Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis

by Alexis Coe

  But could Alice and Freda have experienced “physical pleasure,” the kind a man and woman enjoyed together?

  The Appeal Avalanche wondered at Turners’s point. After all, there had been no formal physical examination, and thus “it has not been proved that Alice could not perform the duties of a husband.” Cases of indeterminate genitals, or hermaphrodites, were rarely introduced into polite conversation, let alone written about in newspapers consumed by the masses. Peters, however, would not request that Alice undergo a physical examination. Murderess or not, she was a respectable white woman from a prominent family, and her body was off limits—even if it played a large role in the case.116

  “Was Freda Ward insane, too?” asked the prosecution. It was a rhetorical question. No, Campbell conceded, even though he had never met the deceased seventeen-year-old, and anyway, “she was dominated by Alice Mitchell, the stronger-willed of the two girls.”117

  “What about a man in her situation?” the prosecution further pressed. Has no man with sexual desires toward a woman ever committed murder? One need not be insane, possessed by perversion, to be driven to violence.

  Sale granted that a man who committed a similar crime of passion “on the spur of the moment . . . is an ebullition that might occur in every normal man.” But this case was not comparable, he maintained, and returned to the defense’s central message, the argument that tied all of the testimony together: Alice thought she could marry Freda and work to support a childless union, that they could live like that indefinitely—an insane notion.118

  After three days, the prosecution had failed to offer a convincing counterclaim, and inconsistencies did little to undermine the expert testimony. The Attorney General persevered, calling four witnesses who lacked expertise, but had actually known the deceased.

  The state called Ada Volkmar, Freda’s eldest sister, to testify first, but she offered the court very little new information, as did Christina Purnell, who had witnessed the murder. The next witness, however, was not only new, but a highly anticipated arrival.

  Freda’s erstwhile beau and Alice’s romantic rival, Ashley Roselle of Featherstone, Arkansas, took the stand, and the energy in the courtroom surged, with onlookers hoping for a plot twist. There was an outspoken group of spectators who shared William Volkmar’s suspicion that a man was somehow involved. In this version of the story, Alice killed Freda not out of love for her, but to clear the way to marry Ashley.

  Unfortunately for that camp, Ashley’s testimony did little to support the theory. His courtship of Freda was largely unremarkable, though it bore her trademark theatrics. She wished to conceal the correspondence from her older sister, Ada, and thus used Alice as an intermediary. This arrangement continued until Alice read their letters and realized they were full of romantic sentiments, and increasingly serious in nature. After she refused to funnel any more of their letters, Freda broke it off with Ashley, but the explanation she offered was disingenuous. She lied and said that both Alice and Lillie had moved to Chicago, which meant that neither of her friends could serve as intermediaries any longer.

  The state prodded Ashley to admit that Alice had expressed interest in him, but he denied it. There was no question, he testified, that Alice was exclusively fixated on Freda. During their conversations, she was interested in one thing and one thing only: getting Ashley to confirm or refute what Freda had told her about their relationship.

  Ashley was in agreement with the prosecution on one front: Alice seemed perfectly sane. But just as soon as he had uttered those pivotal words, he cast a shadow of doubt on his assessment, recalling that, yes, she had spoken openly of a most violent act. But she did not threaten to harm Freda, or Ashley himself. The life she spoke of taking was her own.

  By the time Ashley stepped down from the stand, the public was thoroughly disappointed. The next day, he was lambasted by the press. They took particular issue with the twenty-three-year-old postmaster’s appearance, ridiculing his poorly formed mustache and “round, close cropped head, and his eyes [which] do not open very wide.” His pink shirt, blue tie, and pants were mocked as ornate and unrefined. If any man was going to be able to tempt Alice Mitchell, the press agreed, it was not the foppish Ashley Roselle.119

  HER OWN BEST WITNESS

  GANTT AND WRIGHT SPENT SIX MONTHS isolating Alice from the public, and the result had been near total control of the narrative. They were not about to let her testimony be the very thing that hanged her.

