Slaughter at the Governor’s Lodge
SLAUGHTER AT THE GOVERNOR’S LODGE
Chroniclers of crime (who, if they are at all good at the job, are basically novelists telling a truth) are vastly underprivileged compared with fictionists of crime. They cannot skirt a writer’s block by, for instance, changing a method of murder in midscream, replacing a dull character with a quaint one, removing the scene of a crime from a semi-detached in suburban Tooting to a five-star hotel in the West End, ironing out nonsenses in a plot, altering a murderer’s licit occupation from that of butler to that of butcher for the simple reason that, as everyone knows by now, it is never the butler whodunnit. And they cannot—or rather, should not—have characters talking Capotely-precise prose or thinking at all. (The latter constraint means that the chronicler worth his salt is adrift from the cosy mooring that Ogden Nash termed HIBK, standing for Had I But Known—which, as Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor explain in their wonderful A Catalogue of Crime (New York, 1971; revised and enlarged edition, 1989), “sums up the heroine’s mind as she repeatedly ponders her failure to see the obvious traps laid for her by the villains, or as she recurrently regrets not having acted with ordinary judgment and spoken out in time, for reasons never stated to herself or the reader”; and it bars the chronicler from membership of what the book-dealing Jack Hammond of Ely called the He-Must-Have School—e.g., “As Tom Brown set about the grisly task of dismembering the late Mrs. Brown, his thoughts must have turned to their wedding night.”)
And writers about English crimes suffer from the ordinariness of what most of the people concerned are called: the fictionist can tell his characters apart just by his christening of them (there is no chance of a novel-reader confusing the apparently blameless Marigold Sunbeam with the plainly deceitful Hortense Garrotte, or the privately investigating Nick Sharp with the constabularian Aloysius Plodd)—but, nine times out of ten, the chronicler is stuck with Janes and Johns, such names preceding indiscriminately distributed ones such as Brown, Jones, Patel, and Smith.
Writers about American crimes are better off—chiefly because natives of and settlers in that land tend to be ornately designated, but also because some American parents and priests and registrars of births go by drawled or mumbled sounds when spelling, and so add oddity to perfectly ordinary names (thus, an intended Barbara goes through life as Barbra, a Candice as Candace, a Deborah as Debra, a Justin as Dustin, an Elizabeth as Lizabeth—whose father, one guesses, was a lectrician); and even forename/surname combinations that are drab by American standards—Oscar Hammerstein, for instance—are, if passed down, given uniqueness by the tagging on of sequential numbers, II, III, IV, and so on, until the latest in the line of parents, not knowing the Roman numeral that comes next, break the baptismal monotony.
An instance of the truth of the saying that, in the United States, clarity of characterisation begins at home is provided by what became known, maybe unfairly to a woman called Candace, as the Candy Murder Case.
Candace’s husband, who played the nonspeaking role of victim in the affair, had originally been called Jakella Moscovitz, but long before becoming a dead millionaire, had made his name as Jacques Mossler. Among others in the large cast were John V. Handwerker, who was the first of several doctors who looked at the corpse (he was not the pernickety one who counted thirty-nine stab wounds in the torso and upper limbs and half a dozen blows to the head from a blunt instrument, and who made the neat observation that Mossler “could have died from the stabbing, even if there had been no blows, and could have died from the blows if there had been no stabbing”); Melvin Lane Powers, the widow’s favourite nephew; Earl C. Martin and Freddie Duhart, each of whom swore that Powers had offered him a fee to commit murder, the former saying that the offer was made—and turned down—a year or so prior to 30 June 1964, the date of Mossler’s demise, and the latter saying that he had received—and rejected—the offer only a month before that date; Billy Frank Mulvey, who stated that Candace Mossler had given him the first installment of a payment for killing her husband but that he had welched on the deal, and Virgil Nelson Halford, who sought to cast doubt on Billy Frank’s statement; Clyde Woody, senior spokesman for Candace when she and her nephew stood trial for her husband’s murder; and Nathan Greenbaum, Leroy P. Grigley, and Clarence McQueen, members of an all-male and quarter-black jury that, because of peremptory challenges and challenges for cause by the aforementioned Mr. Woody and Melvin’s leading counsel, the renowned though unimpressively named Percy Foreman, took nine and a half working days to amalgamate. The fact that three of the other nine jurors had surnames starting with Z—Zeller, Zellner and Zoller (making them sound to a reporter of the trial “like Siamese Triplets”)—indicates either that the queue of prospective jurors was in alphabetical order, and was just about exhausted by the time the jury was complete, or that Dade County, Florida, which was where both the murder and the trial took place, had more, far more, than its fair share of Z-initialled residents.
Candace’s maiden name was Weatherby. She was the sixth of a dozen children born to a small-time farmer and his wife, residing and toiling near the small town of Buchanan in the state of Georgia, just north of Florida. A record of her birth puts it in February 1920; but she, when grown up, insisted that she was not delivered until seven years later. If her insistence was justified, then she was a tender twelve when, in 1939, having been urged to marry a civil engineer named Johnson by one of her grandfathers, a bishop of the Mormon Church who had looked after her following the death of her mother and the decampment of her father, she did so. Whatever her age when she became Mrs. Johnson, her golden hair had grown long, her features were pretty in a pert sort of way, and her build, though small (perhaps because she had been stricken with polio; for five years she exercised her body to complete recovery), was pleasingly proportioned.
