The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  He’d discovered this despicable act of his inamorata’s when, freed from jail, he’d gone back to the boardinghouse to get his possessions. The previous landlady was gone, but the new proprietor told him who had taken his things. She was, said the proprietor, a woman named “not Miss Wilson, but Mrs. Lucretia Chapman” who lived “at a place called Andalusia about thirteen miles from Philadelphia.” So he set out for that place, and find the thief he did. He spotted a house with a sign that said “Chapman,” entered it, and discovered, seated in the dining room, “the very woman of whom he was in search.”

  This story provides a far more plausible explanation of why Lino turned up in Andalusia than does the one the prosecution presented at Lucretia’s trial. But it is a difficult story to credit, since Lino told different versions of it on different occasions. When he sought release from the Eastern State Penitentiary, he told prison inspectors that the objects he was accused of stealing had been given to him by “another person of my own age” and made no mention of a mysterious woman’s having planted them in his room. When he was apprehended for William’s murder, he said nothing about Lucretia’s having stolen anything from him, or even that he’d known her before coming to Andalusia; he also, at that time, claimed to have stopped in Andalusia purely by accident. While awaiting his murder trial, he told a journalist that he had known Lucretia before he was jailed for theft, that she’d been his sex partner and stolen his treasures, and that when he was released he’d set out to find her. But he also told the journalist that no one directed him to Andalusia, that he stopped there serendipitously, and that only once there did he recognize—to his great surprise—that the lady of a certain house had been his “chère amie in Philadelphia.”

  It was as if he couldn’t stop inventing and reinventing the story of his life.

  On April twenty-fourth, a day on which a local newspaper reported the hanging of a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, man before fifteen thousand witnesses, Lino’s case was at last brought to trial. He entered the courthouse nonchalantly that day, chatted confidently with his defense attorneys, and as soon as he was placed at the bar began picking his teeth, as if oblivious to his setting or its perils.

  Once again Judge John Fox was presiding and Thomas Ross and William Reed were prosecuting. But this time something was different. When Reed led off the trial’s preliminaries by inquiring whether the prosecution could ask prospective jurors if they had conscientious scruples against finding a verdict of guilt, Judge Fox unexpectedly said, “Yes. It is a proper question and I will allow it to be asked.”

  As soon as he’d spoken, young Samuel Rush, Eleazar McDowell’s apprentice, called out, “Am I to understand your Honor to say that you have decided contrary to the opinion you gave in the former trial?”

  “Yes, contrary to my own opinion.” He had changed his mind, Judge Fox explained, after discussing his previous decision with several other judges and with the chief justice.

  Rush and McDowell were dismayed. They hadn’t, after all, asked for a jury of foreigners. But they’d been hoping for compassionate Americans, for the kind of jurors who, perhaps secretly harboring an antipathy toward taking the life of a fellow human being, might be counted upon to be automatic allies during deliberations. They tried to explain this to Lino, who with his limited English had been listening uncomprehendingly to the discussion. For a moment his face fell and he looked forlorn. But immediately afterward he recovered himself and glanced about him with an air of machismo.

  The indictment was read. Jurors were selected—among them seven Quakers who did not abhor capital punishment. The prosecution delivered its opening remarks, promising to prove that “The death of Mr. Chapman was caused by a most deadly poison that the day before he was taken ill the individual at the bar purchased in Philadelphia.” Yet still, Lino’s nonchalance didn’t fade—perhaps because he knew that at Lucretia’s trial Ross had been unable to establish that poison was the cause of William’s death. But Lino was in far more jeopardy than Lucretia had been. For one thing, the state’s ability to tie him to the purchase of the deadly poison was potentially of greater significance to the jurors than was its inability to explain exactly how William had died. For another, unlike Lucretia, Lino was an outsider, an alien to the community.

