The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  She was once again wearing her traveling outfit, but this time Brown had made her hide her russet curls beneath a close-fitting cap and dark silk hood. In her fingers she clutched a fan, fluttering it back and forth despite the cool February weather, as if hoping that by busying herself with it she could stop the trembling of her hands.

  Lino wasn’t trembling or twitching at all. Sporting beneath his frock coat an embroidered shirt and a silk stock ornamented with a gleaming gold pin, he nodded and smiled at the crowd and seemed to be in high good humor.

  As soon as the pair was ensconced in the dock, McDowell raised the issue of separate trials. “My application for separate trials is a mutual one,” he addressed the court. “A juror who would be acceptable to one defendant might be challenged by the other, and in this way, injustice would be done if both were tried together.”

  Thomas Ross objected. “The mode and manner of trial is to be determined by the prosecution,” he reminded the judge, “and if in their opinion the ends of public justice will be defeated by a severance, they have the right of insisting upon a joint trial. We so insist, and say the ends of public justice will be defeated if these defendants are granted separate trials.”

  Samuel Rush was on his feet at once. “If our application is refused, Your Honors, will the defendants have that which the law contemplates—a fair trial? May it please the Court, it is the defendants’ purpose to make war upon each other! They strive, in effect, to cut each other’s throats! But, say the gentlemen of the prosecution, ‘We can’t help that—nay, it is the very thing for us!’ Shall human lives thus be lightly sported with? Lives that can never be given again, if taken in this affair? And is this to come within the discretion of the Attorney General! Sir, the powers of the Attorney General are well laid down and defined. They cannot be transcended. Let him show his right, based upon the incontrovertible law of the land. Until that is done, we protest against it; we desire, first and last, that it may not be granted.”

  Moved by Rush’s eloquence, the judges adjourned the trial for a brief time so that they could consider the merits of each side’s arguments. They left the courtroom and proceeded to their chambers.

  While they were gone, the crowd outside the courthouse kept swelling. Suddenly it surged forward and, like a powerful wave, burst open the courthouse doors, flooding its way into already packed foyers, hallways, and stairwells. By the time the judges returned to the bench, more than six hundred people had fought their way inside, and the building seemed on the verge of collapsing.

  “We can’t proceed!” Judge Fox shouted, and directed police officers to eject the newcomers. They tried, pushing against the crowd with linked arms. But the crowd pushed back, and the struggle continued for over half an hour. Then finally, after enormous exertion, the police succeeded in expelling from the building everyone who did not have a seat in the courtroom.

  In the restored tranquillity, Fox announced the court’s decision. “The prosecution,” he said, “has certified that if separate trials be granted, the ends of public justice will be defeated. To this opinion, we pay great respect. But we do not think it should prevent us from exercising our own discretion. And having been called upon hastily to decide the question, and considering the vast importance to the public interest that if conviction should take place all should be satisfied that the prisoners have had a full, fair and impartial trial, I throw the doubt on the side of the prisoners and direct that they be allowed to have separate trials.”

  At this, the disappointed Ross calculated quickly whose case he should proceed to try. Mina’s? Or Mrs. Chapman’s? He decided in favor of hers. “We would like,” he said to the satisfaction of the remaining spectators, most of whom were far more interested in female than male transgression, “to take up the case of Lucretia Chapman first.”

  That afternoon prospective jurors were examined. They were all men—it would be many years before women would be permitted to sit on juries—and Ross and Brown were soon tangling over how to select them. Ross wanted to ask each candidate if he was opposed to capital punishment and if so, whether he was so opposed to it that his scruples would prevent him finding the defendant guilty of first-degree murder. Brown maintained that to ask such a question would be to subject a juror to “a sort of moral torture.”

