Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  In his argument for the defence, Darrow sought to show that his theory of criminal behaviour being the result of a unique combination of genetic and environmental forces beyond the criminal’s control applied as much to the rich as to the poor, and that compassion was in order even for these two. He believed both boys were abnormal if not mad. A psychiatrist for the state, however, declared them sane. Dr. Krohn always declared everyone sane, and in so doing had condemned many men to death. Here Darrow compared the motives of Richard Loeb with those of Dr. Krohn:

  ‘As I think of the story of Dick trailing that little boy around, there comes to my mind a picture of Dr. Krohn—for sixteen years going in and out of the courtrooms of this building and other buildings, trailing victims without regard to their name or sex or age or surroundings. But he had a motive, and his motive was cash … One was the mad act of a child; the other the cold, deliberate act of a man getting his living by dealing in blood.’

  In answering the proposition that the killers deserved the same fate as their victim, he declared that if the state was not kinder and more humane than these two mad children then he was sorry he had lived so long. He described in detail what a hanging entailed, the months of waiting, the useless hope of relatives and condemned man alike, the final day, being woken at dawn, the long walk to the scaffold, the feet being tied and stood upon the trapdoor, the black cap drawn over the head, the hangman pressing back the spring … He was aware, he went on, that this would bring ‘immense satisfaction’ to some people. He spoke with pity and contempt of the cruelty of righteous indignation, and disparaged the easy assurance with which men speak of justice.

  Who really knows what justice is? No man, he argued, can sufficiently understand another, know the billions of biological and genetic forces and the millions of incidents in his life, the humiliations and cruelties that formed him. No man can grasp the enormity of these influences and say, ‘Had all these forces acted on me, I could have resisted them.’ And no mere mortal has the omniscience required to assess these elements, judge them, and then extinguish a life because of them.

  Many bizarre and painful facts came out about the boys. Nathan Leopold had all kinds of physical problems, including an adrenal deficiency and a diseased thyroid that was thought to have led to far too early a sexual development. Some other malady had given him round shoulders, an abdomen which stuck out weirdly, and extremely coarse hair. Because he was shy around girls, his parents had, to his great embarrassment, sent him to an all-girls school. Later on, when he was fourteen, a governess forced him to perform oral sex on her.

  Richard Loeb’s problems were less apparent but can be inferred from the behaviour of his parents. Before the murder he was given a car, an allowance of $250 a month, and access to whatever other money he required from his father’s secretary. After the murder, his father never once came to visit him, did not attend the trial, and refused to hear his name mentioned from then on.

  Everything, Darrow argued, has a cause, including crime. To attempt to terrorise people out of criminal activity is futile. The only cure for the problem is to understand it, as doctors do with disease. To execute the boys would not only be morally wrong and cruel, but pointless. Far better to keep them alive and study them.

  Toward the end of his two-day speech, the exhausted Darrow said:

  ‘I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men, when we can learn by reason and judgement and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.’

  Leopold and Loeb were given life in prison.

  As if proving Darrow’s theories, at least on the ‘nurture’ front, the parents of the boys neglected to pay him. When he finally sent a note requesting that they at least talk about the bill, they wrote back saying the suggested arbitration by the Bar Association was unfair to them because Darrow was a lawyer himself and therefore at an advantage. Would he suggest a figure? He and his firm had spent months on the case. He suggested $200,000. The families came back at $75,000. Disgusted, Darrow agreed and told them to send a cheque. The next day it arrived.

  It was for $70,000. Darrow banked it.

  Because of the Leopold and Loeb case, the ACLU was against Darrow getting involved in the trial. It had made him too famous and they feared he’d turn the Scopes Trial into even more of a circus than it already was. Worse still, he’d focused attention on Nathan Leopold’s fascination with Nietzsche. He had even suggested it was partly his interest in the idea of the Superman, of the survival of the fittest, which had inched him closer to the crime, and this seemed like an obvious gift to the prosecution. Hadn’t Darrow already proved their case for them? Wasn’t this precisely the danger of teaching evolution? Darrow himself had thought of this problem and decided not to get involved, but when he heard that Bryan was in, he could not resist the challenge.

