Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis

by Alexis Coe

  If Alice was found presently insane, it would not void the murder charge, but it would indefinitely postpone it. She would be sent to the state lunatic asylum for “treatment.” If physicians were pleased with her progress, they could reassess her, and determine her well enough to stand trial. Whether the case would be reopened or not would be up to the state, but it was unlikely to ever reach that point. Once Alice went into the asylum, she had very little hope of ever getting out. It was as good as a life sentence.98

  With that goal in mind, George Mitchell was the first witness to be heard at his daughter’s long awaited hearing. He was motivated on that summer morning, and delivered a moving performance on the stand. George spoke to the court with great emotion, sharing the history of his wife’s puerperal insanity, and the way it seemed to intensify with each birth, just as Alice’s own odd behavior had progressed each year. And yet, despite his most valiant efforts, he had failed to save his women from themselves. The saga was so painful to relive, it brought George to tears.

  Isabella Mitchell, who bore him seven children, was not in the courtroom that day. She did not hear her husband, or the doctor who had committed her time after time, painstakingly review how Isabella’s body had been poisoned by her own family, just as she had unwittingly poisoned her youngest daughter’s body. The puerperal insanity had turned Alice into someone capable of perverse, unnatural love and, ultimately, murder. Isabella was noticeably absent throughout the hearings, but she could read all about her own insanity in a variety of newspapers—as could all of her friends and family, her church, and neighbors. Everyone was now familiar with her medical history, and its consequences.

  IT WAS ONE THING TO SATISFY the hereditary component, but quite another to support the defense’s claims that the murderess’s body had displayed physical symptoms of insanity. Gantt and Wright called older sisters Mattie and Addie to the stand, and asked them about Alice’s nosebleeds. Both sisters remembered that the bleeding had begun when Alice was twelve years old, or as the Hypothetical Case placed it, “around the time her womanhood was established.”

  Of course, Mattie and Addie were quick to point out that they had not suffered from nosebleeds—it was a condition unique to Alice. Whenever possible, the Mitchell family was sure to juxtapose their own normalcy with Alice’s strangeness, an approach that served a dual purpose; the family maintained respectability while drawing attention to Alice’s illness. For their own sake, it had to be clear that Mattie and Addie had escaped their mother’s insanity.99

  Alice’s nosebleeds had not been diagnosed at the time. It was not until a certain Dr. Callender, one of the doctors who interviewed Alice in jail, offered his professional opinion, declaring it “vicarious menstruation.”100

  The Mitchells could offer far more examples of behavior that transgressed gender boundaries than evidence of bodily symptoms. They focused on Alice’s preference for her brothers’ physical activities, and indifference to her sisters’ comparatively domestic pursuits. Mattie and Addie’s dolls had never excited their youngest sister, but their brother Frank admitted Alice “could pump in a [baseball] swing” better than he could. Their half-brother, Robert, took the stand armed with the props of boyhood—baseballs, marbles, and other decidedly unfeminine evidence—taken from Alice’s bedroom. His youngest sister had always favored her brothers and preferred to play with boys, Robert said with the authority of a man twenty-one years her elder.101

  By the time Lillie confirmed that Alice had been on the baseball team at Miss Higbee’s, as if it were a revelatory admission, Attorney General Peters had heard enough. He took issue with the defense’s emphasis on sports, asserting that it had nothing to do with insanity, nor was it even rare. After all, Alice had not started the baseball team at Miss Higbee’s. It existed before she enrolled, and when she joined, her name was added to a roster of other young women who enjoyed sports, but still acted in an otherwise non-homicidal manner.102

  Still, Alice’s preference for boys as playmates, not romantic interests, was a surprisingly persuasive argument in the courtroom. It suggested that she had not formed appropriate associations as a child, and subsequently developed aggressive behaviors alongside her male counterparts. Later in life, when it was time for her to experience romantic yearnings, Alice continued to mature as a boy would—by developing an interest in girls.