  Ross stuck to his position staunchly, observing that if people who under no circumstances would find the defendant guilty were permitted to serve as jurors, “the doors of the prison might just as well be thrown open and the country saved the expense and the trouble of a trial.” But once again Judge Fox came out against him. “It would be inquisitorial,” he ruled, “to compel a juror to show that by reason of conscientious scruples he was disqualified from exercising the all important privilege of serving upon juries.” Additionally, Fox rejected a further request from Ross to automatically exclude Quakers from the jury. Pennsylvania had been founded by the Quaker William Penn, and was heavily populated by members of the Society of Friends, as the Quakers called their denomination. Fox knew that many of the prospective jurors who would be called up today would be members of the Society. But he also was convinced that a man’s being a Quaker didn’t necessarily mean he was opposed to the death penalty. In the 1790s the Pennsylvania legislature, filled with Quakers, had abolished capital punishment for robbery, burglary, and sodomy, and for murders committed during the perpetration of these and other crimes, like rape and arson; nevertheless, it had retained the death penalty for murders that were premeditated. “Opposition to capital punishment,” Fox pronounced, “is not a matter of conscience in the Society of Friends, as a society. Many of its members have such scruples, others have not.”

  That settled, he told Ross and Brown to continue interviewing jurors.

  Obediently, the pair proceeded. They questioned nearly forty people and rejected more than half that number, some because they said they had already formed an opinion about the defendant’s guilt and at least one because on his own and without being forced to provide the information, he told the court that he was opposed to capital punishment. After only a few short hours, the twelveman panel was complete. The men who would pass judgment on Lucretia included the son of a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1790, the organizer of a society that promoted farming, and a prominent merchant of the increasingly popular new fuel, coal; the vast majority of them, including foreman John B. Balderson, were Quakers, observant practitioners of their faith who asked to affirm rather than swear that they would execute their duties faithfully.

  The dramatic structure of a criminal trial was much the same then as now. The prosecution opened the case, detailing the charges against the defendant and foreshadowing the evidence it would present in support of the charges. Next, witnesses for the prosecution were examined, and cross-examined by the defense, which then opened its case, questioned its own witnesses, and turned them over to the prosecution for cross-examination. Later, both sides had the opportunity to call rebuttal witnesses and to try to sway the jury in elaborate closing arguments.

  Those closings and openings, however, were far more pompous in language and melodramatic in style than lawyers’ speeches today. “Gentlemen of the jury,” Ross began the Chapman case immediately after the jury was selected, “The crime of murder has occurred so frequently in this county within the last few years that it is calculated to awaken the fears of the community and to render it imperiously the duty of jurors to carry into execution the laws of the Commonwealth, without regard to the consequences that may follow a verdict of conviction. Scarcely has more than one year passed by since there was placed at this bar a brother charged with having imbrued his hands in the blood of a brother! Now, there is about to be placed upon her trial a wife. Charged with having been the destroyer and murderess of her own husband! The evidence which we shall lay before you will irresistibly lead you to the melancholy truth that the prisoner before the bar is guilty of the offense with which she stands indicted. The evidence will disclose such a scene of p
rofligacy and immorality as has seldom been witnessed in this, or indeed in any other country.”

  As she listened to Ross, Lucretia’s eyes filled with tears. So did the eyes of her children, who were all in the courtroom, sitting alongside their Aunt Mercy and a daughter and son-in-law of Mercy’s. Ross ignored the tears and continued his blistering opening, promising to prove that William Chapman had been poisoned, and that although Lucretia’s lover had been the one to purchase the poison, she herself had put it into her husband’s soup and made sure it worked by neglecting him as he sickened. More, Ross pledged, “We shall lay before you a letter of Mrs. Chapman’s, in which certain expressions are used, which will leave but little doubt upon your mind that they have reference to the crime of which she stands indicted. We shall show you very strong presumptive evidence of her guilt, such as treating her husband with so much cruelty and neglect during his illness that he was induced to complain that he believed his wife wished him gone. Such as flying from the county upon the first intimation that she was suspected. These circumstances will all be proved to you and will, I have no doubt, be sufficient to enable you to render a verdict of guilty.”

  He paused briefly after that, took a breath, and orated, “Blood, though it sleep a time, yet never dies.”