  He offered his services in so public a manner that the ACLU was forced to accept, particularly when Scopes himself—he was, after all, the defendant—turned out to be a huge admirer of Darrow and said he liked the idea of being represented by him.

  And so the play was cast and the stage set.

  I walk back to the car and drive slowly through town toward the Magnolia House, thinking how sad it is that three-quarters of a century ago, Darrow was in despair at the judicial system’s barbarity and defeatism, and nothing has changed. When you contemplate the blind refusal of even sophisticated Americans to acknowledge that crime must have a cause which, if understood, would undoubtedly lead to a remedy far more effective than the slammed door of harsh punishment, you cannot help but wonder if this is because the cause is so hard to find or because it might be so easy? Are they afraid that to probe beneath the surface of this land of Christian promise would instantly expose a rebuke to their very existence, a starving shadow-race which has for generations been denied either spiritual or material opportunity? And if this were so, what, as decent Americans, would they be forced to do?

  It is almost heretical to say, but obvious nonetheless, that so long as 95 per cent of the wealth is held by 5 per cent of the population, those whose snouts are excluded from the golden trough are liable to express their discontent in crime. Like everyone else, however, Americans love their illusions and would far rather suffer the consequences of crime than face the ramifications of its cure: with Communism dead, is it time to take a critical look at capitalism?

  Beyond this disturbing question lies an even less appealing one: why is America, a country where 98 per cent of the people believe in God and over 50 per cent believe in the literal existence of angels, why is this so holy place infested with serial killers, rapists, paedophiles—often men of the cloth—drug addicts, gangs, cults, and madmen? Why, in short, isn’t Christianity having the advertised effect?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Gloria in Excelsis Deo

  I find Gloria up in her den, smoking and drinking and somehow finding limbs free to peck out messages on AOL (‘u r 2 Sweet’) and stuff clothes into suitcases, among them a hot pink one, the last of a set given her when she was a child.

  She offers me some wine and I take it. The light flickers gloomily as we talk. Freight trains, hooting their horns to avoid killing more Daytonians, pass by every now and then, making the house vibrate even though the track is a quarter of a mile away. At one point Gloria gets up and goes into the next room, her bedroom. I can see her reflection in the glass front of a cabinet. She’s undressing! She seems to be getting into some light blue medical scrubs such as surgeons wear when they’re about to cut you up!

  Have I fallen into a Roald Dahl story? Is she going to skin me and take my epidermis with her up to Hershey to see the street lamps in the shape of kisses? She returns in the scrubs and I see that the legs have been cut off about six inches above the knee. I make no comment and she falls back onto the sofa. I’m not sure if my being here cheers her up and distracts her, or if I’m just another irritating
bump on the road out. Either way, she’s friendly and open, and before long she tells me her story.

  Her maternal grandmother owned a farm in Dayton but was forced to sell it by the Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA administered a huge endeavour involving dams and reservoirs and hydroelectric plants. Intended to bring prosperity to one of the poorest regions of America, it succeeded to a large extent. Gloria’s Aunt Ruth and several other family members stayed in Dayton, but her grandmother and mother moved to Los Angeles where they ran a boarding house. Gloria’s mother married a mysterious Filipino war hero who had worked for the United States fighting the Japanese and had been caught and tortured. Later, it was rumoured, he went crazy and shot a lot of people in Manila. There was a price on his head so the Americans allowed him to immigrate and change his name. He became an alcoholic hairdresser in Hollywood. When Gloria was young, he’d sit her on his knee and say, ‘Your daddy’s gonna die young.’ When she was four, he left, and when she was seven he fulfilled his prediction, dying, I believe, of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of thirty-four. He was buried in Long Beach military cemetery with full honours and Gloria and her sister received $15,000 each from the government.

  Her mother then married a rich but mean-spirited man who Gloria remembers with great distaste. The marriage didn’t last.

