6

Up to this time the cases that had been submitted to us for investigation involved facts which could hardly be expected to occur in the life of an average citizen. However, let us consider the case of a man whom I will refer to as Richard Roe.

I don’t think this man would object to having his true name appear in this account, but he has a young daughter, and for her sake we shall describe this man as Richard Roe.

Richard Roe was a typical average citizen. A highly skilled mechanic with a good job, a man who was popular, who had scores of friends. He loved to hunt and fish, and was a strong, red-blooded outdoor type.

He was married to a fine substantial wife, had a home, a child, and an established position.

He had been married long enough for the relationship to settle down to a take-it-for-granted basis on the part of his wife, who had perhaps become a little more absorbed in her duties as housekeeper and mother than as companion to her husband.

Richard Roe happened to meet an attractive, twenty-seven-year-old divorcee. She was a young woman who laughed easily and who was physically attractive to men.

It wasn’t long before Richard Roe’s acquaintance with this woman ripened into an intimacy which furnished him that degree of extramarital satisfaction for which he had been unconsciously searching.

Once the relationship had ripened into terms of physical intimacy, he found that his home, his wife, whom he really loved, his hunting, his fishing, his circle of masculine friends, and his surreptitious but more or less regular visits to the young woman in the case, rounded out a happy life.

One Thursday night in midwinter he started out for a weekend hunting trip with friends. They went to a hunting club some two hundred miles from home, where Richard Roe had a most enjoyable week end. There was the masculine companionship which he so loved. There was the thrill of hunting in the crisp air. There was food, fellowship, sleep, and lots of outdoor exercise.

Returning to his home town at a late hour on Sunday night, he decided that before going home he would slip in to see his girl friend.

He parked his car, locked it, slipped quietly into her apartment as he had been doing on so many occasions during the past eighteen months—and found her lying nude on the bed, quite dead, a scarf wrapped around her neck.

The woman had evidently been dead for some time.

In stunned silence he stood over the bed. He had been very much attached to this girl, although both were simply “playing around.” They liked each other, and understood their relationship.

Richard Roe had entered the apartment in happy anticipation. Now, having switched on the light, he found himself looking down at a dead body.

In the midst of staggering shock, his own predicament loomed menacingly.

He dared not announce his discovery because he couldn’t account for his presence in that room at that time of night by any possible excuse which would not have cheapened his position in the community, exposed him to public ridicule, and in many instances, contempt. Moreover, it would have had a disastrous effect upon his wife and daughter.

Richard Roe switched out the light. There was only one thing to be done. He must get away from there, and get away fast, and under such circumstances that no one could ever prove he had been in that apartment.

Richard Roe tiptoed out of the place, looking furtively over his shoulder. He unlocked his car, jumped in, and drove away.

At two o’clock Monday afternoon the woman’s body was discovered.

Police had very few clues to work on, but they started trying to reconstruct something of the woman’s life.

A young, attractive woman cannot entertain a man in her apartment over a period of a year and a half without people noticing and commenting. The talk will be in whispers, but it will exist.

Now that the woman was dead, witnesses began to come forward with bits of gossip. Little clues began to build up. One witness contributed this, another witness contributed that. The police began to get a description of the “man in the case.”

Finally they were able to get the key clue which resulted in a positive identification.

The police picked up Richard Roe for questioning.

At first he denied everything. Then, seeing that he was trapped, he admitted the affair, and then admitted his presence at the apartment at approximately eleven P.M. Sunday night. He told a straightforward, convincing story and the police released him.

But there were no other clues forthcoming. The police began to think things over, and finally Richard Roe was arrested for the crime.

The resulting trial was, of course, a tragedy so far as Richard Roe’s family was concerned, and a tragedy for him.

A jury convicted him.

There was strong evidence of his innocence. He could give an iron-clad alibi from Thursday until around nine or ten o’clock on Sunday evening.

There was a great deal of circumstantial evidence to indicate that the woman in the case had been killed on Friday night.

