Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis

by Alexis Coe

  Newspapers enthusiastically accepted whatever scraps of information the defense tossed at them, and relied on an abundance of loose-lipped locals to fill in the gaps. The city was overtaken with intrigue, and there were hordes of Memphians who wished to weigh in on the murder. Some sought to correct erroneous material, but more often than not, they offered subjective observations. These opinions were often based on personal experience with the Mitchells or the Wards, though as time went on, they were clearly influenced by what they read in the newspapers, too. Others, whose lack of connection to the case did not deter them from offering highly quotable views and speculation, were also tapped as ongoing sources. These unreliable perspectives were no more subject to fact checking than any of the other details making their way across the nation.

  Neighbor John Perry offered what was likely a nebulous recollection of the Mitchell’s youngest daughter, combined with what he had obviously absorbed about the version of Alice now being discussed in newspapers as an insane murderess.22

  I live next door to Mr. George Mitchell and have known Alice for nine years or more, and have never considered her strong mentally. Her manner has been always flighty and unsettled and her ways different from that of most girls. She was of an impulsive disposition, and given to doing very much as the present mood inclined her, whether it was to snatch up a rifle and stand about her yard shooting sparrows or to ride a bare back horse at break-neck speed about the premises. I have never seen anything about her conduct that was at all immodest, nor was she the least bit fast as regards to men. On the contrary, she seemed to care nothing for them and rather preferred the society of her own sex. . . . From a long and close knowledge of Alice Mitchell her act was that of an insane woman.23

  Concerned citizens, and those with other sorts of motives, reached out to the authorities as well. The attorney general’s office received many letters, both signed and anonymous, riddled with suspect details, outlandish claims, and transparent lies. While the offices of the court and the police privately dismissed the more outrageous reports, they were more than willing to turn around and discuss them with reporters. Attorney General George Peters was constantly asked about a popular rumor that Alice Mitchell had sent the office a letter from jail, but Peters shunned it as “the ebullition of a crank.” Likewise, a Memphis detective relayed a phone call he received from an agitated man in Cincinnati who informed him that three years prior to Freda’s murder, Alice had “made love like a man to his daughter, now deceased.”24

  Relentless messages concerning the supposed unnaturalness of Alice’s motives were clearly working. In the mind of the public, she seemed endowed with an almost supernatural power to commit heinous acts, no matter the time or place.

  THE PROSECUTION OFFERED very little information beyond stating that Alice was of sound mind—a decidedly insipid claim next to the defense’s adamant plea; dramatic presentation of sensational, anecdotal “evidence”; and aggressive campaigning. Public opinion was leaning toward the defense, but Gantt and Wright had yet to play their wild card: the most incendiary part of Alice’s statement.

  The Appeal Avalanche published this part of Alice’s statement under the headline, “WHO IS THIS JESSIE JAMES?”

  Today’s readers are likely to interpret this confession as the unfortunate saga of a troubled, teenage romance turned deadly: Alice believed she had found her one true love, and that their commitment could withstand any challenge—or be immortalized by death. For some time, Freda felt the same way, or at least proved convincing enough that the withdrawal of her affections truly broke Alice’s heart. Her only solace was the assumption that Freda was bowing to familial pressure, and when she learned this was not the case, that Freda’s love had been fickle, Alice was determined to hold her to their agreement. If any part of her statement casts a doubt on Alice’s sanity, it is the conclusion, in which she claims to know Freda is happy to have been murdered.

  But to Americans in 1892, her insistence on loving and wishing to marry and support a woman were, in and of themselves, clear signs of lunacy, and there was no shortage of physicians willing to corroborate that assumption. Still, in their efforts to create an airtight case, Gantt and Wright scoured Eastern Tennessee in search of the most prominent and influential physicians for supporting testimony. The prosecution had far less luck finding doctors to refute the plea, while the newspapers, sensing readers wanted some medical context, readily printed any theory that called itself scientific.

  The first “prominent physician” quoted in a newspaper—or at least, the first one who made it to press—diagnosed Alice with erotomania, defining it, inaccurately, as “unnatural affection between two persons of the same sex.” Other doctors, also unnamed, would assert erotomania was a “malady of the mind” that could easily “lead on to murder.”26

  Whether or not the unnamed doctors’ quotes were fabricated by overzealous newsmen, their alleged interpretations of erotomania were as legally convenient as they were medically creative. For more than two centuries before Alice murdered Freda, erotomania had described “forms of insanity where there was an intensely morbid desire to a person of the opposite sex, without sexual passion.”27

  While the Mitchell case would eventually produce new meanings, Gantt and Wright would not rely on the diagnosis of erotomania. In fact, the lawyers would avoid any argument that contained even a hint of the erotic, and most certainly any that acknowledged actual sex acts. Sex between two women was not entertained, even as a theoretical proposition. The defense and prosecution, as well as most newspapers, tacitly agreed on this point: There would be no public discussion of anything even faintly sexual. Three years later, the English press would similarly cover the libel case Oscar Wilde lodged against the Marques of Queensberry, who left the writer a calling card inscribed, “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic].” Wilde’s sexual preference was never explicitly identified, but simply suggested through vague euphemisms, which included the very words the press seized upon and frequently applied to Alice—“unnatural,” “immoral,” and “indecent.”28

  That should not suggest the papers were unwilling to test the waters, even granting that Alice and Freda had experienced some “gratification of the perverted mental passion.” The defense, however, was always quick to push back against these claims, insisting Alice and Freda’s love was “purely . . . mental.”29

  WHO WAS ALICE MITCHELL? Why did she kill Freda Ward? Was she a masculine murderess? A pervert? A fast and jealous young woman? Or was she insane, like her mother?