She gave birth to a son, called Norman, after his father, in 1943; to a daughter, called Rita, probably because Rita Hayworth was all the rage, a year later. Before Rita had mastered toddling, her father became ill; and her mother, forced to be the breadwinner, did a crash course in dressmaking then departed the family home for New York City, where she set up—and, it seems, prospered—as a fashion designer. After but a year or so of designing, she turned to the task of being photographed for advertisements and was soon specially in demand on behalf of dental products, for her front teeth, all her own, were immaculate. Her husband, well enough by now to have gone engineering in Canada, suggested a “friendly divorce”; she having agreed, the formalities were completed; like it or not, she had custody of the children.
In 1949, when she was at least twenty-two, she moved to New Orleans, there to set up, all in one go, the Candace Finishing School, the Candace Modeling School, and the Candace Modelling Agency. In the first-named establishment, she tutored pupils toward becoming Southern (but not too Southern) belles; in the second, graduates of the first were taught tricks of the modelling trade; the third hired out well-endowed alumni of the second for dressing and undressing assignments. Years later, reminiscing about her days down upon the Mississippi, she said:
“I was doing so well, I had time for art and culture. I volunteered to help raise money for the New Orleans Grand Opera Company. They gave me a list of businessmen to call on. Jacques Mossler, who had an office in New Orleans that year, was on my list.”
“That year.” Just one? Well, yes.
Indeed, only a few months of it. As an indirect result of the contribution-requesting call on Mr. Mossler, she became Mrs. Mossler before May was out. Having given some of his riches to her predecessor, he was “down to four little finance companies.” He was fifty-four—and so thirty-two or twenty-five years older than Candace.
If what, when widowed, she said of the marriage night was true, Jacques had a faulty sense of time and place for revelations about himself that were liable to startle those in whom he confided. “He told me … that women had made trouble for him—tried to blackmail him. To protect himself, he had undergone a sterilisation operation. He could never be victimised by a paternity suit.”
According to her recollections of postnuptial discoveries concerning her husband’s sexual inclinations, sterilisation had not impeded, may even have increased, his versatility. So far as I can tell, there was no corroboration of her allegations; but neither that nor the trial judge stopped Percy Foreman, the loudest of the defenders she bought for her nephew, from declaring that, “except for the shoe fetish, Mossler had ’em all—transvestite, homosexuality, voyeurism, masochism, sadism, all the perversions mentioned in Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing’s great masterpiece.”
I may be showing my unsophistication by saying that the picture of Mossler as a Jacques of all errant traits is hard to reconcile with the seemingly firm fact that he was, nicely, a lover of children. When he divorced his first wife, the four daughters she had borne him were, at his legal pleading, allowed to stay with him; and one of his stipulations before marrying Candace was that his daughters and her Norman and Rita were to be treated as their children, equal recipients of their love and largesse. Wanting more children, but incapable of seeding any, he told Candace that they would adopt some—and amply fulfilled that intention in 1957, when a six-year-old girl and her three younger brothers were made waifs by the action of their father in shooting dead his wife and a still younger child, having mistaken them (so said psychiatrists who subsequently spoke up for him) for Japanese soldiers who had somehow missed the news that World War II was over. The four children were added to the Mosslers’ six, and Jacques straightway amended his will so as to ensure that each of the resultant ten would, when he died, receive no more, no less, than the others. As the diversification of his business interests—to include, as well as credit-finance houses, insurance companies, and banks—was making him pots of money, the children had the prospect of becoming fatherless or step-fatherless millionaires.
In case I have misled you into thinking that the children’s ten-way split would account for Mossler’s entire estate, I must explain that the arrangement applied only to part of what he would leave. His widow would be well provided for.
During the fifteen years before he was taken from her, he gave her, sexual requirements apart, everything she desired: jewels, flashy automobiles, bespoke clothes, an Egyptian maid who spoke three languages other than Egyptian—one, just as well, being English. There were other servants at her beck and call, some stationed in or around a twenty-eight-room house in the least undesirable part of Houston, Texas, that he bought for her, or on his present to her of a ranch southeast of Houston, just inland from the Gulf of Mexico, and some portable between the house and the ranch.
But for voluntary work in aid of a cause she considered worthy, she and Jacques would not have come together, and so it may be that he, not congenitally benevolent, was spurred by sentiment to put a little exertion and a lot of money behind her campaigns in support of cultural and social organisations (for instance, respectively, the Houston Grand Opera Association and a boys’ club in the city) and of individuals who had fallen foul of the law.
It is hard to make out what attracted her to the cause of one person of the latter category, a disagreeable young man named Howard Stickney who had, perfectly properly, been sentenced to death for a specially barbaric double murder. Not only were her efforts in vain (after thirteen stays of execution, all wholly or partly financed by Mossler, Stickney went to the electric chair), but as a result of them she met a man named Billy Frank Mulvey, a prison-mate of Stickney’s, who, a few years later, when she herself stood in peril of legal extinguishment, did his best to point her toward that end.
