporters. He was convicted all three times, but the convictions were thrown out by the appeals courts, which were controlled by Republicans who had been political allies of Governor Taylor. Powers and Howard, still asserting their innocence, were pardoned by a Republican governor in 1908. The evidence against them was weak and bewildering, and no one really knows who killed Governor Goebel.
You know the old moral quandary … if you were in position to kill Adolf Hitler in 1934, would you have been morally justified to do so? I think almost everyone agrees that you would. The assassination of Goebel may be that very rare case where the murder was morally justified. Goebel was not Hitler (although he was German … he was raised in an immigrant family, and spoke only German the first six years of his life). Goebel was not Hitler; he was more like Huey Long. Had he been able to consolidate power, I have no doubt that he would have ruled Kentucky, as Long ruled Louisiana, for the rest of his life. The people of Kentucky did not want him as their ruler, but he didn’t care; he was determined to gain power by whatever means could be found. His determination to rule Kentucky, regardless of the will of the people, was driving the state toward civil war. It’s easy to pooh-pooh that now, but armed militias were in place on both sides. If the only soldier who died was William Goebel, that may have been the best outcome that we could hope for.
On September 23, 1900, William Marsh Rice was murdered in his apartment in New York City. Born in Massachusetts before 1820, Rice moved west, and made a fortune in Houston before the Civil War. Although he was a slaveholder Rice disapproved of slavery and sided with the North, thus moved back to New Jersey during the war. By 1900 he lived in the Berkshire Apartments, 500 Madison Avenue. He was 84 years old, a widower, and childless except for his stock certificates. He was almost a recluse at the time of his death, living with Charles Jones, who served as his butler, valet, and personal secretary.
Rice’s relatives had begun fighting over his money several years before his death, and he had decided to leave his money to a private institute that would bear his name, the William M. Rice Institute. It is today known as Rice University. His wife had other ideas, however; she had left a will dispensing of one-half of the couple’s assets, or about $2.5 million, most going to relatives. She died first—unexpectedly—and her will was contested by Mr. Rice, a contest that depended on whether or not Mrs. Rice was a legal resident of Texas at the time of her death. If she was a Texas resident, then she was entitled under Texas law to dispose of one-half of their assets in her will; if not, under New York law, the community property would pass automatically at her death to her surviving spouse.
She hadn’t been to Texas in years, but the wife’s would-be beneficiaries hired an enterprising attorney, Albert Patrick, to find or invent evidence that Mrs. Rice intended to return to Texas, and thus might be considered a Texas resident. This put Patrick at odds with Rice, and a deep enmity developed between the two men. The attorney approached Mr. Jones, Rice’s butler and personal secretary, to see whether, at the right price, the butler might be willing to help the litigation come out the right way. Jones was interested, and the two began to work together to pilfer from Rice’s fortune.
They conspired for several years as the litigation dragged on, and eventually Patrick spotted a bigger opportunity. Mr. Jones prepared all of Rice’s correspondence and could forge his signature passably well, so Patrick had him prepare a new will, naming Patrick as Rice’s principal beneficiary, but also setting aside a few hundred thousand to be distributed among Rice’s relatives and other interested money-grubbers. The genius of his plan—and this is the kind of thinking that you just don’t get unless you have an actual attorney involved in the conspiracy—was that he left the previous will in existence, and made sure that both wills would be found at the time of Rice’s death. If he had destroyed the legitimate will, then the self-interest of Rice’s survivors would have been to prove that the new will was false, since that would mean that Rice had died intestate, and his wealth would be divided among his natural heirs. But by leaving the old will on record and greatly increasing the amount of money set aside for the relatives, Patrick made it in the interest of the relatives to accept the new will as valid. Without asking them, Patrick intended to draw relatives, employees, and even the doorman into his conspiracy.
The original design was not to murder William Rice, but merely to steal his estate when he happened to pass away. But how to explain Rice’s decision to leave the bulk of his estate to a man that he hated?
To make this seem plausible, Patrick and Jones created a string of fictitious documents supposedly passing between Patrick and Rice, amicably resolving the previous dispute, and then making Patrick the attorney of record for William Rice. Events began to press upon the conspirators, however, and they took steps to hasten the old man’s demise. They got a doctor to prescribe mercury pills for him, and then fed him more than he needed, attempting to weaken his heart.
On September 16, 1900, a fire destroyed the plant of the Merchants and Planters Oil Company of Houston, of which Rice owned 75%. It would cost $250,000 to re-build, and Rice, the old fool, was prepared to wire them the money. Patrick had better plans for that money. Worse yet, a deposition was scheduled in the suit concerning his late wife’s estate. If Rice gave his deposition, that would undermine the deception regarding the settlement of the suit. We have to act now, Patrick told Jones. About 7:00 on the evening of Sunday, September 23, 1900, Charles Jones soaked a sponge in chloroform, wrapped it in a towel, and pressed it to the face of the sleeping William Rice.
