Nine

Pennsylvania v. Lucretia Chapman, Part One

Mid-December 1831–Mid-February 1832

BROWN WAS IN A temper on December thirteenth, the day before Lucretia’s trial was scheduled to begin. On the shortest of notice, he’d managed to hire an assistant, a talented young lawyer named Peter McCall, and the two of them had taken a coach out to Doylestown. But the county seat was jammed with gawkers and journalists from all over the country, not to mention a horde of prosecution witnesses. It was so crowded that even though the town had six hotels and numerous smaller lodging places, Brown and McCall weren’t able to find accommodations. Were he and his new assistant to be like Noah’s dove, with no resting place for their feet? he wondered as they traipsed from one inn to the next. Then finally, quite late at night, they succeeded in finding quarters and were able to set about preparing for the next day’s work—work that promised, Brown feared, to be a most awful and embarrassing business. Because he had no witnesses lined up, or even any idea if his client had witnesses. Not yet. The whole thing was happening too quickly.

In the morning, fighting a wintry wind that sent a chill through his bones, he and McCall hunched to the jail to confer with Lucretia. Brown was still edgy. His short stay in Doylestown had convinced him that not only did the prosecution have a veritable army of witnesses, but public prejudice was running high against his client. When he and his junior colleague passed through the prison’s front door, the grated portal seemed almost to groan as it swung open, and the eerie sound gave him a momentary and uncharacteristic lapse of confidence. What could he do against so much prejudice and proof, he fretted. He needed helping hands.

Nevertheless, when he spoke to Lucretia, he tried to assume an optimistic air, for he didn’t want her to know how worried he was. Who can help us? he asked in as cheerful a manner as he could muster. Who should we call to testify on your behalf?

She named all sorts of people. But many of them—like her first lawyer, Campbell, who’d gone off to sit with the legislature in Harrisburg, or her husband’s speech student, John Bishop, who resided in Vermont, or her own student, Ben Ash, who lived in New York—were hundreds of miles away. Brown wasn’t at all sure he’d be able to round up all the witnesses she was proposing, let alone these remote ones. Concerned, he said a hasty goodbye to Lucretia, and he and McCall hurried over to the courthouse next door, where they began furiously making out subpoenas. They wrote them with their own hands and hired court hangers-on to deliver them, paying the men right from their own purses. And as they dispatched the process servers they perversely hoped that if the trial actually began that day as docketed, the evidence against their client would take up a great deal of time; that way their servers would be able to locate and bring to Doylestown at least the nearest of Lucretia’s witnesses. Then when it was their turn to present evidence, Brown and McCall vowed, they’d examine those first witnesses so lengthily that they’d give their emissaries time to search out and produce the more distant individuals. It was a forlorn hope, but it was almost all they had. Unless, of course, they could win a postponement.

That afternoon Lucretia and Lino were led into a courtroom in the cupola-crowned courthouse and placed, as was customary, not at a table alongside their lawyers but in an elevated dock in the front of the room. Lucretia, her face drawn, was dressed in her dusty traveling outfit, its sturdy cinnamon-colored fabric and even its trim of black braid showing faded patches. Lino was wearing the black frock coat Watkinson had long ago tailored for him, and he kept trying to improve his appearance by running his fingers through his cloud of curly hair. Neither eyed the other as the court’s clerk began to read aloud the indictment against them that had been handed down two days earlier by a grand jury. “Lucretia Espos y Mina,” the clerk boomed out, “and Lino Amalia Espos y Mina, not having the fear of God before their eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil, did mix and mingle certain deadly poison, called arsenic, in certain chicken soup, which had been prepared for the use of a certain William Chapman and by these means did feloniously, willfully and of their malice aforethought kill and murder him, contrary to the form of the Act of the General Assembly and against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

One avid listener was the man who’d gotten the grand jury to indict, Deputy Attorney General Ross, a serious young lawyer whose long jaw, narrow nose, and purse of tight lips gave his face a stern and brooding expression. Ross had never before tried a case of this importance. Indeed, he had been admitted to the Bucks County bar only two years earlier. But within a year he’d been appointed the county’s chief prosecutor. It had helped that he’d gone to Princeton, where he’d learned a bit about the law as part of his general curriculum; in the absence of law schools as such, attending college or apprenticing oneself to another lawyer was all that was required to enter the profession. It had helped even more that his father was John Ross, now sitting on the Supreme Court and for thirty years before that a circuit court judge with a great deal of political clout. Still, Judge Ross, for all his prestige, wasn’t entirely popular in Bucks County. “Iago” and “old Judas,” some newspapers called him. And when twenty-four-year-old Thomas took over as deputy attorney general, he’d had to put up with being dubbed “a stripling of old Judas.” But Thomas admired his father and hoped to make him proud. This would be no easy task, for John Ross was a difficult man. Once, when Thomas had offered to assist him on one of his cases, his father had written him a note saying, “Dear Tom: When I require your advice it will be time enough to give it to me, and then, and not till then, will it be acceptable.” But Thomas expected that if he could win a conviction in the Chapman case, his father would be pleased with him. So, too, his mother, an upstanding woman who had decided despite a fine education to devote her life to caring for his brain-damaged brother, John. His mother, Thomas may have reflected as he listened to the clerk read the indictment, was cut from a different cloth from the female defendant. That woman, he intended soon to tell a jury, was wanton, devoid of all moral scruples.

The clerk was addressing her now. “How do you plead?” he asked.

“Not guilty,” she replied.

“How would you be tried?”

“By God and my country,” she murmured, giving the ritual answer.

When the clerk finished questioning the woman, he directed his attention to the male defendant. “How do you plead?” the clerk asked him.

