The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  He wasn’t able to do so yet, Ross temporized. But Blayney was on his way. He was due on the next stagecoach from Philadelphia.

  Fox was reluctant to wait. Most trials at the time were exceedingly short, many lasting only a few hours; this one had already dragged on for over a week. He warned Ross that he’d best produce Blayney as soon as his coach got to town, for he’d tolerate no further delays.

  In his tin-roofed law office down the street from the courthouse, Thomas Ross waited fretfully for the arrival of the coach from Philadelphia, pacing the planked floor of the tiny building and taking frequent pinches from the gold snuff box in which he’d recently invested. But when the coach pulled into town, Blayney wasn’t on it. Instead, the driver turned up at Ross’s office and handed him a letter. The high constable had a sick child, the letter said. Plus he had official duties. Urgent official duties.

  Lucretia’s old friend Blayney had, it seemed, changed his mind about testifying against the woman he’d once so respected. Or at least he’d changed his mind about testifying against her voluntarily and decided not to come to court unless he was forced to take the stand. Very well, then, Ross resolved. He’d subpoena him. Fine him, too.

  He marched back to the courtroom and explained to Judge Fox, “Your Honor, the stagecoach from Philadelphia has arrived. With Mr. Blayney’s name on the waybill. But without his person.” Then he pleaded for a short delay in the trial.

  Fox was in no mood to be obliging. “No further delays!” he expostulated, and demanded that the prosecution close its case and the defense get under way immediately.

  At this, Peter McCall stumbled hastily to his feet, for Brown had promised him the honor of opening their presentation. “May it please your Honors, and you Gentlemen of the jury,” the untried McCall began humbly. “Personally a stranger to you all, with neither experience nor ability to entitle me to attention, I stand before you in defense of a ruined female, whose character and life and all that is sacred and precious to her, are staked upon the issue of your decision.”

  Ten

  Pennsylvania v. Lucretia Chapman, Part Two

  February 22–25, 1832

  BROWN HAD GRANTED THE opening of the defense to his inexperienced junior man. But he himself had devised the defense strategy. His plan was to prove that William Chapman had not been murdered, and that not only had he died a natural death, but the allegedly tainted chicken soup he’d consumed hadn’t even contained poison. To this end, Brown had up his sleeve a witness who would surprise and enthrall the courtroom—but he didn’t produce her early on. Rather, an expert at timing and drama, he began the actual work of defending Lucretia with a decidedly unshowy offering, a written deposition from a medical expert who stated that it was almost impossible to distinguish death by arsenic poisoning from death by cholera morbus. He followed this with the testimony of another medical expert, one who iterated what Brown had already gotten the prosecution’s chemists to say, albeit more reluctantly—namely, that Pennsylvania Hospital’s attempts to find arsenic in William’s body had been inconclusive. It was enough to put spectators to sleep and make the jury wonder if Philadelphia lawyers, who already had a reputation for shrewdness, were really that much better than their own homegrown attorneys.

  But on the second day of the defense case, Brown introduced his surprise witness: Lucretia’s middle daughter, ten-year-old little Lucretia. Like other witnesses, she had been sitting in the courtroom all along, which was apparently no bar to her being able to testify. Nor was her age. Children were allowed to give testimony provided they were first examined in the courtroom on their ability to tell the difference between truth and falsity.

  When Ross demanded this privilege, Brown offered no objection, and the child, a reed of a girl, with sticklike arms and a chest as flat as a slate, took the stand gravely. She was composed, her big eyes fastened squarely on Ross’s long-jawed face as he asked her sternly, “Do you know what you have come here for?”

  Little Lucretia didn’t answer right away. She thought about the question, then replied, “To swear to all I know.”

  “Do you know what will become of you if you do not tell the truth?”

  This time the girl didn’t hesitate. “I will be cast into hell fire forever,” she murmured, her voice trembling but her gaze still steady.