Doctors hired to say so would later insist that the chloroform did not kill William Rice, that he merely happened to die a natural death at about that time. This sounds pretty stupid to me, but what do I know; I’m not a doctor. Patrick had arranged in advance for a death certificate, signed by a physician, after which Rice’s body was to be rushed to a crematorium. They arranged for burial of the ashes on Tuesday morning, and waited until late Monday afternoon to notify the relatives, most of whom lived in Texas, of the death. In the meantime, they worked to drain Rice’s bank accounts.
They had overlooked a few details. It took 24 hours to heat the crematorium; they hadn’t realized that, and didn’t have the time to spare. Their e
fforts to cash large checks, forged with Rice’s signature, drew the attention of bank executives, who called the police. Nobody bought their story. The police arrived in time to order an autopsy. The issue of the relatives supporting the phony will was never reached, since the conspirators were in custody before the will could be filed.
The trial of Albert Patrick became a legal landmark:
Space forbids any reference to (Patrick’s) elaborate and ingenious defense …
Wherever lawyers shall get together, there the Patrick case will be discussed with its strong points and its weak ones, its technicalities and its tactics, and the ethics of the liberation of Jones, the actual murderer, now long since vanished into the obscurity from which he came.
—ARTHUR TRAIN, TRUE STORIES OF CRIME (SCRIBNER’S, 1908)
Train was the Assistant D.A. who prosecuted the case. Patrick argued, in short, that in the actual murder there was no evidence against him except the testimony of Jones, who was allowed to walk in exchange for his testimony against Patrick. By law, the testimony against his co-conspirators of a person involved in a crime was admissible only if it was corroborated. This was un-corroborated, therefore inadmissible, therefore there was no case against him.
Technically, this was probably true. Had Patrick been able to get a jury of twelve lawyers, he might even have been acquitted. What got him, in the main, was the paper trail. The string of false documents produced to make the will seem reasonable had the effect of proving an elaborate conspiracy between the two men, of which Patrick was the primary beneficiary. Technically, this may have proved only that Patrick committed fraud, not murder, but in any event he was convicted of murder, and sentenced to die in the electric chair. He fought to save his life with appeals and challenges; in the words of Arthur Train, this became “the most extraordinary struggle in the legal history of the State on the part of a convicted murderer.” His life was spared by the Governor of New York in 1906, when his sentence was commuted to life in prison. In 1912, for reasons that evade my ken but have something to do either with bribery or doubts about the legality of his conviction, he was pardoned by the governor, and allowed to leave Sing Sing. He moved to Oklahoma, where he lived quietly for the rest of his life, at least by the standards of Oklahoma, where at that time you were considered quiet to the point of peculiar if you didn’t kill somebody once in a while.
There is a book about the case, The Death of Old Man Rice, by Martin Friedland (New York University Press, 1994), but I have not seen the book, and can’t tell you whether it is worth reading. And I don’t dislike lawyers, or Oklahomans; I’m just having a little fun with them.
Colonel Griffith J. Griffith was a wealthy Los Angeles mining and real estate investor who several years earlier had given the city Griffith Park, and who would later add the funds for the Griffith Observatory. On September 3, 1903, Col. Griffith, in a drunken rage, forced his wife to kneel in front of him and then shot her in the head. She survived, lost an eye, got a divorce. Col. Griffith got two years in prison and a reputation so sullied that the next time he tried to give the city of Los Angeles a few million dollars they actually turned him down. Griffith Park remains one of the largest municipal parks in America, and is the home of the famous “Hollywood” sign.
On December 30, 1905, the former governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, was killed by a bomb at the gate of his house in Caldwell, Idaho. A man named Harry Orchard was arrested, and confessed to that murder and many others, saying that he had committed the crimes at the instigation of nationally known union leader Big Bill Haywood. This led to a sensational trial, at the end of which Haywood was acquitted, there being no real evidence against him other than the statements of Orchard. Haywood was loud, aggressive, and violent to the point of being half crazy, but had no clear motive to murder Steunenberg, against whom there was reason to believe that Orchard held a grudge. Harry Orchard, whose life was spared in exchange for his testimony, lived quietly in an Idaho prison until 1954.
On January 27, 1906, Chloe Canfield, a beautiful Los Angeles socialite and philanthropist, was shot dead at her front door by Morris Buck, an ex-employee who had been fired years earlier for beating the horses. Mrs. Canfield’s husband, who had co-founded the Midway Oil Company, stated that he would spend millions, if necessary, to ensure that Buck was executed. And he was.