  Thomas Ross, who’d been bested by David Paul Brown despite all his hard work, his ambitions, and his dreams of glory, didn’t intend to lose again. Not this time. He’d tightened his case, located witnesses who could add to the devastating evidence of Lino’s having purchased arsenic by testifying to the fact that he’d lied in order to get it, that although he’d said he needed arsenic to preserve birds, he actually had no birds. Ross was ready with two such witnesses, acquaintances of Lino’s, and with the whole cast that had testified at Lucretia’s trial, including the medical men who had tended William while he was dying, those who had autopsied his body, and those who had searched for traces of arsenic in his tissues.

  On the second day of the trial, he began producing his witnesses, and when he had examined them all, he capped his show with Willis Blayney. This time around he’d gotten Philadelphia’s high constable to come to court voluntarily. And this time around Blayney was talkative. He described at length how he’d taken Lino into custody in Boston, how he’d escorted him by steamboat to Philadelphia, and how he’d promised Lino that if he owned up to whether he’d ever been a pirate or a convict, Blayney wouldn’t divulge in a court of law anything else he might reveal. But after saying all this, Blayney suddenly clammed up. He didn’t want to break his word to the prisoner, he explained, and begged the court not to force him to report what Lino had said to him once he’d claimed never to have been a pirate or convict.

  Judge Fox listened to him respectfully and said understandingly, “Any declaration a man makes that is drawn from him by the offer of favor or by threats cannot be given in evidence. But the question is, did you actually promise the defendant favor?”

  Before Blayney could reply, all four attorneys rushed to give their opinions on the matter. Blayney had promised Lino favorable treatment in return for a confession, argued the defense counselors. “The defendant’s confession cannot be given in evidence.”

  Blayney hadn’t promised Lino favorable treatment, argued the prosecution lawyers, and in addition they made the point that what Lino had told their witness wasn’t a confession. “It is a statement made by Mina with a view of shielding himself. There was no admission of his having participated in the murder.”

  After listening to the outbursts from both sides Fox asked Blayney to repeat exactly what he’d said to Lino. Blayney described once again how on the steamboat Lino had kept trying to talk to him and how finally in order to silence the prisoner he’d asked him to answer his two questions and promised that anything else he said would be kept private.

  “That was not a promise of favorable treatment,” Fox admonished Blayney. “You must tell us what he said.”

  The high constable accepted the judge’s directive. He had no choice but to do so. “I asked Mina whether he had a medicine chest,” he began. “He said he had, and had left it in the Boston jail. I asked him whether he had arsenic in it. He said he had medicine or stuff in it that would kill people and kill rats. I asked him whether he gave any of the medicine to Chapman. He said no, he was innocent. He said Mrs. Chapman put the physic in the soup. He said, ‘She take it from my bottles.’ He said that afterwards, ‘Mr. Chapman get very bad and die. Mrs. Chapman then come and kiss and hug me and say, ‘Lino, I want you to marry me.’”

  The story Blayney had managed to withhold at Lucretia’s trial was now out—for whatever it was worth.

  Lino’s defense was a sorry affair. Rush was a very junior man—he had not yet even been admitted to the bar—and McDowell himself, court-appointed and not receiving his usual high fees, chose not to expend much energy on the case. The pair’s cross-examination of prosecution witnesses was so perfunctory that the prosecution was able to get through all of its witnesses
—there were twenty-three of them, almost as many as at Lucretia’s trial—in a mere two days. Their presentation of their own case was even more swift. They produced no witnesses at all, contenting themselves with only two things: the verdict of acquittal in Lucretia’s trial, and a deposition from a medical expert stating that it was difficult to differentiate death caused by cholera morbus from death caused by arsenic poisoning. Worse, despite his reputation for being a shrewd as well as likable attorney, McDowell did not deliver an effective closing argument. At least, whatever he said made little impression on the reporter from the Saturday Bulletin, who termed prosecutor Reed’s summation “clear” and “powerful,” but said nothing at all of McDowell’s closing remarks except to note that he had made some.