“Not guilty,” Mina said.

Like the woman, he, too, was being represented by two lawyers, the highly experienced Eleazar T. McDowell, and McDowell’s apprentice, Samuel Rush. McDowell hadn’t been hired by the defendant. The heavyset, doughy-faced lawyer, so sociable and witty that on the rare occasions when jurors voted against him they felt constrained to apologize, commanded high fees. But the first American Congress had made it possible for the courts to appoint attorneys to indigent defendants facing capital punishment, and McDowell had been assigned to handle Lino’s defense. He wouldn’t be receiving his customary fee, but he’d agreed to take the case on, no doubt because the trial promised other rewards, augured attention and publicity.

“How would you be tried?” Ross heard the clerk ask the male defendant.

“By God and my country.”

But was it his country? Ross thought it was. But the man’s own counselor, McDowell, seemed not altogether sure of this. He’d gone on record saying that in order to ensure his client a fair trial he might make the unorthodox request that at least half the jury be composed of foreigners. Ross wasn’t certain that McDowell would actually proceed with the request, but he couldn’t afford to worry about the matter. It was time for him to speak. Rising, he looked hard at the defendant. “Are you ready for trial?” he asked.

“Yes.”

And was the woman ready for trial?

She didn’t answer. Instead, Peter McCall jumped up, waved an affidavit in his hand, and asked for a postponement. His client, he declared, had witnesses who lived in New York; in northern New Jersey; in Vermont. They’d all been sent for, but it was doubtful they could be procured before the next court session in February. “To urge an immediate trial under such circumstances would be in the highest degree unjust,” McCall called out, and requested that the case be put over until February.

Ross sat down and let his assistant, William B. Reed, handle this first argument. The two of them were the same age, but Reed was more experienced. He’d been admitted to the bar nearly six years ago, and since that time he’d not only practiced law in Philadelphia but done diplomatic work in Central America. Ross expected that Reed would skillfully present the prosecution’s view that delaying the trial would cause their witnesses great inconvenience. And indeed Reed did. “We are ready to go to trial,” he countered McCall. “Many of our witnesses have been brought to Doylestown from a distance, at a great sacrifice of convenience on their part and a considerable expense to the county. Many of them are females, unaccustomed to travel in an inclement season. Several are professional gentleman, whose time is valuable. I don’t want to press harshly or unkindly upon the prisoners, but I think we should set an earlier trial date than February.”

“January ninth?” the presiding judge, John Fox, suggested. As was customary in Pennsylvania at trials of capital crimes, he was one of a panel of three judges hearing the case. But he was the principal adjudicator, a solemn and aristocratic man who had himself once been the deputy attorney general of Bucks County. That had been years ago, before he got on the bench. Since then he had become an intimate of Andrew Jackson, had helped the president select his secretary of the treasury, had even served as Jackson’s confidential adviser during his cabinet troubles. Since then he’d also become an enemy of Ross’s father. But his animosity toward the father didn’t seem to be affecting his treatment of the son. Rather, he was trying hard to go along with the state’s desire to get the trial off to an early start. “January thirtieth?” Ross heard him offer when the defense attorneys declined the ninth.

But Brown and McCall were determined to get the matter put over until February, and in the end they prevailed. “Case continued,” Judge Fox said, “until Monday, February thirteenth.”

Lucretia’s lawyers had won their first battle and during the next two months they devoted themselves to preparing for the trial. They spoke with potential witnesses, explored possible defense strategies, and decided that the most pressing requirement of the case was to get Lucretia’s trial separated from Lino’s, for the defense of one was likely to interfere with the rights of the other. To defend Lucretia, they would have to attack Lino; to defend Lino, his lawyers would have to attack Lucretia. It was a prospect that would put them all in an untenable situation. Well before February, Brown and McCall presented this view to Lino’s team, persuaded them that severance was essential, and obtained their agreement to demand it as soon as the case was called.

Brown had been feeling out of sorts ever since the trip to Doylestown. But with the crucial issue of severance virtually resolved, he began to feel his health and stamina return, and along with them the confident feeling that “if life was to be lost, it would not be without a [valiant] struggle” on his part.

He had no idea that part of that struggle would be just getting back to Doylestown. Yet so it turned out. Early on the morning of February thirteenth, 1832, he and McCall left Philadelphia for Doylestown, expecting to get to the provincial courthouse in plenty of time for the start of the trial. But when they were still several miles from the town their carriage broke down.

The driver tried to repair the damage. He fiddled and fumbled with the broken vehicle while they stood at the side of the road. Time passed, the sun grew high, the driver kept fiddling. Then at last he announced that it was hopeless. The carriage was totally disabled.

Brown and McCall had no choice but to heft their boxes of clothing and law books and proceed on foot to Doylestown. It was slow going, and they didn’t reach town until late in the afternoon. Once they did, Brown realized there was no way they could start to try the case that day. Not in their soiled clothes, not with their dirt-streaked faces and aching feet. He sent word to McDowell to tell the judge of their mishap and implore him to postpone the trial’s opening until the next morning, the fourteenth.

McDowell did as he was bid, and luckily for Brown and McCall, Judge Fox acquiesced.