  Despite the courtroom presence of Alice’s friend, Lillie, whose material importance to the case was undeniable, experts agreed that Alice suffered from an inability to develop proper attachments. She was confused by her early proclivities, they said, and was unable to differentiate between female friendships and prospective suitors.

  Lillie’s brother, James Johnson, age twenty-one, shared a personal anecdote to illustrate Alice’s unresponsiveness to men. He recalled the time he approached her, outstretched in a hammock with Lillie, and asked her to dance. Alice refused James—who, for all we know, smelled of garlic and told bad jokes—preferring to lay alongside his sister.

  Addie confirmed that Alice showed no interest in the men who came to court her, and refused to receive their calls. She was capricious, the Mitchells added, and sometimes refused to speak with the family at all.

  After that, the personal testimony given during the first five days of the hearing—by family, friends, and neighbors—became progressively vague. “I felt as if there was something wrong with her, but I couldn’t say what it was,” testified Mrs. Charles Mundinger, who attended the same church as the Mitchells. The family’s butcher made a brief appearance, recounting the time he called Alice a tomboy. Her damning reaction? She did not balk, testified the butcher.103

  HEREDITARY INFLUENCE, SOMATIC EVIDENCE, and a history of odd behavior all played a significant role in establishing Alice’s supposed insanity, but the single most important factor—the one that dominated the Hypothetical Case—was Alice’s relationship with Freda.

  “The attachment seemed to be mutual, but was far stronger in Alice Mitchell than in Fred[a],” read the statement. The theory was supported by a variety of physical evidence, including the engagement ring bearing the engraving “From A. to F.,” as well as what the public was most desperate to see: the love letters.

  Having kept aloof from Alice during her darkest period, the Mitchells could barely speak to her obvious heartbreak—but Lucy Franklin could. The “Negress,” as she was identified by the press, testified to Alice’s anguish and despair, and how she suffered after the estrangement. Her behavior was consistent with what was known as “love sickness,” a popular term used in nearly all articles on crimes of passion during the nineteenth century. It served as a kind of justification for any violence that might ensue after heartbreak. The prosecution repeatedly argued that it applied to the case, but the disconnect between Alice’s same-sex love and the traditional model of love-sickness-turned-crime-of-passion (forsaken woman murders temptress over a man’s love) rendered it irrelevant.104

  Alice seemed to have trusted Lucy more than anyone else in the Mitchell home. She showed her the contents of the secret, locked box in the kitchen, and told Lucy dramatic stories about her devastating loss, and how it made her want to die. There was the laudanum incident, of course, when Alice had intentionally ingested the potentially lethal poison. But Lucy divulged another unsettling incident, in which Alice held the family’s rifle to her own ear. In the excitement, she had accidentally let out a few shots, but remained unharmed.

  Even though Lucy found the length and depth of Alice’s torment worrisome, and did truly sympathize, she seemed to eventually regard it as self-indulgent. Lucy was a domestic worker in the segregated South. After a long day laboring for the Mitchells, she probably had just as much work, if not more, to do in her own home. The double shifts left her exhausted, and unable to lessen many of her family’s immediate concerns, no matter how hard she worked. Tellingly, Lucy tried to comfort Alice by pointing out her privilege, recalling that she tried to explain that “there was no use to worry as she had plent
y of money.”105

  The Mitchells also had difficulty describing Alice and Freda’s relationship before the murder, and what little they did manage to say was heavily informed by the same sources everyone else had access to: the newspaper articles and the Hypothetical Case. The Mitchells’ unique insight came from their visits to jail, and they all agreed that Alice appeared to be unremorseful, both of her love for Freda and the brutal murder itself. They claimed Alice spoke of Freda in the present tense, as if she were still alive.

