EDYTHE ON THE STAND

Reports of the contentious three-hour showdown over the confession seemed to whet the public’s enthusiasm for the case. The courthouse elevator operator began referring to the scene as “the battlefield” when people arrived at the courthouse at 5:30 a.m. on the day Edythe Klumpp took the stand. When the doors to room 316 were opened, the rush of the crowd was so great that the guards worried about someone getting hurt. Dave Fullbright, who had been on guard duty during the Lyons trial, said, “It was never like this,” as old ladies pushed on one another, arguing, “I got here first!”

By the time Edythe got to the witness stand, the toll of the trial was even more apparent in her face and countenance. She had lost weight, the newspapers noted, and looked pale. “Her blond hair, once curled precisely, now straggles at the ends and hangs unnoticed over her forehead,” reported Margaret Josten in the Enquirer. “Although her clothing is still fresh and uncrumpled, it is obvious she is no longer making the effort to wear a new costume each day in court. Nor does the accused woman bother to hide animosity for those at the prosecution table.” She had a particularly hard glare for Hamilton County prosecutor C. Watson Hover when he argued that her confession should be admitted as evidence. “If looks could kill, Hover would fall dead!” one observer quipped.

Before Thursday’s session got underway, Edythe told the press that she was more upset about the pending testimony of her daughter than her own appearance on the stand. Hopkins was apologetic: “I wouldn’t bring her in if I didn’t need her. She’s my only witness.”

Edythe reenacting at her trial, with Hopkins. Cincinnati Enquirer file.

Her twelve-year-old daughter Joanne testified before her on Thursday morning, June 25. Edythe sobbed convulsively, her hands in her face and leaning on the counsel table, as the girl made her way to the stand. She managed to calm herself as the girl told Foss Hopkins that she went to Sunday school and knew right from wrong. The child bore a striking resemblance to her mother and wore white gloves with her frilly green dress. She spoke calmly and clearly as she told of the phone call at her house late on the afternoon of October 30. As she left the stand, she blew her mother a kiss. Edythe broke down again when the girl was out of sight.

Then Edythe took the stand and stayed there for the rest of the day and the next two sessions. When she described the events at Caldwell Circle, Hopkins directed the court to bring out the front seat that had been removed from her ’56 Chevy. Hopkins had her rise from the witness stand and act it out as he played the part of Louise Bergen.

Edythe said that she first told the police that it was Louise’s own gun because she was trying to protect Bill Bergen. “I thought if they knew it was Bill’s gun she shot herself with, they would think maybe Bill did it. I didn’t want to get him involved.” She started crying on the stand when she talked about going back home the night she confessed. She said her son, Jan, was standing at the doorway to his room, and the girls were in the living room. “The little one was on the steps and the other one sitting on the couch with her boyfriend,” she said. “I just walked over and kissed her and said, ‘Take care of Jo for me.’”

Hopkins showed her the handwritten confession and asked her if the detectives gave her any help in writing it. The question was a loaded one, harkening back to the Pugh case when the defendant, Robert Lyons, said that the prosecutor’s investigator, Don Roney, told him exactly what to write. Edythe said she got the same kind of “advice.”

“Because I couldn’t even think how to start it,” she said, “Mr. Stagenhorst stood right behind me and told me everything to say and he would confer with Mr. Moore and they would decide how to word this and how to word that, and then I would write down what he said.”

Edythe said that she didn’t recall hitting Louise at all but had put it in there because the detectives kept insisting she did. “They kept pounding questions at me and kept saying, ‘You hit her, you had to hit her,’ and they kept that up and I kept saying I didn’t and I couldn’t have. So finally, I said, ‘If I did I don’t remember.’”

“I then want to refer back to the phraseology, ‘I am writing this statement voluntarily in the presence of Detectives Moore and Stagenhorst and that it is the truth,’” Hopkins said. “I will ask you whether or not that was your own phraseology or whether or not that was suggested by the detectives?”

“Mr. Stagenhorst told me to put that in,” she said, “when I was finished.”

The police claimed that Edythe had given no thought to her right to an attorney. She testified the next morning that, to the contrary, after they fingerprinted her and said they were going to Cowan Lake, she told them that Hopkins was going to come and see her that morning. “They kind of argued around and said they couldn’t wait,” she said. “They just insisted that I go out to Lake Cowan with them.”

One of them said to her, “We’ll be back before Hopkins gets here.”

“Well, he said he’d be here first thing in the morning,” Edythe protested. “He should be here now.”

“His first thing in the morning means noon,” Stagenhorst said. “We are going out to Lake Cowan. We are going to try to find the gun. If we don’t find it, you’re sunk, because that means you didn’t shoot her. So you better pray we find the gun.”

