“ANOTHER CASE ON MY HANDS”

When noted Cincinnati criminal lawyer William “Foss” Hopkins met with his client for the first time after her arrest, he offered her a cigarette.

“I don’t smoke,” she said. She looked tired but nervous. Although she wasn’t happy with the way the Hopkins brothers’ firm had handled her divorce, criminal law was Foss Hopkins’s specialty. At sixty years old, Hopkins had defended more than 250 murder cases, and only two of those clients were sentenced to death. Just a year earlier, he had defended a high-profile client who had confessed to and filmed a reenactment of the murder of a Cincinnati socialite and earned a remarkable, headline-grabbing acquittal.

Indeed, earlier that afternoon, he had addressed a lunch meeting of the Hamilton County Bar Association on the subject “Crime Pays” at the Netherland Hilton, one of Cincinnati’s finer hotels. He told his colleagues that he learned his technique for defending clients by studying other famous criminal attorneys. By combining their methods, he developed his own.

One of those techniques, he said, was to “waive examination in Police Court and wait until the client gets to the county jail. Then we talk to him with my secretary taking down every word. This statement is typed up and submitted to the client for changes. We warn the client not to lie to us, and assure him that it is all confidential. We try cases on the facts, do not stretch the truth, nor do we use fake testimony.”

Little did Foss Hopkins realize how much strain Edythe Klumpp would put on his techniques, but he told the Bar Association that afternoon, “Well, I have another case on my hands, but I haven’t been able to see my client yet. The police have her out reenacting the alleged crime.”

Edythe confers with her lawyer, William “Foss” Hopkins. Cincinnati Enquirer file.

Edythe and Hopkins wait for trial to begin. Cincinnati Enquirer file.

Hopkins seemed a little testy by the time he reached Edythe Klumpp’s cell in the basement of city hall and probably didn’t recognize the irony of offering the accused torch murderer a cigarette. He was a three-pack-a-day man himself.

There was a tense moment, with the two of them looking each other over warily. Hopkins took note of how much Edythe had changed since his firm worked on her divorce. “Gone was the fat which had rendered her undesirable,” he wrote in his memoirs, Murder Is My Business. “She had slimmed to the point of being svelte. But I could see that she remained the exasperating female whose personality alternated between girlish foolishness and those ice-cold moments when she worried about keeping her family financially afloat. As she gripped the bars that afternoon she was not the silly giggler. Her face was solemn, white and drawn.”

Finally, Edythe spoke. “I asked for you yesterday,” she said, “and they told me I couldn’t see you until I confessed the murder.”

“Listen,” he snapped. “I entered this case at 11:45 last night when your brother called me to defend you. I phoned to Colonel Sandman and he told me they were interrogating you. I told him I wanted to see you at 8:30 this morning, and when I got down here, they had taken you somewhere else. Now it’s three o’clock and you’ve been talking to them for 26 hours, and they haven’t even booked you.” There was no privacy, so they did not speak long.

At about 9:45 a.m. the next day, Detective Stagenhorst signed and delivered the writ charging Edythe Klumpp with first-degree murder. “But I thought it was supposed to be manslaughter,” she protested. “It was accidental, you know. You said yesterday it would be manslaughter.” Stagenhorst and Moore both immediately denied having said any such thing. They also denied Edythe’s statements that she had repeatedly asked to see her attorney during the twenty-six hours she was in custody.

“They told me I would have to make a statement before I could see him,” she complained.

Hopkins expressed his outrage over the way the whole matter had been handled. “I am utterly amazed at the way in which police obtain these statements,” he told the press. “I’ve argued for years that there should be a public defender or other neutral person present during the entire time a suspect is being questioned and that during the entire time a tape recording should be made of all that is said. This would be a protection for both the defendant and the Police Department. Then no defendant or lawyer could come in and say afterwards that statements were made which actually were not made.”