  Even the Commercial was becoming increasingly convinced of the insanity plea:

  Had she slain a man who had deceived or betrayed her, the idea of insanity may have never been presented, but she slew a girl for whom she entertained a passion such as exists ordinarily between members of the opposite sexes, and the peculiarity of the case at once gave color to the suspicion of insanity.106

  Freda’s family, however, remained unconvinced. They agreed that the idea of two women eloping was strange, but they had distinct memories of Alice’s behavior in their home, and they saw no evidence of insanity. Alice should be held accountable for Freda’s death, the Wards maintained. They wanted to see her tried for murder.

  William Volkmar, who had waited, Winchester rifle in hand, for a man to claim his sister-in-law the night she planned to runaway, testified that Alice was sane. She had even displayed affection toward men in his presence. Jo Ward repeated this refrain, informing the court that Alice was a member of the Pleasant Hour Social Club, and had attended its dances with male escorts.

  Alice had indeed gone to such dances, but her reasons for attending were never entirely clear. A romantic interest in men may have been the obvious impetus, but perhaps it was just easier to attend and socialize. She could satisfy expectations and keep a watchful eye on Freda, who also attended the dances. Furthermore, Alice’s escort was one of convenience, a young man a couple of years her junior. He was not a romantic interest, and it was clear that, outside of Freda, Alice had not shown romantic feelings for anyone else, male or female.

  As Wright pointed out, Alice might have gone to the Pleasant Hour dance with a young man, but she went home with Freda. Most interested parties avoided any explicit mention of a sexual relationship between Alice and Freda, which put defense in a bind; They had to find a way of mentioning the unmentionable. The more deviant Alice’s love for Freda, after all, the stronger the claim to insanity. And yet, the extreme deviance of same-sex love, the bizarreness of it, meant that it appeared to be unprecedented to most people’s minds. How does one speak of the existence of that which does not exist? It was a rhetorical tightrope walk, as demonstrated in these two highly suggestive lines from the Hypothetical Case:

  Time strengthened the intimacy between them. They became lovers in the sense of that relation between persons of different sexes.

  And with that, the first half of the ten-day inquisition drew to a close. The defense was still in the lead, but it had been far more of a volleying match than they had expected, with Attorney General Peters’s litigation skills proving to be a formidable challenge. The second half, however, would be decisive.

  AN IMPOSSIBLE IDEA

  DURING THE SECOND HALF of the inquisition, the defense called five medical experts to the stand, while Peters, unable to lure a single physician to support his case, had only his courtroom acumen to depend upon. The expert testimony would be highly influential, but Gantt and Wright were saving the best for last—though they did not yet know it. Alice Mitchell would take the stand.107

  The doctors had received the Hypothetical Case in advance, despite the prosecution’s attempts to render it inadmissible as hearsay. Judge DuBose allowed it, since each of the experts had personally interviewed Alice in jail, at least once, for no less than an hour.

  All five prestigious physicians concurred with the Hypothetical Case, and did so with great authority. Dr. John Hill Callender, who had introduced the term “vicarious menstruation” to the court, was a sixty-year-old Nashville native and longtime medical superintendent of the Central Hospital for the Insane. He was also a professor at the University of Nashville and Vanderbilt University, where he earned a statewide reputation for his work with nervous diseases.108 Dr. Frank L. Sim, a fifty-eight-year-old professor at the Memphis Hospital Medical College, was also held in great esteem, and from there, the other doctors’ backgrounds were varied enough that the defense could claim they sought opinions far and wide—at least within the state of Tennessee. It did not matter that it was hard to differentiate between each expert’s testimony. On the contrary, consistency only reinforced the impression that the opinions were objective, the result of rigorous scientific methods.109

  Before they had even met Alice, the doctors agreed she had a hereditary disposition. In jail, they observed her to be of low intelligence, noted her supposedly vacant facial expression, and above all, documented a complete lack of remorse. One doctor, E. P. Sale, cited Alice’s left-handedness and slightly asymmetrical features as further proof of her condition.