  Nor did McDowell’s closing make much of an impression on William Du Bois, the law student turned true crime writer. He copied none of it down. But then Du Bois, who had been enjoined from publishing anything about the Chapman case until Lino’s trial was over, seemed to have grown bored with the entire subject of William Chapman’s murder. He didn’t jot down any of the summations. Lucretia’s trial had struck the writer as being of “exciting interest,” and he had copied out virtually every word of it. But Lucretia was a woman of the same class as Du Bois and presumably of the same class as his readers. Lino was a lower-class foreigner. All that interested Du Bois about this second trial were the various legal arguments. And all he wanted, all that stood between him and financial fortune, was the verdict.

  He got it soon enough. At nine o’clock on the evening of April twenty-seventh, only three days after the trial had begun, Judge Fox sent the jury out to deliberate, with instructions that they were to receive no dinner until they reached a verdict.

  Despite their hunger, they stayed out a respectable period of time—nearly three hours. Then, at midnight, they pronounced Lino guilty of murder in the first degree.

  “Take the prisoner back for the night,” Judge Fox ordered the high sheriff. “Return him tomorrow for sentencing.”

  Lino was flippant. His neck was ready for the rope, he told reporters.

  The next day, Saturday, April twenty-eighth, Fanny Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans was published. Among the many anecdotes recounted by the feisty Englishwoman, who had organized theatricals in Cincinnati before turning to writing, was one about two Pennsylvania criminals, one an American, the other an Irish immigrant. They’d jointly committed a robbery, and they’d each been sentenced to death, but, Trollope reported, “the Irishman was hanged and the American was not.” Worse, she wrote, she’d heard but not yet been able to verify that such injustice was common in America, where ever since the Declaration of Independence nearly all the white men who’d been executed in the country were immigrants.

  Whether Trollope’s statistic was right or not, Lino was, on that Saturday, in grave danger of death by hanging—the requisite sentence for his crime—and to prevent that unfortunate outcome, his lawyers finally roused themselves to make a last-ditch effort on his behalf. There was as yet no legislation granting automatic judicial review to defendants convicted of capital crimes. But the common law allowed them to seek a new trial, provided it could be shown that at their original trial, improper evidence had been admitted. McDowell and Rush, convinced that Willis Blayney’s evidence should not have been admitted, asked Judge Fox for permission to file an application for a new trial.

  Fox gave them less than the customary four days. He’d expect their application, and their oral arguments, too, he said, at court’s opening on Tuesday.

  Over the weekend the two defense attorneys consulted the law books in McDowell’s Doylestown office and began writing down precedents and salient points. In jail, Lino, who had lost faith in McDowell and Rush, also began writing. This time it wasn’t another anecdote for his memoirs but a letter to the court asking for a few more months of life than the judges might be inclined to give him. “My name is Carolino,” he wrote. “I was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, and desire to die in its faith. I pray that a priest of that religion may be sent to me that I may prepare myself for death by confession and the blessed absolution, and by partaking of the holy communion according to the rites and ceremonies of that church.

  “I have written to my father and brother, and expect they will come to this country to see me, and I have in the island of Cuba, a daughter four years old. It is necessary before I die, that I should execute some legal papers, in order to secure some property to my daughter. I therefore pray the Court to grant me at least a few months of existence, before I am ordered to be executed.”

  The letter was in English. He would ask to have it read to the judges, he decided, if McDowell and Rush proved themselves as inept at getting him a second trial as they’d been at handling his first.

  “Is it necessary for the prisoner to be here as we present arguments as to why he should have a new trial?” Samuel Rush asked Judge Fox first thing on Tuesday morning.

  “There is no such necessity,” Fox replied, “if you are willing to argue the motion in his absence.”

  They were willing, Rush said, and began the petitioning. “The High Constable made a compact with the prisoner,” he argued. “It was a promise of favor. It amounted to an offer of immunity from prosecution.” To bolster his position, he cited two Pennsylvania cases in which judges had ruled differently from Fox about allowing similar police testimony.

