A NEW SENTENCE

At 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 4, just forty-eight hours before the scheduled execution of his client, Foss Hopkins got a call from Governor DiSalle’s office requesting his immediate presence in Columbus. He tried to pump for details but could gather only that C. Watson Hover had been invited as well. “You can bet your life it’s about the Klumpp case,” he told his wife, Anne, on the phone. “If you want to go, be ready in 20 minutes.”

Hopkins and his wife were there by 7:00 p.m. The governor’s outer office was “a madhouse” of reporters, television cameras and radio microphones, Hopkins said. But they all had to wait an hour for the governor to arrive. He walked into the room with an entourage that Hopkins didn’t recognize. The lawyers followed him into the inner office and to the governor’s desk. Without any cordialities, he went straight to business, telling them where he had been and noting that he wanted both counsel to hear it.

When he flicked the switch, the room fell silent, with more dramatic tension than Hopkins could describe, “a drama no playwright could have manufactured.” He added, “For most of us it was a weird, spine-tingling experience. But not for Hover. He sat chain-smoking in a chair much too large for him. His face was white and frozen. He eyes stared intently at the tape recorder as it spun out Mrs. Klumpp’s account of Mrs. Bergen’s death. The tape played for 90 minutes, punctuated only by Hover’s periodic snorts of disgust and outraged belief.” Hover and Schoettmer interrupted the tape several times and said that they did not believe what Edythe was saying.

When the tape finished, “Governor DiSalle said he thought Mrs. Klumpp was innocent,” Hopkins said. “Dr. Parker said he thought so, too. The governor said he would commute the sentence. I was hearing what I had prayed for. I was at the end of the road.”

But Hover jumped to his feet, staring at the governor in disbelief. He moved his mouth, but no words came out for a tense moment before the room erupted in shouts and accusations. “The prosecutors tried to cross examine the governor,” Hopkins told the press. “They also tried to cross examine Dr. Parker. The governor and Dr. Parker became incensed. The fur flew. I have never heard anything like it. Everyone was shouting at everyone else, everyone, that is, but the governor. Dr. Parker and Hover argued with vehemence the merits and lack of merits of truth serum.”

“If you really believe the killing was accidental,” Hover said, “why don’t you just give her a full pardon?”

“Well, don’t push me,” DiSalle said.

When the governor said that the prosecution needed to reinvestigate Bill Bergen, Hover said, “Give me one shred of evidence that he did it.”

“Well, she says he did,” the governor replied.

“Then you believe her, a convicted murderer, when Bergen had six lie detector tests and came out clean, and the police gave her seven tests, all showing that she was lying?” DiSalle said that if Bergen was involved, he should be prosecuted. “Let your attorney general do it!” Hover snapped sarcastically.

At one point, after earlier heaping praise on Schoettmer for being “a terrific trial lawyer,” the governor accused him of using his wife and mother to help get the conviction against Mrs. Klumpp. The governor produced a Cincinnati Enquirer story on the trial sideshow that told how Schoettmer’s mother would pass notes to him suggesting questions. Schoettmer sprang to his feet and, according to Hopkins, had to be restrained by one of the entourage when “he approached the governor in a manner that can only be described as threatening.” Schoettmer got in the governor’s face, saying that his wife was never in the courtroom while the trial was going on, that his mother had been helping him since he was born and that he appreciated it.

“That’s a fine sentiment,” the governor said, but he noted that Schoettmer should care more about justice than about winning cases. Another shouting match ensued.

“All the while,” Hopkins noted, “spinning rapidly, the tape spun on the tape recorder, and having run its length, twirled uselessly with a flap-flap-flapping noise.” When a sudden silence fell on the room, the noise became apparent, and DiSalle flicked the switch to turn the machine off.

Then, Hopkins said, “never once raising his voice above a conversational level…[DiSalle] explained with patience as one might explain to an unruly kindergarten class the wonder of the stars that Colonel Vance of the parole board also recommended the use of truth serum” or any other means available to “learn the true facts.”

While the prosecutor and his team seethed in angry silence, DiSalle called Washington, D.C., and told Bill Bergen about the truth serum interview. DiSalle said that he believed Bergen was guilty of the slaying, though not that the killing was premeditated. DiSalle urged him to come back to Cincinnati and “clear the slate” and noted that he would help him in any way possible. But Bergen, now remarried “to a teenage girl,” Hopkins said, “wanted no part of the fun and games.”