  Her grasp of the seriousness of the proceedings impressed the judges. They accepted her as a witness despite her youth, and Brown began taking her through the now familiar story of how Lino had arrived at the Chapmans’ front door, and subsequently William had arrived at death’s door. There was little new in her account, but it was filled with vivid tidbits, the kind of details that give a story the ring of truth. When Lino first appeared, little Lucretia said, “Pa was sitting in the rocking chair, nursing little John.” When her father took sick, she was no longer allowed to sleep in the master bedroom in her familiar little “truckle bed.” When her father dined on smearcase and pork, she was in the dining room but no longer at the table; like many a child who finds protracted dinners boring, she’d gotten up and started reading a book.

  By the time she came to her version of William’s final days, she had fully persuaded the jury of the authenticity of her recollections. It was on the value of those recollections that Brown was counting. So he asked her to describe at length what had happened on the day William lunched on the presumably poisoned chicken soup.

  “Mary brought the chicken and soup upstairs,” little Lucretia said. “The soup was in a blue quart bowl. The chicken was on a plate, I think. It was whole. Pa cut it himself. Pa tasted the gizzard, but it was tough. He gave the rest to me and I ate it.” Then she delivered her thunderbolt. “Pa ate only a few spoonsful of the soup, but he ate very heartily of the chicken. I ate some of the soup myself.”

  This was a stunning revelation. And although later the prosecution tried to suggest that little Lucretia was telling a story that had been concocted by her mother, the child insisted this was not so. “I have not talked to my mother about this,” she averred. “I have told this story to my aunt and lawyer Brown—no one else.”

  Brown had no further feats of courtroom prestidigitation among his bag of tricks. As is common in criminal defense, he would have to win his case, if win he could, on the basis of cross rather than direct examination, for with the exception of little Lucretia, he had very little to offer other than character witnesses. That afternoon he called on several people who had known Lucretia over the years and examined them swiftly as to her exceptional probity. “Her character was more than moral,” said the father of one of her pupils, and she and her family were “very religious.” The Reverend George Scheetz supported this. Mrs. Chapman was a regular at his church, he said, and took communion from him frequently; moreover, since the rest of his communicants were prone to reporting to him the follies and foibles of their neighbors, “if anything had happened in the neighborhood calculated to impeach her character, I would have been informed of it.”

  Indeed, the prideful pastor was so firm a supporter of Lucretia’s that when he was cross-examined, he went out of his way to say that he didn’t find it at all surprising that spots had appeared on William’s face. William, he’d happened to notice a while before the unfortunate man fell sick, had an infection “in the neighborhood of the ear.”

  The next day Brown cursorily questioned a few more character witnesses and two poulterers whose ducks had died suddenly, one farmer’s after eating pickles, the other’s after drinking water tainted with lime. Then abruptly, Brown declared the defense case finished. He had examined eighteen witnesses in a day and a half; Ross had taken six and a half days to examine twenty-four.

  But now, it developed, Ross wasn’t done. Telling the three judges on the bench that he wanted the prosecution case reopened, he announced that he had served a subpoena on Willis Blayney, that Blayney was here in Doylestown right now, and that it was absolutely necessary he be heard because he had evidence that had been alluded to during the pros
ecution’s opening remarks.

  The judges would not relent. The prosecution case could not be reopened, they told the deputy attorney general. But if Blayney’s evidence contradicted something a defense witness had said, perhaps they would allow him to testify. Ross thanked the judges and offered Blayney as a witness who could rebut the defense’s character witnesses.

  The spectators grew excited. Philadelphia’s high constable was something of a celebrity, a man whose exploits the press wrote about. They anticipated that such a man would provide them with a performance full of fireworks. But Blayney had come to Doylestown reluctantly and was in the courtroom only because he had been fined for his earlier failure to appear. Ignoring the air of expectation that pervaded the pews, he gave Ross what must have been the tersest testimony the prosecutor had ever elicited. “I believe I am acquainted with the general character of Mrs. Chapman,” he said. “From 1818 to 1829 I always considered her character good. Since then I have considered it bad—gradually getting worse.”