  It was no surprise, then, that the moment Alice Mitchell was called to the stand, the defense jumped to their feet. They implored Judge DuBose to consider the upstanding Mitchell family of Memphis, who “may not care to have her made the object of scrutiny to some sensationalists.” Indeed, Alice had arrived at the courthouse flanked by her male relations, but in comparison to Lillie, who was often described as meekly leaning on her father for support, the men of the Mitchell family appeared to be more shield than ballast.

  Judge DuBose delayed the proceedings to check the legal precedent in his chambers, leaving Attorney General Peters irate. If Alice had convinced so many experts and good citizens of Memphis that she was insane, Peters taunted, her attorneys should be more than willing to let her demonstrate it on the stand.

  While Peters grumbled and Judge DuBose deliberated, barely a murmur passed among the spectators. His draconian methods of courtroom control—unrelenting censure and ejection for relatively harmless infractions—now appeared to have a real purpose. The packed courtroom had waited so long for this very moment, on the most important day of the lunacy inquisition, that when it finally arrived, they remained perfectly still, spellbound by curiosity.

  AT LONG LAST, IT WAS DECLARED: Alice Mitchell would testify.

  Her short walk from the defense table to the witness stand was complicated by the swelling crowd. She had to maneuver past those seated and standing, who were quick to move aside. They were eager to make way for the star defendant, a woman who had captured the nation’s attention, and yet, Alice had rarely been seen in public, and had hardly uttered a word aloud. After listening to people talk about her and Freda for the last six months, Alice’s voice would finally be heard.

  The courtroom watched with bated breath as Alice arranged herself on the chair, shifting and smoothing out her dress. They had become quite familiar with the back of her head during the lunacy inquisition, which is not to suggest that an obstructed view had ever stopped them from analyzing her; every diminutive gesture and expression had been subject to conjecture. Many had fixated on the way she calmly fanned herself during the long, oppressively humid days in court, judging her to be startlingly imperturbable. Others declared her furiously confident, content, and even cheerful. Of course, who could really claim such insight from their seat? They were barely able to make out her features during her quick entrances, and even speedier exits.

  From underneath her wide-brimmed summer hat, Alice glanced over at the all-male, all-white jury, “selected from among the best citizens of Memphis,” showing the rapt audience her profile. They gazed upon her in full view, and opinions were predictably varied. The room became a muffled cacophony of hushed tones and whispers as the crowd debated whether her oval face was pretty, or far too small for her body. Surely her features reflected her deviant acts, and spectators made sure to remember the shape of her nose.120

  DuBose insisted on silence, and Peters launched into his line of questioning as soon as his voice could be heard. He wasted no time getting to the subject of Freda, although his opening question appeared relatively benign: How long, he asked, had they known each other?

  “For as long as I remember,” Alice said, her voice carrying to the back of the courtroom.

  Of course, she had not known Freda her entire life. They had met at the Higbee School for Young Ladies, a fact she also denied. But her memory was not otherwise cloudy; she remembered every single date she saw Freda, and the many letters they exchanged.

  Alice recalled visiting her ex-fianc�
� twice since her move to Golddust, once alone and on another occasion with Lillie. She offered small, insignificant details, like meeting a boarder in the Volkmar home during her first trip, along with far more consequential episodes, like her introduction to Ashley Roselle during the second visit. She denied having feelings for him, confirming Ashley’s testimony; she had sought him out for the sole purpose of deducing his intentions with Freda.

  “Did you know if he was in love with Miss Freda Ward?” Peters asked.

  “Yes, I think he was,” she answered, eyes watering.

  Crimes of passion were rooted in jealousy, and Peters saw Alice’s possessiveness and mistrust as integral to his argument. In his view, she was sane, and should be tried as a man would be in the same situation. “What made you think so?” the attorney general pressed.

