The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  Brown knew what was coming. They’ll have that farmer on the stand soon, he thought, that quack, that expert in quackery who’s been claiming his ducks were poisoned by something in the Chapman yard. He had to show that if his client had poisoned her husband’s food, she’d never have let her cleaning woman dispose of it, or even have let her leave it sitting around in a place where it could harm anyone or anything else.

  “Who brought the soup and uneaten chicken back to the kitchen?” he asked Ann when he got his chance to cross-examine her.

  “Mrs. Chapman put it on the table and left it there.”

  “Did Mrs. Chapman say anything about eating or not eating the leftover chicken?”

  “I don’t recollect that she said anything about eating the chicken.”

  “Was it thrown out right away?”

  “No, the chicken stood on the table until teatime, and then I threw it out. I threw out the soup when I washed up the dishes.”

  “Was anyone else in the kitchen while the chicken and soup were sitting out?”

  “The whole five of the children were in the habit of being in the kitchen every day,” Ann complained.

  Brown nodded his head sagely. Ann had given him the answer he’d been hoping to elicit.

  He was going to press the point further, impress on the jury that at any time the leftovers could have been sipped or nibbled at by a hungry child, but before he could do so, Judge Fox interrupted with a question of his own. “Did Mrs. Chapman clean the pot?” he asked the unwary cleaning woman.

  “I do not think she cleaned the pot.”

  “Did she tell you to throw away the leftover food?”

  “Mrs. Chapman gave me no directions to throw the soup or the chicken away.”

  Brown folded the notes he’d made on Ann’s testimony. The judge had done his work for him. He’d established that Lucretia had allowed the food—that presumably poisoned chalice!—to remain in the house for nearly half a day. That she’d allowed it to remain right where her servant—and her children; her children!—could have eaten it and turned deathly ill.

  He had no further questions, Brown told the court, and as it was close to six in the evening, Fox adjourned the trial for the day.

  Lucretia spent that night, as she had all the others since coming to Doylestown, praying and trying to keep warm in her chilly cell. But unknown to her, Lino, in his cell, was embarking on a new money-making scheme. It was a scheme that would make him one of the first in the long line of American criminals to profit from crime through publishing. Lino was composing a memoir.

  Writing in Spanish and creating an aristocratic literary persona, he began the memoir with, “Carolino Estradas was born in the island of Cuba at the city of Trinidad and was the legitimate son of the Brigadier of Infantry Don Francisco Estradas de Arango and of Dona Rosa Maria de Mina, both formerly citizens of Spain.… he always displayed a love of what was proper, a warm and intrepid yet ductile spirit, was a foe to vanity and a stranger to pride, disinterested, generous, and liberal.”

  Then Lino described how his alter ego grew up surrounded by silver and gold, attended the University of Havana, and rescued from the clutches of pirates an exquisite, nobly born fifteen-year-old whom he married and with whom he had a child, only to lose both tragically and early, and, grief-stricken, to try to forget his sorrows by enlisting in the elite, danger-ridden service of the king of Spain.

  Soon the autobiographer would get to his schoolmistress wife.

  On Thursday, February sixteenth, when Lucretia’s trial reconvened, the industrious Ross called six more witnesses. The book salesman Edwin Fanning testified that while William was sick, he complained that his wife was neglecting him. The tailor Richard Watkinson testified that Lino and Lucretia were in his shop on June sixteenth, picking up clothes for Lino. The brother of the clerk who worked at the druggist’s across the way testified that later that day he encountered Lino, though not Lucretia, at the pharmacy. The clerk himself testified that Lino asked him for arsenic.