  That was all he said, all that Ross could get him to say, other than that he had become a policeman in 1829. Hoping it was enough, Ross announced that he had no further questions.

  Brown was stunned. No further questions? He himself had quite a few, and had been wondering if there was any way to turn Ross’s cagey witness into a witness for the defense. When the high constable was handed over to him for cross-examination, he asked, “Isn’t it true that within this past week you said to someone that you knew absolutely nothing bad about Mrs. Chapman?”

  Blayney didn’t deny it. “Not in those exact words,” he replied. “I have said that if the prosecution expected me to give Mrs. Chapman a bad character, they would be mistaken. That is, to my personal knowledge, I have never seen anything but what was right.”

  So far, so good. But what had he seen, Brown wanted to know. In answer to the question, Blayney said, “She lived in my mother’s house and behaved herself remarkably well. My sister taught music in her seminary for several years. I have visited at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Chapman. They lived very happily together—I never heard anything to the contrary.”

  “What then did you mean about her character being bad?” Brown asked him.

  “I am speaking of a police report,” Blayney said, and added with a touch of irony, “I can’t say I ever heard a good police report.”

  Brown knew full well that police reports or “characters” of the kind Blayney was referring to were confidential. But he couldn’t subdue the gambler’s soul that inhabits every defense attorney, and he decided to take the chance of angering the court by asking the high constable to be specific in the matter of Lucretia’s report. “By the way,” he said, “what exactly did you learn about Mrs. Chapman from her police report?”

  “Objection!” Ross called out at once, without explaining the reason for his objection.

  “Sustained,” Judge Fox ruled. “Though you can,” he directed Blayney, “explain in general terms the kinds of things that might give a person a bad police report or ‘character.’”

  Blayney frowned, then said, “If I were to find stolen goods in a person’s house, or if I knew that counterfeiters had been taken in that house, I would say that the owner of the house had a bad police character.”

  Brown was satisfied. To those inclined to consider Lucretia guilty, the constable’s reply would add fuel to their fire by suggesting that she’d once harbored stolen property or counterfeiters in her Philadelphia boardinghouse. But to those who were inclined to be sympathetic, the implication of Blayney’s remark might be altogether different. They might wonder why, if the police really had evidence of his client’s having had a prior criminal history, the prosecution and not the defense had objected to revealing her police report. They might ask themselves if perhaps the report contained no evidence, if perhaps it cited her not as a wrongdoer but merely as the owner of a raided property. Maybe they’d even wonder if there was some secret police report on them.

  The contents of the mysterious police report would never be revealed. But both prosecution and defense would refer to the high constable’s testimony during their summations, and each side would treat the man’s words as evidence that bolstered its own arguments.

  It was three in the afternoon when those summations started. William Reed, who was to speak first for the prosecution, had been practicing his peroration for days beforehand, writing down phrases, crossing them out, and experimenting with a variety of postures and gestures while regarding himself in a mirror. But in a way, he had been practicing for years. Like most young men of his time, he had studied the art of public speaking back in grade school. Since an educated male was expected to know how to declaim, primers gave boys precise instructions in such things as how much to incline the body or lift the arm when emphasizing a point, and how best to compose the face when trying to convey a mood: to indicate melancholy, advised one textbook, “the lower jaw falls … the eyes are cast down, half-shut”; to indicate pride, “the eyes open, but with the eyebrows considerably drawn down, the mouth pouting out, mostly shut, and the lips pinched close.”

