Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  Helen Becker—mindful of the awful experience of the first trial—had awaited the verdict in an anteroom. Once again she knew without hearing the words. “After a time,” she said, “I saw people coming out of the courtroom slowly and dejectedly, and my heart sank, for I realized that we had lost again. I could see by the way they walked that it was bad news. After good news, people walk briskly.”

  CHAPTER 12

  DEATH HOUSE

  BECKER’S SECOND CONVICTION for murder was practically unprecedented. Retrials, as several papers pointed out, almost invariably resulted in either a mistrial or an acquittal. There had been only one other case of a repeat conviction in the entire history of New York State.

  The policeman’s bitterness was exacerbated by the fact that he had again been found guilty of murder in the first degree. At the end of his earlier trial, his own defense team had insisted that it would accept only two verdicts: not guilty or guilty of first-degree murder. McIntyre had hoped this announcement would push the jury toward an acquittal. Manton—perhaps less confident, perhaps simply less hubristic—had made no such stipulation and the jury (noted Hill of the Sun)

  could have saved Becker’s life even in finding him guilty if they had wanted to show mercy. Justice Seabury had told them they could choose among three degrees of murder, and two of those degrees would have meant imprisonment. But like twenty-four men who had gone before them, the first Becker jury and the gunmen’s jury, they believed that Jack Rose told the truth…. Becker and his counsel never thought there was a chance in the world that twelve men after the Court of Appeals decision would send Becker to the chair.

  The throng outside the courthouse was just as large and just as hostile to the policeman as they had been nearly two years earlier, but this time there was no comforting crowd of friends and relatives to offer Becker their support. The lieutenant and his wife had waited alone in the sheriff’s office for the verdict, and Becker was taken back to Sing Sing by car, the members of his escort explaining that they had heard worrying reports of an angry mob assembling at Grand Central Station. This time the condemned man was led to a cell on the death house’s upper tier that had not been used for several years. It was much smaller than the one he had occupied before the second trial and had no fitted toilet, only a slop bucket. “That’s one of the hottest cells we got,” a keeper observed unsympathetically. “And it looks like a hot summer coming up.”

  One thing had changed for the better at Sing Sing since Becker left it for New York City: A new warden, Thomas Mott Osborne, had arrived at the jail. Osborne was a craggily handsome and wealthy patrician from Auburn, in upstate New York, who had spent much of his youth as an active Tammany Democrat. After a spectacular falling-out with Boss Murphy, he had abandoned politics and developed an unquenchable passion for prison reform, fueled perhaps by memories of a childhood tour of the enormous prison in his hometown, which had left him with nightmares of being chased down darkened streets by an escaped prisoner. Some of the new warden’s concerns, admittedly, could only have been held by a man of Osborne’s elevated social class—he was outraged at the idea that prisoners were forced to sleep in their underclothes, rather than being issued pajamas—but he was the first Sing Sing warden not to owe his appointment to patronage and the first to be a genuine reformer. Almost all of Osborne’s predecessors had been outsiders foisted on the prison by Tammany as a reward for services rendered—their numbers included “a steam-fitter, a coal dealer, a horseman and a drunkard (by avocation if not by profession)”—the majority of whom, despairing of the prospect of controlling their brutal charges, had ruled through a system of harsh discipline, rigorously enforced. In most cases, however, “brutality and incompetence [had] seemed to go together—so much so that suspensions and removals were incredibly frequent.” A warden of Sing Sing lasted on average less than a year, a fact that did much to explain the prison’s enduring reputation as a hellhole that sucked prisoners in and destroyed them.

  Thomas Mott Osborne arrived at Ossining determined to change all this, and his root-and-branch reforms improved the lot of every prisoner, even those confined to the death house. Some of the changes were purely superficial—the warden saw to it that the thick drifts of litter in the yards were removed—but others were so radical that they still appear astonishing more than a century later. By far the most dramatic was the creation of a prisoners’ association that Osborne named the Mutual Welfare League (MWL). Membership in the league, Osborne stressed, was a privilege and not a right, earned by continued good behavior. But so convinced was the new warden that no man was beyond redemption that he ceded much of the responsibility for discipline within the prison to an MWL committee, which sat in judgment on malefactors even in cases of attempted murder.

