Popular Crime

by Bill James

  Frederick Drimmer’s other arguments in favor of Chessman focus on essentially irrelevant points. Chessman was tried before a judge who “reportedly had sentenced more criminals to death than any other in the state’s history.” I don’t doubt that he was a hanging judge, but what does this do to prove that he hung the wrong man? Chessman, says Drimmer, made “some grave mistakes” in defending his case. “The worst was in choosing the jury. One man and eleven women were selected—four of them with daughters the same age as the bandit’s female victims.” One of the Bandit’s rape victims was a teenaged girl; the other was a woman in her thirties. But even if this was true, why should it cause us to believe that Chessman was innocent?

  As I see the case, there is every reason to believe that Chessman committed the crimes for which he was executed. Apart from the eyewitness identifications and the fact that Chessman matches the description of the Red Light Bandit, we should consider:

  • Chessman was arrested driving the stolen car described in the APB.

  • Stolen property from the Redondo Beach robbery, committed 90 minutes earlier, was in the car at the time of his arrest.

  • Chessman initially denied the clothing-store robberies as well as the sex crimes, and offered an implausible explanation of how he came to be driving the stolen car.

  • Chessman, throughout his criminal career, had several times used the pretense of being a police officer to gain the element of surprise before committing a robbery. The jury which convicted him of the crimes did not know this.

  • Chessman was alleged by police and eyewitnesses to have made incriminating statements during a police lineup—for example, when an officer attempted to help him place a handkerchief over his face, he said “I know how I wore it.” Chessman denied making such statements.

  Chessman’s basic defense, the one he returned to again and again and again after he abandoned the pretense of complete innocence, is that he was “just” a thief. Economic circumstances had forced him, at an early age, to steal, so he argued—but he was not a pervert. He was not a sex criminal, never had been, never would be.

  This argument, however, is so weak that I wonder if I need even rebut it. All of Chessman’s previous convictions, it is true, were for theft—but how does this prove that he didn’t commit the crimes with which he was charged? Criminals have been known to change the types of crimes they commit, you know, to start out in one area and escalate gradually toward more serious criminal behavior. This happens in … oh, I don’t know, 95% of all crime stories, give or take a few.

  What’s more, the crimes for which Chessman was executed did start out as economic crimes; the Red Light Bandit began by pulling a gun on lovers in remote places, then taking their money and valuables. It’s just that, as he found himself in control of young women who were afraid to resist him, he began to grow bolder, and began demanding sex acts as part of his price. There is nothing in this that is inconsistent with Chessman’s prior history.

  It is, of course, a terrible thing that a brilliant and multi-talented man like Chessman was executed for crimes that fell short of murder. By no means do I minimize the crimes that he committed. His second (known) rape triggered a nervous breakdown in the victim, from which she never recovered. She was in a mental hospital for many, many years after the crime.

  But when people write about the Chessman case today, there is a tendency to assume that the battle focused on the appropriateness of executing a man convicted of rape and kidnapping, but not murder. In fact, it did not; perhaps Chessman should have chosen to fight that battle, but he didn’t. The battle was focused on the questions of Chessman’s guilt, and on questions of due process. Since Chessman was in fact guilty and had in fact received a fair trial, it was perhaps inevitable that the story would end with his execution. He was one of the last people in this country to be executed for a crime less than murder.

  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed on June 19, 1953. I am going to stiff you on Julius and Ethel, but there was something related to them I wanted to say.

  One of the arguments made against popular crime stories—probably the most common one—is that they distract the public from more serious news. In my view, this argument is without merit.

  First of all, as I see it, no one has any ability whatsoever to figure out what is going to be important to people. I look back on my own life. When I was in high school I had two habits that greatly irritated my teachers; actually, many more than two, but let’s focus. One was writing funny notes to my classmates, trying to make them crack up in the middle of class. The other was spending hours of valuable study time making mystifying totals from the agate type in the sports pages. I was called on the carpet any number of times and told to stop doing this stuff and pay more attention to What Was Really Important.

  As I look back on those years, the two most useful things that I was doing, in terms of preparing me for my career, were

  1) Writing humorous notes to my classmates, and

  2) Making mystifying totals from the agate type in the sports pages.

  By writing amusing if vulgar notes to my classmates, I was learning to write—not learning to write in a way that would please English teachers, but learning to write in a way that would hold the interest of people who had no reason to read the note, other than the expectation that they would enjoy reading it. That’s much, much closer to writing books than writing insipid research papers to please bored English teachers. The adults in charge thought they knew what was important, but in retrospect they were just completely wrong.

  In the 1960 election cycle, the island nations of Quemoy and Matsu emerged as central issues. In essence, Nixon charged Kennedy with being unreliable on national defense, and Kennedy defended himself. Kennedy was asked, “If you were to learn tomorrow that Quemoy and Matsu—American allies—were under attack by communist forces, would you commit American forces to defend them?” Kennedy insisted that he would, and this dispute became a central issue in the race.

  The intellectuals, the commentators, the smart-money crowd ridiculed that. “Why are we spending all of this time talking about Quemoy and Matsu?” they demanded to know. “Why aren’t we talking about the real issues in this campaign?”

