“Pat Crowe is not equal to Mr. Edward Cudahy. Nor am I or Judge Sutton. I’d wager no one else in this courtroom is equal to Mr. Cudahy. Very few in this country can equal his station. But here in this chamber you twelve men have the opportunity to live up to that forever fraying and fleeting virtue. You have the opportunity to judge Pat Crowe as an equal to a man who, in every other realm of the world, has so few. This is the power of the law. To finally see the scales of justice on an equal balance.”
Ritchie paused to wipe the fog off his eyeglasses with his pocket hanky and, before placing his newly cleaned spectacles back on his face, took a survey of the audience. He looked again at me and paced the front of the courtroom.
He said, “Now we are upon it. Here as I stand, this is the last opportunity—whether I am doing my duty well or poorly—that Pat Crowe will have to be heard. He will be heard for better or for worse now. And so we come to this consideration: whether the money was lost by Cudahy and whether it was lost through the criminal agency of another and whether these facts are proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And why did Mr. Cudahy, as he claimed on the witness stand, put a sum of twenty-five thousand dollars out in the middle of a desolate street seven miles west of town? Because a letter found on his front lawn instructed him to do it.
“You are all familiar with this letter. It was analyzed and read and reread in this court many times over. But who put the letter there? I don’t know who put it there. The state says you must guess, you must dream that Pat Crowe put it there because there has been a great crime committed and we need a hostage and somebody must be convicted. It must be Pat Crowe. We have got to convict him or everybody’s child in Omaha will be carried off.
“What was the first thing that Mr. Cudahy did with that letter? He read it to his wife, in the presence of his groom and his stable hand and his housemaid. He read it to the Chief of Police Bill Donahue. The contents of that letter were known to everybody that was there. No secret at all made of it. Every policeman in Omaha knew the contents of that letter. Hired Pinkerton agents numbering more than thirty men knew what the letter said. A man named Sears who remained in Cudahy’s employ just ten days after this transaction and went to Sioux City, he knew the contents of that letter. He carried that information in his brain when he went down to his boardinghouse that night. Fifty or sixty other men from the packinghouse came up there and knew the contents of that letter.
“Now if the money was placed out there on Center Street, let us see who got it. Everybody told everybody else in town, and everyone knew that Mr. Cudahy was going out with a rig with a lantern tied on the dash. A red lantern. Everybody in town knew that there was going to be a lantern on the highway where the fellows were going to get the money that he was going to take out there. But, of course, no one else could’ve gotten that money except for Patrick Crowe and William Cavanaugh. They were the only ones who could possibly set up the lantern on the highway to catch the cash when it came along.
“I wish I had been in on that. I wish I had known the contents of that letter, and I might have taken a chance at it myself,” Ritchie said, garnering more laughter from the audience. “I wish I hadn’t been one of the few poor idiots in town who didn’t know that a millionaire packer was going out on a dark road in the middle of the night to leave twenty-five thousand dollars in gold on the side of the road. Go on out there with a lantern and find yourself a rainbow’s pot of gold.”
The courtroom erupted again, much to Judge Sutton’s dismay. After silencing the room with his gavel, he warned that the next outburst would force him to clear the courtroom. He said the next person to make a display in his court would be ushered out onto the street with force, and again the spectators were as silent as a church congregation.
Ritchie continued, “Why, it was all too easy. There was too much silk in that for anything. Anyone could get a lantern and tie black and white ribbons on it and go upon that highway and stick it out. Oh, tell me, pray, how do you know that anybody ever got that money who was in the plot to take the boy?
“We do not find twenty-five thousand dollars on the highway every Wednesday evening, and we are all looking out for twenty-five thousand dollars on the highway. If we learn from someone that it is going to be put there, we will go out there and take chances on getting it. Ah, but they will say, the Father Murphy letter, this supposed confession to the crime, proves the corpus delicti and that Pat Crowe, over his own signature, tells Mr. Cudahy that he offered him back eleven thousand dollars.
“Why didn’t Mr. Cudahy swear to that on the stand? I never saw, I never knew of a greater omission. Mr. Cudahy was offered back eleven thousand dollars, and he was on the stand two hours two separate times, and he never said anything about it besides the reciting of it in that supposed letter of confession. Never said another word about it. Not a word.
“Another circumstance that is of great value in this case: some hoboes got into that Grover Street cottage after Eddie Cudahy returned home. They had a gasoline lamp with two burners and a red tank there. They had some old jute hung on the walls, and they were in that house a couple days and moved out. Ah! There is a weighty circumstance in this case. A circumstance that proves something. I could take you to all the empty houses there are in Omaha and South Omaha, and I can show you that nearly the same thing has occurred in any one of them. Those were possibly some poor devils who did not have money enough to buy a week’s board or to buy a bed. So they go into that house and sleep for a few nights and then went on further to be buffeted to and from by the cold winds of adversity. Every vacant house on the edge of the city is subject to such use.
