UBC: Kansas Charley, Dr. Crippen, Major Arthur Griffiths, Charles Bravo, Mary Rogers, Lizzie Borden

[truepenny]

So mirrorthaw and I both have some low-grade virusy crud, which means that, instead of going to Midwest Horse Fair, I spent all day yesterday reading the stack of books that I'd hoped to ration out over a couple of weeks. It's all Victorian true crime (with one foray into Edwardian), and there's no common theme here besides murder.


Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. Kansas Charley: The True Story of a 19th-Century Boy Murderer. New York: Viking Books, 2003.

This is a very good book about a completely forgotten murderer. "Kansas Charley" (born Karl Muller, but known for most of his life as Charles or Charley Miller) was fifteen when he committed his crime and seventeen when he was hanged for it. Like Gitta Sereny in Unheard Cries, Brumberg is interested in the phenomenon and plight of children who kill, and she provides a much more nuanced and historically aware discussion--unlike the horrifically historically naive Sereny, Brumberg is perfectly aware that the "innocence" of childhood is a construction of nineteenth-century middle-class privilege--including questions of race and class, as well as gender. (She also notes that today's "violent video game" theory of child criminals is presaged, pretty much note for note, in the "trashy dime novel" theory; she does not note, although I do, that the "immoral comic book" theory of the mid-twentieth century also falls squarely in this lineage.) Possibly because her subject is fixed in time, limited to his trial testimony and newspaper interviews, rather than available for interviews as an adult, she also does a better job than Sereny of giving a sense of her subject as a person--a flawed, warped, incompletely developed person, who commited a brutal, unjustifiable, unforgiveable murder, but who still deserved something better than he got from the state of Wyoming.



Cullen, Tom. Crippen: The Mild Murderer. 1977. London: Penguin Books, 1988.

I came across a quote from Robertson Davies the other day which sums up perfectly my feeling about Cullen, as about several other true crime writers: "She was worse than a blabber; she was a hinter. It gave her pleasure to rouse speculation about dangerous things." This is Cullen in a nutshell. He hints, and it drives me crazy. He goes about ninety percent of the way to outlining a case that Ethel LeNeve was the actual murderer--or at the very least Lady Macbeth to Crippen's dithering--but he never comes out and says it. He keep leaving it in implications and hints, without even the decency to put it out there as frank speculation.

The book has other flaws, particularly in the hard to follow, chronologically higgledy-piggledy structure which Cullen clearly chose as providing maximum drama rather than maximum clarity. But it was interesting, if for no other reason than that it demonstrated a man could be a brutally cold-blooded murderer (unless that was Ethel), could immolate himself in self-sacrifice (even if Crippen committed the murder alone, Ethel clearly was an accessory both before and after the fact, and Crippen was willing to tell all the lies it took to get her acquitted and himself executed), and could still be banally sentimental, intellectually and ethiclly muddled, and--except for the fact of his uncharacteristic crime--utterly uninteresting.

The book also confirmed my belief that Walter Dew is not a trustworthy source for anything, and Ripperologists need to stop quoting him.



Griffiths, Arthur, Major. Mysteries of Police and Crime: Victorian Murderers. 1898. Stroud: The History Press, 2010.

This is the only book on this particular list actually written by a Victorian (Griffiths is notable as the first publication of Sir Melville Macnaughton's three most likely suspects: Druitt, Ostrog, and the mad Polish Jew, also for his comments on Constance Kent, whom he knew when he was in charge of the prison she was sent to, which for the life of me right now I can't think of the name of, and I'm not going to look because I feel like death warmed over on a hot-plate), and like the Newgate Calendar, it's mostly interesting as a historical conversation piece. Griffiths has no idea how to tell a coherent story, and his murderers and victims are curiously flat, all their individuality flattened out into the little melodrama marionettes of Victorian convention. Every case in Victorian Murderers that I'd heard of, I've read a better account of (except for William Palmer, whom I otherwise know only from the allusion to him and Pritchard in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and for the cases that I know from reading the Newgate Calendar--which still has a better account of Mary Blandy), and the cases I hadn't heard of, Griffiths did not leave me feeling particularly enlightened.