On April 6, 1906, a child was born to a woman near death in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her name was Leone (Krembs) Muenter, and she was near death because her husband was putting arsenic in her tea. The childbirth was attended not by a regular doctor, but by a couple of young women who were called “faith cure” doctors. Most likely Muenter was trying to make it appear that his unfortunate wife had not recovered from childbirth, but the young women called in real doctors, who prescribed a regimen of medicines and treatment. After a few days the doctors decided that the regimen was not being followed properly, blamed the faith cure doctors for this, and withdrew from the case. A couple of days later—April 16—Mrs. Muenter passed away.
Once she was dead the doctors re-entered the case, performed an autopsy, and removed the stomach contents for analysis. On April 17 her husband packed up his dead wife and his two young children and headed for Chicago. On April 18 an analysis of the stomach contents found the arsenic, but by this time police were unable to find Mr. Muenter.
Erich Muenter had been a lecturer at Harvard, lecturing in German, which was his native language. He was a tall, thin, shuffling psychotic with pale gray eyes, a hook nose and an excitable nature. He had earned a degree from the University of Chicago in 1899, and had taught at the University of Kansas before working his way up to Harvard. He fled to Mexico, it was later learned, where he worked as a cook and an accountant. We will leave Mr. Muenter in Mexico, and he will re-enter our story later on.
On June 25, 1906, world-famous architect Stanford White was murdered on the roof of the old Madison Square Garden, which he had designed. White was murdered by Harry Kendall Thaw, a wealthy young man from Pittsburgh who had married White’s former lover, Evelyn Nesbit. This is, of course, the most famous crime of the era, and has been depicted in film numerous times, most notably The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (Joan Collins and Ray Milland, 1955) and Ragtime (Howard Rollins, Mary Steenburgen and James Cagney, 1981; Norman Mailer and Elizabeth McGovern play Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit).
Colonel Thomas Hunton Swope of Kansas City had much in common with Colonel Griffith J. Griffith of LA. Like Griffith, he was a Colonel of uncertain derivation and no known military accomplishments. Like Colonel Griffith he left home as a teenager and headed west. Like Colonel Griffith he built a fortune into a huge fortune by purchasing land in the path of the development of a burgeoning city. In 1896 Colonel Swope gave Kansas City 1,350 acres to make Swope Park. It was at the time the second-largest municipal park in the United States, pushed down the list one year later by Colonel Griffith. Unlike Colonel Griffith, who was born in Wales and had little education, Swope was a Yale graduate. He was modest, polite, soft-spoken and a bachelor.
On October 3, 1909, Colonel Swope died in his brother’s mansion. Kansas City public schools were closed so that school children would be free to line the route of his funeral procession. Dr. B. Clark Hyde—an unfortunate name for an accused murderer—was married to Swope’s niece, and was in attendance at the time of death. Just two days earlier he had been in attendance at the bedside of another of his wife’s old uncles, when he, too, had died suddenly. A few weeks later he was attending his wife’s brother when the brother also went off to explore the afterlife.
Dr. Hyde was arrested three months later, charged with poisoning all three relatives in an effort to inherit as much of Swope’s money as he could get as soon as he could get it. By murdering his wife’s relatives he was cutting down on the number of ways that the inheritance would be split, as well as the number of people that he had to put up with at Thanksgiving. Over the next seven years he was put on trial for these offenses three times. He was convicted i
n the first trial and sentenced to life in prison, but the conviction was thrown out on appeal. The next two trials resulted in hung juries, in one case because they just couldn’t agree and in the other case because a juror lost his mind in mid-trial. A fourth trial was scheduled but was eventually abandoned. Hyde’s wife inherited $114,000 from the estate. She divorced Dr. Hyde a few years later, charging cruelty and violence. Dr. Hyde became an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist in Lexington, Missouri.
There were other crime stories in this era, of course, but there is no other era in American history in which the most prominent crime stories are so much the same—the murders of rich and powerful people by others who knew them and envied them. To draw parallels between famous crime stories and cultural history is, as a rule, a dubious effort. Crime stories embody the unusual, not the normal, and despite this they seem much the same across borders and across centuries, and thus tell us more about human nature than about the vicissitudes of the culture.
But in this case I think there is something here; there is a reason these stories dominated that era. Crime stories do not generally involve the rich and famous; they generally involve people lifted out of obscurity by the crime. But America between 1890 and 1915 was driving toward revolution, or toward a second civil war. I always find it amazing how little people understand this, and how little they know about it. It seems to me that, since we didn’t actually arrive at the revolution, people dismiss the whole concept that this could have happened. One might expect historians to disagree about how close we were to revolution or civil war, but it doesn’t seem to me that they do; they just dismiss the whole concept and talk instead about the international conflicts leading to World War I and the revolution in Russia. We weren’t at the brink of civil war in 1914, as Kentucky was in 1900, but we were headed in that direction.