Of course, Minnie Wallace Walkup will be acquitted of the charge of poisoning her husband. . . . Her neck was made for strings of diamonds and pearls, and not for the hangman’s circlet of hemp.
—Atlanta Constitution (1885)
The first day of the case for the defense saw another attendance figure of seven hundred. One woman fainted. By 1:30 P.M., there was such a crowd in the courtroom, the hallways, and the stairs that the sheriff had to close the doors to the courthouse.1
Defense attorney William Scott’s opening statement lasted an hour and a half. In an age that valued oratory, long speeches were a given, expected by audiences who often rated the performances of speakers. Even so, one juror fell asleep during Scott’s speech.
Scott presented a David versus Goliath situation, with the big bad prosecution, paid for by Harry Hood’s money, pitted against a poor girl of sixteen who had only “one noble man” to help her “scrape up the evidence in her defense.” And he revealed a northerner’s perception of southern girls as maturing faster by saying that if she had been brought up in the North, she would “hardly have been said to have arrived at the age of full maturity and competent to take upon herself the duties and responsibilities of womanhood.”
The defense attorney demeaned James Walkup by saying that he fell in love with Minnie, “so far as a man of his calibre [could] understand . . . love,” and was “leading a low and disreputable life . . . cohabiting with lewd, debauched, and diseased women, both white and black” in dives in Kansas, New Orleans, and elsewhere. The defense theme of blaming the victim was evident in this opening statement. It would show that Walkup was the author of his own destruction and that he had had many similar attacks over the years, including the illness on the boat. These, Scott said, were all caused by his arsenic habit.
William Scott went on to relate the story of Walkup’s meeting Minnie, the courtship, and the trip to Emporia in July, which included Minnie’s five-year-old nephew Milton Findlay (“a fit member of a formidable conspiracy to take the life of a human being”).
James Walkup’s friend Eben Baldwin was called as a somewhat hostile witness on the first day of the defense’s case. Baldwin had testified for the prosecution and now was asked to relate Walkup’s drunkenness and debauchery while in New Orleans—which he did reluctantly. He retold the details of the illness his friend suffered on the boat going down and the prescriptions filled along the way, in St. Louis and in Cairo, Illinois. Baldwin didn’t know what the prescriptions were, which left it open to the defense to suggest that they were arsenic preparations for the treatment of syphilis.
A witness named Van Holmes testified about the bullet hole in Walkup’s room, saying that it was at a downward angle and the gun must have been held where a man’s head would be. This man was on the inquest jury and had told Scott about the bullet hole because he had seen it himself. It seems odd, from a forensic point of view, that nobody thought to plot the trajectory of the bullet in any scientific way.
In cross-examining this witness, Clinton Sterry gave him a revolver and asked him to point it at his own head and demonstrate how it would be held so that, in missing the head, it would make a hole three feet from the floor. Holmes was clearly uncomfortable pointing a gun, empty or not, at his head, and the audience enjoyed his discomfiture. The witness eventually gave it up, saying he didn’t know whether Walkup had been sitting or standing.
Sterry was a very aggressive and effective cross-examiner who pulled no punches. His out-of-court friend Scott labeled him a “human hyena thirsting for the blood of the young girl.”As for Minnie, she seems to have alternated between crying at times and at other times showing little interest in what was happening. But, as many later spoke of her impassivity, the teary parts must have been minimal. One of her attorneys, Thomas Fenlon, made what could have been a tactical error in bringing to court with him that day another client of his, Frankie Morris, and introducing her to Minnie. The two women chatted for a long time, and they probably had much to chat about.
Frances Morris, thirty, had been convicted of the arsenic poisoning of her mother, Nancy Poinsette, for $15,000 in insurance money. It was thought that Frankie was in cahoots with her stepfather (divorced from Mrs. Poinsette) and her own ex-husband to do away with her mother and split the proceeds. At the time of the Walkup case, she had just been granted a new trial, which would begin later in the fall, and, although she was now married for the second time, she was always known as Frankie Morris (her maiden name).2
Because of the notoriety of Frankie Morris and the similarity of the two cases, there was a lot of negative comment about these two women being introduced to each other. Morris came back to the trial at least one more day. (The Winfield [Kansas] Courier, disgusted with the bad press these two were bringing to the state, suggested that they join another pair of female murderers and get P. T. Barnum to buy them for his circus.)3
Bill Greer reported that one of the witnesses for the defense would be Lina Burnett, there in court that day to talk about her affair with James Walkup in Emporia and Topeka. However, Mrs. Burnett was never called to the stand, possibly because of her arrest in September on a charge of grand larceny in Shawnee County, which would have compromised her credibility.4
The testimony presented on day two of the defense case was so lurid and shocking to the Emporians of 1885 that the Daily Republican refused to print even a summary—let alone the promised verbatim transcript—of the testimony of three of the witnesses, as it was “too obscene and vulgar for publication in a decent newspaper.” One of the Emporia weeklies also declined to print it, saying that it didn’t belong in a family-oriented publication.