  “By the way Freda spoke of him and the letters I saw,” she explained, handkerchief in hand.

  Alice remembered this betrayal well. Freda had been afraid that her brother-in-law, the postmaster in Golddust, would notice that she was receiving letters, and tell his wife. Alice was happy to hold the letters for her beloved until the day she decided to open them, and learned Freda and Ashley were moving toward an engagement.

  As tears streamed down her face, Alice told Peters of Freda’s repeated flirtations, and explained how they drove her to extremes. She divulged details of the laudanum incident, and how she had tried to convince Freda to take it as well. She confirmed Lucy’s account of another suicide attempt when she tried to turn the family’s rifle on herself, but accidentally shot off a round in the process. And there was the incident before the murder, when Freda ignored her outside the photography gallery. The snub had so overwhelmed Alice that her shaking hands could not fetch the razor from her dress pocket in time.

  “You intended to kill her?” Peters finally asked. The jury already knew much of what she had recounted, but premeditation was an important part of the prosecution’s case.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” he quickly followed, hoping to finish the line of questioning before the defense could raise another objection.

  “Because I could not have her.”

  At that, the Commercial, which had cast a shadow of doubt over the insanity plea from the beginning, was greatly affected by her testimony.

  The spectacle of a girl who has not yet reached her 20th birthday—one born of refined and [C]hristian parents, reared with the tenderest of care, amidst surroundings whose every influence was good—calmly and nonchalantly admitting the perpetration of an awful crime, is rare enough and sad enough in all conscience. But that was not all. Into every horrid detail she entered with apparent relish.121

  The paper’s confusing portrayal of Alice—claiming that she was “nonchalant” about the crime but allegedly discussed it with “relish”—contradicts not just itself, but more importantly, the many reports of her crying on the stand. Had she flipped so wildly between emotions, from cool indifference to flagrant enjoyment, multiple sources surely would have noted it—with relish. Instead, a wealth of reporting indicates that Alice, still but a sheltered young woman, offered unflinchingly honest answers, to the best of her recollection, throughout the emotionally charged testimony. She had committed a terrible crime, to be sure, but she seemed far from the coldblooded, self-satisfied villain depicted in the Commercial’s pages.

  “Do you miss her now?” Peters continued.

  “I have missed her every day since last summer,” Alice said, her voice quivering. The season she named was not winter, when she had murdered Freda, but the previous summer, which she had hoped would represent the beginning of their life together as husband and wife in St. Louis. Instead, it had marked the start of their forced estrangement.

  In stark contrast with earlier testimony from the Mitchell family, Alice made it perfectly clear that she did, in fact, understand that Freda was dead, and that she longed to see her beautiful face.

  “Attractive?” he pressed, to which she answered yes.

  Peters would have probably preferred to go further with this line of inquiry, but he would not have gotten far.

  The Commercial praised DuBose for barring “revolting” details and “depraved, sensuous or degraded” interludes, and on this point, the Appeal Avalanche was in complete agreement.122

  There has been a very close observance of proprieties and no disposition has been shown to harass the defendant, or to go to a line of investigation which, because of its suggestiveness, might have compromised her moral character.123

  Peters yielded the floor to the defense, who approached Alice with caution. It had gone relatively well so far, and Wright was intent on keeping it that way. He played it safe, relying on topics that would remind the jury that Alice, at that very moment, was expressing the sentiments of an unsound mind. The obvious tact, then, was to ask his client open-ended questions about her plan to wed Freda, and what she imagined married life in St. Louis would be like.

  Wright’s approach worked on the Appeal Avalanche, who emphasized the marriage plot as the most salient indicator of her insanity. They compared the intention of one woman to marry another to “those of a child who would be capable of forming plans without taking into consideration the responsibilities of life.”124

  When Wright concluded—relieved, no doubt, if not optimistic about the public testimony his team had worked so hard to avoid—he was met with even better news: Peters declined further cross-examination. Alice’s testimony had ended on just the right note for the defense. She made a quick exit from the witness stand, and began walking toward her father.