Attending trials was a major form of entertainment in a society that lacked our modern diversions; on the morning of February fourteenth, when word spread that Lucretia’s trial was at last actually going to commence, not hundreds but thousands of people gathered around the steps in front of Doylestown’s courthouse. Enormous changes were brewing all over the country. In South Carolina planters were demanding that because of tariffs that protected northern manufacturing but neglected southern agriculture, their state should secede from the Union. In Virginia a legislator was speculating that the federal government had in mind outlawing slavery and thundering, “Mr. Speaker! Who can bear the thought of seeing a black speaker occupying that chair in which you are now seated.” Everywhere, doctors were predicting that cholera, which had arrived in England and was spreading there like wildfire, might shortly decimate the United States. But to the crowd at the courthouse steps none of these harbingers of the momentous events that would soon alter both America’s history and their own personal lives seemed to matter. They were focused on one thing and one thing only: getting into the courthouse. Jostling, shoving, trampling one another, they rushed the sheriffs and constables assigned to limit entry, crushing the ribs of one guard who barred the way, and poured into the small brick building. Some even pressed into the courtroom into which Sheriff Morris had just led Lucretia and Lino and, unable to obtain seats, massed themselves against the walls.

Lucretia, a journalist from the Germantown Telegraph noted, seemed determined to ignore the unruly spectators. She held her head straight and tried to adopt a firm and becoming expression. But she couldn’t keep her lips and nostrils from twitching nervously.

She was once again wearing her traveling outfit, but this time Brown had made her hide her russet curls beneath a close-fitting cap and dark silk hood. In her fingers she clutched a fan, fluttering it back and forth despite the cool February weather, as if hoping that by busying herself with it she could stop the trembling of her hands.

Lino wasn’t trembling or twitching at all. Sporting beneath his frock coat an embroidered shirt and a silk stock ornamented with a gleaming gold pin, he nodded and smiled at the crowd and seemed to be in high good humor.

As soon as the pair was ensconced in the dock, McDowell raised the issue of separate trials. “My application for separate trials is a mutual one,” he addressed the court. “A juror who would be acceptable to one defendant might be challenged by the other, and in this way, injustice would be done if both were tried together.”

Thomas Ross objected. “The mode and manner of trial is to be determined by the prosecution,” he reminded the judge, “and if in their opinion the ends of public justice will be defeated by a severance, they have the right of insisting upon a joint trial. We so insist, and say the ends of public justice will be defeated if these defendants are granted separate trials.”

Samuel Rush was on his feet at once. “If our application is refused, Your Honors, will the defendants have that which the law contemplates—a fair trial? May it please the Court, it is the defendants’ purpose to make war upon each other! They strive, in effect, to cut each other’s throats! But, say the gentlemen of the prosecution, ‘We can’t help that—nay, it is the very thing for us!’ Shall human lives thus be lightly sported with? Lives that can never be given again, if taken in this affair? And is this to come within the discretion of the Attorney General! Sir, the powers of the Attorney General are well laid down and defined. They cannot be transcended. Let him show his right, based upon the incontrovertible law of the land. Until that is done, we protest against it; we desire, first and last, that it may not be granted.”

Moved by Rush’s eloquence, the judges adjourned the trial for a brief time so that they could consider the merits of each side’s arguments. They left the courtroom and proceeded to their chambers.

While they were gone, the crowd outside the courthouse kept swelling. Suddenly it surged forward and, like a powerful wave, burst open the courthouse doors, flooding its way into already packed foyers, hallways, and stairwells. By the time the judges returned to the bench, more than six hundred people had fought their way inside, and the building seemed on the verge of collapsing.

“We can’t proceed!” Judge Fox shouted, and directed police officers to eject the newcomers. They tried, pushing against the crowd with linked arms. But the crowd pushed back, and the struggle continued for over half an hour. Then finally, after enormous exertion, the police succeeded in expelling from the building everyone who did not have a seat in the courtroom.

In the restored tranquillity, Fox announced the court’s decision. “The prosecution,” he said, “has certified that if separate trials be granted, the ends of public justice will be defeated. To this opinion, we pay great respect. But we do not think it should prevent us from exercising our own discretion. And having been called upon hastily to decide the question, and considering the vast importance to the public interest that if conviction should take place all should be satisfied that the prisoners have had a full, fair and impartial trial, I throw the doubt on the side of the prisoners and direct that they be allowed to have separate trials.”

At this, the disappointed Ross calculated quickly whose case he should proceed to try. Mina’s? Or Mrs. Chapman’s? He decided in favor of hers. “We would like,” he said to the satisfaction of the remaining spectators, most of whom were far more interested in female than male transgression, “to take up the case of Lucretia Chapman first.”

That afternoon prospective jurors were examined. They were all men—it would be many years before women would be permitted to sit on juries—and Ross and Brown were soon tangling over how to select them. Ross wanted to ask each candidate if he was opposed to capital punishment and if so, whether he was so opposed to it that his scruples would prevent him finding the defendant guilty of first-degree murder. Brown maintained that to ask such a question would be to subject a juror to “a sort of moral torture.”

Ross stuck to his position staunchly, observing that if people who under no circumstances would find the defendant guilty were permitted to serve as jurors, “the doors of the prison might just as well be thrown open and the country saved the expense and the trouble of a trial.” But once again Judge Fox came out against him. “It would be inquisitorial,” he ruled, “to compel a juror to show that by reason of conscientious scruples he was disqualified from exercising the all important privilege of serving upon juries.” Additionally, Fox rejected a further request from Ross to automatically exclude Quakers from the jury. Pennsylvania had been founded by the Quaker William Penn, and was heavily populated by members of the Society of Friends, as the Quakers called their denomination. Fox knew that many of the prospective jurors who would be called up today would be members of the Society. But he also was convinced that a man’s being a Quaker didn’t necessarily mean he was opposed to the death penalty. In the 1790s the Pennsylvania legislature, filled with Quakers, had abolished capital punishment for robbery, burglary, and sodomy, and for murders committed during the perpetration of these and other crimes, like rape and arson; nevertheless, it had retained the death penalty for murders that were premeditated. “Opposition to capital punishment,” Fox pronounced, “is not a matter of conscience in the Society of Friends, as a society. Many of its members have such scruples, others have not.”

