The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  At dawn Brown dressed himself carefully, donning a costly silk waistcoat and sleek new boots—he’d never known a man to speak well in clumsy boots—awakened the still slumbering McCall, shared a hurried breakfast with him, then leaned on the younger man’s arm and walked weakly to the courthouse. But there he straightened up, parted the horde that was milling noisily around the steps, and strode into the spartan courtroom as if he were the great Junius Brutus Booth himself, an actor stepping onto a grand and beautiful stage.

  Inside, he let McCall speak first, and was gratified to hear his protégé effectively tackle the prosecution’s witnesses and shred its ponderous medical and scientific evidence. The young fellow shows promise, Brown thought, and he’s not without humor. As witness his bantering, “One thing that speaks volumes in the defendant’s favor is that she managed to live more than twelve months under the same roof with Ellen Shaw!” More, the ambitious acolyte had a definite way with words. Telling the jury about one of the crucial defense positions—namely that Lucretia had not engaged in sexual activity with Mina before her marriage to him—he explained away that unfortunate marriage by coming out with, “Left upon the wide theater of the world, with a family of tender offspring looking to her maternal hand for protection and support, was she not bound by the most sacred ties of duty and affection to embrace every possible means of advancing their interest and promoting their happiness?” But McCall wasn’t the orator Brown himself was. If Lucretia was going to be acquitted, it was going to be up to him, David Paul Brown, to find the words to make the jury let her off.

  When his turn came, he started out mildly and told the panel he was feeling indisposed. But in a matter of moments his eyes were flashing and his voice was soaring through the austere chamber. Yes, he was sick, he was saying, “however, if fate should decree this speech to be my last, I do not know that my professional or earthly career can be more happily terminated than in the just defense of an oppressed fellow creature—a woman—hapless, helpless, friendless and forlorn.”

  He was off and running. Lucretia, he told the assembled throng, was a victim. She’d been assailed by “the storm, the tempest, the whirlwind of prejudice … the leprous distillment of pernicious rumor.” But the jurors could rectify that wrong and refuse to permit “the sacred ermine of justice to be stained or polluted by the blood of the guiltless.” If they didn’t, he warned, they’d be condemning not just her but her children, and the time would come when their verdict, “should it affix crime to a mother’s name, will enter deeply into the children’s souls; the worm that never dies shall prey upon their hearts through life; and the curse that never spares shall stigmatize their memory when dead.”

  Soon he was telling the jury he had two major reasons for expecting an acquittal: first, because the prosecution had not shown that William had actually been poisoned, and second, because even if William had been poisoned, the prosecution had offered no evidence to indicate that Lucretia had any knowledge of the poisoning, let alone that she had participated in it. Dwelling on these arguments, he reminded his listeners of the many exculpatory admissions he had forced from the prosecution’s scientists, and waved in the air one of the test tubes that had failed to reveal the presence of arsenic. It was, he said, his “dumb witness … small, it is true, but with a giant’s strength.”

  His own strength seemed fully to have returned. He was Ciceronian, clear-headed, forceful. He slammed the prosecution’s nonscientific witnesses, calling them vipers and liars. He presented his theory about the supposedly incriminating line in Lucretia’s last letter to Lino, insisting that if she’d committed murder she wouldn’t have written that she feared God’s punishment on this side of the grave but that she feared it on the other side, in the world to come. He made light of Reed’s two-bowls-of-soup proposition, pointing out that it stood upon no evidence, and mockingly asked why, if the prosecution believed only the soup consumed by Chapman had been poisoned, they had bothered introducing all that “quackery” about poisoned ducks. He justified his client’s hiding her second marriage from the police, inquiring, “Was she to join in the general cry, was she to hunt down one to whom, bad as he was, she had plighted her faith? I openly rejoice that she did not, for fidelity is the brightest jewel that adorns the female character.” And finally he accounted for Lucretia’s flight from Andalusia by saying that any woman in her predicament would have fled. “She was the teacher of a large and highly respectable seminary,” he cried out. “Her reputation was her stock in trade; exposure was but another word for death. That she should shrink from it, therefore, was natural—was excusable.”

