Poisoning the Pecks of Grand Rapids

by Tobin T. Buhk

  Waite glanced at the courtroom ceiling like a bored student. Warren Waite didn’t share his son’s indifference. Tears streamed down his face as he listened to Dr. Karpas discuss his son’s depravity.

  Waite, Dr. Karpas testified, openly laughed when he described his attempts to murder Catherine Peck. When he detailed his various attempts to murder John Peck, he did it with frankness and without a hint of emotion. “[A]t this examination, the lack of moral sense was very striking,” Dr. Karpas said. “There was no feeling whatever, particularly when he discussed his crime.”179

  Shearn interrupted Dr. Karpas’s narrative to adjourn court for the noon recess.

  At 2:00 p.m., Dr. Karpas returned to the stand to hear Deuel’s five-thousand-word hypothetical question. The question, which took Deuel thirty-five minutes to read, detailed all of Waite’s alleged wrongdoing going back to his childhood. Deuel had an ulterior motive; he wanted to catalogue Waite’s numerous indiscretions for the jury. The underlying question, buried in layers of alleged wrongdoing, was simple: was Arthur Warren Waite of sound mind, and if not, what ailed him?

  “He was suffering from moral imbecility,” Dr. Karpas explained, “or otherwise known as moral insanity, or, by still others, moral idiocy—all synonymous for the same disease.” He defined “moral imbecility” as “an abnormal mental condition characterized by lack of willpower and lack of feeling,” which, he noted, was “a congenital condition.”180

  Brothers cross-examined Dr. Karpas. He began by asking Dr. Karpas to detail his experience with examining murderers. Karpas admitted that Waite was the first criminal he had formally examined, although he had seen two other criminals in Bellevue.

  Brothers then rattled off a sequence of questions about Waite’s attempts to cover his tracks and his evident motive—money—but Dr. Karpas stuck to his diagnosis. All of Waite’s actions, he believed, could be seen as those of a man with a warped mentality. He didn’t want Waite to go free but felt that Waite needed to go to Matteawan, not Sing Sing.181

  Penney summoned Deuel’s second mental health expert, Dr. Allen R. Dieffendorf.

  Like his colleague, Dr. Dieffendorf visited Waite in the Tombs and listened to a few shocking admissions. Waite said after Hannah Peck’s death, he rifled through the clothes on her body and stole eighty dollars. He also said his interest in medicine was for the sole purpose of completing his scheme of murdering the Pecks. Each time Waite had admitted to something shocking, Dr. Dieffendorf said, he laughed heartily.

  After three interviews with Waite, Dieffendorf arrived at the same conclusion as his colleague: Waite suffered from moral imbecility. “It seemed to me that he was entirely devoid of emotions or feeling,” he said.182

  When Dr. Dieffendorf left the stand, court was adjourned for the day. It was a fortuitous break for Deuel; the last thing the jury heard was the insistence of his experts that Waite lacked the moral sense of a “normal” man.

  14

  VERDICT

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  Saturday, May 27, 1916

  The psychological debate continued on Saturday morning when Swann called three rebuttal witnesses: mental health experts Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe, Dr. William Mabon and Dr. Menas Gregory.

  Waite, according to Dr. Jelliffe, “was a great deal of a poseur,” who “would distinctly endeavor to fabricate, or to exaggerate, and endeavor to mislead” throughout his examinations. Waite didn’t want to acknowledge the enormity of the trouble he was in, but this was characteristic of others in the same boat. “In my opinion, he was sane,” Dr. Jelliffe concluded.183

  Dr. William Mabon followed his colleague to the stand and testified about the four interviews he conducted with Waite. Like Jelliffe, he saw nothing that convinced him the defendant was anything other than sane. When Deuel asked him about Waite’s affect during the trial—his constant smiling while on the witness stand—Mabon said he thought Waite was putting on a show.

  For his last expert witness, Brothers called Dr. Gregory, supervisor of Bellevue Hospital’s “psychopathic, alcoholic and prison services.” Like Dieffendorf and Mabon, Dr. Gregory concluded that Waite was sane and well aware of the consequences of his actions when he murdered John Peck. He also believed that Waite was attempting to fake insanity. During Deuel’s brief cross, however, Dr. Gregory characterized Waite as a “born criminal” who had a faulty moral sense.