  The expert witnesses primarily focused on the romance between Alice and Freda, including the unspoken topic about which everyone had been wondering. Callendar, Sim, and Turner boldly revealed that they had found no evidence of “sexual love” between Alice and Freda, even though the couple had spent nights together, and had been physically affectionate. But, the doctors hastened to add, Alice’s feelings were indeed “unnatural,” and that she had formed a “morbid perverted attachment” to Freda.

  And yet, a “morbid perverted attachment” to Freda was not what the doctors ultimately deemed insane. Their attention was drawn to Alice’s plan to marry and support Freda, “an impossible idea” that convinced doctors that she was clinically insane.110

  Dr. B.F. Turner, the least tenured of these men, found Alice’s desire to be economically self-sufficient—which, in this case, meant posing as a man—totally absurd, trumped only by her preposterous idea of same-sex marriage. He shared a part of their conversation, in which he pressed Alice about the impossibility of procreation between two women. A childless home, to his mind, served no purpose, and could only be understood as another sign of unreason.

  “Alice, do you not know that you could not have married another young lady?” Dr. Turner had asked her.

  “Oh, I could have married Freda,” she replied.

  “But some one usually has to support a family in a case like that.”

  “I know it, but I was going to work and support both,” Alice explained.

  “But a girl like you could not earn enough for both.”

  “But I was going to dress as a man . . .”

  “But Miss Mitchell, do you not know that usually when young people get married they look forward to the time when they shall have children growing up around them?”

  “Oh, yes sir.”

  “Well, did you and Freda propose to have children?”

  “No, we were not going to have children.”

  “How do you know you were not?”

  “Oh, I know we were not,” Alice demurred.

  Like Turner, Callender emphasized Alice’s peculiar “logic” as a way to identify which of her desires were normal, and which were abnormal; it was, for the defense, a convenient mission of nineteenth-century psychiatry. Callender found Alice’s plan to pass as a man and support Freda to be insane, concluding, “The frankness and sincerity of her manner on this topic was evidence either of a gross delusion or the conception of a person imbecile, or of a child without knowledge of the usual results of matrimony or the connubial state, or of the purpose of the organs of generation in the sexes.”111 The idea that Alice might imagine a life with Freda in childless terms was so foreign to the doctors that, in their estimation, it could only mean she lacked basic adult understanding of how sexual reproduction worked.

  When it came to the act of murder, three out of the five experts believed Alice had been “dominated” by an insane desire to end Freda’s life, displaying a total loss of self-c
ontrol, another hallmark of turn-of-the-century psychiatric theory. On the stand, Turner used the analogy of a runaway horse, so strong the driver cannot control it.112 Sale, however, believed Alice was suffering from “simple insanity,” a version of “erotomania” that the defense had worked to avoid as a possible diagnosis. Interestingly, thirty-six-year-old Dr. Michael Campbell—who had almost agreed to testify on the state’s behalf—declined to offer a diagnosis. He did, however, note that there were many patients in his asylum, the Eastern State Hospital for the Insane in nearby Knoxville, Tennessee, who appeared rational on most subjects.

  All five, however, not only agreed that Alice was in some way insane, but also—and most conveniently for the Mitchells—incurable. At best, they warned, an asylum would offer her relief through “treatment.”113

  ATTORNEY GENERAL PETERS, lacking a single dissenting physician, nonetheless persevered. He pressed witnesses for limited definitions of same-sex love, and challenged them to substantiate claims that it was consistently emblematic of insanity. Campbell conceded it was not, though like Turner, he associated same-sex love with passions taken to an extreme. The always suggestive Sale testified that Alice and Freda’s relationship illustrated the dangers of extreme passion, which he described as a pathological love.114

  Unable to get much traction, Peters shifted his focus from love to marriage. Could two women marry? There was a known example, Peters pointed out. Annie Hindle, a male-impersonator who had performed at Broome’s Variety Theater on Jefferson Street in Memphis, had been regarded as eccentric—but not insane—despite having married a woman. Turner rejected this line of questioning, explaining that two women could not experience “physical pleasure and giving birth to children.” To his mind, these reasons alone precluded any ability to form a union.115