  And yet, in retrospect, that turned out to be precisely the defining issue of the following years. The name of the obscure ally that we had to decide whether we wanted to defend with blood and treasure was “Vietnam,” not “Quemoy” or “Matsu,” but the principle was the same. The smart people who thought they knew what was “really” important turned out, in retrospect, to be just entirely wrong.

  Third example … psychology. Since the 1960s, when trendy psychology burst onto the scene, it has been common to ridicule it, and in particular to ridicule popular psychology by contrasting it with serious workaday psychology.

  And yet in retrospect, at least as it seems to me, a huge percentage of what was mainstream psychology in the 1950s and 1960s has now been discarded. Freudian psychoanalysis turned out, in retrospect, to be a useful plot device for The Sopranos and several Woody Allen movies, but otherwise almost entirely a waste of time. Nobody really does that stuff anymore, because nobody will pay for it, and the insurance companies won’t pay for it because there is no actual evidence that it does much good.

  On the other hand, pop psychology, at least in my view, has turned out to have great value to our society. Popular psychology has created an entire lexicon of internal-dialogue concepts that we all use every day to try to think through our problems.

  When I was a senior in college I was taking a class in which we read a number of Charles Dickens novels, in regard to which the professor made this argument. “In Dickens’ time the serious novelists wrote for public consumption,” he said, “and many of these writers had huge audiences. Whereas now, anybody who is really ‘serious’ about writing novels writes for a very small audience composed mostly of other writers.”

  “Dr. Worth,” I objected, “what is your definition
of ‘serious’? Why would any serious person waste his time writing to an audience of a few hundred people?”

  “That is the way it is done now,” he replied.

  I wrestled with this exchange for weeks following. Dr. Worth’s definition of “serious” was “people like Dr. Worth.” People like me, who have PhDs, we are serious people, and we only write to other serious people. But is that really serious?

  I would argue that it is not serious. Writing academic novels to be read by a few dozen or a few hundred other academics is not “serious” writing; it’s literary masturbation. The people who do that are amusing themselves, without engaging the society in serious discussion.

  This is the way I see it:

  1) The world is vastly more complicated than the image of the world that we all hold in our heads, therefore

  2) Nobody really has any idea what will be important to society or to individuals in society in the future.

  That which is symbolically significant, like the Super Bowl and Michelle Obama’s sleeves, often turns out, over time, to be of far more real importance than that which is tangibly significant, like Middle East policy and economic reform. Sophisticated Frenchmen, a hundred years ago, were appalled to see France tearing itself apart arguing about the Dreyfus case. It was a symbolic issue, justice for one man. In retrospect, what was going on in France at that time that was more important?

  Bob Costas once had a contract to fill in for Larry King on CNN. Costas thought he had made it clear, in negotiating that contract, that he was not going to do “stories” that exploited personal tragedies. But as soon as the contract started, he found himself being maneuvered into interviews that he felt he should not be doing. Finally, pressured to do an interview about the Natalee Holloway case, he refused to do the interview, and walked away from a lucrative contract.

  I certainly admire Costas for having the courage to stand up for his values. I also think that he was right—but not because the Natalee Holloway case was not important. The problem with doing another hour on Natalee Holloway was that there was simply nothing to be said. Several cable shows were spending hours a day, at that time, “covering” Natalee Holloway. There was no actual news; it was just stupid speculation, masquerading as news. I respect Costas for saying, “I’m not going to take part in that.”

  But at the same time, I do not believe that the serious news issues favored by grave and enlightened commentators are any more likely to be of real importance to society than … the Natalee Holloway case, to pick one at random. I think the whole idea of popular crime stories diverting attention from serious news is just complete nonsense.

  Now, back to Julius and Ethel and their commie friends. Popular crime books normally run 100,000 to 150,000 words, or 250 to 400 pages, more or less. Books about the Rosenbergs—and there are dozens of them—start at 600 pages and go up. These God Damned things go on forever.

  Why?

  Because the authors are so “serious” about their work—in the same sense that academics are serious about their precious academic novels. The authors of the Rosenberg works are trying to communicate to us, through the vastness of their literary output, how serious they are about their subject. “This is not a lightweight amusement about Ted Bundy or Darlie Routier or the Manson family,” they are saying. “Oh, no. This is A Serious Book containing Serious Academic Research about A Serious Subject.”

  My view is that if the people who write these Rosenberg books were really serious people, they would

  a) figure out what it was that they had to say,

  b) say it, and

  c) shut up.

  They won’t do that, for the most part, because they’re operating out of a paradigm of what constitutes a “serious” subject that they’ve never really questioned, and which they couldn’t defend.

  At one point I was very interested in the Rosenberg case, and I actually bored through six or seven of those interminable texts that constitute the Rosenberg bookshelf. For younger people who may be mystified by the reach and impact of the Rosenbergs, I would say that in many respects the Rosenberg case parallels the 1991 battle between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas. In both cases, there was a small, tightly knit group of people who were

  a) ethnically distinct,

  b) highly political, and

  c) quite remarkable people.