  After Deuel finished his cross of Dr. Gregory, he returned to his table, took a long sip from a glass of water and approached the jury box to begin his closing argument.

  Walter Deuel’s remarks consumed forty minutes. He characterized the conflicting testimony of the alienists as “a crisis” but suggested that no man who did what Waite admitted to doing could be considered sane. “As to his moral sense,” he asked, “how can anybody do the things that he did, do the repeated acts that he did, looking to kill a human being and have any moral sense whatsoever—any idea as to his duties toward society?”

  Would a man with “moral sense” put water in John Peck’s rubbers and dampen his bedsheets in an attempt to weaken his immune system so the germs would work more efficiently? Would such a man administer ninety grains of arsenic when a fatal dose was two and a half to four? If Waite was sane, Deuel pointed out, then why would he do things like sign the poison register in his own name? “Is there any coordination of thought in a mind that will operate like that?”

  And then, Deuel noted, there was his affect on the stand—smiling when he described unthinkable acts like inducing diarrhea with heavy doses of calomel, chloroforming and then smothering Peck with a pillow.

  Deuel ended with one final plea: “Would you have it upon your conscience to send an idiot to the chair, a person without understanding whatsoever, a lunatic, a child of tender years? I think not.” Deuel returned to his chair and watched as Brothers began his concluding argument.184

  George Brothers walked over to the jury box, leaned on the rail and began his closing remarks. He characterized Waite as a man trapped by the overwhelming evidence of his guilt and who turned to an insanity plea as a last resort.

  “This defendant says himself he was not insane,” Brothers pointed out, “that he never was insane.” He scanned the faces of the jurors. “However, two other individuals have come temporarily from their obscure positions, and come here before you gentlemen in a vain attempt to put something over,” Brothers said, implying that Deuel had treated them like fools.

  Waite’s premeditation, Brothers said, was evident in the details. The murder took place on a Sunday, when Waite knew that all official government departments—including the DA’s office—would be closed. Both Hannah and John Peck died “in the middle of the night,” and their bodies were taken from the city on Sunday afternoon.

  Then, Brothers noted, there were Waite’s many attempts to cover up his crime: the attempted cremation, the alleged $25,000 bribe to Kane and a Machiavellian maneuver to visit Swann’s office to offer his help and thus throw off any suspicion of him. “Does an innocent man prepare a defense before he is accused?” Brothers asked, pausing for the jurors to think about the statement.

  Father Hans B. Schmidt, a priest who clandestinely married housekeeper Anna Aumüller in New York City. When he discovered she was pregnant, he slit her throat. Despite an attempt to feign insanity during his subsequent trial, a jury convicted him of first-degree murder. He died in Sing Sing’s electric chair on February 18, 1916. Newspapers covering the Waite case often compared Waite’s insanity defense with that of Schmidt. From the Bain News Service, Library of Congress.

  Anna Aumüller, circa 1913. From the Bain News Service, Library of Congress.

  The Bridge of Sighs, circa 1905. Waite passed across this bridge from his cell in the Tombs to the criminal courts building, where his trial took place. From the Detroit Publishing Company, Library of Congress.

  Waite, Brothers noted, then tried to take the coward’s way out of his fix, “and that poor little woman, Mrs. Horton, whom this defendant, by h
is devilish wiles and ingenuity, tempted away from her own home, and probably has ruined her life, was the one that he got to go and buy the poison with which to take his life. He could buy poison for the Pecks but not for himself. This alone is positive proof that this defendant had a full realization that he had committed crime.” Brothers smiled. “Suicide is confession of guilt,” he said.

  Brothers looked at Waite, who smirked. Disgusted, Brothers pointed to the defendant. “The same smile, gentlemen, that won Mr. Peck and Mrs. Peck and Aunt Kate and all his friends and acquaintances. It is the friend that got him out of trouble in South Africa and Mackinac Island. Shall a smile be a defense? Shall we turn loose this moral pestilence upon the streets again because of a smile?” Brothers asked in concluding.185

  In his lengthy remarks to the jury, Justice Shearn addressed the notion of “moral imbecility.”