  Had he demolished Reed? He hoped so. But in a last effort to get the jury to acquit, he challenged them to set her free. It would be an act of bravery, he told the sober-faced family men who faced him, for if they convicted Lucretia, each and every one of them would have to “return to your own domestic circle, to your own firesides, and surrounded by your partners and your offspring … tell them that the popular clamor was too loud and too general to be escaped, the popular prejudice too powerful to be resisted; tell them that under those influences you have consigned a mother to a timeless grave, and her children to endless ruin. And thereby give them to understand how frail and feeble is the tenure of human happiness—human character—and human life.”

  He was done. He had given one of his best performances. It wasn’t just his own opinion. The press thought so, too. He’d been “powerful,” a reporter from the Philadelphia National Gazette said; he’d fully justified his “fame for energy and eloquence,” the man from the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin said.

  Thomas Ross’s mother, Mary, a deeply religious Episcopalian, was a local heroine, at least among that portion of the Bucks County population that had supported Andrew Jackson for president. When he ran for office, Thomas’s father had erected a large hickory pole, Jackson’s symbol, in a corner of the family’s property, but one night a posse of anti-Jackson men had tried to uproot it. Mrs. Ross had sprung from her bed and, without consulting her husband or sons, rushed out of doors, planted herself at the base of the shaft, thrown her arms around its rough-hewn surface, and told the vandals that if they wanted to remove the pole, they’d first have to remove her. The men had backed off. Opposed to Jackson as they were, they respected Mary Ross, with her passionate loyalties and scrupulous piety, and some had been direct beneficiaries of her kindhearted ways, including her habit of keeping a lamp burning in her window throughout the night to aid anyone who might feel lonely or frightened.

  In the courtroom, despite the murmurs of admiration that greeted David Paul Brown when he finished speaking, Mary Ross smiled encouragingly at her son Thomas. She had no doubt he would be every bit as effective.

  It was four in the afternoon, and some members of the jury were showing signs of weariness, their faces wan, their eyelids drooping. Thomas, mightily annoyed with Brown, cleared his throat. In his view the defense counselor had overstepped the bounds of courtroom propriety. He had taken a woman of base behavior and turned her into a victim of public prejudice and prosecutorial vengeance. He had turned the most grave and serious subjects, like the scientists’ vials and poor Boutcher’s dead ducks, into matters for gaiety and merriment. Determined to eschew such cheap tricks, the deputy attorney general glanced at his mother, opened the drawn purse of his lips, and solemnly reminded the panel that “the ground upon which you stand is holy; the moment you passed the threshold of this sanctuary of justice, an impartial administration of your duty required a sacrifice at its altar of every passion or feeling of excitement which you may have heretofore imbibed.”

  The heads of a few jurors seemed to nod in agreement, and Ross plunged ahead, presenting numerous arguments as to why the jury should deliver a verdict of guilty. Some of his arguments were analytic—like Reed, he dwelled on minuscule aspects of the medical testimony—and some were absurd, at least by modern standards. Among the latter were that Lucretia had been nasty to her husband, and that she had cu
ckolded him; “any woman who would compel [her husband] to make the bed in which he sleeps” must have, he asserted, “the feelings of a savage or a demon” and “the wife who can defile the marriage bed will have no hesitancy in taking the life of that husband.”

  He spoke inventively, providing jurors with little scenarios to help them see things as he did. They could discount little Lucretia’s evidence, he suggested, because the child had either forgotten just what had happened when her father lay dying, or, already without one parent, she’d lied to protect the other so that she wouldn’t be completely orphaned. They could accept the two-bowls-of-soup theory without believing, he assured them, that Boutcher’s birds had been poisoned by Chapman’s leftovers. No, Mina was so perverse that he could well have tried to amuse himself by tossing arsenic salt directly at the pecking ducks.

