The Linda Wolfe Collection
Page 85
p. 243 “‘Joy’s not that young!’” to “murder her”: Interview with Joan Wachtler, July 16, 1993.
p. 244 “‘How could someone as intelligent as you fall for that crap?’”: Interview with Joan Wachtler, July 16, 1993.
p. 244 “maybe he’d enjoyed seeing someone who could be such a bitch”: Interview with SW, July 16, 1993.
pp. 244–45 “Dr. Solomon was still seeing Sol twice a week” to “You bet there was”: Interview with Sanford Solomon, M.D., Sept. 26, 1993.
p. 245 The party at Tavern on the Green: “To State Judges, He’s Sol Right,” New York Post, June 30, 1993.
p. 246 “What’s the matter with those guys?” to “effectively done violence to a mother and a daughter”: Michael Chertoff, remarks before Judge Anne Thompson at the sentencing of SW, Sept. 9, 1993.
pp. 246–47 “thick packet of materials” to “‘highest aspirations of our Judeo-Christian culture’”: Stillman, Sent. Memo. of SW.
p. 247 “Stillman wasn’t sure it was a good idea”: Interview with Charles Stillman, Aug, 17, 1993.
p. 248 “The New York Times … pointed out”: “Seeking Leniency Ex-Judge Wachtler Blames Adversaries,” New York Times, Sept. 5, 1993.
pp. 248–55 “On September 9, a dank and gloomy day” to “federal correctional institution in Pensacola”: Observations and quotations from author’s attendance at sentencing, Sept. 9, 1993.
p. 255 “‘It’ll be all right’” to “grabbed a handkerchief: Interview with Sanford Solomon, M.D., Sept. 26, 1993.
p. 255 “‘With Sol Wachtler’s sentencing today … victimize women and children’”: “Silverman: ‘Message Has Been Sent,’” Newsday, Sept. 10, 1993.
pp. 255–56 “‘Joy’s an avaricious person.… And she wanted more, from my husband’”: Cindy Adams, “Dad Gets the Rap for the Way Joy ‘Destroys’ Men,” New York Post, Sept. 10, 1993. Interestingly, Joan Wachtler makes an error about the number of JS’s husbands—there have been three, not two.
p. 256 “‘Joy never knew her father.… One by one’”: Ibid.
p. 256 “‘Teach?’” to “‘be a hero again!’”: Interview with Dick Lavinthol, Nov. 19, 1993.
p. 257 “‘It’s dangerous’” to “‘people with grudges against judges’”: Interview with Sanford Solomon, M.D., Sept. 26, 1993.
EPILOGUE
p. 259 “Sol had been stabbed” to “middle tines removed”: Interview with FBI office in Raleigh. N.C., Nov. 29, 1993 (interview conducted by Jack Bourque).
p. 259 “According to Sol” to “attacked him”: Interview with Sanford Solomon, M.D., Nov. 24, 1993.
p. 259 “the injury appeared to be self-inflicted”: Daily News, Dec. 22, 1993.
p. 260 “Why would he have wanted to hurt himself?” to “He had adjusted”: Interview with Sanford Solomon, M.D., Nov. 24, 1993.
p. 260 “After the stabbing” to “creative writing”: Letter from SW to a friend, dated Apr. 15, 1994.
pp. 260–61 Letter to William Kunstler: “Kunstler’s Fan Mail,” Newsday, Feb. 2, 1994.
p. 261 Letter to Cindy Adams: “Marla Reminisces About Past; Wachtler Leading a Dog’s Life,” New York Post, Apr. 4, 1994.
p. 261 “‘We had met on several occasions’ to ‘will never be again’”: Letter from SW to a friend, dated Apr. 15, 1994. Note: the honorary degree to which SW refers was given not “the summer before last,” which would have been 1992, but in 1991.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There were many people without whose help I could not have brought this book to fruition. First and foremost were those who granted me interviews. I’m grateful to them for permitting me entry into their lives and for sharing with me their individual perspectives on the events recounted here.
I’m also grateful to my two researchers—Naomi Bernstein, whose skill at digging up elusive facts was extraordinary; and Jack Bourque, whose persistence in tracking down elusive individuals was exemplary—and to my brother, Alan Friedman, who read an early draft of the manuscript and offered invaluable suggestions.
