A combination of factors—illness, embarrassment and reticence born of alleged misquotes by sensationalized accounts—had caused Clara to shy away from reporters, but on the eve of the trial, Clara sat for an interview. Nervous, she rubbed her hands together as she spoke.
In her statement, Clara chastised Margaret Horton and indicted all Big Apple women for their loose morality: “I am different from the women of New York. I blame the women here as well as the husbands they entangle. Mrs. Horton knew my husband was married. If New York is to be better, its women must reform. Personally, I care nothing about the Horton woman. I never think of her.”
The reporter looked up from his notebook and stared straight into Clara’s eyes.
“I think she ought to be punished, yes, but I will take no action against her.”
Clara looked out the window and paused. She would have accepted “another woman” as the inevitable consequence of wedding a hunk. “Dr. Waite could have had her and a thousand like her if only he had spared me my parents. He has taken those I loved most and he might as well have taken me. I believe he would have done so eventually if he had not been discovered. Life holds nothing for me now.”
“But Mrs. Waite…”
Clara interrupted the reporter, holding up her index finger as if scolding a recalcitrant child. “Dr. Waite is no longer my husband. He ceased to be a long time ago.” Clara explained that even though her divorce was not yet final, she considered it a done deal.
She also said that she knew Arthur was “perfectly sane” and said she would willingly testify against him. “There is something that is urging me,” she said. “I cannot express exactly what I mean—it is as if my dead parents were directing me to appear as their representatives against the man who coldly and cruelly killed them.”132
“The man from Egypt” had returned.
PART II
TRIAL AND AFTERMATH
11
THE CASE AGAINST WAITE
NEW YORK, NEW YORK,
Monday, May 22–Tuesday, May 23, 1916133
The sun was shining in Manhattan when Arthur Warren Waite crossed the Bridge of Sighs on his way to the Criminal Branch of the Supreme Court. Grinning ear to ear, Waite felt confident he would beat the rap. After what he had to say on the stand, he was certain the jurors would find him insane despite what the newsmen had written.
It was a crime “worthy of the Borgias,” wrote the New York Herald correspondent at the outset of the trial, “though prompted solely by an unbridled lust for money.”134 The Herald writer joined a cadre of journalists from Grand Rapids as well as New York who waited for Waite to make his entrance.
Clara Peck, who had dropped the “Waite” and reverted to her maiden name, sat alongside her brother, Percy, and his wife. In another section of the courtroom, Warren Waite sat with his son Frank.
Several doctors and alienists also sat in the gallery. As the trial progressed, they would study the defendant, noting anything—from facial expressions to physical movements—that provided hints about his psychosis. Doctors working for the prosecution would look for signs of sanity, while doctors working for the defense wanted to prove them wrong.
Just before 10:00 a.m., Swann entered the courtroom alongside Assistant District Attorney George N. Brothers and co-counsels Francis X. Mancuso and John T. Dooling. Brothers, a tenacious litigator, would handle questioning for the prosecution. Walter Rogers Deuel, with young attorney Joseph Force Crater as his second chair, appeared for the defense.
Waite photographed during a break in the court action. From the Bain News Service, Library of Congress.
All five attorneys sharply stood to attention with almost military precision as Justice Clarence J. Shearn walked into the courtroom. Shearn nodded to the court clerk, William Penney.
“Arthur W. Waite to the bar,” Penney bellowed.
Waite strode into the courtroom with the same long gait he used when stepping onto the tennis court. Tall and lanky, he stood half a head taller than the officer who escorted him from his cell in the Manhattan City Prison, better known by its ominous nickname, the Tombs. He smiled—the signature smile that had opened many doors and even more blouses.
Frank Waite (left) and Warren Waite (right) photographed during Arthur’s trial. From the Bain News Service, Library of Congress.
Clara watched him take his seat and remembered how that smile once made her weak in the knees. Now, the expression just turned her stomach.
Jury selection began promptly at ten o’clock. Crater and Waite whispered to each other while Deuel and Brothers questioned potential jurors about their views on capital punishment and mental instability.