  Remarkably, the system worked. Osborne’s first day at Sing Sing, the New York Times observed, “was a success in every way. There were no incendiary fires, no riots, and no strikes—all marks of the coming and going of wardens in the past.” Within days the new prison governor was mingling contentedly with men who had been forbidden to approach within fifteen feet of his predecessors. To the horror of his guards, Osborne even went so far as to decline the loaded revolver other wardens had invariably carried with them on their rounds.*64

  Osborne, with his fervent belief in men’s potential for redemption, had long been an opponent of the death penalty and swore early during his incumbency that he would never be found in the death house when a man was being executed. But the new warden did distinguish between ordinary prisoners and men convicted of a capital crime. Many of his reforms, from the right to receive visitors on Sundays to the dispensation to purchase postage stamps, never applied to the men in the death house; nor were condemned men permitted to join the Mutual Welfare League. Almost the only privilege extended to them under Osborne’s rule was the right to hear regular Sunday-evening concerts, and even then the death-house men remained segregated from the other prisoners. Gazing curiously at Becker as he passed through the tiers of condemned cells—the brawny policeman stood, literally, head and shoulders above most Sing Sing inmates and was an object of intense curiosity throughout his time in jail—Osborne found himself repelled by the prisoner’s appearance: “In spite of the handsome face and splendid physique there was a hardness about the eyes and mouth that spoke of unscrupulousness, even cruelty.” Such a man, the warden thought, might easily stoop to murder. But as he got to know Lieutenant Becker over the succeeding months, Osborne changed his mind. The policeman, he became convinced, could still be redeemed:

  The doomed man would sit for hours at the door of his cell reading aloud to his fellow prisoners, whiling away the dreadful monotony of the period between sentence and death. There was, too, something manly about his attitude. He liked to talk…about his own case, yet never tried to appeal for sympathy with hypocritical avowals of repentance. He admitted certain crimes—chiefly concerned with graft—but not the murder of Rosenthal.

  Talking matters over with his prisoner, Osborne found himself unexpectedly convinced of Becker’s innocence. “Certain features of the crime,” he thought, were not in keeping with the lieutenant’s character: “If such a man had set his mind on murder, he would have made a better job of it. Certainly he would never have put himself at the mercy of several accomplices.”

  Becker’s existence in the condemned cells could scarcely have differed more utterly from the life he had led in Satan’s Circus. It was thoroughly tedious. Opportunities to exercise remained limited, and the policeman’s principal recreation was clipping his way through the pile of newspapers brought to him each day. His reading matter continued to reflect an unspoken yearning to be rid of the stone confines of his prison: tales of expeditions to the Amazon jungle, histories of Central America. And there was something new as well: At some point during his incarceration, Becker underwent a religious conversion, abandoning the nominal Lutheranism of his youth for a more active Catholicism under the tutelage of Father William Cashin, Sing Sing’
s much-loved chaplain, and Father James Curry, an elderly priest from an East Side parish who made regular trips up to Ossining to see him. Before long the lieutenant was helping Cashin to conduct his nightly Bible classes in the death house. Becker, Cashin confided to one reporter who had come to visit, “had been of the greatest assistance in comforting and preparing men who were going to die.” “Look here,” the prisoner hurriedly returned, “I don’t want to be made a white angel or anything of that kind.”