That settled, he told Ross and Brown to continue interviewing jurors.

Obediently, the pair proceeded. They questioned nearly forty people and rejected more than half that number, some because they said they had already formed an opinion about the defendant’s guilt and at least one because on his own and without being forced to provide the information, he told the court that he was opposed to capital punishment. After only a few short hours, the twelveman panel was complete. The men who would pass judgment on Lucretia included the son of a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1790, the organizer of a society that promoted farming, and a prominent merchant of the increasingly popular new fuel, coal; the vast majority of them, including foreman John B. Balderson, were Quakers, observant practitioners of their faith who asked to affirm rather than swear that they would execute their duties faithfully.

The dramatic structure of a criminal trial was much the same then as now. The prosecution opened the case, detailing the charges against the defendant and foreshadowing the evidence it would present in support of the charges. Next, witnesses for the prosecution were examined, and cross-examined by the defense, which then opened its case, questioned its own witnesses, and turned them over to the prosecution for cross-examination. Later, both sides had the opportunity to call rebuttal witnesses and to try to sway the jury in elaborate closing arguments.

Those closings and openings, however, were far more pompous in language and melodramatic in style than lawyers’ speeches today. “Gentlemen of the jury,” Ross began the Chapman case immediately after the jury was selected, “The crime of murder has occurred so frequently in this county within the last few years that it is calculated to awaken the fears of the community and to render it imperiously the duty of jurors to carry into execution the laws of the Commonwealth, without regard to the consequences that may follow a verdict of conviction. Scarcely has more than one year passed by since there was placed at this bar a brother charged with having imbrued his hands in the blood of a brother! Now, there is about to be placed upon her trial a wife. Charged with having been the destroyer and murderess of her own husband! The evidence which we shall lay before you will irresistibly lead you to the melancholy truth that the prisoner before the bar is guilty of the offense with which she stands indicted. The evidence will disclose such a scene of profligacy and immorality as has seldom been witnessed in this, or indeed in any other country.”

As she listened to Ross, Lucretia’s eyes filled with tears. So did the eyes of her children, who were all in the courtroom, sitting alongside their Aunt Mercy and a daughter and son-in-law of Mercy’s. Ross ignored the tears and continued his blistering opening, promising to prove that William Chapman had been poisoned, and that although Lucretia’s lover had been the one to purchase the poison, she herself had put it into her husband’s soup and made sure it worked by neglecting him as he sickened. More, Ross pledged, “We shall lay before you a letter of Mrs. Chapman’s, in which certain expressions are used, which will leave but little doubt upon your mind that they have reference to the crime of which she stands indicted. We shall show you very strong presumptive evidence of her guilt, such as treating her husband with so much cruelty and neglect during his illness that he was induced to complain that he believed his wife wished him gone. Such as flying from the county upon the first intimation that she was suspected. These circumstances will all be proved to you and will, I have no doubt, be sufficient to enable you to render a verdict of guilty.”

He paused briefly after that, took a breath, and orated, “Blood, though it sleep a time, yet never dies.”

Promptly the next morning, the prosecution began summoning its witnesses. Ross called first on Mary Palethorpe, who had been attending school at the Chapmans’ the night Lino first arrived there. He directed her to tell the jurors in her own words what she had seen and heard that night, and when she had finished doing so, questioned her about her subsequent observations.

“They went up to Bonaparte’s,” Mary, twelve years old now, volunteered.

And was there anything different afterward? Ross asked.

“I saw Mina and Mrs. Chapman together often.”

“Under what circumstances?”

“Mina used to have fits,” Mary replied, speaking in a high-pitched, quavering voice. “He and Mrs. Chapman would go into a room together and shut the door—I don’t know if they closed the windows.”

Mary’s mother had once advised Lucretia that it would be improper to walk beside Lino at William’s burial. The girl, too, was interested in proper behavior. “I don’t think Mrs. Chapman treated her husband right,” she observed not long before Ross turned her over to the defense for questioning. “She called him a fool one Sunday, as we were going to church.”

Cross-examining Mary, Brown was gentle. After all, he reasoned, she was just a slip of a girl. To be fierce with her might alienate the jury. But more importantly, she’d said nothing that could possibly hurt Lucretia. What wife hadn’t called her husband a fool on occasion? And what kind of illicit activity could a woman be up to if she closed the door but not necessarily the shutters of the room in which she was supposedly disporting herself? Deciding that the child’s testimony was unimportant, he asked her only a few innocuous questions: Was anyone else in the carriage with Lucretia and Lino when they drove to Bonaparte’s? was one of them. Did Dr. Chapman or just Mrs. Chapman give Lino permission to stay at the house? was another.

The answer to both those questions was yes.

Ellen Shaw was the next witness. She hadn’t wanted to come to what she would later call “this plaguey trial,” and she had half a mind to tell the judge so. But she’d promised young Mr. Ross she’d testify, and he was counting on her. So she put her hand on the Bible and, lips pursed and back ramrod-stiff, shot a baleful look at her former employer and took the oath.

She told the jury that she hadn’t liked the looks of Lino from the start. “His shirt wasn’t worth anything,” she explained. Besides, “He was a Spaniard, and a body didn’t know what he might do.” As to her employer, that benighted woman had deeply offended her sense of propriety. She and that butterfly of hers. “They used to kiss each other,” Ellen grimaced. “They sang love songs to each other. They were often engaged in a private room by themselves.”

Ross asked her to tell about some of the other shocking things she’d witnessed in that godforsaken household, and she said the worst ones she remembered. “Mrs. Chapman went up to Lino’s room a good deal,” she said. “I saw her come downstairs in the mornings. I saw her one evening sitting on his bed. He was in the bed at the time, so I don’t know if he was dressed or not. She was wearing her nightdress!”