Edythe and Hopkins confer during her trial. Cincinnati Enquirer file.

Sandman told the Post that he would be agreeable to such a law if a police officer or “impartial person” could be allowed to listen to conferences between attorneys and clients, especially in major crime such as murder.

This was not a typical case for Hopkins from the start. Instead of waiving examination in police court on Friday, November 21, he requested a postponement because there were still unanswered questions in the case:

•   How did Louise Bergen die? Was it from a gunshot wound, a fractured skull, asphyxiation from being in the trunk of a car overnight or from burns from the pyre on Cowan Lake?

•   Where did Louise Bergen die? Was she killed in Hamilton County, Clinton County or somewhere in between?

“Normally in this type of case, I would waive preliminary examination,” he later told the court, “and I do not want to go into details, but I would like to hear some testimony on the cause of death and venue…I want to be sure I’m in the right court…I understand from the newspapers that a first-degree murder warrant also is on file in Clinton County.”

The prosecutor asked Stagenhorst if he was ready to proceed. “We would like a two-day continuance,” Stagenhorst said. “Then we will be ready.”

During the brief hearing, Edythe stood and remained silent. She looked tired and haggard, but the newspapers were taken by her neat appearance. As the case progressed, many stories would contain a description of her wardrobe. On this occasion, “She was dressed neatly in a long-sleeved white blouse and a flared dark brown skirt with a wide brown belt cinched at her slender waistline,” the Enquirer’s Paul Lugannani reported the following day. “Her thin lips, lightly touched with lipstick, were tightly drawn in a straight line. Shadows showed under her eyes. There were no smiles or giggles which were so frequent on the day of her arrest.” (On the second day of her trial, one report noted that she had on a pink dress that she bought. The next day, she took the reporter to task over it: “Why that dress was lavender!” she exclaimed. “The girls in the jail gave me an awful razzing.”)

The court gave Stagenhorst until the following Wednesday to assemble his witnesses. Someone in the squad told the press that the case was admittedly “unfinished.” Sandman, however, said that he was ready to prove that Louise died in Cincinnati. He wanted her tried at home. The criminal code left leeway in the matter: “If any mortal wound is given, or other violence or injury inflicted or any poison administered or sent into one county by means whereof death occurs in another county, the offender may be prosecuted in either county.”

Bailiff William Wiggeringloh escorts Edythe into the courtroom. Cincinnati Enquirer file.

That afternoon, Hopkins had his first substantive meeting with his client in the consultation room at the Hamilton County Jail. He and his staff—secretary Virginia Heuser and assistant Harvey Woods—were already feeling some of the heat that goes along with handling front-page murder cases, including fielding irate and obscene phone calls. Hopkins told them not to be discouraged. “There will be more,” he said, and they got down to business.

“Before you say anything, Mrs. Klumpp,” he began, “I want to explain a few things to you. You are going to be tried for your life. I know what that means. I’ve been through it hundreds of times. The only clients of mine who don’t get a fair verdict are those who lie to me.”

As was his custom for the first interview, Hopkins let Edythe talk without interruption. And talk she did, for three solid hours. This time, it was difficult for Hopkins to be still. His client seemed smug and sure of herself. As he listened to the same confession, word by rehearsed word, that she gave police, it occurred to him that she forgot one important thing to make her story a true fairy tale. She forgot to begin it with “Once upon a time…”

Edythe confers with Hopkins (seated); his secretary, Virginia Heuser; and his associate, Harvey Woods. Cincinnati Enquirer file.

“Are you quite finished,” he finally said. She nodded, looking him straight in the eye. “Now,” he said, “I will tell you why you’re a liar.” She gave him a look as if he had slapped her but said nothing. “First,” he went on, “do you mean to tell me that you burned the body of Mrs. Bergen in broad daylight in a state park—the fire must have lasted three hours—and that no one in that time noticed anything?” She nodded, saying nothing.