  Becker was permitted to send letters three times a week. Those he dispatched to his family generally sought to stress his innocence and reassure them that he was doing well. “I am writing,” he noted to his nephew Gus Neuberger, “to tell you that though I am convicted, I am as innocent of this horrible murder as you are, as God is my judge…I say this to you, Gus, so that you may not hang your head in shame for any act of mine…I am feeling as good physically as I could want, but you may know the mental strain is simply awful, the shame of the thing is what weighs heavily on me.” On a few occasions, however, even Becker’s determined optimism deserted him. “It does seem,” he told a niece, “as if fate had decreed nothing but misfortune and woe for our family, death, disgrace, trouble, destruction seem to be the watchwords…. If it wasn’t for my Helen poor old mother,*65 I tell you I wish myself [dead], for I am tired of man’s inhumanity to man. Life is but a burden from the cradle to the grave.”

  It was probably only in his letters to Helen that the condemned man felt free to reveal still more of himself, though he certainly repressed much of his fear and concern in order to spare his wife’s feelings. Isolation and the inexorable approach of death did, however, unstop emotions that men of the period did not often express. Becker wrote sometimes of the stifling Sing Sing regime, but more often of love and of intensely imagined romantic scenes that seemed increasingly unlikely to be realized.

  “Queen of my heart,” he began one wistful letter home,

  I’ve been thinking of you the best part of the night, in fact you are never out of my mind, but somehow you seemed nearer and dearer to me than ever…. I do want and love you so much that my heart seems loaded and my head feels like bursting with love and thoughts of you. I think of you sitting on the porch and in my mind’s eye you look lovely but sad. I try to fix in my mind how you’d look if you saw me coming in at the gate. You always were such a bunch of sunshine when I came home…I often think back to the dismal years before I met you, and I can’t recall any pleasure in life except that which I’ve known since I met you. I love to sit in reverie and recall all the beautiful times and days we enjoyed together—the many talks, the drives, the places we visited, our home coming, and the words you said, the question you’d never fail to ask and, when answered properly, the look of satisfaction I’d see on your face made me happy beyond words…. Sweetheart, let us not lose faith or heart. This must come right, and you and I live out our lives together.

  Helen, for her part, wrote to her husband every night, just before going to bed. Knowing how empty days in the prison could be, she corresponded at length, often covering eight or ten sides of papers. “I try,” she explained, “to put in amusing things, jokes that I have heard or read, and bits of gossip that will cheer him up.” But, like her husband, she instinctively avoided distressing topics, including her departure from the house on Olinville Avenue in the autumn of 1914. In an attempt to recoup some of his unpaid legal fees, Martin Manton had put the property up for rent, and Mrs. Becker was forced to move into a much smaller apartment on University Avenue in the Bronx. She shared it with her twin brother, occasioning mild sensation among a number of neighbors who assumed she had taken up with another man before her disgraced husband had so much as been electrocuted. Fortunately for Helen, her sense of the ridiculous helped her to see the humor in such situations:

  Another bad time was riding to school in a White Plains car. I often feel discouraged on street cars; I don’t know why—perhaps it is just because there is nothing to do but just sit there and think. On this day it seemed as if almost everything that could happen to me had happened. My husband was under sentence of death, I had lost my baby, our money was gone, my housekeeper had killed herself, my mother had died, my dog Bum had bitten a man and been shot, my pet canary had died. Then I thought: “Well, anyway, I am not blind. There’s something to be thankful for, that I am not blind.”

  The very next morning I woke up with a sore eye. That struck me as funny and I wrote it to Charley in my next letter. I am glad I have a sense of humor. I think it has often saved me from suffering.

  By the summer of 1914, Charles Whitman’s life was anything but boring. Almost as soon as the district attorney had heard the verdict in the second Becker trial, he turned his attention to furthering his own political career. The triumphant prosecution of that eternal Manhattan bugbear, a venal senior policeman, made Whitman far better known than his rival Republicans, and this time he had little difficulty in capturing his party’s nomination for the governorship of New York State. The DA’s timing proved admirable; the impeachment of William Sulzer had resulted in the accession of an unpopular Catholic governor named Martin Glynn, and this, combined with a sharp decline in support for Theodore Roosevelt’s breakaway Progressive Party, made the Republicans far more electable in 1914 than they had been two years earlier. By autumn the safely Protestant Whitman, with his reputation as a fighter against corruption, had taken a strong lead over his rivals. On election night he carried the state by 145,000 votes, which was regarded as a landslide.

