Great American Crime Stories

by Bill Bowers

  Then followed Blixt, and for parts of three days, the unlettered engineer held at bay one of the most ingenious of cross-examiners, but clinging to his story, evidently true in the main in every detail, to the last. Shocking as was the narration of his dreadful deed, the murderer was listened to by some of the largest crowds that attended the trial, illustrating to a high degree the morbid curiosity which sways a large portion of the community.

  Dramatically following this came the betrayer of the crime, Adry A. Hayward, against whose testimony came another vigorous contention that he was insane, and should not be allowed to testify. Judge Smith, however, ruled continually against the broad claim, sometimes with such emphasis on the delay it was causing that led to exciting scenes in court, but without error, evidently.

  Then the insurance agents and bankers with whom Hayward had talked about insurable interest, death by violence, and other matters of a suspicious nature, were called in and as the list of witnesses was almost finished the state stumbled upon a hack driver to whom Hayward had talked about driving his rig over a precipice into a lake, and about the power of his conscience, if he had committed a murder.

  Last of all came what seemed like a voice from the dead, the testimony of Mrs. Lillian Hazelton, since deceased, to the effect that on the afternoon of Dec. 3d, Catherine Ging had told her she was going out that evening with “Harry.”

  The defense first exploited the presence of the defendant at the opera house in order to prove an alibi as to the actual murder, and also a number of witnesses to show the whereabouts of Hayward during the afternoon and early evening of the same day to show that Blixt’s statements were untrue. However, it was a case where a few minutes’ variation did not disprove anything, and Blixt’s story in the main was not directly contradicted. But in the midst of its own case, the defense was misled into placing on the stand M. D. Wilson, a liveryman, who had been reported as saying that a rig containing a couple talking loudly had followed him for a mile or thereabouts on Kenwood parkway. His testimony, however, was that the rig only turned into that street from Lyndale as he passed, and in his best judgment the man in the buggy was Harry Hayward. The defense could not impeach the truthfulness of its own witness and from [then] on the fight was against fearful odds.

  George A. Grindall, a familiar figure around Minneapolis courts for years, told an implausible story about seeing a man with gray whiskers get into a buggy with a lady on First avenue north just about the time that Miss Ging was known to have left the West Hotel, and Maggie Wachtler, a stenographer formerly employed by R. R. Odell, the attorney for Blixt, testified that in Blixt’s’ confession, which she took as stenographer, he had said that Adry told him to kill the girl. Both these stories were generally doubted, and indictments for perjury were threatened but never prosecuted.

  The defense had distinguished experts on nervous affections to testify that Adry appeared to be insane, but the character of the testimony which they were allowed to give was so general in its character that it affected the case but little.

  As a dramatic close to the case of the defense came the testimony of the defendant himself, an ingenious explanation of his tell-tale conversations with the insurance men, which he did not deny, and a graphic history of his gambling exploits much resembling that given in his antemortem confession but without any reference to the crimes therein mentioned. The state’s rebuttal was chiefly occupied with the impeachment of the testimony of Grindall and Miss Wachtler, but it did include one new and startling element, the very positive identification of Hayward by Geo. W. Jenks as a man he had seen runnig up Hennepin avenue from the direction of Superior avenue on the night of the murder, a short time after 7 o’clock.

  In vain the defense sought to exclude it on the ground that it was too late for them to investigate the incident, and on the heels of this dramatic incident, the closing arguments were begun.

  County Attorney Nye, scarcely recovered from an illness that had kept him from the trial during so important a part as the cross-examination of Hayward, made an eloquent argument for the protection of society by the punishment of such an offender.

  Then the senior counsel for the defense closed the case of the defense in an address that occupied eleven hours in actual delivery, parts of three court days. All that ingenuity could devise to explain the suspicious conduct of the defendant, and the most eloquent periods of an advocate known throughout the world by causes he had championed, proved unavailing, however, to save the life of the man who had wronged society so grievously, and after a confinement of seven weeks, the jury on the 7th of March arrived at a verdict of guilty within two hours after leaving the court room.

  Lessons From the Ging Murder.

  I cannot believe any one is born absolutely depraved—wholly destitute of soul. It may seem to be entirely absent, under some conditions of birth and education, so that to all outward appearances the man is soulless and conscienceless. Harry T. Hayward was a most phenomenal example of this class of beings. To all appearances he was without a soul. It was at least latent. It did not speak—did not manifest itself. He knew not love, that universal language of the soul. All humane, sympathetic and tender sensibilities seemed to be absent from his nature. He appeared to be born under a cloud of moral darkness, and his career demonstrated that he loved darkness rather than light. It is impossible to say whether as a criminal he was indebted most to birth or training—whether his depravity was native or acquired. It was doubtless both.