“But the state would like to make you believe that because there were cigarette stubs on the floor and because there was a gasoline stove and an old oaken bucket in the front room that these things were left there by Pat Crowe. They would like to make you believe that Pat Crowe is guilty simply by calling attention to these things. I expect that if we had all the literature that Mr. Cudahy received in answer to his advertisement that he would give fifty thousand dollars for the capture of Pat Crowe, we would have answers that could fill this courtroom from the floor to the ceiling.
“Witnesses who come that way are witnesses who come with the purpose of gain. Their testimony must therefore be scrutinized very carefully, very carefully indeed. Just the same as the evidence of the policemen who are pursuing one path and no other all the time. Archimedes of old who invented the fulcrum and the lever, he claimed that if he could get a place to stand on he could lift the world. If you will give me a million dollars and make me vice president of the Cudahy Packing Company, I can pretty near move the social world in the city of Omaha.
“And as much as I admire my friend, the district attorney here, who shows so much enthusiasm and warmth for Mr. Cudahy and for the state, so mingled that you cannot distinguish them, I wonder how much of that warmth and enthusiasm you will attribute to Mr. Cudahy’s gold. Ah! Ah! How they sidestep for him when he comes in here. Everybody gives him the center of the path as he walks up to take the witness stand. How they bow in obeisance.
“Gentlemen of the jury, the people of the United States are homely, poor people. The middle class and the laborers, they are the bulwark of American liberty and the strength of American society. They are not to be hoodwinked by the shedding of a few crocodile tears of the wealthy and the powerful. There are people right here in this courtroom now who expect to get something in some way out of this. We would all like to get hold of some of Mr. Cudahy’s money if we could. But I don’t see how we are going to do it unless we run him for mayor on the Republican ticket,” Ritchie said and earned his fourth round of hearty laughter from the spectators. Even I had a chuckle at that one. I could not help it. Ritchie continued, “Then he will open up his barrel, and those people will all gather around his standard again.
“But what has been presented to you by the prosecution? Evidence or want of evidence? There is nothing
in this case that shows one single thing that Pat Crowe ever had was found anywhere near the Cudahy house or the Grover Street cottage or anywhere else. No proof that he ever made a mark anywhere pertaining to this case. Not a single thing. If you could get a piece of board that was broken off from that hideaway cottage and another piece of board that fitted right into it that came from Pat Crowe, then you would be getting near something tangible. But you cannot draw inferences from things like buckets and cigarette stubs.
“Then we have the testimony of Edward Cudahy Senior. His anxiety to bear witness against Pat Crowe was exhibited the second time he was on the stand. The counsel for the state asked, ‘Did you ever see Pat Crowe again after he worked for you in your market in South Omaha?’ He answered yes. He had forgotten that the first time he was on the stand. He was asked it, but for some reason he did not answer it. But the second time he said, ‘Yes, Pat Crowe was at my house.’ He then went on to detail what Pat Crowe had told him. He said Pat Crowe came to his house in an ailing state and that he wanted nothing more than for Cudahy to see the poor condition he was in. Mr. Cudahy said that Pat Crowe asked him for a drink at seven in the morning and that he appeared to be a drunkard on the bum.
“Now, if any living human being can tell me what that has to do with this case I would like to know. What was the point of Mr. Cudahy revealing these details to the court? Was he trying to railroad this man by blackening his character with admissions that were unrelated to the alleged crime and Crowe’s relation to it? I cannot see any other reason for such details other than that purpose. Oh, and Mr. Cudahy also revealed the he gave Pat Crowe one of his old secondhand coats he was not using. Talk about the heart of the millionaire! There is one thing in this world that is perhaps the coldest and chilliest thing in it, and it is a million dollars. There is only one thing that is colder and chillier and more heartless, and that is two million.”
Applause rang out in the courtroom and, again, Judge Sutton’s gavel brought it to a halt with some seven or eight whacks of his judicial hammer.
Ritchie pressed forward. Pacing with his hands in his pockets, he said, “Now, in closing, let us talk a little while about this so-called confession letter written to Father Murphy, the letter that was introduced in evidence by Mr. Cudahy. Attorney Black is going to claim that Father Murphy is a good man and that when he gave that letter up to Mr. Cudahy, he gave it up to the public to help the state. He gave it to him for the purpose of convicting Pat Crowe and punishing a great criminal.
“Is there any evidence of that in this case? Why didn’t Father Murphy go on the stand and swear to it if that kind of a confession was made to him? I will tell you why not. It is the same reason two and two don’t make five and the same reason elephants don’t give birth to baby birds. Because it is impossible. I tell you, gentlemen of the jury, it is a moral impossibility that Father Murphy gave that letter to Mr. Cudahy or that it is a genuine letter. A moral impossibility. For Mr. Black to claim otherwise is a blasphemous slander upon that old and ancient faith and upon the priests and ministers of that faith.