Stashower, Daniel. The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder. New York: Berkley Books, 2006.

Although not as good as Cline's book on Helen Jewett, this is a much better book than The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers. Although I suspect Stashower may have cribbed from Srebnick in discussing Mary Rogers' genealogy (since this is a "popular" book, his citing of sources is sketchy at best), he has done--or has profited from someone else who has done--yeoman's labor in tracing the narrative of the crime and the investigation through the newspapers. He makes it very clear how randomly tacked-on the idea about a botched abortion was (even though he, too, seems to be somewhat swayed by it), and he addresses the thing that maddened me so about Srebnick's book: if Mary Rogers died of a botched abortion, why was she strangled? And she was strangled; Stashower does an excellent job of making that clear. He doesn't have answers, any more than anyone else, but (possibly because he himself has written mysteries) he is much much better both at laying out the evidence in a coherent and comprehensible way and at articulating the questions and the way that the various theories either do or do not answer them.

This book is only half about Mary Rogers. The other half is about that self-destructive genius (and genius at self-destruction) Edgar Allan Poe, and his "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt." Stashower talks about Poe's career and his absurdly, tragically melodramatic personal life, and the way in which this particular story was both a serious attempt to prove Poe's theories about ratiocination and a shameless publicity stunt which very nearly got scuppered at the eleventh hour by the late-breaking botched abortion theory. Stashower lays out Poe's efforts at legerdemain in making his story fit popular opinion (not unlike twisting facts to suit theories), and does me a great service, thereby, because he explains one of the reasons why "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," in its current form, is so unsatisfying. Poe's waffling neither actually rewrote the story to make the botched abortion theory the answer, nor held true to his original theory of the naval officer; it only made it harder to see what his theory was.



Ruddick, James. Death at the Priory: Love, Sex, and Murder in Victorian England. New York: Grove Press, 2001.

I was skeptical of this book. Ruddick is as sketchy about citing his sources as Stashower (again, this is a "popular" book), and he performs some bits of legerdemain of his own which I found highly dubious. He's also a little too invested for my taste in trumpeting his own resourcefulness and originality (even though I understand rhetorically why he needs to, it just puts me off). But for all that, this is a very engaging book, well-structured and clearly written, and in the end he convinced me that his theory was correct. Partly, this is because he does what I always want true crime writers to do, which is providing a meta-commentary about theories of the crime and how they do or don't fit the evidence. Partly, this is because his theory does fit the evidence, and it makes sense of the otherwise baffling behavior of Florence Bravo and (especially) Jane Cannon Cox. I also ended up liking Ruddick for his patient empathy (as distinct from sympathy) with all the actors in the drama.



Sullivan, Robert. Goodbye Lizzie Borden. 1974. London: Penguin Books, 1989.

Although Sullivan makes a nasty and unnecessary swipe at Victoria Lincoln in his introduction (and I admit, he started the process of alienating me right then and there), he comes to essentially the same conclusion she does, and for the same reasons: Lizzie Borden killed her father and step-mother, she told transparent, self-contradicting lies about it, and she got off because the judges at her trial were determined that she should and the jury let themselves be led by the nose. Sullivan was a lawyer and a judge of the Massachusetts Superior Court himself, and he's only interested in the legal aspects of the case, meaning that his comments on the trial are fascinating, but his treatment of everything else frequently only makes sense if you have read Lincoln (or another careful, thoughtful, well-researched book on Lizzie Borden; although I myself have not read one, that doesn't mean they aren't out there). He isn't at all interested in the background of the crime or in any of the bits of the mystery still surrounding it. (The title is a direct and deliberate reflection of his impatience with Lizzie Borden's continuing pull.) Sullivan frequently differs with Lincoln on interpretations of character, and he lost great whacking heaps of my trust by putting forward as more reliable than anyone else Abby Borden's ninety-year-old niece (whom he talked to when writing his book in 1973) and her memories of Abby and Lizzie Borden and of the murders, which occurred when she was ten. Paul Sugden talks very usefully in his book on Jack the Ripper about the complete worthlessness of memoir and reminiscence as forensic evidence, and while Abby Borden Whitehead Potter's memories are great from an oral and social history point of view, they don't tell us a single damn thing about the murders. Specifically, there's an anecdote which Sullivan relates from her, an anecdote about Lizzie killing her stepmother's cat (with an axe!), which is in complete contradiction with the one thing we do know about Lizzie, namely her love for animals (and Sullivan knows this, too, because he quotes her will and mentions that the porch of Maplecroft, the house she bought after she was acquitted, was designed so that she could be invisible to her neighbors while she watched the birds and squirrels she fed). It's too pat--too neat a foreshadowing of what Lizzie was going to do to Abby herself--and combined with the rest of Abby Potter's "evidence," made me feel that she, and by extension Sullivan, who quotes this anecdote as if it were gospel, were simply not to be trusted.