  Certain it is that the habits and environments of a life time will do much to transform virtue into vice or vice into virtue. The great lesson of this case is, that man is not man except he have a soul—that the cultivation of this divine attribute in man is not only the duty and high privilege of the individual, but of society as well. It is fortunate for humanity that this case attracted such wide and general attention. The eye of a continent, almost of the world, has been upon it, and the character of Hayward may well enlist the study and contemplation of every thinking mind. Indeed, society is in a measure responsible for such Characters. They are in some degree at least the fruit of our civilization. They are the product of a money-loving and money-worshiping age—an age which feeds the intellect and starves the soul—idolizes mind and assassinates conscience. “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

  Born of wealthy parents, reared in fashionable society, of smooth and polished exterior, having the appearance of refinement, he moved in the best circles, outwardly a gentleman, inwardly a fiend—a moral monstrosity. He was intellectually acute, cunning and active, original and daring in schemes of wickedness. A genius in crime. A romancer in the realm of wickedness. He loved darkness rather than light. He was a moral owl. His vision, which was purely intellectual, loved the night. The sunlight blinded him.

  He was a born gambler and cultivated this native talent, until a dollar became more valuable in his eye than a human life. He took others’ money for nothing, till it was easy to take others’ lives for money. I have not the slightest doubt he had committed numerous murders before he planned and consummated the cruel and fiendish murder of Catherine Ging. He was a precocious child of crime and his native talent had multiplied and increased in that school of darkness into which he readily entered with great natural advantages and from which he graduated with distinguished ability and complete thoroughness.

  After weeks of preparation for the murder of this poor, trusting girl, after he had practiced the most cruel and monstrous deceptions upon her, with professions of love and affection, after he had obtained the insurance policies and after he had placed Blixt in the carriage with her and sent them to the scene of death, he goes to the theater for amusement. He chooses that hour of bloody assassination for pleasure and recreation. In the midst of the multitude, with a thousand eyes to prove his alibi, he watches the shifting scenes upon the stage and cheers and applauds the play. On the morning succeeding the homicide he feigns grief in the presence
of her lifeless form, and later brings flowers to the casket and indulges in the hollow and hellish mockery of mourning. In his last confession he says that on his return from the theater, learning in a confused way of the report of the injury, he feared she had not been killed, and that something had intervened to prevent the consummation of his scheme, and that the plot would be at once disclosed; that he was greatly relieved when he learned there had been no failure. These circumstances but illustrate the prodigiously criminal character of the man. The crime and the circumstances of it correspond with the man. The crime fits the criminal. His conduct was not altogether simulated. It was in a large degree natural. His actions were but a part of the man himself. The criminal and his crime were the growth and development of years. The act was not a freak or paroxysm of crime but the inate and natural product of a soulless, conscienceless demon, fully grown and matured.

  If such a darkened and depraved condition in a human being is insanity, Hayward was insane. It certainly was not legal insanity, because no one will claim he could not distinguish between right and wrong, or that he did not comprehend the nature and consequence of his acts. It may be, and no doubt is, a condition of moral insanity. ‘‘Whoever reasons towards crime reasons wrong,” says a learned judge. Wrong reasoning argues an unhealthy mind. Philosophically speaking, therefore, wrong reasoning and wrong conduct are indicative of moral insanity. This kind of theorizing, however, affords no guide for the practical administration of justice or the wholesome preservation of law and order. Law is a practical science, having for its object the general well being of society. Its safe and salutary edict is that which commends what is right and prohibits what is wrong.

  Hayward was clearly responsible, under the law, for his acts. His guilt must be wholly unquestioned. It stands prevent to a moral, almost a mathematical, certainty. The law decreed his death. He met it with a disgusting bravado, which the vulgar mind confuses with heroism. He died for no principle. He did not pretend to be sustained in that final and awful hour by any consciousness or claim of innocence. He had been assured that the execution would be attended with very little physical pain. His mind (not his soul) was fully prepared for what was to come, and he died as callous and as conscienceless as he had lived.

  This may seem harsh, but it is more charitable than his own estimate of himself. He expressed no regrets at the last hour, but boldly and flippantly flaunted his iniquity before the world and gloried in his unique and colossal career of crime. Unregenerate, defiant and desperate, this unfortunate, misguided and wicked child of earth, dropped into that final and dark abyss, which only the sunlight of God’s mercy can penetrate.

  Here I might close; but I 1have it in my heart to add a further thought. This child of sin was a child of our race—a brother in the great fallible family to which we all belong. He who beholds the end from the beginning and whose infinite intelligence and love may reach the darkest caverns of hell itself, He who knows how imperfectly and unjustly we often judge our fellow men, grants mercy which in our darkness and hatred we refuse.

  There may be circumstances of birth and habit surrounding the character and life of Harry Hayward which it is not in our power to comprehend. We are ever incompetent and unjust judges of our fellow men.