She had a job, seemed to like it, and was a regular, steady worker. Whenever she hadn’t been able to go to work she had notified her employers by telephone.

She had quit work on Friday evening and had been escorted to her apartment by two women who worked with her at the same factory. Except for the person who murdered her, she was never seen alive by anyone after that time. She did not report for work on Saturday morning, nor did she call in to say she would be absent. The clothing that she had worn to work on Friday was neatly folded on a chair by the bed.

Saturday afternoons she habitually went to visit her mother in a nearby city. It had been her plan to do so on this Saturday afternoon. She did not go, nor did she telephone her mother. The mother said this was the first time that her daughter had ever failed to visit her without telephoning to let her know that plans for the regular week-end visit had been changed.

In this case, of course, the medical evidence became a matter of prime importance.

Unfortunately the doctor who first examined the body had made a cursory examination. He had had limited experience examining the corpses of murdered persons to determine how long they had been dead, and while he gave it as his opinion that the woman had been dead only a few hours when he saw her, his testimony was such that it appeared he had done little to give his opinion any real evidentiary value. The jury, however, accepted this opinion.

The coroner’s physician had viewed the body on Monday evening at about seven P.M. He guessed that death had occurred some twelve to twenty-four hours earlier, but admitted under cross-examination that the woman could have been dead for perhaps seventy-two hours.

It was the mortician who gave the best evidence in the case. The mortician testified that he had cared for several thousand bodies, but he had never seen a body as decomposed as was the case here, unless the person had been dead for at least eighty hours.

Richard Roe was convicted. The case was appealed to the State Supreme Court, and the State Supreme Court divided four to three on whether he was guilty. The majority of the court held that he was. The minority opinion was written by the chief justice of the court who set forth reasoning which, in the light of later developments, proves to have been remarkably logical.

This chief justice, in his dissenting opinion, said that Richard Roe had “found himself enmeshed in a set of circumstances which raised a suspicion of his guilt, but each of these circumstances is consistent with his innocence. There is no rule at law or at logic that several suspicious circumstances, each one of which is consistent with the innocence of an accused, becomes proof of guilt when they are considered together. Four or five times nothing is still nothing. In this case it is impossible to find a single fact cited against the accused which is not consistent with his innocence.”

It is indeed unfortunate that there was no expert medicolegal examination of the physical evidence while it was still intact. There was, however, a sufficient compilation of medical facts to enable us to submit the problem to Dr. LeMoyne Snyder, who, after a careful examination, issued a statement in which he advanced a very positive and definite opinion that the victim had died on Friday night.

Similar facts were submitted to Dr. Richard Ford, acting head of the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard University, and while Dr. Ford’s opinion was not couched in the forceful language of that given by Dr. Snyder, it indicated that he had reached substantially the same conclusions. Both men deplored the fact that there had been no adequate examination of the physical facts.

However, tragedy had struck into the life of Richard Roe. His affair with the woman in the case developed, of course, into sensational news which was known to everyone. He had now become a convicted killer. His conviction had been sustained, even if by a divided court, and there was nothing for him to do but to go to prison. And so he became a felon, donning a prison uniform, and being assigned a prison number. He moved into a cell to await the long, weary passing of the years before he could once again be permitted to emerge as an individual, tainted with a felon’s record, his life, his home, his career, completely destroyed.

However, Richard Roe had a vigorous, aggressive lawyer. Ordinarily our so-called Court of Last Resort does not concern itself with cases where the prisoner is represented by counsel, but we made an exception in this case because we definitely felt that no procedural rules should prevent us from doing everything we could for Richard Roe.

We co-operated with his attorney, and he co-operated with us. We made an exhaustive investigation of the facts in the case, and came up fighting mad. We went to the Board of Pardons and we went to the Governor.

In view of the dissenting opinion of three members of the Supreme Court, in view of the additional facts which had been uncovered, it should have been a simple matter to get a pardon for Richard Roe, but it turned out that it wasn’t so simple.

