Centenaries - whole and half

[sdreid]

100 years ago - 1913 April 14 - In England, Jeanie Baxter shoots and kills her fiancé in his flat. She claimed that the shooting of Julian Hall was an accident even though he had been shot twice. Jeanie's jury let her off the murder charge and sent her to prison for three years.

100 years ago - 1913 April 14 - Gangsters Harry Horowitz, Louis Rosenberg, Jacob Seidenschwer and Frank Cirofici are executed in Sing Sing's electric chair for the murder of Herman Rosenthal, the co-owner of a gambling club with a corrupt police lieutenant named Charles Becker. Lieutenant Becker was also in on the hit but was able to postpone his execution until 1915.

[Mayerling]

100 years ago - 1913 April 14 - Gangsters Harry Horowitz, Louis Rosenberg, Jacob Seidenschwer and Frank Cirofici are executed in Sing Sing's electric chair for the murder of Herman Rosenthal, the co-owner of a gambling club with a corrupt police lieutenant named Charles Becker. Lieutenant Becker was also in on the hit but was able to postpone his execution until 1915.

Hi Stan,

The guilt of the crooked Lt. Becker in the Rosenthal Murder is still debated. A good case about how he was a scapegoat for future crime kingpin Arnold Rothstein (who as "Meyer Wolfsheim" talks about the murder in THE GREAT GATSBY), New York World editor Herbert Bayard Swope, and ambitious D.A. Charles Whitman of New York was made by the late Andy Logan in AGAINST THE EVIDENCE. Becker was a crooked cop though. In 1895 he was at the center of a nasty incident where he arrested a prostitute for soliciting when she was in the company of a genteel individual. Unfortunately for Becker the individual was the popular novelist and writer Stephen Crane who testified for the prostitute in court. The arrest was upheld only because it was a prostitute, and Theodore Roosevelt (aways rather puritanical) supported Becker. In 1912 Roosevelt was running as the Bull Moose/Progressive Party for re-election to the Presidency, but I wonder if he noted how his protege's reputation really was in the mud that year.

Jeff

[sdreid]

Thanks for the additional information Jeff.

Regarding Ms. Baxter, her 3 year sentence was the result of her conviction on the lesser charge of manslaughter.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1963 April 23 - William Moore is gunned down while walking along an Alabama road. Mr. Moore, who was white, was making a solo civil rights pilgrimage through the south. The murder is still officially unsolved but bullets taken from Moore's head matched a .22 caliber rifle owned by Floyd Simpson, a local grocer. Simpson and Moore had argued earlier in the day but the store owner was never put on trial. A group of 10 civil rights activists honored Moore by completing his march to Jackson, Mississippi.

[sdreid]

100 years ago - 1913 April 27 - In Atlanta, the beaten, raped and strangled remains of Mary Phagan, 14, are found in the basement of the pencil company where she worked. She was last seen alive on the previous day when she came to the factory to pick up her pay. The plant manager, Leo Frank, was convicted of the murder and condemned to execution but this was commuted to life in prison by the governor who had doubts about the convict's guilt. This commutation led an outraged mob to break Frank out of prison in 1915 and lynch him. Frank's guilt or innocence is still debated.

[Mayerling]

100 years ago - 1913 April 27 - In Atlanta, the beaten, raped and strangled remains of Mary Phagan, 14, are found in the basement of the pencil company where she worked. She was last seen alive on the previous day when she came to the factory to pick up her pay. The plant manager, Leo Frank, was convicted of the murder and condemned to execution but this was commuted to life in prison by the governor who had doubts about the convict's guilt. This commutation led an outraged mob to break Frank out of prison in 1915 and lynch him. Frank's guilt or innocence is still debated.

Hi Stan,

Just some added details.

The case was sent to the U. S. Supreme Court (after going through the Georgia Courts) on a question of the violation of the Due Process Clause of the Constitution because of the heavily anti-Semitic atmosphere in Georgia and in and around the courtroom in the course of the trial. The case was heard before the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Edward White (from Louisiana) in 1914, but the decision came out in 1915. In a 7-2 decision the court decided (decision by Justice Mahlon Pitney - a rather second rate justice, although from New Jersey and an ancestor of Christopher Reeve), that there was no violation, but that Frank had full benefits of his own counsel before a jury in the trial. Pitney played down (if not distinctly ignored) the atmosphere of hate towards Northerners (Frank was born in the North) and Jews in the court and city and state.

There were two dissenters: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Holmes actually never bothered to study the details of the crime, but he was aware (as was Hughes, and everyone with common sense) of that effective hate in Georgia towards Frank, stirred up in large part by Georgia newspaper owner and politician Tom Watson. The dissent is a blistering attack on the majority opinion and how it totally ignores the reality of the situation (oddly enough, about seven years later, after White and Pitney were dead, Holmes wrote a court opinion on a similar trial in Arkansas of an African-American defendant, where the pressures were quite present, and stating it was a violation of Due Process - the Frank decision was never a permanent precedent, fortunately.

