THE CHAPLAIN CALLS

Edythe Klumpp’s days as a seamstress were over the moment the jury found her guilty of first-degree murder. Her jailers had previously given her permission to use a dilapidated old sewing machine at the jail to make some of the dresses that she wore to trial and a decorative spread for her jailhouse bed. Upon her conviction, that privilege was revoked.

All prisoners at the Hamilton County Jail, according to Warden Charles Junker, were deprived of forks, knives and other sharp objects. They had to be content to handle jail food with spoons. But you can’t sew with a spoon. Upon hearing this, the Cincinnati Enquirer made a rather ghoulish call to the state prison keepers to find out if this meant that Edythe would not be able to make her own death dress. “Prisoners headed for the chair are allowed to choose the menu for their last meal,” the reporter asked. “Are they also allowed to choose their death costume?” A spokesman for the prison said that such a request would probably be granted.

In the meantime, Edythe was stuck at the Hamilton County Jail at least until after August 10, while Judge Frank M. Gusweiler took a Canadian vacation shortly after the trial ended. He would rule on a motion for a new trial when he returned, and Edythe would then be transferred to the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville. Her hearing wouldn’t be until August 20. Sometime during that seemingly interminable wait, Foss Hopkins received a surprise visitor to his office: Reverend Oscar Minyard, chaplain of the county jail.

“I’ve talked quite a bit with Mrs. Klumpp before and during the trial,” he told Hopkins. “Frankly, I’ve been convinced for a long time that she was lying.”

“Welcome to the club,” Hopkins said.

“When I talked to her after the verdict, she was scared,” the minister said. “She’s scared to death, Mr. Hopkins.”

“She has every right to be.”

“I’ve been urging her to tell the truth,” Minyard said.

“She’ll never do it,” Hopkins said.

“No,” the chaplain said, “after I urged her, she was silent for a moment, then it was as if a dam had broken, Mr. Hopkins. All the emotion and frustration she had been holding in during the trial…Now she admits she lied to the police, to you and to the jury.”

“Oh, God,” Hopkins whispered. The minister nodded. As Hopkins and his secretary, Ginny Heuser, listened to his story, Hopkins said that he couldn’t help but grin with joy. The chaplain said that Edythe told him that Bill Bergen threatened the lives of her children if she didn’t go along and that he fabricated the fairy tale that Edythe Klumpp palmed off on everyone else.

“This way, nobody gets hurt,” Bill Bergen had told her, according to the minister. “Your children stay alive and the jury won’t do anything to a woman.” Hopkins, Heuser and Harvey Woods jumped into a taxi and within minutes were back in the little conference room at the county jail with Edythe Klumpp. Hopkins later wrote that he had to control himself “after the misdirected effort I had put forth on her behalf,” but instead of heaping a diatribe on his client, he treated it like the first meeting: let Edythe talk.

This time, the story had some key differences. She said that Louise Bergen’s death was not at Caldwell Circle but on Stratton Drive, a dead-end street where a subdivision was under construction in Mount Washington. More importantly, Bill Bergen was there and was a witness—perhaps even a participant—in the accident that took her life. The story got out, or at least the story that there was a story. Even before Judge Gusweiler returned from vacation, the papers started speculating that Edythe had a new story to tell, based on a rumor that she had confided to some relative. Edythe and her lawyer, however, both declined to comment and kept the secret.

Her hearing for a retrial took place on August 20. Edythe wore the black dress with a white collar and said that she had dropped twenty-five pounds since the beginning of her trial. She looked refreshed, the papers said, and followed Hopkins’s arguments closely.

Hopkins asked for a new trial on four main grounds: lack of proof of venue, misconduct by Juror No. 12, an error in admitting Edythe’s confession and prosecutorial misconduct for calling Hopkins’s defense in his final arguments “the Hopkins treatment.” “I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life when I left no. 12 on the jury,” Hopkins said. “When a juror can enter a courtroom in a death case with a smile on her face, there is something wrong.”

“As early as the third or fourth day of the trial,” Hopkins went on, “during Mr. [sic] Cleveland’s testimony, it became evident to every fair-minded person in the courtroom that here was a prejudiced and unfair juror who should not sit on any jury and in particular where someone’s life was involved.” He noted, “Audible remarks were made by Juror No. 12 and could be heard at counsel table and the kindly looks and smiles she bestowed upon the prosecuting attorney’s staff, coupled with the frowns and expressions of disapproval cast toward the defendant and defense counsel, left no other interpretation that Juror No. 12 had her mind made up.”

He said charges should be brought against Eugene Moore and Wilbert Stagenhorst for preventing Edythe from seeing a lawyer. He also criticized “the red carpet treatment” given to Bill Bergen, citing the “two or three highballs” he had with the prosecutor’s staff the night before his testimony. His arguments took Schoettmer to task for saying that his client was getting “the Hopkins treatment” and commenting on Edythe’s reputation. Hopkins did not bring up the amended confession at the hearing but instead waited until the judge rendered his decision on August 28.

Edythe sobbed silently at the defense table as she awaited the arrival of Judge Gusweiler, who said that the only motion that even deserved his comment was the charge against the jury, and even then, he decided, “there was no misconduct.” “The jury in this case individually and collectively did a magnificent job under extreme pressure,” he added. “They discharged their duty in the most commendable and conscientious manner…We need more people like them.”

Hopkins said that Edythe trembled at his side while the judge spoke, her eyes brimming with tears. When he asked Edythe if she had anything to say before he passed sentence, she shook her head and looked at Hopkins. Hopkins explained to the court that when he took the case, he did not believe Edythe’s story either, but she stuck to it and he felt it his duty to go to trial with it. He said that it was not until after her conviction and the visit from Reverend Minyard that he learned the new story; he had it read into the court record. He said that he had hired private detectives to corroborate her new story but that they had not been able to do so at the time.

Hover moved that the new confession and the alleged certificate be stricken from the record. “During the trial, the prosecution observed that the defense was improvised day-by-day and point-by-point,” he said. “At the moment, I see no reason to change that observation.”

Gusweiler overruled the motion, saying the defendant could introduce whatever she liked in a proceeding like this. Then he turned to Edythe: “I see nothing to alter the verdict which was based on the evidence and the law and was a clear and just one.” Edythe’s first date with Old Sparky was set: December 15, 1959.

After the session, Hopkins told reporters that he forgot to mention to the court that Edythe was not only willing to take a test with “truth serum” (sodium amytal, now known as amobarbital) but also would insist on one and would let the state name the doctor. When they asked Hover for comment, he simply said that she would soon be in the custody of the state, quietly washing his hands of the notion.

Bill Bergen, reached at his home in Washington, D.C., where he now had a government computer programming job for the Department of the Navy, said that he was surprised by this new version of the story. “I have nothing to worry about,” he said. “I didn’t do it. She is grasping at straws. I guess people do that in this sort of situation.”

Hover reminded the press that Bergen was carefully checked out during the investigation and passed polygraph tests, although he did not mention that it took him two tries. “Bergen had no part whatsoever in this killing other than he happened to be the man Edythe wanted to keep,” he told the press, ridiculing the new story as “part of the Hopkins treatment.”