  Promptly the next morning, the prosecution began summoning its witnesses. Ross called first on Mary Palethorpe, who had been attending school at the Chapmans’ the night Lino first arrived there. He directed her to tell the jurors in her own words what she had seen and heard that night, and when she had finished doing so, questioned her about her subsequent observations.

  “They went up to Bonaparte’s,” Mary, twelve years old now, volunteered.

  And was there anything different afterward? Ross asked.

  “I saw Mina and Mrs. Chapman together often.”

  “Under what circumstances?”

  “Mina used to have fits,” Mary replied, speaking in a high-pitched, quavering voice. “He and Mrs. Chapman would go into a room together and shut the door—I don’t know if they closed the windows.”

  Mary’s mother had once advised Lucretia that it would be improper to walk beside Lino at William’s burial. The girl, too, was interested in proper behavior. “I don’t think Mrs. Chapman treated her husband right,” she observed not long before Ross turned her over to the defense for questioning. “She called him a fool one Sunday, as we were going to church.”

  Cross-examining Mary, Brown was gentle. After all, he reasoned, she was just a slip of a girl. To be fierce with her might alienate the jury. But more importantly, she’d said nothing that could possibly hurt Lucretia. What wife hadn’t called her husband a fool on occasion? And what kind of illicit activity could a woman be up to if she closed the door but not necessarily the shutters of the room in which she was supposedly disporting herself? Deciding that the child’s testimony was unimportant, he asked her only a few innocuous questions: Was anyone else in the carriage with Lucretia and Lino when they drove to Bonaparte’s? was one of them. Did Dr. Chapman or just Mrs. Chapman give Lino permission to stay at the house? was another.

  The answer to both those questions was yes.

  Ellen Shaw was the next witness. She hadn’t wanted to come to what she would later call “this plaguey trial,” and she had half a mind to tell the judge so. But she’d promised young Mr. Ross she’d testify, and he was counting on her. So she put her hand on the Bible and, lips pursed and back ramrod-stiff, shot a baleful look at her former employer and took the oath.

  She told the jury that she hadn’t liked the looks of Lino from the start. “His shirt wasn’t worth anything,” she explained. Besides, “He was a Spaniard, and a body didn’t know what he might do.” As to her employer, that benighted woman had deeply offended her sense of propriety. She and that butterfly of hers. “They used to kiss each other,” Ellen grimaced. “They sang love songs to each other. They were often engaged in a private room by themselves.”

  Ross asked her to tell about some of the other shocking things she’d witnessed in that godforsaken household, and she said the worst ones she remembered. “Mrs. Chapman went up to Lino’s room a good deal,” she said. “I saw her come downstairs in the mornings. I saw her one evening sitting on his bed. He was in the bed at the time, so I don’t know if he was dressed or not. She was wearing her nightdress!”

  Might it be, Ross prompted her, that knowing the boarder was prone to fits, she’d gone up to his room to look after him?

  “His spells,” Ellen replied scornfully. “They didn’t appear to affect his general health. He was soon over them.”

  The whole time she was up there she kept remembering poor Dr. Chapman. How he’d cried that time when Lino and his wife didn’t come home from Philadelphia on time. How he’d once wanted to use the horse to break ground so he could plant potatoes, but Mrs. Chapman said she had to have the horse that day, and that she was mistress of her own house and could do as she pleased. Ellen told the jury about that, and about how Mrs. Chapman used to tell her husband to make his own bed and say that if he didn’t get it done, he should have no breakfast. “She spoke pretty harsh sometimes,” she said. “She used to tell him she was ashamed of him and she wished to God he was gone, for she was tired of him.”

  “Was that why you left the Chapmans’ employ?” Ross asked.

  “I left because there were things going on I did not like to see,” Ellen shot out. “Also, my folks were against my staying there. They heard a great deal of talk about Mrs. Chapman and her boarder.”

  The woman’s a human volcano, Brown thought, spewing flames, devastation, death. She’s a female Iago. A modern Penthesilea, bent on total destruction. He was itching to get a chance to cross-examine her, and as soon as Ross finished the direct examination, he demanded to know if the witness had anything personal against Lucretia.