  Just as the Mitchells insisted that the defense argue for Alice’s insanity, the Wards pushed the prosecution to maintain the opposite. “She was no more crazy than I am,” asserted Ada’s husband, William Volkmar, an “old Memphis boy” who had hosted Alice in his home.30 Alice said “I don’t care if I’m hung,” Jo Ward recalled, insisting the murder was premeditated, and carried out in cold blood. Neither quoted the writer Mark Twain, but they would have found agreement in his essay, “A New Crime—Legislation Needed.” Two years before Alice was born, Twain bemoaned the rise of the insanity plea, and how it allowed for otherwise unremarkable behavior to be recast as proof of an unsound mind.

  Of late years it does not seem possible for a man to so conduct himself, before killing another man, as not to be manifestly insane. If he talks about the stars, he is insane. If he appears nervous and uneasy an hour before the killing, he is insane. If he weeps over a great grief, his friends shake their heads, and fear that he is “not right.” If, an hour after the murder, he seems ill at ease, preoccupied and excited, he is unquestionably insane.

  But it was the prosecution’s case—and not the defense’s plea—that newspapers characterized as inconsistent and unconvincing. Attorney General Peters called Alice “fast,” citing jealousy over a man as a possible motive, but also claimed she was indifferent to men. At the very least, he argued that she was ill-tempered and vindictive, but certainly not insane.31

  By questioning Alice’s moral
character, Peters challenged readers’ cherished notions of the Mitchell family’s respectability, and few outside the Ward family were interested in that perspective. The Appeal Avalanche soon reported that “the preponderance of public opinion is in favor of the theory that Alice Mitchell is insane.”

  Months before the lunacy inquisition would officially commence, the defense could claim public opinion as its first victory. Mass media played an influential role in regulating the boundaries of American modernity, and such a high-profile domestic tale on public display provided a means to do so. The defense offered editors a message they wanted to propagate: Alice was a well-to-do white woman from a pious family who was neither bad nor fast, and did not deserve to be in jail among base miscreants of every race and class. The public most certainly refused to see her hanged, with her fine family looking on.

  Of course, the papers could not uniformly align themselves with the defense. Debate was a useful strategy when it came to selling copies; it was in the newspapers’ interest to see that all positions were argued for vociferously. In Memphis, the Appeal Avalanche supported the case for insanity in lockstep with Gantt and Wright, while the Commercial often challenged them. If Alice had indeed loved Freda, the paper contended, she should be judged as a man would be, had he committed a crime of passion. She was legally responsible, they argued, “because she cowardly ran away. Had she been wholly irresponsible and insane, she might have acted differently after drawing the razor across Miss Ward’s throat.”32 The Appeal Avalanche countered that the ability to function in daily life was irrelevant, as was any talk of treating a woman like a man, maintaining that Alice was “the slave of a passion not normal and almost incomprehensible to well-balanced people.”33 On that point, the Commercial almost always retreated.

  Before Alice even entered the courtroom, newspapers across the country had latched on to every detail, real or imagined, of what they considered a particularly lurid murder. But national fascination with the case was about far more than the death of a seventeen-year-old girl, or a desire for entertainment and spectacle. Same-sex love, passing as a man, and alternate domesticities challenged everything Americans understood, and were desperately holding on to, in the late nineteenth century. During the next six months, this domestic drama would put issues of morality, individual liberty, and mental health front and center, forcing people to have a stance.

  But first, Lillie Johnson would have to be arrested, and Freda Ward laid to rest.

  MAIDEN PURITY

  WHILE SOME REPORTERS waited outside the jail, others sought answers from the families themselves. They visited the Mitchell residence, where knocks on the door went unanswered. A few intrepid reporters managed to talk their way inside Lillie Johnson’s home on Vance Street. Out of respect for her father, J. M. Johnson, local journalists promised they would leave—right after they had a quick look at Lillie, just long enough to describe her as “prostrated with grief” in the next print editions.

  The Ward family lived up the river, but reporters would not find them in Golddust. Jo had sent word home with officers on the Ora Lee—the very steamer she and Freda were supposed to take home that day—instructing the Wards and Volkmars to board the next boat bound for Memphis. It is unclear whether or not, upon arrival, they knew that their youngest had died, or thought Freda had been injured, but would survive. They may have gone to the widow Kimbrough’s house first, where they would return later that night as mourners taking refuge, but either way, someone directed them to Stanley & Hintons. The undertakers had already begun sealing the long, deep wounds on Freda’s face and neck with wax.