Might it be, Ross prompted her, that knowing the boarder was prone to fits, she’d gone up to his room to look after him?

“His spells,” Ellen replied scornfully. “They didn’t appear to affect his general health. He was soon over them.”

The whole time she was up there she kept remembering poor Dr. Chapman. How he’d cried that time when Lino and his wife didn’t come home from Philadelphia on time. How he’d once wanted to use the horse to break ground so he could plant potatoes, but Mrs. Chapman said she had to have the horse that day, and that she was mistress of her own house and could do as she pleased. Ellen told the jury about that, and about how Mrs. Chapman used to tell her husband to make his own bed and say that if he didn’t get it done, he should have no breakfast. “She spoke pretty harsh sometimes,” she said. “She used to tell him she was ashamed of him and she wished to God he was gone, for she was tired of him.”

“Was that why you left the Chapmans’ employ?” Ross asked.

“I left because there were things going on I did not like to see,” Ellen shot out. “Also, my folks were against my staying there. They heard a great deal of talk about Mrs. Chapman and her boarder.”

The woman’s a human volcano, Brown thought, spewing flames, devastation, death. She’s a female Iago. A modern Penthesilea, bent on total destruction. He was itching to get a chance to cross-examine her, and as soon as Ross finished the direct examination, he demanded to know if the witness had anything personal against Lucretia.

“I have had no difference with Mrs. Chapman,” Ellen said. But Brown kept probing, and finally she admitted that when she quit, Mr. Chapman didn’t pay her all the wages she was owed, and that she attributed his shortchanging her to his wife’s influence. “Mrs. Chapman always had the chief management of the household,” she sniped.

Satisfied that he’d suggested to the jury that the housekeeper harbored a grudge against his client, Brown proceeded to other areas of inquiry. “You say Mrs. Chapman and the boarder were often alone in a private room? What room was that?”

“The parlor,” Ellen had to admit.

“You say she sang love songs to the boarder,” Brown pressed her. “What songs were those?”

Ellen said she couldn’t remember.

“Was this a religious household?”

“Religious service was performed during the chief of the time I was in the house,” the witness answered. Then she added sarcastically, “And much good did it do!”

At this, even Judge Fox became annoyed with Ellen’s opinionated testimony. “What did you mean by that last phrase?” he interrupted. “Do you know for a fact that the performance of religious service did no good?”

“No,” Ellen subsided. “It just seems that way, seeing the way things turned out there.”

The judge let the remark go and pursued a new tack, asking, “Was your employer in the habit of singing songs?”

“She was not in the habit of singing songs,” Ellen answered. Then, as if realizing she wasn’t being altogether truthful, she remarked that her employer did sing church songs. “She had a piano and played and sung hymn tunes.”

“What hymns did she sing?”

“I can’t tell the names of any of the songs,” Ellen sulked.

She had been Ross’s star witness, and she had done him as much harm as good.

That afternoon, wishing he’d been able to confer with his client during some of the testimony that had been presented against her, Brown decided to ask the court for permission to let Lucretia sit alongside him. He wanted to be able to whisper the occasional question to her, wanted to be able to have her clarify one thing or another. Besides, he didn’t like the whole business of putting defendants in a dock. Penning them there. It was inhuman. Moreover, it made them look guilty, when by rights they were innocent until proven guilty.

He made his petition to Fox and the other two judges, hoping they’d see the value of his arguments. But they didn’t. “This court has already refused an application of this kind in a former case,” Fox summarily dismissed him, as if his petition had no merit whatsoever, and he and his client were left to listen to the next witness as if from opposite sides of the great glorious earth.

She was Esther Bache, Lucretia’s friend and dressmaker. Esther told the jury about the time Lucretia had excused herself from a dress fitting, presumably to tend to an ailing Lino. She hadn’t believed Lino was really ill, the dressmaker said; she’d heard him laughing up in the attic, and watched him eat heartily at the midday meal. She also said, as if revealing something markedly improper, that when he came to the table for that meal, he sat down at Lucretia’s right—an observation that thoroughly irritated Brown.

Where else should the boarder have sat? he wondered. At the head? At the foot? If Lino had helped himself to one of those seats, then the dressmaker might have had something discreditable to complain about. Especially if he’d taken Chapman’s seat. But as it was, the seamstress was trying to harvest forbidden fruit from nothing, nothing at all. No, she didn’t worry Brown.

The next witness did, however. She was Ann Bantom, the pivot, Brown surmised, upon which the prosecution intended to rest its whole case. And indeed, the part-time cleaning woman told a story full of damning details. She said that on the Monday after Chapman first became sick, her employer informed her in the morning that he was feeling better, but that later that day, after eating soup and chicken made by his wife, he reported he was feeling worse. She hadn’t seen her mistress put anything odd in the food, Ann admitted. Not in the kitchen, where Lucretia had sprinkled her concoction with a bit of pure salt, or in the parlor, where she’d carried it after it was cooked. But Lino had been there in the parlor, and the two of them had had a conversation. Not that she overheard it, Ann went on. She didn’t know what they talked about, just that they talked. Then the food was sent up to the sickroom, and that was the last she saw of Mr. Chapman’s meal until the leftovers were brought down to the kitchen, where she left them around for a while before throwing them out in the yard.

Brown knew what was coming. They’ll have that farmer on the stand soon, he thought, that quack, that expert in quackery who’s been claiming his ducks were poisoned by something in the Chapman yard. He had to show that if his client had poisoned her husband’s food, she’d never have let her cleaning woman dispose of it, or even have let her leave it sitting around in a place where it could harm anyone or anything else.