  Third time out, her mother found true love in the form of Steve Brodie, whom she met at a singles gathering at the Hilton in Beverly Hills. Brodie was an actor who played bad guys in Westerns. In life he was the reverse. Kind and gentle, he treated Gloria and her sister as if they were his own, and Gloria adored him.

  Gloria often spent summer vacations in Dayton, but when she was fourteen she came for a year, staying with her Aunt Ruth, who ran a flower shop out of the Aqua Hotel. She was a cheerleader at the high school. She was beautiful and from out of town and God knows what the local boys made of her. Her best friend was named Bobby-Sue.

  At fifteen she returned to California and promptly ran away, became a flower child, and hitched around the state. She returned a year later and graduated from Encino High and then did two years of college at Long Beach. But, still in her late teens, before she even went to college, she married the first of three husbands, a thirty-six-year-old guitar player and professional hunter. Being so much older, the husband knew everything and was right about everything, which irritated Gloria. One Christmas while listening to the hymn ‘Gloria in Excelsis Deo,’ Gloria said, ‘Oh, listen, they’re singing about me.’ The husband said the word was not ‘Gloria’ but some other word. Gloria said, ‘No, it’s Gloria.’ He said, ‘No, it’s not.’ Gloria said, ‘Listen, I can’t be wrong all the time. Sometimes I have to be right.’

  They argued. Gloria left. The marriage was over.

  She was twenty-one and didn’t get married again for another ten years, during which time she got some kind of degree out of Arizona State, and entered ‘retail.’ When she was thirty-one she married a guy who owned the oldest bar in Long Beach. He was her age, but a spoiled rich kid and smoked a lot of pot. The marriage lasted until she was about thirty-eight. Her retail career, which had begun at Contempo Casuals, ended with her being the District Manager of Target Stores in Los Angeles, and later in Atlanta.

  One day, shortly after her second marriage ended, she saw a lump of chewing gum on the floor of her store in Torrance. She bent over to scrape it off and an avalanche of toys fell on her back, injuring her. She took some time off and was then transferred to Atlanta. She had already bought the Magnolia House, having seen it on one of her periodic visits. For twelve years, she had worked on it whenever she could, restoring it in vacations, paying others to work on it whenever she had money. It would be the only first-class bed-and-breakfast in Dayton and it would provide her with a constant flow of interesting guests to satisfy her gregarious nature. Now in Atlanta and only a couple of hours’ drive away, she soon had the the place almost finished. All she needed to make her dream a reality was someone to help her run it.

  Her third husband was a chef and restaurant manager. A good-looking thirty-five to her … well, at this point her age starts to disobey the usual laws of mathematics (she’s thirty-eight, four years go by, and she’s still not forty, and even I can tell there’s something off) … But anyway, he was younger than her, and perfect. He would do all the cooking, she would run the business.

  And so it was for a year, and the place did well and they were happy. Then he started getting jealous and abusive. She could not even look at another man without his screaming at her when they got home. He was even jealous of her girlfriends. After a while, he refused to answer the phone, even if Gloria was out. It became her job to buy the food. She’d go to the store, leaving him to greet incoming guests and return to be told they’d not arrived. Later they would call from the Best Western outside of town, saying no one answered the door. The husband would swear they never showed and then, when she remonstrated with him, he’d yell, ‘Fuck them! They’re lying. Who are you going to believe, them or me?’

  Unable to count on him for anything, and wanting at all costs to avoid arguments which were becoming increasingly frightening (‘We got through eight mobile phones, him throwin’ them at me’), she began to do everything herself. As business began to go down, his spending rose. He bought eight guns and hid them in the garage.

  Then it got even worse.

  He’d go to the hardware store and not come back for two days.

  ‘He always came in, the door slammed. Then he’d say, “So what the fuck’s your problem? Go on, tell me!” I’d go, “I don’t have a problem.” “Wanna know what I did?” he’d yell. “Okay, I went out, met somebody at the store, played poker, what else the fuck is there to do in this town?’”