Governor John Slayton reviewed the evidence and commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. In his reviewing the evidence he found that for some reason (wholly out of kilter with the "Jim Crow" situation throughout the South in that period) the chief witness against Frank was an African-American named Jim Conley. Conley actually could have committed the crimes himself. Slayton's commutation destroyed his career. He served out his term in Georgia, and left the state to practice law elsewhere. On the night that he was told of the lynching, he was entertaining a guest, the young actor Sidney Blackmer.

In the 1980s an old man named Alonzo Mann showed up and revealled that he saw Conley carrying the dead Mary's body. He never told anyone at the time (he was a young teenager) because he was threatened by Conley who said he'd kill him if he did. This was not enough for the Georgia legislature to grant any posthumous pardon to Frank - it was evidence that could not be cross-examined properly in a timely court of law. However, a posthumous pardon was subsequently issued to Frank, but not on the basis of innocence. Rather it was issued on the basis of the state failing to adequately protect Frank (a few months before the hanging he was actually stabbed in prison by a fellow prisoner, so the failure of protection was there).

The best account (pro-Frank) is Harry Golden's, A LITTLE GIRL IS DEAD. It was written in the late 1960s. The best presentation of the anti-Frank thoughts on the matter was a book written in the 1980s by Mary Phagan, a newspaper reporter and grandniece (and namesake) of the victim. Ms Phagan pointed out that there were suspicions that Slayton did his action in response to bribes, and she gives clear indication that her family and friends always regarded Frank as guilty.

A two-part television movie was made in the 1980s with Jack Lemmon as Slayton. Earlier, a film "They'll Never Forget" starred Claude Rains (using a southern accent) as an ambitious Southern district attorney railroading a Yankee to his doom in the court by playing to local prejudices. Interestingly enough, at the end (after the lynching in the film) Rains looking out the window says, "Hmm...I wonder if he did it?" By the way, the victim in the film was played by a young Lana Turner.

Jeff

[sdreid]

Thanks Jeff. I have read both those books and seen the two movies. I'm probably more to the side that Frank was innocent - but not by a large margin.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1963 May 1 - In Sayama City, Japan, Yoshi Nikita, 16, is kidnapped and raped. A ransom was demanded and an attempt was made to pay it but the contact fled when he became suspicious. After a few days, Yoshie's body was found. A man named Kazuo Ishikawa was arrested and confessed to the murder after some enhanced interrogation. He went to prison and continued to ask for a new trial even after he was paroled in 1994.

[sdreid]

100 yeas ago - 1913 May 2 - A shallow grave in the British countryside yields up the bullet riddled body of Winifred Mitchell. Some shredded letters found on the farm where the victim worked incriminated a coworker named Walter Burton. The man had been carrying on an affair with Winifred even though he was married. He became fearful that he had forgotten his mistress pregnant and lured her to a secluded area on the pretext that they would elope. Mr. Button instead shot the woman a buried her body. He was convicted and hanged within the year.

[Mayerling]

Sounds like Burton may have been copying William Corder, or James Canham Read, or Henry Wainwright, except he did not notice they all got caught.

Jeff

[sdreid]

Yes Jeff, it reminded me of Corder when I first read about the case.

[sdreid]

100 years ago - 1913 May 3 -In a street altercation, Oresto Shillitoni shoots and kills fellow gangster John Rizzo as well as two responding New York City police officers named William Heaney and Charles Teare. Shillitoni was convicted and condemned but in 1916 he killed Daniel McCarthy, a prison guard, and escaped from death row. His freedom was brief and he met his end in Sing Sing's electric chair a few days after recapture.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1963 May 5 - A Quebec pederast serial killer and rapist, Leopold Dion garrotes Michel Morel, 10, and smothers Alain Carrier, 8. The murderer had lured the two boys to a deserted building on the pretext of taking some pictures of them. Dion sexually assaulted many young boys during his career and killed two others in addition to Michel and Alain. He was condemned to hanging but that was later commuted to life in prison. In 1972, Mr. Dion was stabbed to death by a fellow prisoner.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1963 May 6 - Seventy-two-year-old Lexie Haynes is shot and killed in her Alabama home. In the following decade, serial killer Thomas Whisenhant admitted to Lexie's murder. Mr. Whisenhant was executed in 2010 for another slaying.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1963 May 8 - Beverly Samans, 23, is stabbed to death in her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment. Despite the m.o., she was put on the list for the still officially unsolved Boston Strangler serial killer case.