  “I have had no difference with Mrs. Chapman,” Ellen said. But Brown kept probing, and finally she admitted that when she quit, Mr. Chapman didn’t pay her all the wages she was owed, and that she attributed his shortchanging her to his wife’s influence. “Mrs. Chapman always had the chief management of the household,” she sniped.

  Satisfied that he’d suggested to the jury that the housekeeper harbored a grudge against his client, Brown proceeded to other areas of inquiry. “You say Mrs. Chapman and the boarder were often alone in a private room? What room was that?”

  “The parlor,” Ellen had to admit.

  “You say she sang love songs to the boarder,” Brown pressed her. “What songs were those?”

  Ellen said she couldn’t remember.

  “Was this a religious household?”

  “Religious service was performed during the chief of the time I was in the house,” the witness answered. Then she added sarcastically, “And much good did it do!”

  At this, even Judge Fox became annoyed with Ellen’s opinionated testimony. “What did you mean by that last phrase?” he interrupted. “Do you know for a fact that the performance of religious service did no good?”

  “No,” Ellen subsided. “It just seems that way, seeing the way things turned out there.”

  The judge let the remark go and pursued a new tack, asking, “Was your employer in the habit of singing songs?”

  “She was not in the habit of singing songs,” Ellen answered. Then, as if realizing she wasn’t being altogether truthful, she remarked that her employer did sing church songs. “She had a piano and played and sung hymn tunes.”

  “What hymns did she sing?”

  “I can’t tell the names of any of the songs,” Ellen sulked.

  She had been Ross’s star witness, and she had done him as much harm as good.

  That afternoon, wishing he’d been able to confer with his client during some of the testimony that had been presented against her, Brown decided to ask the court for permission to let Lucretia sit alongside him. He wanted to be able to whisper the occasional question to her, wanted to be able to have her clarify one thing
or another. Besides, he didn’t like the whole business of putting defendants in a dock. Penning them there. It was inhuman. Moreover, it made them look guilty, when by rights they were innocent until proven guilty.

  He made his petition to Fox and the other two judges, hoping they’d see the value of his arguments. But they didn’t. “This court has already refused an application of this kind in a former case,” Fox summarily dismissed him, as if his petition had no merit whatsoever, and he and his client were left to listen to the next witness as if from opposite sides of the great glorious earth.

  She was Esther Bache, Lucretia’s friend and dressmaker. Esther told the jury about the time Lucretia had excused herself from a dress fitting, presumably to tend to an ailing Lino. She hadn’t believed Lino was really ill, the dressmaker said; she’d heard him laughing up in the attic, and watched him eat heartily at the midday meal. She also said, as if revealing something markedly improper, that when he came to the table for that meal, he sat down at Lucretia’s right—an observation that thoroughly irritated Brown.

  Where else should the boarder have sat? he wondered. At the head? At the foot? If Lino had helped himself to one of those seats, then the dressmaker might have had something discreditable to complain about. Especially if he’d taken Chapman’s seat. But as it was, the seamstress was trying to harvest forbidden fruit from nothing, nothing at all. No, she didn’t worry Brown.

  The next witness did, however. She was Ann Bantom, the pivot, Brown surmised, upon which the prosecution intended to rest its whole case. And indeed, the part-time cleaning woman told a story full of damning details. She said that on the Monday after Chapman first became sick, her employer informed her in the morning that he was feeling better, but that later that day, after eating soup and chicken made by his wife, he reported he was feeling worse. She hadn’t seen her mistress put anything odd in the food, Ann admitted. Not in the kitchen, where Lucretia had sprinkled her concoction with a bit of pure salt, or in the parlor, where she’d carried it after it was cooked. But Lino had been there in the parlor, and the two of them had had a conversation. Not that she overheard it, Ann went on. She didn’t know what they talked about, just that they talked. Then the food was sent up to the sickroom, and that was the last she saw of Mr. Chapman’s meal until the leftovers were brought down to the kitchen, where she left them around for a while before throwing them out in the yard.