Schoettmer handled the cross-examination of the defendant for the prosecution, and he came at Edythe hard and fast, often being mocking and condescending. In the first minutes, he attacked her morality, asking her if she “lived in a dream world” and forcing her to admit to the multitude of lies she had told since meeting Bill Bergen: lying to her neighbors, her mother, her children, her students, the realtor, the building and loan association, the police investigators, her attorney, the court and even to Bill himself, telling him that she was pregnant—although she denied that she told him she was pregnant that spring and insisted that she really was pregnant just before her arrest but had a miscarriage the day before the lie detector test.

The entire courtroom tensed up when Schoettmer gave Edythe the gun that was in evidence and told her to load it for the jury. Hopkins didn’t object but cautioned Schoettmer to make sure the safety was on, saying, “You’re telling her to do it…You’re taking all the responsibility. It went off once before accidentally.”

One of the jurors blurted out, “Don’t point that at me!” Edythe could not load the gun properly. As she tried to close the breech, the whole room heard the distinctive click. Edythe was unaware that she had pulled the trigger.

The cross-examination was as thorough as it was contentious. The defense didn’t finish by the end of the week as planned. On Monday, June 29, Edythe was back on the stand and would testify for most of the day. Because of the summer heat, Judge Gusweiler moved the proceedings to his regular courtroom on the fifth floor. It was air conditioned and didn’t hold as many people, and the jury struggled to hear Edythe’s testimony over the roar of the ventilation. Hopkins repeatedly admonished his client to speak up. “This is your trial,” he said. He knew it was all in vain, however. When Schoettmer and Edythe faced each other, “it was an unequal duel,” he wrote.

Edythe and Hopkins examine the alleged weapon in court. Cincinnati Enquirer file.

Not everyone saw it that way. The Enquirer’s Tom Mercer called her “a fiery witness for herself,” and his colleague Margaret Josten reported that although “thin, tired-looking,” Edythe “appears to thrive on harsh words and reminders of a lurid past…Mrs. Klumpp emerged before the jury as a strong and determined woman to whom tears and whimpering are foreign in the face of trouble. She talked back to Mr. Schoettmer as if she were arguing politics. She shouted ‘That’s a lie!’ almost constantly during his questioning or statement implying she had killed Louise Bergen intentionally.”

Hopkins, however, sensed the hopelessness of the situation. “She was vulnerable and lying,” he said. “He was poised and experienced. She was a sitting duck as he fired question after question with the rapidity of a machine gun scoring a bull’s-eye with every shot. It became apparent to all that the prosecutor was playing for keeps. Mrs. Klumpp looked worse and worse as Schoettmer, sensing the kill, showed no mercy. She didn’t have a chance. He crucified her. He destroyed her…And thus the trial dwindled to a conclusion.”

Hopkins wrote that Schoettmer’s two-hour summation was inspired indignation:

I look upon this woman as a home wrecker, who used physical wiles to lure this man to set himself up as her husband. Why do I say that? Well for one thing, there was the wedding ring. There was this idyllic setting in which he mentioned undoubtedly the deep pools of fire in her eyes, the heavenly loveliness she has, and slipped that wedding ring on her finger…She claims to be a truthful woman, yet admits lying to her mother, her daughter, Bergen, the community, the police. How many more? Now, as to her appearance: On Thursday, Mrs. Klumpp testified for three and a half hours under direct examination. She had a meek, reticent approach. Her counsel literally screamed at her to keep her voice up. She had the appearance of a fragile woman…But on Friday, she came out of that role. She was fighting…When she said, “The Lord has forgiven me,” she didn’t mean it at all. She was never close to tears. She wanted to be a fighting cat—and that is what she is. Yesterday, again she played the meek, fragile role. Well, was she meek and mild on October 30—or a fighting wildcat?

He ridiculed her defense as “the Hopkins treatment,” trying to get the jury to believe a proposition so ridiculous that it had to be true.

Hopkins began his closing argument by telling the jury that the following day marked his thirty-eighth anniversary in the practice of criminal law. He looked down at his hands as if seeking the truth there and then looked into the eyes of the jurors:

If the Hopkins treatment means that I do not believe in mob rule, that I do not believe in permitting the arresting officers to determine my client’s guilt or innocence, that I do not believe in permitting the prosecuting attorney—or his staff—to go unchallenged in their interpretation of a case; if the Hopkins treatment means that I believe in a fair and legal trial for all regardless of race, color or creed, if it means that I believe in trying cases on the facts without concealing testimony or without employing subterfuge, and if it means that I believe in utter frankness and do not believe in misleading juries—if the Hopkins treatment means all these things, I’m humbly proud that my efforts have not gone in vain.