Eventually, the lawyers agreed on the first juror, a fifty-five-year-old mechanical engineer named Robert Neill. Following tradition, Waite stood, faced Neill and listened as the court clerk uttered, “Juror, look upon the defendant. Defendant, look upon the juror.” Awkwardly, the two men eyed each other for a few seconds before Neill took the first seat in the jury box and jury selection continued.
The press made much about Waite’s reaction to the response of one prospective juror, an insurance agent named Robert Irving.
“Mr. Irving, are you opposed to capital punishment?” Mr. Brothers asked.
“Not in a case like this. I am very much in favor of it.”135
Acutely aware of the alienists in the audience, Waite laughed aloud, so loud, in fact, that everyone in the courtroom—including Justice Shearn—turned and stared at him. From the outset, it appeared, Waite was going to try for some type of insanity defense.
When Irving expressed his disgust with how the courts treated criminals such as Waite and said he would not be inclined “to show this prisoner any leniency whatever,” the court thanked him for his time, dismissed him and called the next candidate.
By one o’clock, the lawyers had managed to empanel a jury. Although Brothers and Deuel questioned fifty-six potential jurors, jury selection took just three hours—the fastest of any trial in the long history of criminal law in New York City.136
Robert Neill would preside as foreman over a group that included a merchant, a building superintendent, a secretary, an entrepreneur, an insurance agent, two brokers, an accountant, a manager, an electrical engineer, a real estate agent and a writer.137 Only two of the jurors were unmarried, which Deuel feared might harm his playboy client’s case, and only three of the jurors were under forty.
After jury selection, Shearn adjourned for lunch.
The afternoon session opened with Swann’s thirty-five-minute summary of the prosecution’s evidence.
Warren and Frank Waite watched the proceedings from the front row in the gallery.138 Nervous, Warren fidgeted—a gesture carefully described by the New York Herald correspondent. “The father’s gnarled hands, hands that worked hard that the son might be educated, clinched and the fingers laced and interlaced themselves, his wrinkled features working in suppressed emotion as District Attorney Swann in plain colors painted the horrid picture of the son’s heartless and sordid crime.”139
Percy, who wore a black arm band, and Ella, in a black taffeta dress, glared at Waite from their spot in the gallery as Swann approached the jury to give his opening statement.
The district attorney waltzed over to the jury box, took a deep breath and began.
“Gentlemen of the jury, we have the trial of an indictment for murder in the first degree against the defendant, Arthur Warren Waite. That indictment charges him with the murder of his father-in-law, John E. Peck, on the twelfth day of March, 1916. The criminal agency alleged in that indictment is the use of arsenic.”
Waite listened, his head drooping slightly, as Swann addressed the jury. Although still smiling, Waite’s pale complexion betrayed his appearance of suave indifference.
Swann outlined the state’s case. After giving a brief biography of the man in the dock, he detailed Waite’s scheme to murder his father-in-law to gain control over his wife’s inheritance—a plot that inclu
ded “live cultures” of “typhoid and pneumonia, diphtheria and other deadly diseases” that he mixed into John Peck’s food and ninety grains of arsenic that he stirred into cups of tea and eggnog. The coup de grace, Swann noted, was a chloroform-soaked handkerchief and a pillow.
The district attorney had clearly made an impression on the defendant. The Evening Telegram reporter described Waite during the DA’s opening: “As Mr. Swann’s address continued Waite’s appearance underwent a decided change. From the cheerful, carefree and erect young man of the forenoon session, he drooped visibly. His head sank forward so that his gaze rested on the table before him. The color faded from his face, leaving it deathly pale. The relatives of the dentist were affected visibly. Warren Waite, of Grand Rapids, father of the defendant, was seen to brush away tears.”140
As for motive, Swann said, it was all done “for the purpose of obtaining money.” He placed both hands on the rail, leaned forward and scanned the faces of the jurors. “Now gentlemen, that is the case of the People.”141 He bowed his head slightly and returned to his seat.