More understandable than her espousal of Stickney’s cause, when Johnny Will Ford, a black worker on her ranch, was sentenced to three years in prison for having habitually carried a concealed weapon, she took up the cudgels on his behalf, first of all arranging for his release on bond, and then talking the governor of Texas into ordering his parole. Governor Daniel (his first name was Price—apt to the generality of politicians) was running for reelection. Those local newspapers that favoured one or other of his opponents were so vociferous in their condemnation of the clemency that he felt obliged to revoke the parole. While the police scoured Mossler property for the now-fugitive Ford (one officer, bespectacled, so irritated Candace by his insistence on peering in every nook and cranny that she gave him an uppercut to the chin, sending his spectacles flying he knew not where, and so causing him to grope his way home, there to search for his contact lenses), Governor Daniel issued press statements that he, his advisers, and theirs had been taken in by lies told by the parole-seeking Mosslers and their lawyers. Already upset by Daniel’s reneging on a deal, Candace and Jacques were made revengeful by his besmirching of their reputations. They set about besmirching his, at the same time extolling virtues they perceived in one of his foes—contributing to his defeat by John Connally (who thereby acquired a mite of immortality, for it was he, proud governor of the Lone Star State, who, seated in a car with, among others, President John F. Kennedy, was wounded by a bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald). Just prior to the poll, Johnny Will Ford surrendered to the police; when he was released from prison after serving a little of his sentence—no time tacked on for the inconvenience he had caused by his disappearance—he went back to his job on the Mossler ranch.
Another of what Candace termed her “fights for justice” was a family affair. A brother, DeWitt Weatherby, proprietor of a gambling establishment called the Silver Dollar Club in her native town of Buchanan, shot to death a regular customer, and, despite his explanation that he had acted self-defensively, was charged with murder. Candace rearranged her appointments so as to be free to attend the trial but didn’t seek to interfere with the legal process until (much to her surprise: thinking that acquittal was a foregone conclusion, she hadn’t even offered to buy DeWitt top-notch defenders) her brother was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Thereupon, she collected Georgian lawyers much as poorer people collect Penny Blacks—at least fifty, it was reckoned by Governor Marvin Griffin, who was in the best position to keep count, since he was the target of their supplications. The trouble, from Candace’s point of view, was that her collection was indiscriminate, including politico-lawyers who were not of Griffin’s party: if he had granted the particular favour asked by them all, cronies and adversaries alike, the latter’s cries of victory would have drowned out the former’s tributes to his mercy. And so he refused to make DeWitt’s durance briefer or less vile. “But they got him out anyway,” Griffin subsequently grumbled, referring to the fact that DeWitt was released after serving only four years of his life sentence. Griffin’s successor as governor was the lawyer who had worked hardest on behalf of DeWitt. Most of his electioneering expenses had been covered by Jacques Mossler.
Among others of Candace’s kin to whom she gave succour was a nephew named Melvin Lane Powers, the son of one of her older sisters. He was born in 1941, which means that he was either twenty-one or fourteen years younger than his wealthy aunt. He was tall and well-built and had jet-black hair, specially noticeable as eyebrows, a disheveled nose, thick lips, and cheeks and a chin that, as well as being creased, were pitted with the scars of acne. He lacked social grace and displayed an arrogance that he surely cannot have felt.
Candace doesn’t seem to have paid much heed to her nephew until 1961—though at some time during his late teens she may have gone out of her way to visit him: a subsequent business acquaintance of Melvin’s recalled his saying “that he was in jail in Chicago—fraud for selling property or some stock or something, embezzlement, and that she [Candace] came to visit him or came to visit his cell-mate, and that’s the way he got to know her.” Having been allowed to leave Chicago, Melvin hawked magazine subscriptions door-to-door in Arkansas on behalf of a company run by an ex-convict named Arthur Grimsley. Late in 1961, he forsook Mr. Grimsley and, after traipsing southwest, turned up at his aunt’s house in Houston. She and her husband told him to make himself at home, which he did. Once he had put on weight, was chic in garments paid for by Candace, and was no longer able, credibly, to blame his sluggard behaviour on footsoreness, Jacques Mossler fabricated a job for him in one of his Houston-based finance companies.
About a year and a half later, Jacques came to the definite conclusion that Melvin had overstayed his welcome. Having imparted his conclusion to both Melvin and Candace, without receiving a cooperative response from either of them, he sacked Melvin and, since the latter still refused to find other accommodation, enlisted legal assistance in kicking him out of the house. Candace was most upset. Understandably so, in the view of those who, early in 1966, prosecuted her and her nephew on the charge of having murdered her husband: they believed that her distress at Melvin’s eviction was occasioned by the fact that she had grown partial to incest.
According to one of the aforementioned prosecutors, Candace’s distress was not prolonged. Shortly after the eviction of Melvin, Jacques travelled on his own to Europe, stayed abroad until the autumn of 1963, and then resided not at the house in Houston but in an apartment in Miami. The prosecutor:
“Upon moving to Miami, he lived over his office at the Allen Parker Company, located on 36th Street. Powers and Candace remained in Houston. On 1 October 1963, Powers [who was now self-employed, trying, none too successfully, to sell recreation vehicles] rented an apartment and introduced Candace as his fiancée. She, Candace, would constantly visit the apartment, and witnesses saw them necking, kissing and hugging. Powers expressed to people how much he loved Candace, and that she was having marital complications and was in the process of obtaining a divorce, and that he, Powers, was going to marry her. On occasions Powers would refer to Candace Mossler as Miss Johnson, and on other occasions he even introduced Candace as his wife. Powers also told people that he loved her so much that he would kill for her.”