“I am not a Catholic. Sometimes I wish I were when I see what good they do in this world. When I see on every hill in Omaha a Catholic charity. When I see down here on the east side of the city a hospital to which white and black, rich and poor, saint or devil, can go free of charge to be cured. My hat goes off to Catholicism. It is, without a doubt, one of the very few institutions in this world dedicated to unconditional goodness. We cannot but believe that they will keep the secrets that are entrusted to them by their communicants. That is a jurisdiction which no one hitherto has touched and which the mightiest of earth have always respected.
“For more than twelve centuries this honored church, in one way and another, has gone forth succoring the sick, caring for the helpless. And Mr. Black would have you believe that a priest of that faith gave to Mr. Cudahy a letter which was to be used as evidence against Pat Crowe. Believe everything and anything else in this case, but do not believe that this good old priest would have been guilty of such perfidy as that. You will not cast such slander upon the men who devote their whole lives to the caring for the weak, the sick, the sinful, and those who look up to them for aid and consolation.
“This relation of priest and communicant is a sacred jurisdiction. It is a relation which no vandal shall enter and devastate. It is morally impossible that could have been done. It is a malicious, cowardly, and perjured falsehood. The most despicable falsehood ever dropped from the lips of a perjured man. If anyone here has the effrontery to even intimate that Father Murphy betrayed the secrets of his holy church, I say that the man who says that lies and I have never met Father Murphy in my life.
“I also never met Pat Crowe before I met him a few months ago when hired as his lawyer. Many people condemn me for having taken this case. My wife didn’t want me to take this case. I myself wasn’t sure I should take it. But against all better judgment, even my own judgment, here I am in its deepest throes.
“Here we all are. It’s like every other case where everybody knows all about it and nobody knows anything about it. Here is what is irrefutable, the only thing that is known for sure: young Edward Cudahy went missing one night on December 18, 1900, and when he came home less than two days later, he came home to his mother and father and never a hair injured or a single scratch upon him. And these men are crying out madly for the blood of Pat Crowe.
“I am glad that I stayed by him in his adversity. I am glad that he can go forth from this courtroom knowing that there was someone in this world who would stand between him and the bloodhounds that are pursuing him.
“When William H. Seward, the Secretary of State for Abraham Lincoln, was practicing law in Auburn, New York, a poor colored man was defended by him for murder. The colored man had killed his neighbor’s whole family. His whole family. Seward took the case. Everybody said, ‘Why, Seward, you must lose the case. The murder was cold-blooded.’ Seward told the court and he told the jury that the colored man was crazy. He told them the colored man was crazy and you ought not to convict him. Seward stayed by him. He was convicted. Seward took the case to the Supreme Court and the case was reversed. It came back and that poor black man died in prison. After he was dead they held a postmortem and found a diseased brain. A diseased brain. And there is not a page in the history of Secretary Seward that will shine brighter than that page which reads of his defense of that poor colored man.
“Take Pat Crowe if you will and hurry his bones across the stones on the theory that he is a beggar. Shoot him down and put him in his coffin rather than send him to the penitentiary to rot and die. Try him on identity. Try him on circumstantial evidence if you will, but make no mistake. Judge not lest you be also judged.
“I ask you to let him go. I do not ask you to let him go on the theory that he must be given another chance to try and live as you would like to. I ask that you let him go because the state has not proven him guilty. I ask you to let him go because the identification and the circumstances here are so weak and uncertain that it would be monstrous to base a conviction upon them. Go home to your children when you go out of this courtroom and let them say of you in the coming years when you are gone that you had the courage to stand up and be counted in favor of giving a man his liberty who was accused of a crime when the evidence against him was weak and unsatisfactory.
“We are doing the best that we can here in this life. We must all of us be gathered sooner or later to our fathers. Rich and poor, white and black, all of us are bound to go one day to that bed on which we shall lie for the last time. As the breath of life passes from you and kind and loving hands come to wipe away the death damp from your brows and you must pass in swift and solemn judgment on every act of your lives, do not let a verdict of guilty against Pat Crowe come up in that final hour to vex your peaceful departure from the scenes of earth.
“Say ‘Not guilty,’ the only just and true verdict in this case.
Say ‘Not guilty,’ and He who said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, He who stills the tempest and who notes the sparrow’s fall, He who looks over us day and night at our best and at our worst, will bless you all.”
XVIII
THE MILLARD HOTEL was a five-story chunk of pale brick on the South Sixteenth Street Mall. Holed up on the top floor, the jury deliberated all night and early into the morning before finally coming to a decision.
Court came to order for the final time at nine sharp. Judge Sutton swayed in from his chambers. His demeanor was that of a man beaten. The county clerk called in the jury.
Ritchie and I rose to our feet.
My head spun like the cosmos.
I stood behind the defense table with my hands clasped before my groin and smiling thinly as the jury took their seats on the platform. My thick morass of stained hair was pushed back but not combed. I wore a checkered suit with a paisley tie in a loose knot. Ritchie clapped me on the back like I’d just won the heavyweight championship. Judge Sutton called on jury foreman Casey Young, an oil station manager from Fremont. He asked him if the jury had reached a verdict.
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