Court clerk William Penney announced the first witness in a booming voice that filled the courtroom: “Dr. Albertus Adair Moore.” Throughout Swann’s opening address, Clara Peck’s nerves frayed. As Moore walked to the witness stand, she retreated from the courtroom, disappearing through a side door.
As the physician who attended John Peck, Dr. Moore described the various visits he made to the Coliseum apartment and John Peck’s seemingly minor illness.
During the first visit on March 5, Peck appeared fine except for a mild case of indigestion, which Peck attributed to eating oysters or “something that disagreed with him.” Two days later, on March 7, he returned because Clara had become alarmed when Peck fainted in the bathroom. Dr. Moore, however, noticed nothing unusual except a slightly elevated heartbeat.
Dr. Moore dropped in on Peck over the next two days, but his patient still suffered from a bad case of diarrhea, so Moore put him on a diet and told the Waites that they could give him an occasional shot of brandy or whiskey.142 Peck’s pulse was a little rapid, but his temperature was normal.
Two days later, at about noon on Saturday, March 11, Dr. Moore saw John Peck alive for the last time. Except for the same slightly rapid pulse, he appeared in good condition. He complained about cabin fever and wanted to get outside. Moore assured him that if he felt better the next day, he could go out for a walk or a ride.
Waite, Moore said, was very anxious about John Peck’s condition. Waite, Moore recalled, “asked me if I thought he [Peck] was in any serious condition, and I said, ‘No, I think he will soon be out again.’”
Late that night, five minutes before one o’clock on Sunday morning, a ringing telephone jarred Dr. Moore from a deep slumber. It was Waite. “I have been trying to get you for some little time,” Waite said. “Mr. Peck—I am afraid something has happened to Mr. Peck. It seems to me that he has died.”
Moore was stunned by the news. “My Lord, doctor, surely nothing serious has happened,” he remarked. He couldn’t believe it and suggested Waite return and check Peck’s pulse again while he waited on the line. “I held the wire,” Moore explained, “and he came back and said that he was afraid that the worst had happened.”
Moore got dressed and went to the Coliseum, arriving at about 1:45 a.m.
Waite met him at the door. “There is no change in his condition?” Moore asked. “No, I think he has gone,” Waite responded.
At this point in Moore’s testimony, Waite had grown tired and began to doze, but Joseph Force Crater prodded him. The incident didn’t escape notice by a New York Herald reporter. “Mr. Crater,” he wrote in his notebook, “touched his [Waite’s] elbow and he started like a sleepy man does in church when he is caught napping.”143
Brothers then asked Moore to recall statements he heard Waite make to Detective Cunniff about purchasing arsenic at John Peck’s request. Deuel shot from his seat and screamed, “Objection!” After a heated exchange, Shearn allowed the question to stand.
“He said, in answer to a question,” Dr. Moore recalled, “that he had not given Mr. Peck the arsenic; that the old man, as he expressed it, the old man must have taken it himself because he did not want to live.”144
As Moore stepped down from the witness box, Justice Shearn glanced at his pocket watch. It was five o’clock, so he decided to adjourn for the day. Before dismissing the jury, Shearn warned them: “During this trial, I will not ask you gentlemen to refrain from reading the newspaper. I am not going to put you in the custody of the sheriff. I will put you on your honor, so that you may go about your business. If anyone speaks to you about this trial you are to report the fact to me.”145
Moore’s testimony provided the perfect opening act for the prosecution, and everyone was curious about how Waite’s defense would attempt to use alleged insanity to sidestep a death sentence.
As the parties withdrew from the courtroom, a reporter overheard one of Swann’s assistants speculate about Waite’s likely insanity defense: “There is no such thing as impulsive insanity. As the name implies, its victims commit crimes on impulses beyond their control. ‘Compulsive insanity,’ I believe, will be held up as opposed to impulsive—the victim being driven to crime by stress of circumstance.”146
That evening, while Waite whiled away the hours in his Tombs cell, Clara agreed to an interview with a New York Tribune reporter. She asked as many questions as the reporter. She wanted to know how Arthur’s father was doing, but she didn’t ask a single question about Arthur, which struck the reporter as odd.