  Within this small group of very bright, highly motivated political activists, there was a betrayal, one member accusing another of an act which the other vehemently denied. Because it lay so close to a national nerve, unraveling the exact nature of that betrayal became a coast-to-coast obsession. What was at stake in one case was whether two people would die; what was at stake in the other was whether a man would go onto the Supreme Court. But in both cases, the entire nation picked sides in this dispute, based on their own philosophical predispositions, because in each case, the issue defined the fault lines of America’s politics at that moment. If you believed that there were communists hidden among us, you believed that the Rosenbergs were guilty. If you believed it was all a witch hunt, you believed they were innocent.

  In an ordinary trial, the issue is whether the accused committed the crime. O. J. Simpson may or may not have killed Nicole, but there is no question that somebody did. In the Rosenberg case, as in the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas affair, the central issue is whether the crime ever occurred. If you want my take on the case, it is

  1) That a crime of espionage certainly did occur,

  2) That Julius Rosenberg almost certainly was involved in that crime,

  3) That Ethel Rosenberg probably had some knowledge about the crime, but that

  4) Nothing really happened here that required that anybody be executed.

  The Rosenbergs were executed because of paranoid and exaggerated perceptions about the seriousness of the crime. They were executed to make the point that one could be executed for supporting the commies. This was wrong. It’s not really a Popular Crime story.

  XVII

  Anyone experienced in interrogation learns to recognize the difference between a man speaking from life and a man telling a story that he either has made up or has gotten from another person.

  —F. LEE BAILEY, THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS (P. 151)

  Sometime after midnight on the Fourth of July, 1954, Marilyn Sheppard was bludgeoned to death in her bed in a Cleveland suburb. Her husband, Dr. Sam Sheppard, called a neighbor about 6:00 in the morning; the neighbors rushed over and then called the police.

  Sam’s story was that he was sleeping on the couch, downstairs, when he heard his wife scream. Middle of the night; he doesn’t have any idea what time it is. Groggy, he gets to his feet and rushes up the stairs. Near the top of the stairs he can see a faint form in a light-colored shirt inside Marilyn’s room, but as he reaches the top of the stairs somebody clubs him from behind, and the lights go out.

  The lights go out, figuratively; the lights were out anyway, but now Sam is unconscious in the dark. He remains that way for some time. Eventually he comes to, goes to Marilyn’s bed, checks her pulse and decides that she must be dead. He goes to his son’s room, checks on his sleeping son, and then hears something downstairs, somebody rustling through stuff. He races downstairs, and sees a figure heading out the back door, toward the lake. He chases the figure out the door, down a set of outdoor steps that lead to the beach. At the bottom of the steps somebody jumps him, perhaps from behind, and begins choking him. He loses consciousness again. When he comes to he is lying in the water at the edge of the lake, and dawn is breaking.

  He returns to the house, and checks again on his wife. She is still dead. He checks again on his son, Chip, sleeping in a nearby room; Chip is still fine. Woozy and disoriented, Sam wanders around the house for some time, wondering whether this might be a nightmare. He decides it is not a nightmare. He tries to remember a phone number … this is twenty years before 911 services. The phone number he remembers is of a friend and neighbor, Spencer Houk, incidentally the mayor of Ba
y Village. Then he passes out.

  After the neighbors called police they also called Sam’s brother, Stephen Sheppard, also a doctor, and Stephen called the rest of the family, his father and other brother also being doctors; even the family dog was a part-time veterinarian. The brothers arrived soon after the police, examined Sam quickly, and rushed him off to the hospital that was run by their family.

  The police for the rest of the day ran back and forth from the house to the hospital, harassing the medicated, lawyerless and sometimes nearly comatose Sam to get his story on record. His story, as they got it, seemed to them to be full of holes, and the police never believed a word of it. They didn’t find any evidence that anyone had been in the house, other than Sam and his late wife and the kid and the dog. The doors hadn’t been broken in, and there hadn’t been any real burglary, just some lame efforts to fake a burglary, and there hadn’t been any serious attempt at a sexual assault. This looked to them like a domestic murder.

  Unfortunately, they couldn’t prove it, as there wasn’t any real evidence that Sam had killed his wife, so the case sat idle for the next three weeks. The Cleveland newspapers began running daily stories about the case, with headlines like “Someone Is Getting Away With Murder,” “Why Don’t Police Quiz Top Suspect?” and “Why Isn’t Sam Sheppard in Jail?”

  What sometimes happens is that a police officer becomes convinced that he knows who done it, and lays out his story for prosecutors, who tell him that he doesn’t have a case that will hold up in court. The police officer refuses to accept that he doesn’t have a case, and begins leaking information to the newspapers in an effort to force the prosecutor’s hand. No sources say so, but I would bet that this is what happened here: a police officer or the coroner was feeding information to the newspapers in a deliberate effort to force the prosecutors to file charges.

  Dr. Sheppard was arrested on July 30, 1954, and was convicted of murder on December 21, 1954. Over the following years numerous books and articles were written claiming that Sheppard had gotten a raw deal, and pointing to flaws in his trial, specifically: