by Kip Gayden
“I know, but I mean . . . Would it bother you if I said that I kind of like Anna Dotson?”
“Well, there are a lot of likable folks who commit bad crimes. Let’s just say it’s up to the jury now.”
“What do you think they’ll do?”
“Who knows? It’s a tough case.” He gave Christian a wink. “If I could predict what twelve men in a jury room will do, I’d quit working for a living.” He nodded and scratched his head, looking into the distance. “Right now, though, I have my doubts, too. Looking at her and listening to everything, and thinking about what she did and how she did it . . . I don’t know. Maybe she is some brand of crazy or other.”
Attorney General Anderson came striding up to them. “Detective, I wonder if you’ve got a few minutes to go somewhere with me? There’s a matter to be discussed, and I’d like your opinion on it.”
Sidebottom gave him a surprised look. “Well, sure, Mr. Prosecutor. Anything you say.”
Anderson gave a quick, tight nod and took Sidebottom by the elbow, leading him off toward the stairway to the street entrance. The detective looked back over his shoulder at Christian as he went and gave him an expression that said, “Who knows?”
J. M. Anderson stood as the attorney general and Detective Sidebottom came into the café on Demonbreun. The three men shook hands and Anderson motioned the chief prosecutor and the detective toward the empty seats at the small table.
“Now, Leonard, I think we ought to be able to settle this right now,” J. M. said, bringing into play his most magisterial bearing as he studied the attorney general. “What can you give me?”
The state’s prosecutor glanced at Sidebottom, then at his opponent. “Mr. Anderson, I appreciate the position you’re in. But you have to appreciate mine. You’ve got a client who’s guilty as sin, and she says so herself—Lord o’ mercy, did you see her nodding while the newshound was talking?”
J. M. did his best to keep a poker face.
“Meanwhile,” the attorney general said, “I’ve got a grieving widow, an orphan, a full and voluntary confession, and a boxful of jurors that are ready to start building a gallows.” He paused, leaned back in his chair. “But . . . I’ll tell you what. I’ve been talking with Detective Sidebottom here, and he thinks your Mrs. Dotson ought not hang. I haven’t asked him why.” The attorney general snickered and Sidebottom gave a little guilty grin and a shrug. “So, here’s what we can do. If Anna pleads guilty to second-degree murder and goes to the women’s penitentiary for twenty years—and no parole, mind you—we’ll call off the dogs and drop the first-degree charge. What do you say?”
J. M. Anderson let them think he was pondering for a few seconds, then nodded. “Well, Leonard, I appreciate it. The state is making a generous offer. I’ll talk to my client and let you know.”
“Call me at my home,” the attorney general said. “You’ve got my number. But remember this,” he said, laying a hand on Anderson’s arm, “once the jury finds her guilty—and they will—then sentences her to hang—and they’ll do that, too—you and I never had this little talk. Understand?”
J. M. ANDERSON LEFT THE CAFé and went straight to his office, where Anna and Walter waited. He sat down and told them about the prosecution’s final offer.
“Anna, as your counsel, I must tell you that I believe in the strongest way possible that it’s in your best interest to accept this offer. Twenty years sounds like a long time, but you have to set that over against what I believe is a very real possibility of hanging. Our strongest case was for an insanity plea, and this Christian fellow did some serious damage today with his testimony.”
Anna’s hand was clasped in Walter’s and the two of them looked at each other for a long time. “I didn’t murder Charlie Cobb,” she said finally. “I’ll tell the jury my side of the story, and then it will be in God’s hands what happens to me.”
Anderson looked at Walter, hoping for some help. But the doctor shrugged. “This must be Anna’s decision. I fully support whatever she says.”
After the two left his office, Anderson opened the bottom drawer of his desk, reached into the back, and brought out a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He uncorked the whiskey, took a long pull straight from the bottle, then picked up the telephone to call the attorney general.
37
On the fourth day of the trial, the defense presented its first witness: Dr. Stephens, the director of the City View Sanitarium. The psychiatrist took the stand and stated that in his opinion, Anna was of unsound mind when she committed the deed.
“I do not believe she was able to distinguish right from wrong.”
In an answer to a question from Attorney General Anderson during the cross-examination, Dr. Stephens stated, “The fact that she was able to plan and execute and afterward relate her action with perfect calmness is no evidence that she was not of unsound mind at the time the crime was committed.”
“Can you enumerate your reasons for believing the defendant suffered from a delusion?”
“As it appeared to me, the first clue was Mrs. Dotson’s assertion of her vow to God. When she interpreted Cobb’s return to Nashville as evidence of God’s answer to her prayer, and considered this circumstance as proof that God had placed him in her hands to kill, I found evidence of irrationality.”
“Could you please define the condition that was your diagnosis for the jury.”
“Monomania is a condition that makes a person insane with regard to one particular thing, even though entirely rational in every other area of life. A monomaniac might be perfectly normal in appearance.
“With respect to her children, her husband, her ability to plan and carry out actions, Anna Dotson looks and sounds like any other person. With respect to her thinking about Charlie Cobb, it is my professional opinion that she was incapable of rational thought.” When Stephens was finished, the defense called a second psychiatrist, Dr. Glenn; he confirmed the diagnosis of monomania.
Christian watched the jury while the psychiatrists testified, but he couldn’t tell exactly how they were responding. Some of them seemed to be interested in the testimony, and some of them just seemed bored. He wasn’t sure what to think. On the one hand, how could somebody’s mind become so unhinged about a single person that the person could walk into a crowded barbershop and commit murder? On the other hand, Anna’s talk about Jephthah, his vow, and its unintended consequences sounded like the ravings of a lunatic, especially so when stated in the psychiatrist’s calm, measured voice.
The prosecutors decided not to call any experts in opposition to the two psychiatrists, because they didn’t think the jury was giving the insanity plea any credence. Later, Christian learned they’d reached this conclusion mostly because they considered his testimony about Anna’s mental state would be more convincing to the average person. They calculated the jury would give more weight to Christian’s observations of Anna than those of the trained specialists.
When the second psychiatrist left the stand, J. M. Anderson made the announcement that everyone in the courtroom had been wondering about. “The defense calls Anna Dotson.”
A low buzz filled the chamber as Anna stood from the table and walked, head up and shoulders straight, to the witness stand. Christian took a glance around the packed courtroom. There was Daisy Cobb, sitting with her family, right behind the prosecution table. On the other side of the aisle was Walter Dotson, sitting with his arm around Mabel and Scott, who looked very small and helpless as they watched their mother raising her right hand to take the oath. Reporters and courtroom artists scribbled away at their pads, trying to capture the mood, the electric sense of anticipation for those who would read their words and view their pictures in just a few hours.
In the upper balcony, as they had been throughout the trial, sat the women’s suffrage contingent. Their presence was coming to seem to Christian almost like a silent rebuke: What right do twelve men have to consider the guilt or innocence of this woman, whose situation they can hardly comprehend
? He was thinking about the news from Washington about their recent demonstration, about the way the police had scarcely intervened when angry crowds hurled projectiles at them, along with the inevitable insults. Kate Warner, Anne Dallas Dudley, Louise Herron . . . these women kept right on writing and speaking, despite the opposition of influential men. What gave them such quiet determination? Was it possible that they were all as crazy or misguided as some believed? Christian thought again about how he’d feel if he were in Anna’s position right now, looking into the eyes of twelve women in the jury box.
Anna had taken off her hat and veil, revealing for the first time in the trial to the entire courtroom her complete countenance. As she sat, calmly waiting for the first question from her lawyers, Christian couldn’t decide if she made him think more of Joan of Arc . . . or Lizzie Borden.
Anna would be on the witness stand all morning and most of the afternoon. As she spoke, Christian sometimes had to remind himself to take notes. He foolishly thought he knew everything she was going to say, but as she told her story, he realized there was so much he had never guessed.
Attorney Seay looked nervous as he approached Anna to begin her testimony; Christian could guess why. Just from the time he’d spent with Anna Dotson, he knew she almost customarily did and said the unexpected.
She told about her early married life, about how happy she and Walter had been. “I never ever had any occasion to doubt my husband’s love for me,” she said. That didn’t ring true to Christian, based on some things Anna had said to him that afternoon in the holding cell. She told of meeting Charlie Cobb, of his growing attentions toward her. “He sometimes came to my house when I was there alone,” Anna said. He began to try to persuade her to enter into an intimate relationship with him, she said, and she resisted his advances for some months. But, at last, she testified, she yielded.
After she had finally confessed the affair to Walter, she said things became increasingly desperate, between her husband’s rage and her own shame and remorse. She related how Walter left their house with a gun, saying he was going to find Charlie Cobb. “That was when Charlie and his family left Gallatin,” she said.
“We began seeing our pastor, Brother Olmstead,” Anna testified. “He urged us to remember our Christian commitments, to do things only in the Bible way. But things were so far gone between Walter and me, it seemed to do little good.” Anna told of an occasion before the shooting where she kneeled beside her children’s beds and begged God to keep them safe, even if it cost her life and the life of someone else precious to her. She told about reading the story of Jephtha from the Old Testament, and how it had seemed to her that God was speaking directly to her through this scripture, assuring her that killing someone in obedience to a sacred vow was not the same thing as murder. She spoke of her desperation and how she begged Walter not to commit violence, to keep himself safe for their children’s sake. For several periods during her testimony, Anna was overcome with emotion and had to pause to collect herself. As she spoke, it seemed to Christian that Anderson and Baskerville visibly shrank within themselves, listening to their client implicate herself in premeditated murder.
Christian could see the prosecution leaning forward, obviously itching for Seay to finish so they could pounce on the defendant. An hour or so before the noon recess, they got their chance. Before he could even get out of his seat, Attorney General Anderson started talking. It was as if the words were forcing themselves out of him, as if they’d been bottled up while he listened to her.
“Mrs. Dotson, what did God tell you after you made this vow?”
“God didn’t speak to me in audible words. I don’t think he does that, this day and time.”
“I see. And so, how was it that you were so strongly convinced the good Lord wanted you to carry out this criminal act?” he said, looking at the jury.
“Because he gave me the opportunity I had prayed for.”
“Mmm-hmm. Did you have some sort of dream, some sort of vision about all this?”
Was he trying to make her sound crazier than she already did? Christian wondered. If that was his plan, it seemed a strange one. But Anna, if she perceived any opportunity in the question, completely ignored it. “No sir,” she said.
“You read the Bible a good deal, do you, Mrs. Dotson?”
“Yes. I read the Bible a lot. I think it is God’s word.”
“And in your reading, have you happened across the Ten Commandments?” he said, practically smirking at the jury.
“Yes, I have.”
“Are you familiar with the commandment ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’?”
“Yes,” Anna said in a small voice.
“How about ‘Thou shalt not kill’? Did you think maybe that God repealed that particular commandment, just for your convenience?”
“No. But I think I was in the right.”
After the noon recess, the prosecution hauled out the letters and notes addressed to Charlie in Anna’s handwriting that had been introduced as part of Daisy’s testimony. “Is this your handwriting on this note, Mrs. Dotson?” the attorney general asked her. “This one that says, ‘All have gone to the fair . . . I am home alone’?”
“Yes.”
THE NEXT DAY, Anna was questioned about the shooting in the backyard. “It was a nightgown,” she said. “On one occasion when Charlie . . . when Mr. Cobb and I were intimate, I had been wearing it. I came to hate it . . . it represented everything that had gone wrong in my life. I put the nightgown up on a board in my backyard and I shot it with the pistol—three times.” She disputed the date that the shooting occurred, as presented by Jordan Warren, her neighbor. “I was the only one who shot the nightgown,” she said. “Walter wasn’t there.”
Christian saw Sidebottom shaking his head at this, and he agreed with the detective. Anna was trying to protect Walter from any connection with the shooting, including his “target practice” in the backyard. Christian knew the detective had tried to obtain the nightgown, hoping that the number of holes would confirm or deny Anna’s repeated assertions that she had acted alone, with no encouragement from Walter. Christian expected the prosecution to press her on this, but for some reason, even though her testimony conflicted with that of another witness with nothing to gain or lose, they let it go. Christian could tell this troubled Sidebottom; later, he heard him arguing with the prosecution about it.
Anna related that after the Cobbs had left Gallatin under threat of violence by Walter, she had posted two letters to Charlie: one to Daisy’s family address in Herndon, Kentucky, and the other to Charlie’s family home in Big Rock. “I didn’t know where he was. I was just trying to warn him to stay away.”
She said that she finally learned of Cobb’s whereabouts from her husband. “He had written the address of the barbershop on a piece of paper. When I asked him, he gave it to me. I told him I was coming to Nashville the next day, to tell Charlie to leave. I brought my son with me, as a way to assure my husband that nothing improper would occur.
“I told Mr. Cobb that my husband knew everything, and I asked him if he wasn’t afraid to stay in Nashville, so close to Gallatin, since Walter had warned him to stay far away. ‘I’m not afraid of him,’ Charlie said. ‘I’m ready for him.’ I wanted to kill him right then, and I had the pistol with me, but Scott was there, and I was afraid.”
Christian couldn’t believe his ears. He didn’t think there was any way that this woman would have carried a gun with her at the same time she had her little boy. Other than damning herself even more decisively, he decided, she was just trying to further remove any speculation that Walter knew she intended to kill Charlie Cobb. What woman in her right mind would willingly take her child to a shooting?
“The next day, I told my husband that I planned to do some shopping and some errands. When he left for his medical office, I took the afternoon train to Nashville. I had the gun in my muff. I went to the barbershop, walked up to Mr. Cobb, and shot him. And then, I was free of my vow
to God.”
As Anna finished speaking, the courtroom was completely silent. It was eerie, Christian thought, sitting among so many people and hearing not a single sound except his own breathing. But what they were hearing was so compelling, so riveting, that he guessed no one—not even the prosecution—could think of anything to say. Anna Dotson was handing the state everything it needed to convict her. Christian truly believed he was watching and listening to one who would be the first woman sentenced to death by hanging in the state of Tennessee.
“No more questions, your Honor,” Attorney General Anderson said at last. Judge Neil, frowning like someone waking up from a bad dream, said, “The witness may step down.”
38
Anna finished her testimony on Friday morning. That afternoon, the defense called an assortment of character witnesses from Gallatin, including the sheriff of Sumner County. Everyone assured the court that Anna Dotson had always been known as a bright, intelligent, and pleasant person.
Then a man named Olmstead, the minister of Anna and Walter’s church, took the stand. He testified about the apparent mental and emotional condition of both Anna and Walter when they came to him for counsel, after Anna’s confession of her affair. “Dr. Dotson told me that he thought he ought to kill Charlie Cobb. On one occasion, he said to me, ‘That man as good as burned down my house and destroyed my family. I wish he had just gone ahead and cut my throat while he was shaving me.’ Of course, as his minister, I urged him against such thoughts and actions.”
“Did you ever hear Mrs. Dotson mention Jephtha’s vow?” Attorney Seay asked.
“Yes. She discussed it with me on one occasion. I told her that Jephtha’s vow should not be a guide for her actions, that killing Charlie Cobb was unjustified except in the event that he was attempting to force himself on her. I told her that even in the Bible, Jephtha’s vow was presented as a rash action, more as a warning than a recommendation to similar behavior.”