Earl C. Martin, one of the several witnesses for the prosecution who testified to having been approached by one or other of the defendants with offers of cash for the rendering of a lethal service, also swore that, on a date that he couldn’t fix precisely—some time toward the end of 1963—he, at Melvin’s invitation, had listened in on an extension to a telephone conversation between Melvin and Candace, from which he had gathered that the former was keen on a pastime that he called “eating pussy,” and that the latter, possessor of the “pussy,” delighted in the former’s “eating” of it.
In the first week of June 1964, Candace, accompanied by her daughter Rita (on vacation from a university) and three of the adopted children (none older than thirteen), went to stay with Jacques, who had rented a small but luxurious apartment on the second floor (which in England would be termed the first) of a block called the Governor’s Lodge, situated on Key Biscayne, a slight island close to Miami and connected to it by a stilted thoroughfare known as the Rickenbacker Causeway. The stay extended until the last day of the month, a Tuesday—early in the morning.
Early on three previous mornings, those of the 24th, 26th, and 28th, Candace, complaining of migraine, had driven to the Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, there to beseech a palliative.
At about 1:30 A.M. on the 30th, she again drove to the mainland—this time (so she later told a policeman) not only because she felt a migraine coming on but also because she had some mail to post. She took the children with her.
That meant that her husband—who had celebrated his sixty-ninth birthday a few weeks before; had, at about the same time, been assured by his doctor that he was in tiptop condition—was left alone in the apartment. Alone, that is, apart from a recently acquired dog, a boxer called Rocky after one or other of the so-known pugilists, Graziano or Marciano: a highly strung beast, sparked into barking by the slightest sound that was uncommon.
One of the ubiquitous fictions of crime novels is that the time of a person’s death can be established, give or take a minute or two, by feeling the warmth or otherwise of the skin, observing the extent and whereabouts of stiffening, peering at a thermometer that has been prodded into the rectum, and/or comparing stomach contents with the last menu. The notion has been accepted as gospel by many lay readers of made-up crime tales—and, occasionally to the detriment of justice, by some people with medical diplomas. It is piffle.
Pleasingly, none of the doctors associated with what came to be called the Candy Murder Case needed to guess the time of Jacques Mossler’s death.
For consider: shortly before 1:30, Mrs. Peggy Fletcher left her apartment across the corridor from Mossler’s. She would be described by reporters as a “socialite,” which, considering that she worked as a typist for an insurance broker, suggests that that word has a less swell meaning in America than it has in England. One of the reporters would note that her dead-of-night emergence was “to keep from being caught short in the morning”—a further cause of confusion for English readers, to whom I must explain that she had run out of cigarettes. She went down to the parking lot and started her car but found the exit blocked by Mossler’s red Pontiac convertible, which she noticed contained all but Candace of the visiting members of his family. As soon as the Pontiac had been obligingly reversed by Rita, Mrs. Fletcher drove to a shop that she thought would be open but which was not. When she returned, still cigaretteless, to the Governor’s Lodge, there was no sign of the Pontiac.
She went up to her apartment, undressed, and got into bed—and had been there “perhaps five minutes” when she was disturbed by the barking of a dog. Then: “I heard the sounds of a scuffle. There was a distinct thud, and someone cried out, “Don’t do this to me!” I heard another thud. The dog continued to bark. Then I heard footsteps running down the corridor—heavy footsteps. Without a doubt, it was a man.”
The barking had awoken Herbert House, tenant of the apartment directly above Mossler’s. It was not the first time that he had been vexed by the noisiness of Rocky; over the past few weeks, he had complained to Mossler and to a manager of the Governor’s Lodge. Now he switched on the bedside lamp and, thinking to get exact data for a letter of furious complaint, looked at his watch: 1:45. House got out of bed, scampered across to the balcony, and, looking down, saw that the abominable Rocky was skittering about on Mossler’s balcony, impounded there by the closed glass doors of the apartment. “I heard those sliding doors open, and I called down to ask if they were going to take the dog in. I heard a voice answer, “Yeah.” It seemed to be the voice of a young man.” House went back to bed and straightway fell into a sleep of such soundness that, despite forthcoming noises, he did not stir until his accustomed breakfast time.
One may assume that House had only just returned to the land of Nod when Mrs. Irene Durr, night manager of the building, was awoken in her first-floor apartment by a scream. Sitting up in bed and switching on the light, she heard barks—which cued drowsy surmise that Rocky had nipped his master, causing him, first, to scream, then to retaliate, causing Rocky, in turn, to raise a rumpus. Before turning off the light and settling down again, she looked at her watch and saw that it registered 1:30. (A subsequent checking of the watch showed that it was fifteen minutes slow.)
No sooner had she settled down than she heard running footsteps on the stairs. Deciding that she had better do some night-managing, she arose and stepped into the lobby just in time to espy someone leaving the building by the back door. Through the glass panel in that door, she could see an area of the parking lot: the area reserved for Mr. Mossler’s vehicles. “The person went to a white Chevrolet in the lot. The walk didn’t seem like a woman. The person got in the Chevrolet and drove off.” (The apparent uniformity of American cars to English eyes makes it surprising to Englishmen that Americans are so good at telling one make from others: it seems as ophthalmically acute as finding a needle in a haystack and, without reliance on a law of probability, declaring that the needle found is the needle that was sought.)