  “Gentlemen of the jury: No such plea as ‘moral imbecility’ is admissible under our law. It may be well known in medicine, but it is not known to the law.” The idea of “moral depravity as a defense,” Shearn explained, had been recently debated by the Court of Appeals in the Hans Schmidt case and rejected. Shearn read a relevant portion of the court’s decision.186

  After his instructions, at about 1:20 p.m., Justice Shearn sent the jurors off to deliberate.

  Meanwhile, officers escorted Waite across the Bridge of Sighs to the Tombs, where he awaited the verdict in his cell, number 138. He chomped down a piece of chocolate cake, quaffed down a mug of coffee and whistled a few tunes before striking up a conversation with a fellow inmate.

  Frank Waite waited with his brother. “Maybe they will find you not guilty,” he said, although the flat tone of his statement belied his true belief about the verdict.

  “No,” Arthur said without emotion. “I’m guilty.”187

  Just a little over an hour later, Waite received word: after only eighty-three minutes, including a break for lunch, the jury had reached a verdict.

  At 2:45 p.m., a crowd of curious news reporters, including Robert Rohde, gathered in Justice Shearn’s courtroom to witness the climax of Waite’s historic trial. From jury selection to verdict, the trial consumed only five days—a dubious record in the lengthy annals of New York City crime. The 1892 trial of Carlyle Harris, who fed his wife an overdose of morphine, lasted fourteen days. The 1912 trial of Charles Becker, the New York cop who faced a jury for murdering a gambler, took sixteen days.188

  Rohde watched as Arthur Warren Waite walked into the courtroom. It was the closest Rohde, or any other member of the press, had come to the defendant since the trial began.

  During the trial, Dr. Waite had simply stopped speaking to reporters. Correspondents from every major newspaper sent notes requesting interviews, but everyone received a curt reply: “Nothing to say.” Waite’s tight lips prompted Rohde to characterize him as one of “the most ungettable prisoners the Tombs ever held.” Rohde wanted to inspect some of the poetry Waite had authored while in jail, but like the others, Waite just turned him away.

  Then, just before Waite walked back across the Bridge of Sighs to hear the jury’s verdict, he jotted a quick note and asked Deuel to deliver it to the herd of reporters that was gathering at the courthouse. He would not sit for interviews at the time, Waite explained in the note, but he was writing down “his impressions” and would perhaps speak to them later.

  For Rohde, this enigmatic statement explained why Waite had suddenly and inexplicably stopped talking to the press. “It was one way of serving notice,” Rohde later explained, “that the days of free copy provided by Arthur Warren Waite were over—an invitation for bids.”189 Waite, it appeared, would make one last attempt to profit from his scheme.

  With a spring in his step, Waite walked past his father, who sat in the gallery next to his other two sons, Frank and Clyde. He took his seat next to Crater and Deuel.

  “Will the prisoner please stand?” William Penney commanded. Waite stood, emotionless, and stared at the floor. “Gentlemen of the jury,” Penney asked, “have you agreed upon a verdict?”

  Jury foreman Robert Neill stood, straightened his jacket and said, “Yes.”

  “What say you, gentlemen, is the defendant guilty or not guilty?”

  “Guilty as charged,” Neill said.190

  Clara Louise Peck fainted. Warren Waite buried his face in his hands and began to sob, tears running down his cheeks. But Arthur remained apparently unaffected. The word “guilty,” a New York Tribune writer commented, had no more effect on Waite’s emotions than “a pin prick on the skin of a side show ossified man.”191

  As Waite left the packed courtroom, he was still smiling but paler in complexion. He shuffled past his father and brothers without so much as glancing at them.

  Warren Waite virtually collapsed. He leaned on Frank’s arm as they left the courtroom. “What can I say? What can I say? My heart is broken,” he uttered as he hobbled past the Sun correspondent.192

  Clara Peck couldn’t quite avoid the reporters, who raced over to her as soon as Waite was escorted from the court back to his Tombs cell. She stated, “You must excuse me. I have no desire to discuss the verdict, except to say it is awful.”

  George Brothers, standing next to Clara, characterized the verdict as the only logical decision. “The evidence was overwhelming,” he commented.