“Do you mean to tell me that you, unassisted, lifted a body weighing more than 135 pounds into the trunk of that car? I know for a fact you had to quit your waitressing job because you lacked the strength to carry trays!” She nodded. “Someone else had to be there, helping you.” She shook her head. “If you persist with this fairy tale, you are headed to the electric chair.”

No amount of pleading, arguing or threatening would get her to change her story. Hopkins knew what was going on. Surely she was covering for Bergen, and she wouldn’t even trust her own lawyer with the truth.

“What will you do now?” Ginny Heuser asked in the cab on the way back to the office.

“Defend her against herself,” he said, hoping that Edythe Klumpp would come to her senses and tell the truth before she would get a date with “Old Sparky,” the electric chair at the Ohio State Penitentiary.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Dr. Frank Cleveland set the official cause of death: “She died of skull and brain injuries as the result of multiple impacts to the head.” He found no bullet wound, he said, but there were traces of metal residue in her head that could have been from a bullet.

Harry Schops from the city’s Engineering Division testified that Caldwell Park was located within city limits, apparently to answer Hopkins’s argument that the state failed to prove venue.

“No testimony has been presented here to show that anything occurred in Hamilton County or Clinton County,” Hopkins said. “All that has been presented is the purported statement of the defendant. You cannot prove venue purely on the strength of a statement by the defendant. She will have to have a trial by jury in the county where the alleged crime occurred, but I want to be sure I’m in the right courtroom.”

City prosecutor Robert Paul answered, “We have proven the corpus delicti of the case. This is merely a preliminary hearing. We have adequate testimony here to show probable cause for the case to be investigated by the grand jury.”

Edythe was dressed in a white shirtwaist and dark skirt for the twenty-five-minute hearing and carried a tan leather jacket over her left arm. She carried a small paperback Bible and seemed oblivious to the flashbulbs and general hubbub on the way in and out of court. Except for a few whispered consultations with Hopkins, she never spoke, but in her cell after the hearing, she told reporters that she didn’t know anything about a beating, despite what Stagenhorst said.

“I never admitted either beating her or shooting her,” she said. “I told them that if I did beat her, I don’t remember it and the shooting was an accident.” Despite Hopkins’s impassioned objections, Judge Clarence Denning ordered her held over without bond for the grand jury.

Although Bill’s comments to the press and follow-up interviews with police seemed to show that he was distancing himself from Edythe Klumpp, he still came to visit her in the county jail—for a while, anyway. Hopkins said that near the end of February, when the grand jury handed down its formal indictment, he went to see his client. She was still telling her lies, he thought, and was more fed up than usual that day.

Edythe studies her Bible as she waits for her trial. Cincinnati Enquirer file.

“What goes on here, Mrs. Klumpp?” he said. “According to what I hear, Bergen has been visiting you three times a week.”

“He believes my story even if you don’t,” she said. “He’s giving me moral support.”

“Well,” he said, “don’t hold your breath waiting for him to show up again. He just quit his job and took off to Washington, D.C., with a girl half his age.” He was telling her the truth, and for more reasons than just to crush her spirit, though it did.

Edythe at her trial. Cincinnati Enquirer file.

“She was tense and continually depressed,” he said. “Her face became pale and drawn. Time after time I felt she was about to break and tell me the truth but at the last moment a look of fear would come into her eyes and her lips would lock in two bloodless lines that no probing of mine would release…I was convinced she was lying, but there was nothing I could do about it.” Hopkins considered withdrawing from the case, but it intrigued him to have a client stick to a lie so tenaciously, so he ultimately decided to see it through to the bitter end. He would attempt to save her in spite of herself.

Edythe works on a drawing in her cell at the Hamilton County jail. Cincinnati Enquirer file.

Edythe hangs a drawing in her cell at the Hamilton County Jail. Cincinnati Enquirer file.

Edythe confers with her lawyer, Foss Hopkins. Cincinnati Enquirer file.