A moment before Mrs. Durr had stepped into the lobby, a homecoming tenant, Martin Tavel, manager of a Miami radio station, had entered the lobby by the front door, and so he got a longer look at the person hurrying out at the back than did Mrs. Durr. He would tell the police that the person was definitely a man—a tall man whose dark hair was so long that no skin was visible between it and the collar of his dark shirt.
Tavel and Mrs. Durr walked out of the front door. The white Chevrolet was coming round the corner of the building, its headlamps on. As the car came closer, the lamps were switched off, only for a few seconds, though: the lamps came on again before the car turned into the street and sped in the direction of the Rickenbacker Causeway.
Rocky’s barking caused Tavel to look up, to notice that lights were on in Jacques Mossler’s apartment. He and Mrs. Durr took the elevator to the second floor. As they emerged into the corridor, so did Peggy Fletcher. The three became a whispering trio by the door of Jacques Mossler’s apartment, and then Mrs. Fletcher, who loved dogs, even Rocky, and seems to have had a way with them, cooed through the keyhole until the boxer was lulled into silence. Pleasure at the peacefulness taking over from interest in what had excited the dog, the three retired to their respective beds. The time was close to two o’clock.
By then, presumably, Candace and her charges were in Miami—a city that was still safe to visit, even in the small hours: not yet ineradicably contaminated by people whose migration from Cuba made that island a nicer place. The pain in Candace’s head cannot have been severe, for after buying stamps and posting whatever she stuck them on, she escorted her children to a public lounge in the DuPont Plaza Hotel, tarried with them there until about four o’clock, and only then made her way to the emergency room in the Jackson Memorial Hospital for her regular, alternate-nights dose of a balm that she must have considered more potent than anything available from an all-night chemist.
She left the hospital at five minutes past four. That time is of less interest than the reason for its being known. Only a moment after she had gone, Maida Loretta Kolodgy, the clerk in the emergency room, took a telephone call from a man wanting to speak to Mrs. Mossler—the same man, Ms. Kolodgy felt sure, who had called twice before, making a similar request, during the previous hour and twenty minutes. Ms. Kolodgy looked outside; but, returning to the telephone, told the caller that there was no sign of Mrs. Mossler.
Who was the man? Why was he so keen to speak to Candace? And—most intriguing of all—what gave him the idea that she might be reached at the hospital? After all, unless the regularity of her previous attacks of migraine had forewarned her that another was imminent, and she spoke of what was to come, how she would deal with it, to a male acquaintance prior to about one o’clock, when—so she subsequently said—she experienced the first twinges, her husband seems to have been the only man who could have known that she was going to Miami and that the hospital was one of her destinations there. Of course, the man may have telephoned or called at the apartment soon after her departure and learned of her proposed hospital visit from Jacques.
For various reasons, none of the questions was provided with a sure answer. Jacques could not help. Candace expressed mystification. The caller never revealed himself.
4:30 or thereabouts. Mrs. Durr, roused by the sound of a car pulling up in the parking lot, and made wide-awake by the patter of five pairs of feet in the lobby, turned on the light and looked at her unreliable watch.
4:45 Dr. John V. Handwerker, a physician of Key Biscayne, heard from an answering-service girl that Rita Mossler had requested his presence at the Mossler apartment, where there had been “trouble—maybe a killing.” He told the girl to ring the police, then dressed and drove to the Governor’s Lodge.
4:49 James Jorgenson, a young deputy sheriff who had recently applied for leave of absence so that he might study criminology at Florida State University, knocked on the door of the apartment and was admitted by Candace, who told him, “He’s over there,” indicating a yellow-blanketed mound in a corner of the living room. Noticing much blood as he crossed the room, Jorgenson tried to prepare himself against horror when he lifted the blanket. It was as well for him that he did so, for the sight of the stabbed and battered body of Jacques Mossler, clad only in a once-white undershirt, would shock and sicken even those subsequently arriving older officers who believed that their emotions had been used up. (At the trial, the judge refused to let the jury see photographs of the body, saying that they were “inflammatory.”) Remembering that he was duty-bound to put his fingers where there had once been a pulse, Jorgenson touched below the right ankle, one of the few unbloodied parts of the body, before replacing the blanket. Then he telephoned his headquarters. He noticed that “the room did not appear to be ransacked. There was a large dog in the kitchen. Rita and one of the children took the dog into one of the bedrooms.”
4:53 Dr. Handwerker arrived. In terms of handiwork, he did no more than confirm Jorgenson’s conviction that Mr. Mossier was dead. But he observed the widow, wondering, without coming to a conclusion, whether or not she was in clinical shock. She was dry-eyed. “She kept herding the children in and out.”
An hour or so passed. It would be nice to know what happened in the apartment meanwhile, but neither Jorgenson nor Handwerker seems to have considered any incidents worthy of mention. In England, someone would have made tea; but the result of a later examination of work surfaces in the kitchen indicates that nobody made a hot beverage of any kind. The thought that someone may have passed round cans of a fizzy drink is too distasteful to contemplate.