  He also spoke passionately, implying that he detested the defendant with every fiber of his being. Lucretia Chapman has “gained a niche in the temple of infamy,” he pronounced in language almost as flowery as Brown’s. “She has inscribed her name upon the darkest page of guilt which the volume of man’s crime unfolds. She has become not only the outcast of virtue, of peace, and of fame, but whatever may be your verdict, she will be the shame of her children, and her children’s children, in each succeeding generation, until oblivion shall have wiped her name from the scroll of time.”

  When he was done, he committed the case to the hands of the jury, and begged them to find Lucretia guilty as charged.

  His speech had been eloquent, and Mary Ross, listening proudly to the only one of her eight sons to pursue the profession in which his father had made his mark, may have had at that moment an inkling of the brilliant trajectory that son’s career would follow—how one day he would rival his father, the Supreme Court judge, by becoming a member of the United States Congress. But to the reporters in the courtroom, Ross seemed a pale second to Brown. He’d shown “persevering zeal,” the man from the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin decided; the man from the Philadelphia National Gazette thought he’d been merely “able.”

  What the jurors thought was not yet clear. They had been treated to two entirely different versions of Lucretia. In the prosecution’s, she was not just a murderer but an adulterer, a souless woman whose acts threatened the very fabric of domestic life because they might inspire other lustful wives to emulate them. In the defense’s, she was not only not a murderer, but not even an adulterer. They consistently maintained that she had not had sexual relations with Lino before their wedding, and that she had married him not to satisfy lust, but to safeguard her fatherless orphaned children.

  At war in these two approaches was the very definition of womanhood in the third decade of the nineteenth century. The defense had opted to present Lucretia in the sentimental fashion in which women were generally viewed—as helpless, weak, and perhaps lacking in judgment, but essentially virtuous and asexual. The prosecution had attempted to suggest that female innocence was a myth, or at least that there were some women—women of “masculine intelligence and habits” like Lucretia—who possessed a sexual appetite to rival that of men.

  Perhaps the jury was uncomfortable with the latter argument, which was, in its way, as troubling to their world view as Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution would be to their children’s generation. Or perhaps they simply could not envision the frumpily dressed figure they had daily been studying in the courtroom as being capable of sexual appetite. She was, after all, over forty, a middle-aged schoolmarm with a brood of children and a jaw that was softening into jowls. Moreover, as her character witnesses had testified, she was one of them, a churchgoing woman striving to carve out for herself and her family a respectable living. And, as her letters had revealed, she was a true American, daughter of a Revolutionary War hero, an American who’d been bilked, as could happen to any of them, by an outsider, a stranger to their homogeneous community. After listening with inscrutable faces to Judge Fox’s charges, they filed from the room, deliberated for just a little over two hours, and announced they had reached a verdict.

  At once the courthouse bell began ringing, its clangor piercing the silence of the village night. It was nearly midnight. People raced coatless from homes, taverns, and inns. The courthouse steps became a perfect pandemonium. But inside the courtroom, where the jurors were filing back into their seats, there was an ominous silence.

  Judge Fox regarded the jurors somberly and asked how they found the defendant.

  Foreman John Balderson arose, glanced sympathetically at a shuddering Lucretia, and called out into the stillness, “Not guilty.”

  Leaving the courtroom that night on the arm of her champion, David Paul Brown, Lucretia was surrounded by well-wishers. They congratulated her, embraced her, clutched at the dun-colored skirt of her traveling suit. She was baffled, for some of those who were warmest to her had hissed and booed her at the beginning of the trial. But she accepted their displays of affection and tried to forget the venom with which they had once looked at her.

  Brown had arranged a room for her and the children at his inn, and unable to rest, she partied and petted and chattered with them for hours. Toward daybreak the youngsters collapsed into sleep, William Jr. and Mary in beds of their own, Abby Ann, John, and little Lucretia huddling together in hers. She lay down in their midst, little John’s head nestling on her chest, the girls’ scrawny arms tangling around her waist, and enjoyed the soundest rest she had known in months.