“Who brought the soup and uneaten chicken back to the kitchen?” he asked Ann when he got his chance to cross-examine her.

“Mrs. Chapman put it on the table and left it there.”

“Did Mrs. Chapman say anything about eating or not eating the leftover chicken?”

“I don’t recollect that she said anything about eating the chicken.”

“Was it thrown out right away?”

“No, the chicken stood on the table until teatime, and then I threw it out. I threw out the soup when I washed up the dishes.”

“Was anyone else in the kitchen while the chicken and soup were sitting out?”

“The whole five of the children were in the habit of being in the kitchen every day,” Ann complained.

Brown nodded his head sagely. Ann had given him the answer he’d been hoping to elicit.

He was going to press the point further, impress on the jury that at any time the leftovers could have been sipped or nibbled at by a hungry child, but before he could do so, Judge Fox interrupted with a question of his own. “Did Mrs. Chapman clean the pot?” he asked the unwary cleaning woman.

“I do not think she cleaned the pot.”

“Did she tell you to throw away the leftover food?”

“Mrs. Chapman gave me no directions to throw the soup or the chicken away.”

Brown folded the notes he’d made on Ann’s testimony. The judge had done his work for him. He’d established that Lucretia had allowed the food—that presumably poisoned chalice!—to remain in the house for nearly half a day. That she’d allowed it to remain right where her servant—and her children; her children!—could have eaten it and turned deathly ill.

He had no further questions, Brown told the court, and as it was close to six in the evening, Fox adjourned the trial for the day.

Lucretia spent that night, as she had all the others since coming to Doylestown, praying and trying to keep warm in her chilly cell. But unknown to her, Lino, in his cell, was embarking on a new money-making scheme. It was a scheme that would make him one of the first in the long line of American criminals to profit from crime through publishing. Lino was composing a memoir.

Writing in Spanish and creating an aristocratic literary persona, he began the memoir with, “Carolino Estradas was born in the island of Cuba at the city of Trinidad and was the legitimate son of the Brigadier of Infantry Don Francisco Estradas de Arango and of Dona Rosa Maria de Mina, both formerly citizens of Spain.… he always displayed a love of what was proper, a warm and intrepid yet ductile spirit, was a foe to vanity and a stranger to pride, disinterested, generous, and liberal.”

Then Lino described how his alter ego grew up surrounded by silver and gold, attended the University of Havana, and rescued from the clutches of pirates an exquisite, nobly born fifteen-year-old whom he married and with whom he had a child, only to lose both tragically and early, and, grief-stricken, to try to forget his sorrows by enlisting in the elite, danger-ridden service of the king of Spain.

Soon the autobiographer would get to his schoolmistress wife.

On Thursday, February sixteenth, when Lucretia’s trial reconvened, the industrious Ross called six more witnesses. The book salesman Edwin Fanning testified that while William was sick, he complained that his wife was neglecting him. The tailor Richard Watkinson testified that Lino and Lucretia were in his shop on June sixteenth, picking up clothes for Lino. The brother of the clerk who worked at the druggist’s across the way testified that later that day he encountered Lino, though not Lucretia, at the pharmacy. The clerk himself testified that Lino asked him for arsenic.

Elias Durand, corresponding secretary of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, was next. The handsome, long-nosed pharmacist, resplendent in a finely tailored Parisian suit, promised to be an impressive prosecution witness, but before he could get very far into his story, Brown and McCall tried to block his testimony. They asserted that Lino’s having purchased arsenic had no bearing on Lucretia’s case, that it was evidence against him, not her. The judges heard them out, but ruled that the fact that poison was purchased by any member of the defendant’s household was admissible, for it established that poison was available in the house—though they warned Ross that he would have to connect Lucretia to that availability by producing evidence that she herself administered the poison. Then Durand was allowed to return to the stand, where in his lilting French accent he declared, “A quarter of a pound of arsenic was given to Señor Espos y Mina. I believe I weighed it and gave it to him myself.”

Ross’s final witness on Thursday was Dr. Phillips, who’d been awakened from his sleep to take a look at William when he first fell ill, and who’d attended to him faithfully during his final hours. The lanky, soft-spoken Phillips described William’s deathbed agonies in vivid detail. But this aside, the doctor was hardly satisfactory as a prosecution witness. Not only did he not substantiate Fanning’s assertion that Lucretia had neglected William during his illness, but under cross-examination he actually praised her care of her husband. “I saw no want of tenderness to William on her part,” he said to the probing Brown. “There was nothing in her conduct that was unbecoming to a wife.”

And there was more. When Brown was done with the witness, Judge Fox himself decided to question Phillips, for he was curious to know if, despite the doctor’s once having thought that William had died of cholera morbus, he now believed he had been poisoned. “Might arsenic have accounted for Dr. Chapman’s symptoms?” he asked.

Phillips was cooperative but cautious. “If arsenic had been administered, it would, I think, have accounted for some of the symptoms, and I am not prepared to say it would not account for all,” he opined. “But neither am I prepared to say that natural causes and natural disease might not produce the same symptoms.”

After Phillips’s testimony was finished, the reporter for the Germantown Telegraph filed a story with his paper that said, “At present, the aspect of affairs is decidedly favorable to the prisoner. The intelligent gentlemen for the prosecution have shown a laudable and becoming zeal in sustaining the rights of the Commonwealth, but thus far they have not made out so strong a case as was expected.”

When the trial resumed the next morning, there was a change in the spectators’ attitude toward Lucretia. She had cried when Fanning and Phillips had described her husband’s sufferings, a flood of tears coursing down her pale cheeks. This display of emotion, combined with Ross’s disappointing performance, had made the crowd in the courtroom suddenly sympathetic to her.