  “Hold on, there! Come back!” Judge DuBose bellowed.

  “Gentleman of the jury,” he continued, once she had resumed her place on the stand, “do any of you wish to ask the defendant any questions, to examine her touching the condition of her mind?”

  Major Fleece, one of the jurors, seized the opportunity, but he had heard enough about love and marriage. He was after macabre details, with a specific eye toward two of Alice’s most distressing preoccupations.

  “You say, Miss Mitchell, that you undertook to kill yourself?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you feel regret that you failed?”

  “I have always wanted to do it.”

  “Do you feel that you are determined to carry out that purpose?”

  “No, sir. I don’t know that I will,” she answered, before concluding, “but I want to die.”

  “It was said you kept a thumbstall saturated with Freda’s blood and yours,” Fleece stated, addressing an oft invoked rumor. “Do you want to have that now? Would it give you pleasure to look upon it?”

  “Yes, sir,” she answered. “I think I would.”

  THERE WAS LITTLE TO ASK ALICE AFTER THAT. But as the papers noted, this was “the last act in the drama, and Judge DuBose wanted to savor it.” He postponed deliberations until Saturday, July 30, so that he might prepare a written charge to read to the jury.125

  When the day finally came, Judge DuBose delivered his statement, and then the jury filed out of the courtroom to deliberate—and returned within about twenty minutes.126 The courtroom was so quiet, so full of anticipation that spectators in the very back of the courtroom, claiming the worst seats in the house, probably heard the wooden chairs creak as the jurors settled back into their seats.

  The foreman, state senator Colonel McGalloway, was called upon to read the verdict.

  “Presently Insane,” he declared.

  THAT STORY WAS NEVER PRINTED

  DECLARED INCURABLE BY LEADING medical experts and judged to be insane by a jury of the finest men in Memphis, Alice was remanded to the Western Hospital for the Insane in Bolivar, Tennessee.

  She was to be committed on August 1, 1892. After six months of being a public figure—the subject of endless lurid speculation across the country— Alice was gone, out of sight in nearby Bolivar. The Wards silently accepted that justice would not be served, and returned home to
Golddust. The big urban dailies called their reporters home, and the emptied city moved on.

  WHEN ALICE ARRIVED IN BOLIVAR, the insane asylum was only in its third year of operation and already overcrowded. The third of its kind in Tennessee, the asylum was built to accommodate some 300 patients, divided by race and gender. But Alice’s arrival pushed the asylum’s population to 319, a number that would continue to rise. The luckiest among the 151 males and 168 females retained at least some semblance of privacy, but when patients began to number in the thousands, they were crowded into large dormitories.

  Alice joined Bolivar’s largest patient population, the 37 percent who had a “hereditary predisposition.” This was followed closely by alcoholism and epilepsy in men, and for women, uterine trouble, those who suffered by the vaguely defined “ill health,” and even the flu.

  The only recorded therapy Alice received was “moral treatment.” It should have entailed regular exercise, a healthy diet, some kind of work or hobbies to occupy the fragile mind, and occasional amusements, like dances, concerts, and magic lantern shows. Men farmed and went to workshops, while women did laundry and spent their days in the sewing room.127

  But patients during this time period often received harsh treatment, and there was little oversight. The asylum staff was overworked, and they were easily frustrated when patients receiving ineffectual treatment failed to progress.

  Not that there was ever any expectation that Alice would “recover.” The asylum was run and staffed by doctors who had declined the prosecution’s requests to testify at the lunacy inquisition. There was no need to interview Alice, they had said, as the sensational news stories had already convinced them of her insanity. The year she was admitted, the asylum’s own publication, the Bolivar Bulletin, reported that experts believed “her insanity is progressive, and it is only a question of time when this victim of erratic [sic] mania will be a driveling idiot through the decay of brain tissue.”128