  Elias Durand, corresponding secretary of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, was next. The handsome, long-nosed pharmacist, resplendent in a finely tailored Parisian suit, promised to be an impressive prosecution witness, but before he could get very far into his story, Brown and McCall tried to block his testimony. They asserted that Lino’s having purchased arsenic had no bearing on Lucretia’s case, that it was evidence against him, not her. The judges heard them out, but ruled that the fact that poison was purchased by any member of the defendant’s household was admissible, for it established that poison was available in the house—though they warned Ross that he would have to connect Lucretia to that availability by producing evidence that she herself administered the poison. Then Durand was allowed to return to the stand, where in his lilting French accent he declared, “A quarter of a pound of arsenic was given to Señor Espos y Mina. I believe I weighed it and gave it to him myself.”

  Ross’s final witness on Thursday was Dr. Phillips, who’d been awakened from his sleep to take a look at William when he first fell ill, and who’d attended to him faithfully during his final hours. The lanky, soft-spoken Phillips described William’s deathbed agonies in vivid detail. But this aside, the doctor was hardly satisfactory as a prosecution witness. Not only did he not substantiate Fanning’s assertion that Lucretia had neglected William during his illness, but under cross-examination he actually praised her care of her husband. “I saw no want of tenderness to William on her part,” he said to the probing Brown. “There was nothing in her conduct that was unbecoming to a wife.”

  And there was more. When Brown was done with the witness, Judge Fox himself decided to question Phillips, for he was curious to know if, despite the doctor’s once having thought that William had died of cholera morbus, he now believed he had been poisoned. “Might arsenic have accounted for Dr. Chapman’s symptoms?” he asked.

  Phillips was cooperative but cautious. “If arsenic had been administered, it would, I think, have accounted for some of the symptoms, and I am not prepared to say it would not account for all,” he opined. “But neither am I prepared to say that natural causes and natural disease might not produce the same symptoms.”

  After Phillips’s testimony was finished, the reporter for the Germantown Telegraph filed a story with his paper that said, “At present, the aspect of affairs is decidedly favorable to the prisoner. The intelligent gentlemen for the prosecution have shown a laudable and becoming zeal in sustaining the rights of the Commonwealth, but thus far they have not made out so strong a case as was expected.”

  When the trial resumed the next morning, there was a change in the spectators’ attitude toward Lucretia. She had cried when Fanning and Phillips had described her husband’s sufferings, a flood of tears coursing down her pale cheeks. This display of emotion, combined with Ross’s disappointing performance, had made the crowd in the courtroom suddenly sympathetic to her.

  But as Brown knew, the case against his client was still in its early stages. Ross had fifteen more names on his witness list. His first today was Dr. Knight, who was likely to prove a destructive witness for Lucretia because, unlike Dr. Phillips, he didn’t think she had been sufficiently attentive to William during his agony. Indeed, “She absented herself,” he said disparagingly, “more than I thought right.”

  Cross-examining him, Brown asked if Lucretia might have been forced to absent herself because she had no cook or housekeeper and thus many chores to perform—a point Dr. Phillips had made. But Knight remarked, “I do not remember her saying she had no servant.” And although he’d testified on direct examination that both Lucretia and William had objected to the purgative calomel he’d prescribed, under Brown’s needling he turned combative and, contradicting his previous testimony, blamed Lucretia alone. “I do not know,” he said, “if Mr. Chapman had any reluctance to take the medicine.”

  Ross’s next witness was Benjamin Boutcher, the poultry farmer, who described how his ducks, after pecking
around in the Chapmans’ yard on the day Ann Bantom threw out the chicken soup, had died suddenly and grotesquely. “There were between twenty and thirty that died that day and the next,” he said.

  Brown didn’t cross-examine him. It was as if he hoped that by ignoring the man he could convey to the jury how beneath consideration he considered him. Later, however, when Boutcher asked to be recalled to the stand because he had omitted mentioning that the bones of the dead ducks had a strange appearance, Brown couldn’t resist mocking him. “For him to describe these bones savors of quackery,” he objected, stretching the bow of his lips into a mischievous grin. “Maybe the bones should be produced so they can speak for themselves! No doubt they’ll speak with miraculous organs.” Brown’s objection was overruled and Boutcher told the jury that he’d seen little pieces of something white and glittery, like salts of arsenic, clinging to his poultry’s bones.