But as Brown knew, the case against his client was still in its early stages. Ross had fifteen more names on his witness list. His first today was Dr. Knight, who was likely to prove a destructive witness for Lucretia because, unlike Dr. Phillips, he didn’t think she had been sufficiently attentive to William during his agony. Indeed, “She absented herself,” he said disparagingly, “more than I thought right.”

Cross-examining him, Brown asked if Lucretia might have been forced to absent herself because she had no cook or housekeeper and thus many chores to perform—a point Dr. Phillips had made. But Knight remarked, “I do not remember her saying she had no servant.” And although he’d testified on direct examination that both Lucretia and William had objected to the purgative calomel he’d prescribed, under Brown’s needling he turned combative and, contradicting his previous testimony, blamed Lucretia alone. “I do not know,” he said, “if Mr. Chapman had any reluctance to take the medicine.”

Ross’s next witness was Benjamin Boutcher, the poultry farmer, who described how his ducks, after pecking around in the Chapmans’ yard on the day Ann Bantom threw out the chicken soup, had died suddenly and grotesquely. “There were between twenty and thirty that died that day and the next,” he said.

Brown didn’t cross-examine him. It was as if he hoped that by ignoring the man he could convey to the jury how beneath consideration he considered him. Later, however, when Boutcher asked to be recalled to the stand because he had omitted mentioning that the bones of the dead ducks had a strange appearance, Brown couldn’t resist mocking him. “For him to describe these bones savors of quackery,” he objected, stretching the bow of his lips into a mischievous grin. “Maybe the bones should be produced so they can speak for themselves! No doubt they’ll speak with miraculous organs.” Brown’s objection was overruled and Boutcher told the jury that he’d seen little pieces of something white and glittery, like salts of arsenic, clinging to his poultry’s bones.

Lucretia’s confidantes—Sarah Palethorpe, who’d warned her it would be unseemly to walk with her boarder at William’s funeral; Sophia Hitchbourn, who’d brought her the news that the papers were saying William had been poisoned; and Ann Smith, to whom she’d poured out the whole story of her abrupt second marriage—also took the stand that day, each of them testifying to Lucretia’s infatuation with Lino. But the major event of the day was the reading of Lucretia’s letters to Lino. Entering them as evidence was a risky business for Ross, since the letters clearly revealed that at least until she wrote the last one, Lucretia was ignorant of Lino’s malevolent character. But Ross was banking on the fact that there was one line in her letters that might thoroughly incriminate her. It was the line in which, in her final letter, she declared to Lino that she didn’t believe God would permit either of them to be happy on “this side of the grave.” To the prosecution, the words were a clear reference to the pair’s having committed murder.

Brown, of course, viewed the words differently. They were ambiguous, he thought, and could mean his client expected God’s retribution because she and Lino had committed adultery, or even that she expected His punishment because they’d married too soon after William’s death. In fact, he mused with a sophist’s subtlety, that phrase of hers, that reference to “this side” of the grave, could be construed as indicating that she anticipated worldly suffering for worldly indiscretion, whereas if she’d committed murder, she’d have been anticipating the punishment that awaits the wicked beyond the grave. Yes, he decided, that was a good argument, one the jury might well appreciate.

“Several letters were put in evidence today,” the journalist from the Germantown Telegraph reported to his editor that evening, letters that would one day surely be “sought after with great avidity.” But he couldn’t provide the paper with any quotes from the material. He and all the other journalists covering the trial had been enjoined from revealing the letters’ contents, or indeed any of the evidence against Lucretia, not just until after her case was resolved, but until after Lino’s case, too, had been heard.

There was one journalist in the courtroom who was determined not to wait so long before cashing in on the public’s curiosity. He was William E. Du Bois, the son of a Doylestown clergyman. Du Bois had studied law, and although he had not yet passed his bar examination, he knew a great deal about legal matters. He also knew that books about sensational murder trials were newly the rage among book publishers.

The first such books—pamphlets, really—had begun appearing in America back in the early 1800s. But there had been precious few of them, and those there were had come packaged as morality tales, the crimes they dealt with fastidiously recounted and accompanied by sermons about the fate that awaited criminals once they met their Maker. By the early 1830s, however, the trickle had swelled to a great river, and the moralistic passages had disappeared. Readers were fascinated by the new crop of unsanitized murder trial books, and novelists and short story writers began capitalizing on the appeal of these works by using the books in their fiction. Hawthorne drew on one murder account for The House of the Seven Gables, Melville another for Israel Potter, and in time Poe would employ a third for “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” What captivated these serious literary men about the new trial books, and indeed what captivated the American public, was that they omitted no detail, however perverse or grisly, in the process illuminating the darker side of human nature.

Du Bois wanted to create a book that would outdo all the others. He would make it a big book, a work, he anticipated, that would be longer and fuller than any similar book since the publication of the trial of Aaron Burr. He owed this to the public, he rationalized his sound commercial instinct, and told himself that in view of the excitement the Chapman case was stirring, it would be unfair of him to offer people anything less than a thorough account. One that included all the romantic and seamy details.

But could he get it out soon? Before the trial of Mina? And to whom could he turn for publication? Du Bois decided he’d propose the project to the nearby Germantown firm of G. W. Mentz & Son. Mentz made its money chiefly from wholesome works, from textbooks, songbooks, and Bibles. But Georg Mentz was a smart businessman. Du Bois was certain he’d see the wisdom in coming out with an account of the trial of Lucretia Chapman, especially once he heard about what was in those passionate letters that the deputy attorney general had just read aloud and that he, Du Bois, had spent the day laboriously trying to copy down.