  When Gloria simply said she wanted to go back to sleep, he’d say ‘You don’t talk. How are we gonna resolve anything if we don’t talk?’ She’d point out that every time they talked he would end up yelling at her. ‘Well,’ he’d then say, ‘our marriage is going down the tubes and it’s never going to be resolved if you can’t talk …’

  In other words, it was all her fault. Sociable and lively Gloria sank into a prolonged silence. He began doing coke. He’d get $500 cash advances out of her account using a card. If that didn’t work, he’d buy things with a credit card and sell them for cash. Clearly he was screwing around too, perhaps he had been from the start. A tough, capable woman, Gloria could not understand how she was allowing herself to be treated like this. Her friends, equally perplexed, and finding the tension unbearable, drifted away.

  One day, she drove to a bookshop in Chattanooga and scanned the self-help shelves for advice. She found a book on verbal abuse and bought it. It described her husband perfectly and stated that the next step would be physical abuse. It told her not to engage. If he lost his temper she was to look at him and in a calm voice state, ‘I will not allow you to disrespect me that way and until you can talk to me cordially, I have nothing to say,’ and walk out of the house. Of course, it was hard to run a hotel under these conditions and soon the Magnolia House was deeply in the red.

  Gloria became convinced he was trying to sabotage the business so they’d be forced to sell the house and he could then take off with ‘his’ half of the money. She found a secret box of his with credit cards she didn’t know about and a camcorder he’d bought recently and hidden. Using the cash card, he began to drain the bank account and build up a stash. Still she continued with her strategy of non-engagement. It infuriated him, but what could he do? He wanted to fight her but she wasn’t there. She had a friend with a farm above town and would go up and do yardwork or ride one of the horses through the hills.

  ‘I did that for three months,’ she tells me, ‘by the fourth month he was ready to go.’ When the credit cards hit their limits, he left.

  For a while, she tried to run the place alone, but the interest on the cards was too high: the debt he had caused could not be paid through the enterprise they had created. It got worse with every we
ek, growing exponentially as these things do. It became clear that the only way she could escape the debt was to sell.

  Soon after she’d made this decision, the husband phoned. He was in bad shape and begged to come back. In spite of everything, Gloria still loved him in a way, but she knew it was hopeless and told him so. He started crying and saying how much he loved her. He’d come back and help her ‘catch up on the bills.’

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I don’t have no money. You’ve ruined me. I’m done.’

  And then she hung up.

  Now she’s on her way to a chilly town in Pennsylvania, back into retail on the wrong side of forty. Undaunted.

  CHAPTER NINE

  My Mother

  Downstairs, my bed is huge and comfortable, but when I turn over it creaks loudly. I hear the hoot of an approaching train and then the house starts to tremble. The train is so long that when the last car beats by and the engine hoots again it’s already a distant sound far off in the night.

  I try to go to sleep, but can’t. My mind plunges inexplicably from one disturbing image to another and I cannot stop it. I feel certain that my mother, from whom I inherited the Darwin gene, suffered similarly, as did her mother, whose episodes of anxiety and manic depression were so severe they put her in the asylum. Clare’s superficial, almost humorous pessimism—no picnic could take place without rain, all dinners were doomed to failure—was something we laughed at; but we knew her gloom was real and profound and her imagination uncontrollably tortured. Eventually she sought relief in alcohol and died from it.

  I choose to vent my imagination through writing, by grinding and reshaping life. It has enabled me to survive, both financially and psychologically, but it has also been a curse. In a letter to his wife, quoted in the John Bowlby biography, Darwin, who worked seven days a week as I do, says, ‘how fortunate I am to have plenty of employment … for being employed alone makes me forget myself.’ I think it was Flaubert who said the same thing in a different way. ‘We don’t write to live, we write in order not to live.’ I stay in my room, in my invented world, absorbed in play. No one looks at me in disgust except myself, and if I can trick myself into a productive trance, even that diminishes. I am only really comfortable when ‘I’ am lost.