In addition, I want to thank Michael Kelly, who patiently transcribed the tapes of my interviews; Risha Rosner, reference librarian of the Great Neck Public Library; and Cathryn Lopiccolo, executive editior of Washington and Lee University’s newspaper, The Ring-turn Phi.
Friends kept me going and provided me with precious leads. Among those who were especially helpful were Pat Baer, Mary De Bourbon, Judith Ehrlich, Lee Gruzen, Mike Kandel, Thelma Kandel, Dr. Helen Kaplan, Dick Laupat, Deborah Mitchell, Tully Plesser, Caroline Stoessinger, and Jo Thomson. But there were many others without whose contacts, insights, and encouragement this would have been a far less worthy book.
Finally, I want to thank my husband Max Pollack, who unstintingly shared with me his psychological wisdom.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Most of the information in this book was obtained from interviews. In the back of the book, there are detailed notes identifying and commenting on sources, and the reader is urged to consult them.
The use of dialogue in conversations comes from at least one participant or from written documents. In the narrative, when someone is said to have “thought” or to have “believed” something, that assertion has been obtained from the person in question or from some source who gained direct knowledge of the person’s thoughts and beliefs from a conversation with that person.
The Murder of Dr. Chapman
The Legendary Trials of Lucretia Chapman and Her Lover
To Larry Weisman
Contents
1 Bucks County, Pennsylvania • June 1831
2 Cape Cod and Philadelphia • 1804–1818
3 Marriage • 1819–1828
4 Lino • 1829–1830
5 Bucks County, Pennsylvania • June 1831
6 Betrayal • July 1831
7 Departures • August–Mid-September 1831
8 Friends and Foes • Late September-Early December 1831
9 Pennsylvania v. Lucretia Chapman, Part One Mid-December 1831–Mid-February 1832
10 Pennsylvania v. Lucretia Chapman, Part Two February 22–25, 1832
11 “Yesterday I Was a Wonder” • April–June 1832
Epilogue
Endnotes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
O, what may man within him hide
Though angel on the outward side.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Measure for Measure
One
Bucks County, Pennsylvania
June 1831
EARLY ON THE MORNING of June 19, 1831, Dr. John Phillips, one of the most highly regarded physicians in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, was awakened in his Bristol home by a persistent banging on his front door. Phillips arose reluctantly. It was a Sunday, and he’d hoped to sleep until it was time for church. God knew he needed some rest. But he wasn’t like some of the doctors who were practicing nowadays, the kind who put their own needs first and turned away patients when being called upon didn’t suit them. Some of those shirkers didn’t even have diplomas. Others had them, but from places he’d never heard of, and as far as he was concerned, if a doctor hadn’t been trained as he was, at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, he had no use for him, none whatsoever.
Still sleepy, he threw off his covers and peered out the bedroom window to see who was making the commotion. It was Mina, that Spanish or Mexican fellow who was boarding at the home of his good friend Dr. William Chapman. A handsome fellow, with olive skin and deep-set anthracite eyes. Tiny, though. But many men looked small to the six-foot-tall Dr. Phillips.
Bounding downstairs on his long legs, he let the foreigner in and, hoping the clamor hadn’t disturbed his wife and children, asked him who was sick. One of the Chapmans’ children? One of their students? William and his wife ran a boarding school at which Lucretia taught reading, writing, and comportment, mostly to young ladies, though she had a few male pupils, too, and William gave speech lessons to stammerers
who sought him out from all over the country, and even from Europe.
In a torrent of garbled English, the foreigner began answering Phillips’s questions. He was difficult to understand, but after a while the doctor was able to gather that it was William who was sick. He’d been throwing up since Friday night.
Nothing unusual about that, Phillips thought. It was almost summer. Cholera morbus time. In the warm months people frequently came down with that nasty stomach affliction that made them regurgitate all they ate and turned their stool to water. There wasn’t much a doctor could do—just wait till it subsided, which it almost always did.