  With a hint of sarcasm in his voice, Walter Deuel gave a brief statement. “As long as the jury would not take into consideration our plea of insanity,” Deuel said, “it was a fair verdict. Under the statutes, the verdict was just and proper.”193

  Swann, reticent of the press, uttered a solitary line: “The jury has said the last word.”194

  After the trial, a New York Tribune writer cornered one of the jurors, who described the deliberations. “When he smiled on the stand, Waite signed his own death warrant. Coupled with the horrible story he was reciting to us, it was ghastly,” the unnamed juror explained. “Waite used to make friends with that smile. We in the jury box knew why he was smiling. He was looking for sympathy, trying to persuade some single one of us to hold out against the chair. That had been his game from the first.”

  In the end, concluded the Tribune writer, it wasn’t the mass of evidence presented by the prosecution that damned Waite, “it was the dentist’s own friendly grin which convicted him.”195

  By Thursday morning, June 1, 1916, Arthur Warren Waite had become irritated with the restrictions that prison authorities had placed on him. The better part of the week had passed as he awaited sentencing, scheduled for later that morning.

  He leered at the guard as he slurped his breakfast with a spoon.

  “I understand that you have a triple guard watching me,” he growled as he noticed Tombs warden John Hanley approach his cell. “It isn’t necessary. I will do nothing to commit suicide. I won’t even make an attempt upon my life. It is perfectly safe to let me have a knife and fork with my food instead of making me eat with a spoon.”196 He had endured such restrictions for three days.

  Hanley smirked, which irritated Waite, but he knew that he had spent his last night in the Tombs. Later that morning, the court would go through the formality of sentencing. Afterward, he expected, they would transport him to Sing Sing’s death house.

  In his Tombs cell, Waite had tried to maintain his bravado throughout the week, but his façade had begun to crack. While Waite always grinned around others, the guards noticed behavior that suggested he wasn’t as calm as he seemed. More and more he read from the Bible, penciled passages from it onto notebook paper and refused to speak to reporters. Instead, he had issued a brief public statement. “I don’t want to see anyone,” Waite said. “I want to be left alone with my Bible. From now until the day I go into the chair I will devote myself to my Bible.”197

  The pressure was clearly getting to Arthur Warren Waite.

  Fearing that Waite might try to cheat the hangman, Tombs authorities had taken precautions. On Monday morning, they took away his knife and fork,
which led to a false rumor that Waite had tried to kill himself.198

  After breakfast, Waite broke his official silence. Just before crossing the Bridge of Sighs for sentencing, he issued a formal statement to the press.

  “I want to go to Sing Sing as soon as I can, the sooner the better. I am not looking for sympathy. I am guilty, and the public knows it. I reiterate that I want no appeal from the verdict the jury made for me. I wish that Thursday was here now, so that the formality of sentencing would be over. I don’t want anyone to be sorry for me. I am ready to pay with my own life for the one I took. I knew what I did when I killed Mr. Peck and I am ready to pay the penalty, the sooner the better.”199

  Waite also said he wanted nothing to do with an appeal. “[It] would simply mean a prolongation of an unpardonable crime. The first time I see my attorney I will instruct him not to take an appeal.”

  He then addressed the ultimate punishment: “I have done wrong and should be punished for it. I am anxious to go to the chair. I will go with my head erect and will not flinch from the penalty the law justly prescribes for such a crime as I committed.”200

  The sentencing was short and to the point. Waite sat and listened as Deuel made several futile motions, which took Shearn mere seconds to deny. As William Penney instructed, the now-convicted slayer stood to hear the court’s sentencing.

  Sing Sing prison, circa 1915. From the Bain News Service, Library of Congress.

  “Arthur Warren Waite, indicted as Arthur W. Waite,” Penney asked, “have you any legal cause to show why judgment of death should not now be pronounced against you?”

  Waite looked at Justice Shearn. “May I say a few words, Your Honor?”

  “Yes,” Shearn responded.

  Waite praised the court, his counsel Walter Deuel and even George Brothers for the “conscientiousness” with which he did “his duty by society” in prosecuting the case. “And then I would like to say, if I may,” Waite added, “that I cannot undo the wrong that I have done. I realize fully what it is. To some of the people the wrong is far beyond asking forgiveness. That would be humanly impossible. I simply would like to say that I am glad, very glad, to give my body in expiation, if it may, in any small degree, make up or rectify in their minds that hurt which I have done them.”