6:10—and all of a sudden the already crowded apartment became claustrophobic, with the advent of two members of the homicide division of the local constabulary, several scene-of-crime officers, laden with apparatus, and the medical examiner for Dade County.
One of the homicide detectives, Lieutenant Jerry Evans, cleared a bedroom of occupants, then invited Candace and Rita into it for a talk. He asked Candace if she had any idea who might have committed the murder, and she replied that her husband—a ruthless, at times vicious businessman—must have made many enemies, adding that a used-car dealer in Miami, whom she named, had a severe grievance against him. She went on to say that she believed that the apartment had been ransacked. When asked if she had any grounds for the belief, she pointed at two unzipped hold-alls in a closet in the bedroom; also she said that her husband’s wallet was empty of cash, that some of her jewellery was missing, and that two hundred-dollar bills that she had left in the bathroom were gone.
Enquiring about the jaunt to Miami, Lieutenant Evans mentioned that he had had a few words with Peggy Fletcher. She had told him, he said, that when she had left the building at 1:30, intending to buy cigarettes, she had seen the four Mossler children sitting in a red Pontiac—but not their mother.
Rita explained that Candace had just popped back to the apartment to pick up something that she had forgotten. Evans asked Candace to amplify her daughter’s recollection but received what he later called a “noncommittal answer.”
Evans, who seems to have been a most unassertive detective, requested Candace’s presence at the sheriff’s office later that morning. She arrived on time, chaperoned by a lawyer, and made a brief formal statement in which, perhaps unintentionally, she added a possible motive for the murder to those which she had earlier supported or suggested. The new possibility (which would, never mind its lack of corroboration, entrance the legal defenders of Candace and Melvin) was that Jacques Mossler, having turned to homosexuality, had been slain by one of his own male lovers whom he had slighted, disappointed, or something of that frenzy-encouraging sort, or by the lover of one of them, wanting to eradicate competition. Evans paraphrased the relevant part of Candace’s statement as follows: “She told me that she felt her husband had boyfriends. She said he had received calls from Texas from a male voice that had feminine tones.”
As Candace and her lawyer were leaving, Evans asked her for details of the jewellery that she had told him was missing from the apartment, and she promised to send him a list. During the two following days, he telephoned Candace nine times and Rita five, invariably pleading for the list, but never did get it. After Candace’s departure from the sheriff’s office, he had no direct contact with her. Until the trial, his only glimpse of her was over the heads of reporters and cameramen outside the premises of an undertaker who had arranged for her husband’s body to be shipped to Washington, D.C., for burial in the Arlington National Cemetery.
By then, other officers of the law—some far-flung from Florida—were getting quite excited over what one of them was audacious enough to describe as “evidential developments of an incremental nature that are confidently expected to nail the Mossler malefactor—singular or plural.”
The knife that was used to inflict thirty-nine wounds in Jacques Mossler’s body was never identified. The blunt instrument that was used to bludgeon him may have been either an empty soft-drink bottle, found in the kitchen by a scene-of-crime officer, or a heavy glass swan, one of a pair in the apartment, that was lying in pieces on the living-room carpet, the head and neck of it so close to the body that what would otherwise have been a puddle of blood was turned into two serpentine streams.
Of all the surfaces in the apartment that were examined for fingerprints, the most immaculate was a Formica-covered counter that abutted the kitchen sink. It had been scrubbed by Roscoe Brown, a black servant of Mossler’s, during the afternoon preceding the murder. The scene-of-crime officers found only one blemish on it: the print of the palm of a hand. In every particular, the print matched that of the palm of one of Melvin Lane Powers’s hands.
The search for the white Chevrolet seen by Irene Durr and Martin Tavel took investigators to the Miami offices of the Allen Parker Company, the agency used by Mossler for his credit-financing activities in southern Florida. There they learned that on 23 June, a week before the crime, Candace had asked to borrow any one of the cars repossessed by the company from clients who had fallen far behind with repayments. A four-year-old white Chevrolet having been picked out, it was, at her request, delivered to her at the Miami International Airport. The deliverer—who also handed over $125 that she had asked the company manager for—was the already mentioned Roscoe Brown. He had been employed by Jacques Mossler for seventeen years and was so grateful for the employment that he had had his son christened Roscoe Mossler Brown. Candace gave him a lift back to within a block of the Parker offices then went on to some unknown destination with her other passenger, who had been waiting with her at the airport. Roscoe was loathe to identify that person to the police but eventually succumbed to their blandishments and said that it was Melvin Lane Powers.
The Parker Company’s records showed that the borrowed car had not been returned. Rather than ask Candace if she knew where it was, the investigators at once circulated a description of it among their own and neighbouring organisations. It was soon noticed, parked a yard or so away from the police station at the airport. The doors were unlocked. The keys were resting on a sun visor. And so was a parking slip, dispensed by a machine at the entrance to the lot: the slip had been stamped at 5:19 on the morning of 30 June—about three and a half hours after someone had driven if not this car, then one very much like it, away from the Governor’s Lodge on Key Biscayne. The car was towed to a garage and there examined—presumably for transferred bloodstains as well as for fingerprints. None of the former was found, but there was an extravagance of the latter, including nineteen belonging to Melvin Lane Powers.
