AN IMPOSSIBLE IDEA

DURING THE SECOND HALF of the inquisition, the defense called five medical experts to the stand, while Peters, unable to lure a single physician to support his case, had only his courtroom acumen to depend upon. The expert testimony would be highly influential, but Gantt and Wright were saving the best for last—though they did not yet know it. Alice Mitchell would take the stand.¹⁰⁷

The doctors had received the Hypothetical Case in advance, despite the prosecution’s attempts to render it inadmissible as hearsay. Judge DuBose allowed it, since each of the experts had personally interviewed Alice in jail, at least once, for no less than an hour.

All five prestigious physicians concurred with the Hypothetical Case, and did so with great authority. Dr. John Hill Callender, who had introduced the term “vicarious menstruation” to the court, was a sixty-year-old Nashville native and longtime medical superintendent of the Central Hospital for the Insane. He was also a professor at the University of Nashville and Vanderbilt University, where he earned a statewide reputation for his work with nervous diseases.¹⁰⁸ Dr. Frank L. Sim, a fifty-eight-year-old professor at the Memphis Hospital Medical College, was also held in great esteem, and from there, the other doctors’ backgrounds were varied enough that the defense could claim they sought opinions far and wide—at least within the state of Tennessee. It did not matter that it was hard to differentiate between each expert’s testimony. On the contrary, consistency only reinforced the impression that the opinions were objective, the result of rigorous scientific methods.¹⁰⁹

Before they had even met Alice, the doctors agreed she had a hereditary disposition. In jail, they observed her to be of low intelligence, noted her supposedly vacant facial expression, and above all, documented a complete lack of remorse. One doctor, E. P. Sale, cited Alice’s left-handedness and slightly asymmetrical features as further proof of her condition.

The expert witnesses primarily focused on the romance between Alice and Freda, including the unspoken topic about which everyone had been wondering. Callendar, Sim, and Turner boldly revealed that they had found no evidence of “sexual love” between Alice and Freda, even though the couple had spent nights together, and had been physically affectionate. But, the doctors hastened to add, Alice’s feelings were indeed “unnatural,” and that she had formed a “morbid perverted attachment” to Freda.

And yet, a “morbid perverted attachment” to Freda was not what the doctors ultimately deemed insane. Their attention was drawn to Alice’s plan to marry and support Freda, “an impossible idea” that convinced doctors that she was clinically insane.¹¹⁰

Dr. B.F. Turner, the least tenured of these men, found Alice’s desire to be economically self-sufficient—which, in this case, meant posing as a man—totally absurd, trumped only by her preposterous idea of same-sex marriage. He shared a part of their conversation, in which he pressed Alice about the impossibility of procreation between two women. A childless home, to his mind, served no purpose, and could only be understood as another sign of unreason.

“Alice, do you not know that you could not have married another young lady?” Dr. Turner had asked her.

“Oh, I could have married Freda,” she replied.

“But some one usually has to support a family in a case like that.”

“I know it, but I was going to work and support both,” Alice explained.

“But a girl like you could not earn enough for both.”

“But I was going to dress as a man . . .”

“But Miss Mitchell, do you not know that usually when young people get married they look forward to the time when they shall have children growing up around them?”

“Oh, yes sir.”

“Well, did you and Freda propose to have children?”

“No, we were not going to have children.”

“How do you know you were not?”

“Oh, I know we were not,” Alice demurred.

Like Turner, Callender emphasized Alice’s peculiar “logic” as a way to identify which of her desires were normal, and which were abnormal; it was, for the defense, a convenient mission of nineteenth-century psychiatry. Callender found Alice’s plan to pass as a man and support Freda to be insane, concluding, “The frankness and sincerity of her manner on this topic was evidence either of a gross delusion or the conception of a person imbecile, or of a child without knowledge of the usual results of matrimony or the connubial state, or of the purpose of the organs of generation in the sexes.”¹¹¹ The idea that Alice might imagine a life with Freda in childless terms was so foreign to the doctors that, in their estimation, it could only mean she lacked basic adult understanding of how sexual reproduction worked.

When it came to the act of murder, three out of the five experts believed Alice had been “dominated” by an insane desire to end Freda’s life, displaying a total loss of self-control, another hallmark of turn-of-the-century psychiatric theory. On the stand, Turner used the analogy of a runaway horse, so strong the driver cannot control it.¹¹² Sale, however, believed Alice was suffering from “simple insanity,” a version of “erotomania” that the defense had worked to avoid as a possible diagnosis. Interestingly, thirty-six-year-old Dr. Michael Campbell—who had almost agreed to testify on the state’s behalf—declined to offer a diagnosis. He did, however, note that there were many patients in his asylum, the Eastern State Hospital for the Insane in nearby Knoxville, Tennessee, who appeared rational on most subjects.