Still, according to the Mexican, Lucretia Chapman was insisting he come over and have a look at William. So Phillips dressed himself, got into his carriage, and followed the voluble man over to the Chapman house, which was ten miles away in the town of Andalusia.
When he arrived, Lucretia and William’s brood of five children and half a dozen or so of their students were just finishing breakfast. Lucretia, looking harried, was serving them herself. Her housekeeper, she explained, had recently quit.
She was a striking woman, buxom and almost as tall as Phillips himself, with pleasing features and a cascade of fashionably bobbing reddish-brown curls, a head of hair that belied her profession. She offered him some food, but he declined and went upstairs to look at the patient.
William was pale, his corpulent body so flabby and white that, lying in the middle of the big marital bedstead, he looked like a beached whale, and the bedstead itself like an island in an archipelago of beds. It was surrounded by a scattering of the trundle beds the Chapmans used to accommodate very young students.
He felt weak, William said to Phillips. He’d been vomiting copiously. Could it be because of the pork he’d had for both dinner and supper on Friday?
William wasn’t a medical doctor. He was a scientist, but he’d taken a few courses at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. Phillips respected him. He told Chapman it could have been the pork, but most likely it was cholera morbus, the cause of which no one could say precisely.
Cholera morbus wasn’t the same ailment as cholera, the virulent bacterial disease of the intestinal tract that was, even as William lay sick, advancing relentlessly from its birthplace in India across the European continent. Phillips had heard about that deadly Asiatic cholera, which in a year would reach the shores of America and produce one of the most frightening epidemics the young country had ever known. But on this bright June morning in 1831, cholera, with its notorious ability to kill within hours after delivering its first symptoms, had yet to cross the Atlantic, and cholera morbus was not a killer. Indeed, it generally got better in just a few days. After examining William, Phillips prescribed a light diet.
His plump friend was well enough to be annoyed by that recommendation. “A beefsteak,” William said testily, “would do me more good than anything else.”
But Phillips was adamant that he eat lightly. He directed Lucretia to feed William rice gruel. And chicken soup. He might even have a little of the chicken with which she made the soup. “Not much,” he advised. But the broth would be very good for him. “He may eat plenty of that.”
Phillips was busy the next few days. He had a great many patients, spread out over the entire area of lower Bucks County, and he was the consultant of choice among the county’s medical men, the doctor they turned to when they had particularly difficult cases. But on Tuesday, after hearing that William Chapman was still sick, he made up his mind he’d drive to Andalusia the next day and check on him again.
When he got there on Wednesday Lucretia informed him, to his surprise, that William had been so violently ill the night before that she’d called in another doctor, his colleague Allen Knight. Knight had given the Chapmans the same diagnosis Phillips had: cholera morbus. He’d also given them a prescription for calomel drops. But she and William had objected to the drops, Lucretia said. Calomel was a purgative, and William didn’t need any more purging. What he needed was for the purging to stop. And it hadn’t. He was purging himself constantly now.
Phillips went upstairs to have a look for himself, and he realized at once that William was considerably worse. His limbs felt cold and clammy. His pulse was barely perceptible. His skin was discolored—a rash of dark spots had sprouted under his eyes and alongside his ears. More, he seemed to have gone entirely deaf. He kept asking anxiously, his brow a web of taut lines, whether he was going to recover. But when Phillips tried to explain his condition to him, he couldn’t understand a word.
Get me a slate, Phillips directed Lucretia.
She brought him one from a classroom, and he chalked out an opinion. William couldn’t read the words. He couldn’t get his eyes to focus.
Worried about the dire turn his friend had taken, Phillips decided to remain at the Chapman house. He ate a quick supper in the dining room, then returned to the sickroom. So did Lucretia. Her boarder and one of William’s older students, a Vermonter, had volunteered to assist with the nursing chores, to apply cold vinegar compresses to William’s aching head and to empty his foul-smelling sick basins. Nevertheless, Phillips noticed, Lucretia was doing most of the chores herself.
Phillips felt sorry for her. She was one of the best educated women in the county. She knew literature, history, even a smattering of science. Knew how to sing and accompany herself on the piano, too. Yet here she was, spending her time bathing a dying man’s clammy limbs, sponging the vomit from his lips, wiping feces off his body and bedclothes. She didn’t seem to mind. She was doing everything most attentively, he noted. Most tenderly.