The police amassed documentary and eyewitness evidence that Powers had flown from Houston to Miami (a distance of almost a thousand miles, east-southeast) on the afternoon of Monday, 29 June, arriving shortly before six o’clock. Similarly, that he had made the return trip the following day, leaving Miami after nine o’clock in the morning.
Information regarding Powers’s whereabouts during the hours between his arrival from Houston and the murder was fragmentary. It seems that the only persons who subsequently recalled seeing him were Badar Shehan and Marshall Klein, respectively a bartender in and the manager of the Stuft Shirt Lounge of the Holiday Inn at the Miami end of the Rickenbacker Causeway. According to Shehan, he served Powers with a drink between half past six and seven on the Monday evening; Powers asked for and was provided with an empty soft-drink bottle but did not take it with him when he left. According to Klein, Powers returned a few minutes later, saying that he had forgotten to take the empty bottle, was given it or another, and walked out. According to Shehan, Powers reappeared just before the closing time of one o’clock, ordered and paid for a double Scotch, quickly downed it, and left.
Paul Peter O’Neill, Powers’s only full-time employee at his recreational vehicles sales establishment near Houston, said that when Powers left for the airport on the 29th, he was wearing dark clothes but that when he returned next day he was wearing clothes of a light colour, the trousers so inadequate to his inseam measurement that they barely overlapped his socks. (Months after the murder, a dark jacket and pair of trousers, both stained with blood, were found by police in the Mosslers’ Houston house; an eyewitness to Powers’s presence at Miami airport on the morning of the 30th was shown the garments and stated, apparently without hesitation, that they were those he had seen Powers wearing.)
Several persons swore that, during the period between Powers’s eviction and firing by Jacques Mossler and the latter’s sudden death, they had, each apart from the others, had conversations with Powers or with his aunt, or with both, in the course of which they had been sounded as to whether, if the price was right, they would commit a contract killing; and one of those persons, Billy Frank Mulvey, went so far as to say that Candace had given him an advance payment toward a fee agreed between them for his murder of her husband, but that he had simply grabbed the money and run.
Not all of the above-outlined evidence had been garnered by the police by 3 July. But by that date they believed they had sufficient evidence to justify their arrest of Melvin Lane Powers.
His aunt heard of his detention within hours of its beginning—as soon as she disembarked at Houston airport from the airplane that had brought her from Washington, D.C., where she had been chief mourner at a funeral. The news was screamed at her—obliquely, in the form of personal questions—by a foregathered pack of reporters. Ignoring the impertinence, she trotted to a limousine and was sped to her home. There, she straightway made her best efforts to ensure Melvin’s protection. It may have crossed her mind that by protecting him, she was also protecting herself.
The suspicion that that was so would inspire an anonymous versifier to compose a couplet:
But, for mercy, yells: “Percy!”
The surname of the Percy to whom Candace yelled was Foreman. He was a Texan defence lawyer, skilled at, among other things, recognising intelligent prospective jurors, ensuring that few of them served, and concentrating the minds of those he allowed into the jury box on irrelevancies and side issues. That he didn’t give a cuss for justice seems to be indicated by this statement: “You should never allow the defendant to be tried. Try someone else—the husband, the lover, the police, or, if the case has social implications, society generally. But never the defendant.” And that he believed that he was worth every penny of his fees, which were among the highest in the land, is shown by his comment: “It’s not that I’m vain, proud, or egotistical. I just don’t have anything to be modest about.”
His asking price for looking after Melvin was $200,000. Candace guaranteed part of that amount by handing over to Foreman the choicest items in her recently depleted collection of jewellery and signing a document saying that he could sell all of them if his bill was not met within a week. Then she up and went to Rochester, Minnesota, where, having booked sessions with a specialist on migraines at the Mayo Clinic, she rented two apartments, one for herself, the other in which her children could squeal to their hearts’ content without exacerbating pains in her head.
Foreman’s first action toward earning his fee was to apprise press and television news editors that, once their representatives were outside the jail in which his client was incarcerated, he would be there too, blustering newsworthily. Having performed, he threatened the jailers with all sorts of dire consequences if they were foolish enough to argue against his interpretation of his and Melvin’s rights, and then he spoke privately with Melvin, saliently for the purpose of ordering him not to say anything to anyone unless he, Foreman, had rehearsed him in an utterance and told him when to utter it.
For almost a year, Foreman resisted efforts by the Floridian authorities to have Powers extradited from Houston to Miami. Meanwhile, the police strengthened their case against both Powers and Candace—and she, acting on her own initiative or in response to suggestions from paid advisers, sought to diminish the police case and to lend apparent substance to her assertion that her late husband was homosexual.
Hearing that Roscoe Brown had made an additional statement—to the effect that the white Chevrolet she had borrowed had been in the parking lot at the Governor’s Lodge in the afternoon prior to the murder—she wrote to the faithful retainer, asking him to telephone her, reversing the charge. Roscoe obeyed. He had two long conversations with Candace, during which she did her utmost to persuade him to retract his statements. Every word of the conversations was tape-recorded by the police.