All five, however, not only agreed that Alice was in some way insane, but also—and most conveniently for the Mitchells—incurable. At best, they warned, an asylum would offer her relief through “treatment.”¹¹³

ATTORNEY GENERAL PETERS, lacking a single dissenting physician, nonetheless persevered. He pressed witnesses for limited definitions of same-sex love, and challenged them to substantiate claims that it was consistently emblematic of insanity. Campbell conceded it was not, though like Turner, he associated same-sex love with passions taken to an extreme. The always suggestive Sale testified that Alice and Freda’s relationship illustrated the dangers of extreme passion, which he described as a pathological love.¹¹⁴

Unable to get much traction, Peters shifted his focus from love to marriage. Could two women marry? There was a known example, Peters pointed out. Annie Hindle, a male-impersonator who had performed at Broome’s Variety Theater on Jefferson Street in Memphis, had been regarded as eccentric—but not insane—despite having married a woman. Turner rejected this line of questioning, explaining that two women could not experience “physical pleasure and giving birth to children.” To his mind, these reasons alone precluded any ability to form a union.¹¹⁵

But could Alice and Freda have experienced “physical pleasure,” the kind a man and woman enjoyed together?

The Appeal Avalanche wondered at Turners’s point. After all, there had been no formal physical examination, and thus “it has not been proved that Alice could not perform the duties of a husband.” Cases of indeterminate genitals, or hermaphrodites, were rarely introduced into polite conversation, let alone written about in newspapers consumed by the masses. Peters, however, would not request that Alice undergo a physical examination. Murderess or not, she was a respectable white woman from a prominent family, and her body was off limits—even if it played a large role in the case.¹¹⁶

“Was Freda Ward insane, too?” asked the prosecution. It was a rhetorical question. No, Campbell conceded, even though he had never met the deceased seventeen-year-old, and anyway, “she was dominated by Alice Mitchell, the stronger-willed of the two girls.”¹¹⁷

“What about a man in her situation?” the prosecution further pressed. Has no man with sexual desires toward a woman ever committed murder? One need not be insane, possessed by perversion, to be driven to violence.

Sale granted that a man who committed a similar crime of passion “on the spur of the moment . . . is an ebullition that might occur in every normal man.” But this case was not comparable, he maintained, and returned to the defense’s central message, the argument that tied all of the testimony together: Alice thought she could marry Freda and work to support a childless union, that they could live like that indefinitely—an insane notion.¹¹⁸

After three days, the prosecution had failed to offer a convincing counterclaim, and inconsistencies did little to undermine the expert testimony. The Attorney General persevered, calling four witnesses who lacked expertise, but had actually known the deceased.

The state called Ada Volkmar, Freda’s eldest sister, to testify first, but she offered the court very little new information, as did Christina Purnell, who had witnessed the murder. The next witness, however, was not only new, but a highly anticipated arrival.

Freda’s erstwhile beau and Alice’s romantic rival, Ashley Roselle of Featherstone, Arkansas, took the stand, and the energy in the courtroom surged, with onlookers hoping for a plot twist. There was an outspoken group of spectators who shared William Volkmar’s suspicion that a man was somehow involved. In this version of the story, Alice killed Freda not out of love for her, but to clear the way to marry Ashley.

Unfortunately for that camp, Ashley’s testimony did little to support the theory. His courtship of Freda was largely unremarkable, though it bore her trademark theatrics. She wished to conceal the correspondence from her older sister, Ada, and thus used Alice as an intermediary. This arrangement continued until Alice read their letters and realized they were full of romantic sentiments, and increasingly serious in nature. After she refused to funnel any more of their letters, Freda broke it off with Ashley, but the explanation she offered was disingenuous. She lied and said that both Alice and Lillie had moved to Chicago, which meant that neither of her friends could serve as intermediaries any longer.

The state prodded Ashley to admit that Alice had expressed interest in him, but he denied it. There was no question, he testified, that Alice was exclusively fixated on Freda. During their conversations, she was interested in one thing and one thing only: getting Ashley to confirm or refute what Freda had told her about their relationship.

Ashley was in agreement with the prosecution on one front: Alice seemed perfectly sane. But just as soon as he had uttered those pivotal words, he cast a shadow of doubt on his assessment, recalling that, yes, she had spoken openly of a most violent act. But she did not threaten to harm Freda, or Ashley himself. The life she spoke of taking was her own.

By the time Ashley stepped down from the stand, the public was thoroughly disappointed. The next day, he was lambasted by the press. They took particular issue with the twenty-three-year-old postmaster’s appearance, ridiculing his poorly formed mustache and “round, close cropped head, and his eyes [which] do not open very wide.” His pink shirt, blue tie, and pants were mocked as ornate and unrefined. If any man was going to be able to tempt Alice Mitchell, the press agreed, it was not the foppish Ashley Roselle.¹¹⁹