Even though no evidence had been submitted in court to support his claims, Hopkins leveled an attack against Bill Bergen: “As I sat there for three weeks listening for the facts in this case to develop, I have come to the conclusion that we are trying the wrong party. The man—and I use the term loosely—who caused this tragedy has been permitted to go scot free. This target-pistol Romeo, this aviator of sorts by his deceit, subterfuge and honey-dripping promises and vows has brought about the death of his wife and the trial of Edythe Klumpp upon the charge of murder.” He was met with stony silence.

“This set-up of his beats Social Security by a mile. A wife working to support herself and a child, a second wife furnishing home, food and lodging to children—the children who, by dropping their dimes into a piggy bank, helped pay for his second honeymoon. Here was a gravy train with biscuit wheels. Bill Bergen wasn’t about to give it up. What a scene that must have been when the ‘wedding’ of Bill Bergen and Edythe Klumpp took place! Can’t you see his sadistic smile when he lied, ‘With this ring, I thee wed’?”

Juror No. 12, who had been quite facially expressive in her disdain for the defendant throughout the trial, openly scoffed at Hopkins, and he shouted, “I don’t care if you like me or not, but I am an officer of this court doing my duty. You may think I’m a fool…but I am an officer of this court and I demand that you listen to me.”

Prosecutor Hover got in the last word, telling the jury that the burning of Louise Bergen’s body could not be ignored, as the defense suggested, nor could it be separated from her murder. “Under the evidence, they are part and parcel of the same scheme,” he said. “Louise, merely killed, provides no benefit at all to Edythe and none of her personal problems. Louise, eliminated, that is, completely destroyed, solves every one of Edythe’s problems.”

He pointed at the defendant, called her a “confessed liar, adulteress, home-wrecker, burner of bodies and, the state contends, a murderer…She has proven herself inescapably a kind of social cancer which certainly cannot be either cured or endured. She must be, like that cancer, completely eliminated instead, in order to keep the healthy balance of our social order and our ideals of human decency…She is an evil woman.”

The jury got the case at 4:02 p.m. on Wednesday, July 1. About an hour later, the jury asked to be read some of Edythe’s testimony, specifically about her trips to the Sohio station. After a dinner break, at about 10:00 p.m., the jurors asked to inspect the ’56 Chevy. Judge Gusweiler explained that it would be impossible to view it that night and so sequestered them at the Netherland Hilton.

The following morning, Gusweiler sent the jury on a freight elevator to the garage. No one else was allowed on the elevator except for the jurors and the operator. Gusweiler ordered everyone out of the garage, even the garage manager, and he stood in the doorway with the sheriff so no one else could enter. Reporters peered in through the opening and watched the jurors take the skull Hopkins had introduced as evidence out of the hatbox and into the trunk of the car in various positions. They opened and closed the lid several times and examined the lock.

Edythe’s 1956 Chevrolet was used in evidence. Cincinnati Enquirer file.

“All of the jurors then gathered around the trunk of the car and one of the men lowered the lid very slowly until it was within an inch or two of being closed,” the Post reported. “All of the jurors bent down again to inspect the lid and look closely and one of the men pointed to the spare tire well. One of the women then looked carefully at the front part of the car near the steering wheel area. One of the men slammed the trunk lid down lightly but it did not latch.”

After examining the car for a half hour, the jury returned to deliberations. Foss Hopkins waited in his office. He had little enthusiasm for a celebration of his thirty-eighth year of practice in law, especially when Harvey Woods called him from the Butler County Courthouse in Hamilton at about 8:00 p.m. Woods had been trying a first-degree murder case for the Hopkins & Hopkins firm there and had just been handed a death sentence verdict for his client, Frank Poindexter. “Instead of happiness and celebration,” Hopkins said, anticipating the worst for his own client, “there was nothing but demoralization and self-condemnation.”

An hour later, the jury signaled that it had reached a verdict after deliberating a total of thirteen hours and thirteen minutes. As the members walked into the room, they did not look toward the defendant, who sat with bowed head, staring at her hands in her lap. Some thought she was mumbling a prayer. “I was praying for strength so I wouldn’t break down,” she later said. “I told myself I wasn’t going to cry. That’s what they wanted. They wanted me to make a spectacle of myself, and I didn’t.”

Although Judge Gusweiler warned spectators that there must be no demonstration, no matter what the verdict, the room gasped at the announcement: guilty of murder in the first degree, with no recommendation for mercy. It was an automatic death penalty.