“I do not feel even curious about him,” Clara explained. “It isn’t that the man I loved is gone, it’s that he never lived. That is what is hardest of all.”
Clara said that even when the evidence began to pile up, she stayed by her man. Eventually, though, she had to admit his guilt. “I had just a little more than three months of married life, and I was happy every moment.” She smiled. “Arthur was a wonderful lover. Think of awaking from a dream like that to such a terrible reality.”
Clara was particularly interested in Margaret Horton. She had more in common with “Mrs. Walters” than she cared to admit. Both had been charmed into an embarrassing situation by Arthur Warren Waite’s irresistible smile. Both shared a childlike naïveté that made them putty in the hands of a gifted con man like Waite. Clara spent most of her youth in the sheltered world of the wealthy, prompting Dr. Perry Schurtz to characterize her as a fourteen-year-old when it came to worldly sophistication. Margaret, according to Harry Mack Horton, was a dove among the predatory crows of New York.
“Tell me what she looks like,” Clara pleaded. She listened intently as the reporter described the attractive singer.
“I knew she must be pretty. I couldn’t have believed that there could have been another woman in Arthur’s life,” she remarked. “He said his one thought was to please me, and to be a better husband.”
Arthur, Clara went on, was a good husband, and despite what appeared in the papers about their courtship, Arthur was her choice as well as her mother’s. She really did love him, she explained, and then, like a little girl showing off her prize, she asked the reporter one last question: “Isn’t he good looking?”147
After a good night’s rest in the Tombs, Waite returned to the courtroom on Tuesday morning, May 23, 1916, with a bounce in his step. He pranced into the courtroom with the sang-froid of a man who just stepped onto the tennis court for a friendly match.
“Dr. Waite,” an Evening Telegram reporter commented, “entered the court room jauntily, briskly, marching a few steps ahead of the two deputy sheriffs who had him in custody. He seated himself vigorously at the counsel table, shaking hands with his counsel, Walter R. Deuel and Joseph Crater, and nodding cheerily to Warren Waite, his father, and Frank Waite, his brother.”148
The gallery was filled to capacity with friends, family, reporters and a few curious observers who managed to find seats, which wasn’t easy
. “The cordon of police officers at the door,” noted the Evening Telegram correspondent, “kept away most of those who applied for admission.” Among the new faces in the crowd were several witnesses for the prosecution and a few friends and family members who didn’t sit in on the first day of the trial. Catherine Peck sat next to her nephew Percy and his wife. “All were dressed in deep mourning,” the Evening Telegram correspondent commented.
Majestic edifice of the City Prison, better known by its ominous nickname, the Tombs. From the Detroit Publishing Company, Library of Congress.
Swann devoted the morning session to medical testimony designed to show that Waite first poisoned John Peck with a fatal amount of arsenic and then, becoming impatient, finished the job by smothering him.
Dr. Victor C. Vaughn, the dean of the University of Michigan’s Medical School in Ann Arbor, took the stand. As the doctor sat down, an assistant placed two jars containing organs removed from John Peck’s body. This delighted the members of the press, who jotted descriptions of the morbid evidence in their notebooks while Vaughn testified about his discovery of arsenic in John Peck’s remains.
Vaughn then held up a vial of pink-colored fluid he received from Dr. Otto H. Schultze. This, he explained, was the fluid Kane used in embalming John Peck, and it contained no arsenic. This piece of evidence destroyed any possible defense that the presence of poison was a result of the embalmer’s work.149
Dr. Otto H. Schultze, “medical assistant to the district attorney of New York County,” testified after Vaughn. He described the second autopsy done on John Peck’s remains in the “autopsy room” of Sprattler’s mortuary in Grand Rapids. He removed the brain, the remainder of the intestines and the throat structures. He placed them in jars and sent them to Dr. Stanley Benedict, a chemistry professor at Cornell University.
Poisoning the Pecks of Grand Rapids Page 11