  Lucretia’s confidantes—Sarah Palethorpe, who’d warned her it would be unseemly to walk with her boarder at William’s funeral; Sophia Hitchbourn, who’d brought her the news that the papers were saying William had been poisoned; and Ann Smith, to whom she’d poured out the whole story of her abrupt second marriage—also took the stand that day, each of them testifying to Lucretia’s infatuation with Lino. But the major event of the day was the reading of Lucretia’s letters to Lino. Entering them as evidence was a risky business for Ross, since the letters clearly revealed that at least until she wrote the last one, Lucretia was ignorant of Lino’s malevolent character. But Ross was banking on the fact that there was one line in her letters that might thoroughly incriminate her. It was the line in which, in her final letter, she declared to Lino that she didn’t believe God would permit either of them to be happy on “this side of the grave.” To the prosecution, the words were a clear reference to the pair’s having committed murder.

  Brown, of course, viewed the words differently. They were ambiguous, he thought, and could mean his client expected God’s retribution because she and Lino had committed adultery, or even that she expected His punishment because they’d married too soon after William’s death. In fact, he mused with a sophist’s subtlety, that phrase of hers, that reference to “this side” of the grave, could be construed as indicating that she anticipated worldly suffering for worldly indiscretion, whereas if she’d committed murder, she’d have been anticipating the punishment that awaits the wicked beyond the grave. Yes, he decided, that was a good argument, one the jury might well appreciate.

  “Several letters were put in evidence today,” the journalist from the Germantown Telegraph reported to his editor that evening, letters that would one day surely be “sought after with great avidity.” But he couldn’t provide the paper with any quotes from the material. He and all the other journalists covering the trial had been enjoined from revealing the letters’ contents, or indeed any of the evidence against Lucretia, not just until after her case was resolved, but until after Lino’s case, too, had been heard.

  There was one journalist in the courtroom who was determined not to wait so long before cashing in on the public’s curiosity. He was William E. Du Bois, the son of a Doylestown clergyman. Du Bois had studied law, and although he had not yet passed his bar examination, he knew a great deal about legal matters. He also knew that books about sensational murder trials were newly the rage among book publishers.

  The first such books—pamphlets, really—had begun appearing in America back in the early 1800s. But there had been precious few of them, and those there were had come packaged as morality tales, the crimes they dealt with fastidiously recounted and accompanied by sermons about the fate that awaited criminals once they met their Maker. By the early 1830s, however, the trickle had swelled to a great river, and the moralistic passages had disappeared. Readers were fascinated by the new crop of unsanitized murder trial books, and novelists and short story writers began capitalizing on the appeal of these works by using the books in their fiction. Hawthorne drew on one murder account for The House of the Seven Gables, Melville another for Israel Potter, and in time Poe would employ a third for “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” What captivated these serious literary men about the new trial books, and indeed what captivated the American public, was that they omitted no detail, however perverse or grisly, in the process illuminating the darker side of human nature.

  Du Bois wanted to create a book that would outdo all the others. He would make it a big book, a work, he anticipated, that would be longer and fuller than any similar book since the publication of the trial of Aaron Burr. He owed this to the public, he rationalized his sound commercial instinct, and told himself that in view of the excitement the Chapman case was stirring, it would be unfair of him to offer people anything less than a thorough account. One that included all the romantic and seamy details.

  But could he get it out soon? Before the trial of Mina? And to whom could he turn for publication? Du Bois decided he’d propose the project to the nearby Germantown firm of G. W. Mentz & Son. Mentz made its money chiefly from wholesome works, from textbooks, songbooks, and Bibles. But Georg Mentz was a smart businessman. Du Bois was certain he’d see the wisdom in coming out with an account of the trial of Lucretia Chapman, especially once he heard about what was in those passionate letters that the deputy attorney general had just read aloud and that he, Du Bois, had spent the day laboriously trying to copy down.