  We are our brother’s keeper. We cannot absolve ourselves from the strong and God-made ties which bind us together in one common, universal family. God is love and His law is the law of love. As society advances to the supremacy of soul, and its splendid evolution of thought, and stands in the warm and all-pervading light of this great law, fetters will fall from its chafed and wounded limbs and it will move on with new freedom to higher destinies. Justice and mercy, twin angels of heaven, will dispel the darkness. Oppression, cruelty, torture, rack, dungeon and scaffold will disappear under the perfect reign of Him whose seamless robe of love envelopes the globe and, warms and comforts the poorest outcast child in all the universe of God.

  FRANK M. NYE.

  Hayward’s Moral Delusions.

  Harry Hayward’s case presents an interesting study for the moralist. It is indeed rare that a man convicted of such a heinous crime as the one for which Hayward was executed and of which he admitted his guilt, goes upon the scaffold apparently so utterly indifferent to his wretched fate, and so unconcerned about the future. Men who have led notoriously wicked lives and who seemed to have been steepd in crime, usually manifest some regret for their misspent life, and some symptom of horror for the dark deeds that have doomed them to the felon’s sad fate. Hayward exhibited an indifference not only phenomenal, but apalling. He showed no sign of sorrow for his offenses against all divine and human law, and he gave no evidence of regret that he had brought such grief and shame to his heart-broken parents’ declining years.

  Yet Hayward was not insane, he rejected with disgust and indignation the theory of his insanity, or that he had not been fully responsible at all times for his conduct. In fact he was particularly vain of the acuteness of his mind, and his adroit reasoning. But this was not the vanity common among men mentally diseased, who often fancy themselves to be the wisest of philosophers.

  His was an egotistical conceit, natural, perhaps, to the young man, but which had become stronger as he met, with what seemed to him, flattering success in “fooling the world.”

  An idiosyncrasy of his character was that he claimed it always gave him special gratification to deceive, and he had reduced lying to a cultivated art. He possessed a certain amount of low, natural cunning, which he skillfully cultivated also, for many years, and which became fully developed in his chosen profession of gambling. Like all egotists, however, he finally over-readied himself and discovered that he had been playing a most hazardous game in attempting to “fool all the people all the time,” but he comforted himself with his gambler’s philosophy that he had played his stake and lost, had had his day, had reached his limit, and should “die game.” Yet Hayward, colossal fool though he was, had formulated a philosophy of his own, that seemed to give some satisfaction to his reason.

  No one will be surprised to learn that his was a revolting philosophy, and yet there was some consistency about it, providing his premises were right. Of course his premises were all wrong, and the result of his delusive reasoning was all wrong, but from his standpoint he could not see the disaster before him; and had he been able to see it, he knew no means to employ to avoid it. In his early youth, at least so he asserted, he received no positive religious instruction. Of course he had been taught the difference between right and wrong and had been encouraged to do the right and avoid the wrong.

  But no motive was assigned, why he should shun evil and do good. All was vague and shadowy. After he arrived at adult age and felt the responsibilities of manhood, he conceived an inordinate desire for money, the gambling frenzy took possession of him, and he schooled himself in all the arts of self-control, that is, control of his emotions, and unscrupulous deception to gain the end he had in view.

  To quiet the stings of conscience, he soon began a careful study of materialism. He was not a well educated man; his range of reading and study had been very limited, he studiously avoided giving any attention to refutations of materialistic theories, for he sought, what he found in the ridicule of religion, encouragement for his disordered and deceitful life. He had succeeded fairly well in quieting his disturbed conscience, by the theories of uncertainty about human accountability to God, and a future life. His excuse for not giving more serious attention to thoughts of religion when under sentence of death, was that his mind was at rest, he felt no certainty about future punishment for sin, no certainty about the existence of God, and why should he disturb his few remaining days with sad reflections upon what was passed or upon serious consideration of an uncertain future.

  The past could not be undone, the dead were beyond recall, his conscience accused him of no wrong, inasmuch as those whom he had sent out of life had suffered no pain, had sustained no loss
; were in fact perhaps better off in another existence, if another life is known beyond the dark and silent grave.

  Hayward was not a keen or close reasoner, he had made a special study of all the objections against religion and carefully ignored any refutation of these, to him, consoling theories. His shallow mind was easily satisfied with the half truths he had learned, and his corrupt heart was gratified with the specious defense of his reckless life, which the alleged uncertainty of the future offered. If there be no God, and if man has a well founded doubt about his existence and consequently about absolute right, justice and an inflexible standard of morality, the selfish interest of man naturally impels him to seek the good of which he is certain and not to take any chances about obtaining the good which may have no existence.

  This reflection only forcibly reminds a thinking man of the infamy into which the corrupt heart of one hardened in crime can sink an intelligent being. There can be no morality without law. There can be no law without a law-giver. A law-giver, capable of framing laws for the direction and guidance of reasonable beings, must have some end in view in making his laws, as well as the right and power to enforce them. If the laws of my being, the laws of nature and the written law of human society forbids or enjoins certain actions, these laws must have their root in authority, or I am not bound to obey them. If there be any doubt about the authority and the consequent binding force of the law, I am not in duty held to observe it, for a doubtful law is not binding.