On Saturday, February eighteenth, the prosecution began the most complex part of its presentation, the examination of expert witnesses. The experts were crucial, for in order to convict Lucretia of murder, the state needed to show that a murder had actually been committed. Ross, who during the past few months had meticulously boned up on the existing scientific knowledge about poison, was hoping that his experts would be able to establish beyond the shadow of a doubt that William had died of arsenic poisoning, and today, confident of his newly acquired learning, he commenced with Dr. Hopkinson.

The celebrated surgeon, responding to the deputy attorney general’s careful questions, told the jury about his graveside autopsy of William. He described how foul-smelling and discolored the corpse’s face had been, and yet how astonishingly odorless and well-preserved the body. He described the incisions he had made, and the organs he had removed. And he said that the two things that had most struck him were the absence of putrefaction in the abdomen, and the peculiar, pickled herring-like smell that had emanated from the stomach once it was opened. Both of these signs, he suggested, were indicative of arsenic poisoning, for arsenic was a preservative, a pickler so to speak, and could keep a body from putrefying.

Brown was quick to attack him on both those points. He’d learned from the Reverend Scheetz, whom he was planning to use as a defense witness, that the soil deep down in the graveyard of All Saints was unusually dry and sandy, and that William’s coffin had been placed particularly far down. “Might the nature of the soil in which a body is buried affect the body’s preservation?” he asked.

“Putrefaction might be retarded by dry soil,” Hopkinson was forced to admit.

“And the smell?” Brown went on. “Is this smell typical of something treated with arsenic?”

Hopkinson backed off. “I never heard or read of the herring smell particularly belonging to arsenic,” he said.

Brown had won those points, and soon he soldiered on. “What of cholera morbus?” he asked. “If a person died of cholera morbus, might his body have the same appearance as that which you describe?”

Hopkinson allowed that it might. “Though I have never,” he insisted on adding, “known a case of cholera morbus to terminate fatally.”

Hopkinson was on the stand for three and a half hours. When he was done, Ross’s parade of medical experts continued, and Brown continued to try to poke little holes in their testimony. Dr. Coates, Hopkinson’s assistant at the autopsy, testified that in his opinion, William had died from some corrosive poison, probably arsenic. Under cross-examination Brown got him to say, “No one can be certain that a man died by poison, unless the poison be found in the body.” Dr. John Mitchell, the Pennsylvania Hospital chemist who had tried to find the poison, described boiling down bits of William’s stomach and intestinal tissue, filtering the residue through paper, treating it with lime, nitric acid, powdered charcoal, and other substances, and comparing the results he obtained to those he’d gotten by performing the same tests on the tissues of a man who’d died a natural death at the poor house. But despite his meticulous research, he’d found no differences, and under Brown’s questioning he admitted, “Chemical proofs of the presence of arsenic, though amounting to a strong presumption, were not conclusive of its presence.” More, he even allowed that the meal William ate on the night his stomach first began to pain him might have caused his decline. “Smearcase and pork,” he said, “eaten at night heartily, if the person be not accustomed to them, would be very sure to hurt him.” But Brown had his greatest success with Thomas Clemson, Mitchell’s Sorbonne-trained assistant, who testified that after one of their tests, there’d been a definite smell of arsenic in the lab. Under cross-examination, he reluctantly admitted that “Other substances can produce an odor so like that of arsenic that one may be deceived.”

Call your next witness, Judge Fox ordered Thomas Ross the following morning. Then as now, part of a judge’s function was to move courtroom proceedings along as snappily as he could, and Fox had been growing increasingly impatient with the prosecution’s slow progress. Ross had put on what was for the time an extraordinary number of witnesses—twenty-five of them. Yet still he wasn’t finished. He had one more witness, he’d informed the court, namely Willis Blayney, the high constable of Philadelphia. Fox urged him to examine the man as soon as possible.

He wasn’t able to do so yet, Ross temporized. But Blayney was on his way. He was due on the next stagecoach from Philadelphia.

Fox was reluctant to wait. Most trials at the time were exceedingly short, many lasting only a few hours; this one had already dragged on for over a week. He warned Ross that he’d best produce Blayney as soon as his coach got to town, for he’d tolerate no further delays.

In his tin-roofed law office down the street from the courthouse, Thomas Ross waited fretfully for the arrival of the coach from Philadelphia, pacing the planked floor of the tiny building and taking frequent pinches from the gold snuff box in which he’d recently invested. But when the coach pulled into town, Blayney wasn’t on it. Instead, the driver turned up at Ross’s office and handed him a letter. The high constable had a sick child, the letter said. Plus he had official duties. Urgent official duties.

Lucretia’s old friend Blayney had, it seemed, changed his mind about testifying against the woman he’d once so respected. Or at least he’d changed his mind about testifying against her voluntarily and decided not to come to court unless he was forced to take the stand. Very well, then, Ross resolved. He’d subpoena him. Fine him, too.

He marched back to the courtroom and explained to Judge Fox, “Your Honor, the stagecoach from Philadelphia has arrived. With Mr. Blayney’s name on the waybill. But without his person.” Then he pleaded for a short delay in the trial.

Fox was in no mood to be obliging. “No further delays!” he expostulated, and demanded that the prosecution close its case and the defense get under way immediately.

At this, Peter McCall stumbled hastily to his feet, for Brown had promised him the honor of opening their presentation. “May it please your Honors, and you Gentlemen of the jury,” the untried McCall began humbly. “Personally a stranger to you all, with neither experience nor ability to entitle me to attention, I stand before you in defense of a ruined female, whose character and life and all that is sacred and precious to her, are staked upon the issue of your decision.”