  On Saturday, February eighteenth, the prosecution began the most complex part of its presentation, the examination of expert witnesses. The experts were crucial, for in order to convict Lucretia of murder, the state needed to show that a murder had actually been committed. Ross, who during the past few months had meticulously boned up on the existing scientific knowledge about poison, was hoping that his experts would be able to establish beyond the shadow of a doubt that William had died of arsenic poisoning, and today, confident of his newly acquired learning, he commenced with Dr. Hopkinson.

  The celebrated surgeon, responding to the deputy attorney general’s careful questions, told the jury about his graveside autopsy of William. He described how foul-smelling and discolored the corpse’s face had been, and yet how astonishingly odorless and well-preserved the body. He described the incisions he had made, and the organs he had removed. And he said that the two things that had most struck him were the absence of putrefaction in the abdomen, and the peculiar, pickled herring-like smell that had emanated from the stomach once it was opened. Both of these signs, he suggested, were indicative of arsenic poisoning, for arsenic was a preservative, a pickler so to speak, and could keep a body from putrefying.

  Brown was quick to attack him on both those points. He’d learned from the Reverend Scheetz, whom he was planning to use as a defense witness, that the soil deep down in the graveyard of All Saints was unusually dry and sandy, and that William’s coffin had been placed particularly far down. “Might the nature of the soil in which a body is buried affect the body’s preservation?” he asked.

  “Putrefaction might be retarded by dry soil,” Hopkinson was forced to admit.

  “And the smell?” Brown went on. “Is this smell typical of something treated with arsenic?”

  Hopkinson backed off. “I never heard or read of the herring smell particularly belonging to arsenic,” he said.

  Brown had won those points, and soon he soldiered on. “What of cholera morbus?” he asked. “If a person died of cholera morbus, might his body have the same appearance as that which you describe?”

  Hopkinson allowed that it might. “Though I have never,” he insisted on adding, “known a case of cholera morbus to terminate fatally.”

  Hopkinson was on the stand for three and a half hours. When he was done, Ross’s parade of medical experts continued, and Brown continued to try to poke little holes in their testimony. Dr. Coates, Hopkinson’s assistant at the autopsy, testified that in his opinion, William had died from some corrosive poison, probably arsenic. Under cross-examination Brown got him to say, “No one can be cert
ain that a man died by poison, unless the poison be found in the body.” Dr. John Mitchell, the Pennsylvania Hospital chemist who had tried to find the poison, described boiling down bits of William’s stomach and intestinal tissue, filtering the residue through paper, treating it with lime, nitric acid, powdered charcoal, and other substances, and comparing the results he obtained to those he’d gotten by performing the same tests on the tissues of a man who’d died a natural death at the poor house. But despite his meticulous research, he’d found no differences, and under Brown’s questioning he admitted, “Chemical proofs of the presence of arsenic, though amounting to a strong presumption, were not conclusive of its presence.” More, he even allowed that the meal William ate on the night his stomach first began to pain him might have caused his decline. “Smearcase and pork,” he said, “eaten at night heartily, if the person be not accustomed to them, would be very sure to hurt him.” But Brown had his greatest success with Thomas Clemson, Mitchell’s Sorbonne-trained assistant, who testified that after one of their tests, there’d been a definite smell of arsenic in the lab. Under cross-examination, he reluctantly admitted that “Other substances can produce an odor so like that of arsenic that one may be deceived.”

  Call your next witness, Judge Fox ordered Thomas Ross the following morning. Then as now, part of a judge’s function was to move courtroom proceedings along as snappily as he could, and Fox had been growing increasingly impatient with the prosecution’s slow progress. Ross had put on what was for the time an extraordinary number of witnesses—twenty-five of them. Yet still he wasn’t finished. He had one more witness, he’d informed the court, namely Willis Blayney, the high constable of Philadelphia. Fox urged him to examine the man as soon as possible.