  It was reported that Thomas Ward was “pitiable on beholding the body of his dead daughter and fears are entertained for his mind.”34 It is highly unlikely that any reporter was allowed inside the room that held Freda’s body, let alone present at the unveiling. But they were crowded outside, and some of them may have seen Thomas’s face on the way out of Stanley & Hintons. In the first of many more instances of hypocrisy, reporters criticized citizens who waited beside them, displaying an “almost ghoulish” desire to see Freda’s “mutilated face”—a sight they themselves seemed desperate to record.35

  After a doctor had stitched Jo Ward’s wounds closed, she joined the rest of her family at the undertakers, but the day she watched her sister murdered was hardly over. The coroner insisted there be an inquest, and so Jo told her story once again, from the very beginning, going all the way back to Miss Higbee’s. It was Jo who placed Lillie, the girl with whom she had once been chumming, at the scene of the crime.

  By ten o’clock the next morning, Lillie was arrested at her home, escorted past the throngs of spectators outside the jail, and placed in a cell with Alice. According to newspaper accounts, J. M. Johnson accompanied her to the jail, but unlike George Mitchell, he remained there long after she was booked, lingering as close to his daughter as he was permitted, for days on end. Lillie was of a sensitive disposition, and her father remained nearby to offer whatever comfort he could. Reporters, however, had their own take on his extended stay: “He is fearful that Alice will do to his daughter some bodily harm and this fear is shared by all of his family.”36

  The papers would later criticize Lillie for offering no objection to sharing a cell with Alice, ignoring the fact that there were only two private cells in the whole jail. Alice and Lillie occupied one, and the other cell held attorney H. Clay King, charged with murdering another lawyer for sleeping with his wife—but his crime of passion was of little interest.37

  With the single exception of Freda’s funeral a few days later, the largest gathering of all occurred outside of the grand jury proceeding in downtown Memphis. As usual, a large, boisterous crowd gathered without the slightest hope of admittance; and, as usual, reporters denounced the public for showing interest in the very frenzy their newspapers were helping to fuel.

  The press expressed particular vitriol toward African Americans. They were certainly allowed to be there, but in the 1890s, their role as spectator while a well-to-do white woman met her downfall presented a challenge—however slight—to the South’s strict racial hierarchy. To diminish the power of their presence and reassert white superiority, the newspapers strained to characterize African American interest in Alice’s case as more sordid than that of white courthouse voyeurs. To hear the press tell it, black Memphians had only shown up because “their favorite weapon was used.”38

  The grand jury proceeding was closed to the public—and the records have been lost to time—but the outcome was soon known to all: Alice was indicted for murder. This was no surprise, but the fact that she did not bear the charge alone was; Lillie was indicted as well. She was generally regarded as an innocent bystander, a naïve friend in the wrong place at the wrong time, with one powerful voice of dissent: The attorney general argued that Lillie knew Alice intended to kill Freda, and did nothing to prevent it. Under Tennessee law, the burden of proof fell on the defendant, not the prosecution. In order to be released, Lillie would have to prove she had no prior knowledge of the murder. Her lawyer filed a writ of habeas corpus, but it would not be heard for weeks; Lillie’s imprisonment had just begun.

  In the few days since the murder, the legal stage for the case had only grown, and the plot had only thickened. Due to the local and national attention the Mitchell case was receiving—and the needs of his own ego— Judge Julius DuBose ordered that the courtroom be expanded.

  FREDA’S FUNERAL BEGAN AT THREE O’CLOCK—the same hour when, just three days earlier, Alice had spotted her leaving the widow Kimbrough’s house. The memorial service was held at Grace Episcopal, the church where Alice and Freda had planned to wed, and was led by Dr. George Patterson, the reverend they had hoped would marry them.

  Freda had been a cherished member of Grace Episcopal, and was “in general request whenever a church entertainment was given, having a decided turn for amateur theatricals.”39 On Sundays, she sang with the church choir, many of whom would perform somber hymns a
t her memorial. And she had attended Sunday school there, too, socializing with the young men who would now serve as her pallbearers.

  But on that Thursday afternoon, the lurid circumstances of Freda’s death meant that the pews held more than just family, members of the church and community, sympathetic friends, and acquaintances. The church was filled to capacity, and it was difficult to tell mourner and voyeur apart in the vestibule where her casket was displayed a half-hour before the service began.

  The Public Ledger showed great restraint, avoiding descriptions of Freda’s face in favor of just one comment about her body, which was “almost hidden from view in a profusion of white roses, emblematic of the maiden purity of the dead.”40 It was a brief, but significant editorial remark meant to reassure the public: One of their promising daughters had indeed lived her life honorably. Her pure, lifeless body could be covered in white roses because it was untainted by perverse longings, her life cut tragically short before she was able to achieve her potential as wife and mother.

  The Appeal Avalanche was far less brief, complimenting the work of Stanley & Hintons as an unsubtle excuse to indulge in the grotesque.

  The face wore a look of peace very different from the expression of despair that marked it before the skillful hands of the undertaker had closed the eyes and mouth and hidden the ghastly wounds through which the life blood ebbed away. The gash on her throat was entirely concealed, and the wounds on her check, chin and mouth were hardly discernible.41