At midnight she was still up and in the sickroom with him when a neighbor, a crusty farmer, came over to lend a hand. “I’m drowsy,” Lucretia confided to the man, “drowsy from waiting on Mr. Chapman.” Phillips heard her, and when, shortly after she spoke, Dr. Knight stopped by again, Phillips took advantage of the younger doctor’s presence by announcing that he would like to rest for a while and recommending Lucretia do the same.
She accepted his suggestion gratefully, said, “Call me if I’m wanted,” and went into another room to lie down. Phillips lay down, too, stretching out on a mattress in a spare room and falling asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. But around three in the morning he awakened abruptly and hurried into William’s room. What he saw was dismaying. William had fallen into a coma, and his bowels were emitting a bloody discharge.
The end was in sight, Phillips realized. He summoned Lucretia, who woke the children, and the six of them gathered around William’s bedside. In hushed voices the family prayed, while Phillips bent over his friend to monitor his passage from earthly travail. The coma, he noticed, had brought a peaceful look to William’s face. Gone were the traces of anxiety that had marked it earlier. As to his breathing, it was shallow—barely a breath at all. Then, as the first faint grays of the June dawn began to light up the room, he saw that William had stopped breathing.
Straightening up, Phillips glanced worriedly at Lucretia. The poor woman was a widow now. Just forty-three years old and a widow. A widow with five fatherless children to look after. What would become of her? As gently as he could, he told her that her husband was dead.
But dead of what? he wondered. Of cholera morbus? Now that he’d witnessed the appalling progression of William’s disease, he wasn’t entirely sure.
Two
Cape Cod and Philadelphia
1804–1818
THE FIRST TIME LUCRETIA fell in love, she was sixteen. It was up on Cape Cod, where her parents had been born and many of her aunts and uncles still lived. She herself was from Barre Plains, in an inland part of Massachusetts, but she adored the Cape, its gilded northern light, long beaches, and wild ocean that washed the very wharves of the villages and the seaside gardens of her relatives, and her parents often allowed her to spend the warm months there. The spring in question, the spring of 1804, she was visiting her aunts and uncles in Harwich when a boy named Mark Holman began
courting her and telling her how comely she was.
She was comely, auburn-haired, tall, and with the erect bearing of her father, Zenas, who’d been a militia colonel in the Revolution, so pretty that Harwich had chosen her to be its Queen of the May.
As for Mark, he was bright and bold and seventeen. In the middle of the Maypole festivities, the two of them slipped off into the piney woods. They stayed there, blissfully alone, for several hours, and when they returned, there was a terrible commotion among Lucretia’s aunts and uncles. They were Winslows, descendants of the pious Edward Winslow who had helped found America’s first permanent settlement, and the Winslows were famously upstanding. Lucretia’s great-grandfather Kenelm Winslow had been the keeper of the Sabbath peace in Harwich. Her grandfather Thomas Winslow had been both a physician and a judge. Her father had been a justice of the peace, at least before he’d moved to Barre Plains and taken up land surveying. The Winslows didn’t approve of girls going off unchaperoned into the woods. But when Lucretia told the family that she and Mark were figuring to get married, she was forgiven her transgression. Her relatives gave her their blessings, and she went home to her parents and began planning her wedding.
She was grappling with whom to invite, and whether to wear the traditional wedding dress of gray or brown silk, and whether to hold the ceremony up on Cape Cod or in the local Congregational church where Zenas and her mother, Abigail, worshipped, when at summer’s end Mark changed his mind. He sent her a letter saying he didn’t want to get married after all, that instead he wanted to go to college. And he went off to Yale and left her in the lurch.
She was a figure of disgrace after that, not so different from the girl one of her neighbors in nearby Worcester had written about in a book, a girl who was so ashamed at being jilted that she went out and hanged herself. Lucretia wasn’t the type for such a desperate, depressive measure. She lived with her shame, remaining at home, in sight of the twisty road she’d imagined would carry her far away, looking after her younger siblings, and hoping that sooner or later she’d find another young man to love and marry.