She actually did persuade a man named William Measamer, who worked at the Houston branch of the Allen Parker Company, to swear that Jacques Mossler was homosexual. Soon afterward, however, Measamer suddenly suffered a severe attack of cold feet, probably a side effect of a district attorney’s dissertation to him on the penalties for perjury, and declared on his oath that, so far as he knew, Mossler was as heterosexual as the day was long, and that he would never have said otherwise had not Candace, generous to him to a fault, pleaded with him to do so on a number of occasions, most urgently when they were in bed together in her apartment in Rochester.
On 20 July 1965, in Miami, a grand jury returned an indictment of murder in the first degree against Melvin Lane Powers and Candace Mossler. Melvin had recently settled in at a local jail. Candace, having surrendered voluntarily, was escorted to another. Percy Foreman, retained by her to represent Melvin, conferred with lawyers she had retained for herself, and it was agreed that though he and they should give the appearance of being separate forces, they would regard him as the chief defence lawyer. The Foreman Alliance soon scored a spectacular success by getting the prisoners released on bail of $50,000 each.
On 17 January 1966, the trial proceedings at last began. It took the lawyers until the last day of that month to gather twelve jurors and three reserves. The forensic farce was made more farcical by the judge’s decision that, as neither defendant was in custody, it would be unfair on the jurors if he were to stick to the convention that jurors in such a case should be kept to themselves, night and day, for the duration of the trial; his admonition to them that, while their time was their own, they were not to read press accounts of the case, listen to radio broadcasts about it, or watch items on it in televised news programmes, seems to have passed unheeded, going by the fact that on the morning after a newspaper report referred to their general lack of sartorial elegance, each and every one of them turned up in his Sunday best.
The trial, which rambled on until Sunday, 6 March, brought disgrace upon the American legal profession. But, perhaps because so many members of that profession had already brought disgrace upon it, no one expressed much concern. Throughout the trial, lawyers on both sides, prosecution and defence, knowingly broke the most elementary rules: every few minutes, a lawyer said something that he knew perfectly well he had no right to say, an opponent objected, and the judge ordered the offending words stricken from the record—adding, ridiculously, that the jury was to ignore them. Perhaps the most blatant instance of a “professional foul” was when Percy Foreman, wanting to discredit a prosecution witness, spoke loudly to himself, wondering whether or not the judge would allow him to introduce evidence pertaining to the witness’s criminal record. (Having used the sporting term “professional foul,” let me suggest to Americans who feel that the Law should have something to do with Justice that they might campaign for judges to be given one of the powers of English football referees: a forensic equivalent of a yellow card would be shown to a persistent offender, who if he fouled thereafter, would be shown a red card, indicating a set period of debarment from advocacy, starting as soon as the current trial was over.)
The prosecution lawyers seem to have been so intent on thinking up ways in which they themselves could cheat and on listening for objectionable remarks from the defenders that they quite failed to notice any of the umpteen illogicalities that Foreman & Company fed to the jury. The most glaring of these concerned the solitary palm print, undoubtedly Melvin’s, found on the sink-side counter in the kitchen of the apartment at the Governor’s Lodge. Ignoring the fact that the print showed—unequivocally, if Roscoe Brown’s evidence as to his charring was accepted—that Melvin was in the apartment within hours of its becoming the scene of a crime, Foreman contended that since some of the prints found on comparatively grubby surfaces in the apartment had not been identified, one or several of them might have been deposited by the “true culprit”: ergo, Melvin’s (timed) print was no more suspicious than any of the unattributed ones.
Needless to say, neither defendant ventured to the witness stand.
The jury took sixteen and a half hours, spread over two and a half days, to agree on the verdicts; they spent the nights at a hotel where one of them normally worked as a bellhop.
The judge, whose name was Schulz, seemed to be surprised by what he read on the verdict-recording slips passed to him, via a bailiff, by the foreman of the jury. He told the clerk of the court to read the verdicts aloud. Melvin uttered one word—“Beautiful”—when he heard that he had been found not guilty. And Candace, knowing that her nephew’s acquittal meant that she was free as well, started sobbing with relief before the clerk read from the other slip.
Some months after the trial, Candace and Melvin announced that they were engaged to be married. Nothing came of it, however. Early in 1969, Candace took Melvin to court, accusing him of having beaten her up after ordering her to “stay home where I belonged.” She subsequently married a tall Texan.
She and Melvin stuck together in one respect. They fought a long-running battle with Percy Foreman over his bill, saying that the collateral that each of them had put up (jewellery from her, a land deed from him) had not only been misappropriated but, what with inflation, had grown in value, putting the lawyer in their debt. Foreman countered: “Mrs. Mossler would not have inherited one penny had she not been acquitted. I was charged with the ultimate responsibility of seeing that both clients were successfully defended against the murder charges. Lawyers often work on a fifty-fifty contingency-fee basis. Therefore, I feel I have a 50-50 percent interest in whatever amount Mrs. Mossler profited by the acquittal. I will settle for any reasonable amount between 4.5 million dollars and 16.5 million dollars.” Later, he said that he hoped that the argument would be aired in court: “As an outcome of such a trial and evaluation of my services, the public might have a better opinion than it now has as to who killed Jacques Mossler.” How the argument was resolved, if it ever was, doesn’t appear to have been reported.
I think that Candace should have the last word. When a journalist vulgarly reminded her of some of the terrible things that had been said about her, and asked if she wished to comment, her reply was, “Well, sir, nobody’s perfect.”