DiSalle then called together a hasty late-night press conference to discuss his findings and his commutation of Edythe’s sentence. Hover stormed out “white-lipped with anger,” flanked by Melvin Rueger and Harry Schoettmer, without comment.

Along with the commutation of the sentence from death to life, DiSalle said that he might ask the Ohio Highway Patrol to reopen the investigation. “There is the possibility of her being pardoned within a few months,” he said, “but the first degree murder sentence could also be reduced to a lesser crime. However, any consideration of a pardon would have to be resolved after reinvestigation of the case, either by the Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office or the state patrol.” He noted, however, that Hover said that as far as his office was concerned, the case was closed.

Hopkins said that he and his wife, Anne, lingered in the governor’s office until they were alone with him. “Long day,” Hopkins said. The governor nodded. “Governor?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve been a Republican and a Protestant all my life—up to now,” Hopkins said. “But after watching you work and the way you conducted yourself tonight, I am going to become a Democrat and I am going to join the Catholic Church.”

“Welcome to the Democratic Party,” he said seriously, but Hopkins saw the twinkle in his eye. “But for God’s sake, don’t ruin our church.”

Hopkins, reflecting on his feelings as he drove back to Cincinnati after 1:00 a.m., said, “I had no feeling of elation or the warmth of victory. It was rather that a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders and that I had been released from a responsibility which was almost too much for anyone to bear. I had walked hand in hand with this death verdict for the past 18 months. For the first time in my life I was near the breaking point. A feeling of peace and thankfulness descended upon me.”

The next morning, Hover told reporters that he had lost his sense of humor that evening, saying that the meeting “was no ‘waltz me around again, Willie’ session.” The whole farce was not about guilt or innocence, he said, but about the governor’s feelings against capital punishment and his reluctance to see a mother executed. “Everything he did was an effort to rationalize his decision,” Hover said. “During the whole proceeding, it was obvious the governor had made up his mind before he even got the truth serum test, and that was a joke. It looked like the governor was looking for some sort of agreement with the prosecution, and he got none.”

He scoffed at the idea of going after Bill Bergen or asking him to take a test. “We knew all about Bergen a year and a half ago,” he said. “The governor says it was accidental homicide and accidental homicide is no crime. That’s why I said he ought to pardon Mrs. Klumpp if he thinks it was accidental.” Bergen told the Cincinnati Post that he’d be willing to take the test but reiterated that he was not present when his wife was killed or when her body was set on fire at Cowan Lake.

Edythe was, of course, jubilant. To her, the entire interview with the governor and the doctor seemed like a dream. She stayed groggy the rest of the day and slept through the night, so she didn’t hear about the commutation of her sentence until Thursday morning. Her first reaction was to fix her hair. There would be company.

“The threat of death was gone and woman’s vanity asserted itself immediately,” Jack McDonald wrote in the Enquirer. “She made her jailers promise not to let anyone in to see her until she looked nice.” Her cell had a “gay, almost festive atmosphere,” he wrote. “Her grey eyes were merry. She wore a smile that seemed to recharge itself.”

“Now, no one can say to my kids, ‘Your mother was a murderess,’” she said. “It would have been terrible for them. And it would have been hard to say goodbye to them.” She seemed to have kind words for everyone—her lawyer, the governor and even Bill Bergen. “Poor Bill,” she said. “He’s so confused. I feel sorry for him.”

Martha Wheeler, Marysville superintendent, said that she’d leave the security cell door open to accommodate the flow of traffic. Edythe seemed to shrink back a little, surprised. “Oh, can you?” she said. “Thank you very much. But of course, I won’t go outside.”

Wheeler said that Edythe would stay in the security cell for a few days to “unwind” and then would be assigned to live in one of the regular buildings and be given a job. “Please, no more sewing!” Edythe said. “There are so many things I’d like to do and learn now. I want to take typing and art and of course I’d like to attend Rev. Decker’s Bible class.” She was also glad that she would now be able to go to chapel on Sundays. “It’s kind of important to me,” she said.

Edythe looks out the window at the reformatory. Cincinnati Enquirer file.