There's also a very very weird moment, which I'm just going to quote:

[...] it is said that there was considerable post-trial correspondence between Lizzie and her former attorney, which ultimately came into the hands of Governor Robinson's grandson, a distinguished member of the Springfield Bar until his death late in 1973. I inquired of the correspondence, hoping for the opportunity to examine it, but leanred from associates of Mr. Robinson that he was then very seriously ill, that he had destroyed much of the correspondence several years ago, and those letters which he had retained he did not wish to make public on the understandable ethical grounds of confidentiality of client-attorney communication--a most creditable position to have adopted, and one that I respect
(Sullivan 200)

The fact that Mr. Robinson destroyed the correspondence makes me howl with wrath, and frankly, I'm puzzled as to how letters between Lizzie and Robinson after Lizzie ceased to be his client could still be considered sacred to attorney-client confidentiality (is there holdover because they were letters about his services to her as her attorney?), and especially after both parties were dead--for, please note, the Robinson pleading attorney-client confidentiality is not the Robinson who was Lizzie's attorney. I can understand that Mr. Robinson might wish to prevent from being made public letters which showed his grandfather in a bad light (and given Robinson's performance at the trial, there's really no way they couldn't), but this apologia, again, made me feel that Sullivan was not to be trusted.

And after he goes through and rips apart Judge Dewey's horribly biased charge to the jury, making it absolutely clear that Dewey was telling the jury how to interpret the facts--exactly and expressly what the judge is not allowed to do--he has this weird backpedaling passage:

Holding, for somewhat longer than did Judge Dewey, the same judicial office which he held in the last century, I find it uncomfortable to criticize his judicial action in the Borden case, and I do not. I do, however, disagree.

Any assertion that there was a hint of colluison in Judge Dewey's conduct at the trial is false and absurd, nor do I charge Judge Dewey with bias or prejudice. But it is here suggested that the appearance of bias or prejudice can, at times, be as damaging to public confidence in the proper administration of justice as would the actual presence of prejudice or bias.

The contention I make here is that Judge Dewey displayed a lack of objectivity in his charge to the jury.
(Sullivan 199)

What, exactly, is the difference between "bias" and "lack of objectivity"? And why, after providing a pithy, pungent, and entertaining criticism of Dewey's charge, is Sullivan so anxious to claim he isn't criticizing Dewey at all? The old-boys network of the Massachusetts legal community is all over this book, and it makes Sullivan both difficult to parse and rather unlikeable. He does, however, offer a clear explanation and a very useful map of the legal minefield of Lizzie Borden's trial.

Comments

[heresluck]

...there's no common theme here besides murder.

I should probably be more disturbed than I am that that sentence provoked in me a great surge of affection and missing you. :D

[opera142.livejournal.com]

"There's no common theme here besides murder." really ought to be a catchphrase.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Is Sullivan as prone to hiding behind passive voice as those quotes make him sound? Because that, too, makes me give him the side-eye.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

As an only sort-of sidenote, have you see Luther yet?

[opera142.livejournal.com]

Missed you at 4th Street. Hope you are well, and hope to see you next year.