  In the morning she took her leave of Brown, and with the children mounted a carriage for the journey home to Andalusia. As they started to move, a stranger’s vehicle slipped behind their carriage. Then another’s, and another’s, until soon there were dozens of carriages following them, sulkies and shays, Abbotts and Dearborns, even market wagons, their horses whinnying, their drivers shouting their gees and giddyups, their passengers calling out Godspeeds and farewells. She sat tall beside the children and rode home at the head of a parade, a triumphal procession.

  In his cell, Lino took up his pen. “The Creator who, in his infinite wisdom, foresaw that gold would be the cause of many evils to man,” he wrote, “concealed that metal deep in the bowels of the earth, and having covered it with ground and rocks, he strewed upon the surface flowers and fruit, and all that was necessary to the comfort of the human family. But the insatiable avarice of man, impelled him to tear open the earth and snatch the hidden treasure from its deepest and most hidden caverns.

  “It was the avarice of William Chapman that occasioned his ruin, as it is more than probable that it was the covetousness of his wife that drove her to murder him. Mrs. Chapman well knew that Carolino had no mines in Mexico, because this fact had originated with herself … but she knew equally well that his parents were of princely opulence, and that by her arts she would inveigle him to marry her, and would thus enjoy his wealth … and at this stage of the case, we [will] see who was the prime mover of all the horrid circumstances which followed.”

  Eleven

  “Yesterday I Was a Wonder”

  April–June 1832

  THE PRIME MOVER OF all the horrid circumstances. While Lucretia tried to resume her former life in Andalusia, Lino, still awaiting trial, continued his attempt to damage her reputation. He’d already written a letter to Mary Chapman, with whom he’d often flirted, begging the teenager to tell the authorities that her mother had once confessed to him that she and she alone had murdered William. If Mary would do so, he promised the girl, “My father, my parents, all will reward and favor you and take you away from your mother and you will be in the bosom of my family as a daughter.” But he hadn’t mailed the letter. Instead he’d begun concentrating on his memoirs, in the process presenting a Lucretia who was not just a killer but a con artist every bit as talented and devious as himself.

  He’d known her before his visit to Andalusia, he wrote, met her while traveling by steamboat from New York to Philadelphia. She’d introduced herself to him under an alias. Miss Wilson, s
he’d said her name was—and made a point of telling him she was unmarried.

  He hadn’t been all that interested in her. His taste was for younger women. He’d recently seduced one, a beautiful girl from upstate New York, a “flower that would have bloomed in the genial rays of the morning sun of love,” but whom he caused to “fall” to his “scorching” attentions. Still, Miss Wilson had found him attractive. And no wonder, for he’d been wearing a braid-trimmed coat and finely embroidered silk vest, and precious jewels had bedizened his fingers and chest. Where would he be staying in Philadelphia, Miss Wilson had asked him, and when he’d said he wasn’t sure, she’d suggested he stay at the boardinghouse where she was going to lodge. He’d agreed, on the theory that though she was older than the kind of women he liked, he might nevertheless have some fun with her, might “succeed in overcoming her scruples of delicacy.”

  His theory proved right. “That very evening, Miss Wilson was sacrificed at the shrine of pleasure.”

  He paid her for her favors. Gave her twelve doubloons, took her out shopping for some new frocks, and, showing her his jewel-filled trunks, presented her with pearl earrings and an emerald-studded bracelet.

  But Miss Wilson wasn’t grateful for his largesse. After seeing his treasures, she played a cruel trick on him. She sent him, via one of her servants, a gold watch and musical snuffbox, and demanded he purchase the items. He didn’t want them, but Miss Wilson’s servant was incredibly rude, and to get rid of her, he bought the lot for ten dollars, after which the ill-mannered servant promptly disappeared. As soon as she did, however, a corpulent police officer arrived, said the watch and snuff box were stolen goods, and dragged Carolino off to jail. Miss Wilson had clearly planned the whole thing, and while he was in prison, she gained access to his room and made off with his trunks.