  The former district attorney’s ambition was still not satisfied, however. From his first day in Albany, Whitman viewed the governorship of New York as little more than a stepping-stone to higher office. The gubernatorial mansion had long been regarded as a way station on the road to Washington, and the new governor’s stunning popularity in Democratic New York—which coincided, as it happened, with a dearth of attractive Republican candidates elsewhere in the country—persuaded Whitman that a nomination for the presidency was not out of reach. Before long his ambition had become so naked and so consuming that it was something of a joke. The rising young Tammany Democrat Al Smith publicly charged that Whitman whiled away his time “sitting in the Capitol at Albany with a telescope trained on the White House.”

  Inevitably, Whitman’s political ambitions distracted him from the workaday politics of New York State. The governor’s first year in office was unremarkable, and his policies struck many voters as better calculated to secure national popularity than they were to serve local needs. For many New Yorkers, indeed, the onetime DA—whose exploits they had followed with such avidity at the height of the Rosenthal affair—began to appear a remote figure. As early as six months after his election, some of Whitman’s most vocal supporters were beginning to abandon him. A few journalists and some members of his staff observed that the governor had begun drinking heavily. In several important quarters, his popularity waned.

  In the first months of 1915, however, the manner in which the governor did his job remained of consuming importance to at least one of his constituents. As chief executive of New York, Charles Whitman, in person, sat in judgment on every prisoner on death row in the state—and that, of course, included the man whose trials had made his election possible. When every other recourse had been explored and the last possible appeal exhausted, the one person still able to save Becker’s life would be the man who had twice gotten him convicted of murder.

  The condemned man had not yet abandoned all hope nonetheless. Martin Manton was laboring away on the paperwork required to lodge a second appeal—some five hundred pages of depositions and complicated legal arguments—and there were still occasional developments in the original case as well. By far the most significant of these erupted quite unexpectedly just before Valentine’s Day, when—for a scant few hours at least—a sensational development threw the entire Becker affair into turmoil and promised to demolish the prosecution case once and for all.

  It was James Ma
rshall, Whitman’s crucial witness in Becker’s second trial, who inadvertently raised the defense team’s hopes. Nothing had been heard from the elusive tap dancer since the guilty verdict had been given, and in January, Marshall had quietly moved down the Atlantic coast to Philadelphia, renting a small apartment with his wife. In the second week of February, though, the couple had a violent falling-out. They argued, and a drunken Marshall struck the woman hard enough to send her running to the police. Having sworn out a complaint against her husband, the battered Mrs. Marshall still felt angry enough to plunge her partner into further trouble. Marshall, she told the policeman taking down her statement, had often boasted to her that he had perjured himself in a big trial in New York. What trial? The Becker case, she said.

  It was Martin Manton’s good fortune that two local newspaper reporters happened to be loitering around the station house when Mrs. Marshall made her confession. The newsmen recognized the Becker name at once and, sensing an exclusive of sensational proportions, hurried down into the cells where Marshall had by then been incarcerated. The buck-and-wing man, seemingly glad of the attention and still a little drunk, freely admitted perjury: He had been paid to testify by Whitman’s office, he now said. The newsmen raced off to write their stories, and an hour or two later a telegram bearing the news arrived at Manton’s offices. It was from the editor of the Philadelphia Evening Ledger, and it requested a comment.

  Manton responded speedily. MARSHALL’S STATEMENT MOST ASTOUNDING, the attorney wired back. ABSOLUTELY NEWS TO US HERE. UTMOST IMPORTANCE TO DEFENDANT AND ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE. TAKING THE FIRST TRAIN TO PHILADELPHIA.