In many instances when a prosecutor has presented a case to a jury and secured a favorable verdict, he is reluctant to consider the possibility that such a verdict could have been erroneous, or that an innocent man was prosecuted. In many instances there are other behind-the-scenes activities, political pressures brought to bear, and there is, of course, the worst handicap of all—official indifference.

It is necessary for pardoning officials to take positive action in order to have a prisoner released. Officials are always busy. Every day brings its emergencies. So long as no positive action is taken in relation to a pardon, things run along in the even tenor of their ways and the “law takes its course.” There is, therefore, every incentive to political inertia, and, unfortunately, all too little incentive for definite, positive and immediate action.

And so in the case of Richard Roe, the weeks lengthened into months and dragged along in endless monotony.

However, the forces of publicity were at work, his lawyer was a fighter, and a very strong public opinion began to crystallize into demand for action.

At length, after Richard Roe had been in prison for four years, the Governor issued not a pardon but a commutation of sentence to time served. This was in the nature of a compromise, something of a sop to all parties concerned, but it resulted in the release of Richard Roe, and it automatically prevented him from claiming damages from the State for false imprisonment.

A few weeks later, Richard Roe, his wife and child, drove three thousand miles to my ranch in California to stop in for a couple of hours’ visit to tell me how much they appreciated the work that had been done in the case, and then to drive all the way back, where he resumed his life in the community in which he had lived prior to his conviction.

That is one of the interesting things about Richard Roe. His steady, dogged determination to fight things out and not to hide from facts.

A man of lesser caliber would have sought to fade into oblivion. He would have tried to take an assumed name and a new life in a new community. A woman who had less sterling common sense than Richard Roe’s wife would have left him.

He went right back into the life of the community. He went right back to the same highly skilled work on the same job he had held down prior to his conviction. He had made a mistake in his companionship with the murdered woman. He admitted that mistake, but he was looking the world straight in the eyes and carrying on.

That attitude is entirely in keeping with his character.

I well remember some of the things he told me during his brief visit at my ranch; things which had to do with the reaction of the public in his case, and things which show what public opinion can do when it is properly aroused.

The day Richard Roe was released from prison he went back home where his wife and child were waiting for him. The phone started to ring, people whom he had never heard of before began to call up to congratulate him and express their gratification that justice had been done. People dropped in to pay their respects. A man came to the door carrying a tape measure. He explained that he was a tailor, that he was unable to make any cash donation to help Richard Roe reestablish himself in society, but he was going to take measurements and donate a suit so that Richard Roe wouldn’t have to start his new life wearing prison clothes.

Later on in the evening the phone rang incessantly. Finally Richard Roe had to sit right by the phone because the minute he’d hang up there would be another party who had been waiting for the line. It was, he said, after two o’clock in the morning before the phone finally ceased ringing so he could go to bed.

There had, of course, been quite a bit of publicity. His picture had been published and there were not only people who knew him but people who knew what he looked like. He told me that for days afterward when he would go out people would look at him, turn around, do a “double-take,” come up and ask him if he wasn’t Richard Roe, then shake hands with him and wish him all the luck in the world.

That was an inspiring example of how people can and will pull together, and of the underlying charity and good will which characterizes the average citizen.

And there was something about Richard Roe that inspires confidence. He had taken a long drive to come to my ranch to thank me. He stayed for an hour and a half or two hours. My ranch is rather isolated and people who come to see me often stay overnight. Nearly always they stay for meals. It’s a long way down there and a long way back. Therefore, we think nothing of having a guest at meals—sometimes one—sometimes eight or ten.

Around dinnertime I told Richard Roe that we were expecting him and his family to stay over for dinner.

He smiled and shook his head. He wouldn’t think of imposing on me. He had driven three thousand miles primarily to thank me, and he was going to drive three thousand miles back. He was ready to start. He just wanted me to know how grateful he was and he wanted to give me personal assurances of his gratitude.

People like that somehow do a lot to restore a person’s faith in human nature.