  Reed was a master of postures and facial expressions, but he was also a budding writer who would one day publish many books and articles on historical subjects. Employing the gestures and moues he had long ago learned, but augmenting his physical performance with writerly phrases, he began to speak, asking the jury “as husbands and fathers, knowing the loveliness of domestic love, appreciating the sanctity of domestic obligation” whether they could conceive of “a more unnatural, a more revolting crime than that which blasts all these, and blurs the purity of woman’s fame.” Then he suggested to them that if Lucretia’s crime went unpunished it might teach many other wives “in whose bosom the flame of impure passion brightens, that there is a summary mode by which she can remove the only check to licentious indulgence, and suggest means and materials for the completion of the gloomy edifice of crime.” In engineering the death of her husband, he went on, the defendant had committed a heinous crime. But it was no surprise, for Lucretia had already committed another heinous crime. She had committed adultery, and if she was capable of that, she was capable of murder, too. “In the moral law of God the first great prohibition was, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ the next, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’—and the interval between the two points on the scale of human depravity is small, indeed.”

  The upright Reed was particularly hard on Lucretia for permitting her children to attend the trial. Her doing so, he lashed out, demonstrated how cruel and even barbaric she was. Indeed, such abusive use of the young reminded him of how in famine-wracked Egypt the starving, convinced that because they were sinful God would be deaf to their prayers, drafted children to supplicate for them, leading “little creatures from five to ten years of age” to the dangerous tops of minarets “to lisp from their slender summits entreaties for Divine mercy.” Lucretia was every bit as manipulative and cowardly. “The mercy this wretched woman does not dare to ask, she has brought these innocent children to ask for her.” But it would do the defendant no good, he predicted. The sight of the youngsters had simply reminded the jury that the children once had another parent, a father whose death their mother had contrived.

  Later, Reed also attacked Brown, accusing him of making sarcastic faces about prosecution evidence and of intimidating prosecution witnesses with his withering frowns and the “thunder of that voice, the lightning of that eye.” But primarily what the prosecution’s second seat did was marshal the evidence against Lucretia. Detail by detail, he went over the medical and chemical testimony, limning William’s deathbed symptoms to show how closely they matched those known to accompany arsenic poisoning, and insisting that although it was true that the prosecution’s chemists had failed to prove there was arsenic in William’s tissues, they had established its presence by detecting a unique smell emanating from those tissues, a smell they believed was that of arsenic. He also read from Lucretia’s letters—“filled as they a
re with disgusting effusions of passion”—using them, and the testimony of witnesses, to establish that she had had a twofold motive for killing her husband. She had killed him, Reed maintained, not only because of her licentious passion for Lino, but because she was avaricious and hoped by killing her husband to obtain “the wealth she supposed the seducer to possess … the rank and honors with which she believed him to be clothed.”

  Finally, Reed presented a scenario to explain why the presumably poisoned chicken soup had been left unattended in the kitchen all day. The entirety of the soup hadn’t been poisoned, he contended, merely a portion of it, and it was that portion which little Lucretia had given to William. The child must have misremembered or lied when she said her sister Mary brought their father a quart bowl of the soup. Maybe Mary had brought two bowls—the quart bowl and a small, separate, poisoned bowl. Maybe the defense had feared this would come out. They’d put the ten-year-old on the stand. But they hadn’t called Mary. “Why is Mary Chapman not produced?” Reed asked insinuatingly, and left the jury to ponder the meaning of his reproach.

  It was seven in the evening when he finished speaking. He had talked without stopping for four hours.

  David Paul Brown passed an uncomfortable night. He’d come down with a cold, and his famous throat felt painful and raw. Worse, he was afraid that Reed had made the jury believe in his preposterous two-bowls-of-soup proposition. But he was determined not to let either physical weakness or mental stress stand in the way of his fighting for Lucretia’s acquittal. Was not one of the maxims he intended to pass along to his sons this: that although a judge and jury might take away the life of a defendant, they must not be allowed to take it away without reaching over a defense attorney’s own body? His prostrate body, if need be. Yes, and he’d be damned if he was going to let anyone know how worried he was. That was another of the maxims he was going to pass on to his sons: a defense attorney must know no fear but that of failure, and even that he must hide from everyone. Everyone. In this case, that included young Peter McCall, with whom he was sharing quarters.