  At this, Thomas Ross demanded to be heard. But Judge Fox, gesturing him to silence, said it wasn’t necessary for him to speak. “We have not changed our opinion since the trial,” he declared. “We do not think that the statement or confession made by the prisoner to Blayney was obtained under any promise of favor whatever. It was at most a promise to keep secret a confession which Mina wished to make.” A promise, he added, that had been made to the prisoner “upon the condition that his declaration that he was neither a convict nor a pirate should turn out to be true.”

  That said, Fox concluded imperiously, “We still think we were right, and therefore the motion for a new trial is refused.”

  Ross leaped to his feet. “I move the prisoner be brought up for sentencing!”

  “Motion granted.”

  From the judge’s tone it was clear that Lino’s sentencing was inevitable, and in a matter of moments the prisoner was led into the courtroom. Briefly, he spoke to his lawyers, handed them the letter he had written, then took his place in the dock.

  “Mr. Espos y Mina,” Judge Fox demanded, casting a grim look at him, “do you have anything to say as to why the sentence of death should not be passed on you?” Lino was silent and from down in the well of the courtroom, McDowell answered for him. “The prisoner has drawn up a paper. We think it best if we read his words.”

  “Permission granted.”

  “My name is Carolino,” McDowell began to read. “I was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church.”

  Fox leaned back, his expression inscrutable, and McDowell read on. “I have in the island of Cuba, a daughter four years old.”

  Judge Fox was a stern man, but he had no fondness for sending another man to his death, especially the father of a four-year-old. He started to look agitated.

  “It is necessary before I die,” McDowell continued, “that I should execute some legal papers, in order to secure some property to my daughter.”

  In the pews, spectators were weeping. Lino, with his taut words, had become for them not the embodiment of evil but a man. A parent. It was a shift in attitude that would soon have serious repercussions for Lucretia.

  “I pray the Court to grant me at least a few months of existence,” McDowell finished, “a few months before I am ordered to be executed.”

  When the lawyer sat down, Fox was silent for a moment. Then he began to speak, but his usually ready words came out slowly and with a difficulty that was noticed throughout the courtroom. “These matters will be laid,” he said. “Before the Governor. Who will no doubt. Grant the request which you mak
e.”

  Lino tipped his head in acknowledgment.

  Fox was still visibly distressed. But he managed to continue speaking, to say as boldly as he could what it was now required of him to say: “Lino Amalia Espos y Mina, the sentence which the law imposes upon you is that you be taken hence to the prison of Bucks County, from whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, and that you there be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy upon your soul.”

  “Back out! Back out at once,” a voice from within Lucretia’s house shouted at a peddler making his way up to the porch a few weeks after Lino was sentenced. The peddler was carrying copies of Du Bois’s book, The Trial of Lucretia Chapman, which had just been published. The book, some copies of which included a brief supplement on Lino’s trial, had become an instant success. Philadelphia’s bookstores were selling scores of the volume each day, and vendors were lugging it door-to-door all over Bucks County. This peddler, however, had come to the wrong door. Within moments unseen assailants—they were probably Lucretia’s children—began hissing and hooting at him, and he was forced to scamper away as quickly as the weight of his heavy sack allowed.

  The effrontery of the peddler was only one of the humiliations Lucretia began to endure once Lino was sentenced. In part her difficulties arose from the very fact of that sentencing: now that Lino was facing death, people were feeling sorry for him, speaking up for him. In part her difficulties arose from the public’s gullibility. Du Bois’s book had given wide circulation to Blayney’s report that Lino had claimed to him that Lucretia, not he, had poisoned William’s soup. Since making that claim, Lino had told variations of it to journalists who sought him out. The journalists hadn’t printed his stories; they’d been under judges’ orders not to write about the case until it was resolved. Now, however, they’d begun publishing information they’d gotten from Lino, including one story in which he had Lucretia poisoning not William’s soup but his dinner wine. She did it, he asserted, by first humiliating her husband, directing him to touch her lover’s curly head and feel how soft his hair was, and only then, when William’s attention was diverted by this small bit of wifely cruelty, delivering the coup de grâce and slipping arsenic into his glass.