But, luckily for modern readers, the Daily News had no such scruples, although it left out a good deal too much. (“Smut!” was the large title, in bold, given to this issue.) It did not miss out on the opportunity to scold its competitor who, after taking the extra seventy-five cents from its patrons and already giving them short shrift on the transcript, now went back entirely on the deal by not providing them with so much as a summary. Why was the Republican being so prudish when there were at least 250 women and way too many schoolgirls who had heard the testimony in its scandalous entirety? “We give it all,” crowed the News, “and let the public discriminate if they want to.”
The day began with Dr. Charles Scott on the stand, the urologist trying to pass himself off as a “mind specialist.” He now identified Walkup’s companion, Mr. Morton, as one of the “obscene” witnesses who would follow him on the stand.
Sterry’s cross-examination could not elicit a definitive answer as to how attorney William Scott knew James Walkup had visited Dr. Scott. The physician said it might have been through a Mister or Colonel Butterfield (never identified, never produced by either side), to whom Dr. Scott had told the story a few days previously. Walkup and Morton stayed in the doctor’s office for an hour, with Walkup apparently being quite entertaining in the stories he told. Dr. Scott didn’t feel he could charge for the little bit of advice he had given (“stop taking arsenic”), so he never presented him with a bill. (Sterry sarcastically called him “a missionary.”)
The next witness, Nathaniel Benjamin Morton of Vidalia, Louisiana, was the first of the trio of smut purveyors. He said he was the editor of the Concordia Sentinel in Vidalia and had been involved in printing and publishing newspapers in Indiana, New Mexico, and Texas, among other places, and that he had known James Walkup for quite a while. Walkup frequently took arsenic for syphilis, and Morton had once taken a bottle of Fowler’s Solution from him in a Basin Street brothel in New Orleans.
Morton had been on the boat to New Orleans with Walkup in 1884 and said his sickness at that time was from the arsenic. But, although he claimed he also knew Eben Baldwin and had spoken with him on the boat, Baldwin said he had never seen the man before—on the boat or otherwise.
What Morton testified to that was so shocking was the incredible number of sprees he and Walkup went on together. These “jamborees,” as he euphemistically called them, always involved a lot of drinking and a lot of sex. They were together with two girls at the Dodge House at the big Cattlemen’s Convention in Dodge City in 1883. In Kansas City, when Walkup went to see Dr. Scott, the men stayed in a brothel called the Cable House. Whenever they were on one of these jamborees, Walkup used only his first and middle names (James Reeves), while Morton “threw out his banner” as Nathaniel Benjamin. (Apparently Morton had missed the part where Dr. Scott said that Walkup had told him his real name. Why give a fake name at the Cable House and his real name to the doctor?) And, although Morton said he was not a pimp (“procurer”), he performed this service for Walkup on occasion, sometimes even delivering women to him in Emporia.
The cross-examination of Morton lasted an hour and a half and provided much entertainment for the audience, who could barely be kept under control. Morton had a self-deprecating sense of humor that caused riotous outbreaks in the courtroom. He never got rattled, made no apologies for what he was, and had a “unique way of calling a spade a spade in the crowded court-room.” Unfortunately, no newspaper shared this hilarious performance, and no transcript exists today.
Who, exactly, was Nathaniel Morton, and how did he get involved in the case? In January 1883, two steamboats, the Laura Lee and the City of Greenville, collided on the Mississippi River near New Orleans. The Laura Lee was being sued for $190,000 in damages. A man calling himself Colonel Ben Morton contacted the owners of the Laura Lee, saying he was a newspaper publisher and had been on board the City of Greenville at the time of the collision. Morton claimed that he had been drinking with the pilot and that the pilot, drunk, had not been paying attention to his duties. Naturally, the Laura Lee people were thrilled to be able to add this boost to their defense, and gave Morton several thousand dollars to come up with other witnesses who had seen the pilot drunk.5
Time went by, however, and the “colonel” had not contacted the Laura Lee representatives. Detectives tracked him down to Henderson, Kentucky, and found letters in his possession that indicated he had been pulling the same scheme with the owners of the City of Greenville! He was passing himself off to the Greenville as a planter named Pike who had been on board the Laura Lee and could attest to the drunken state of the pilot at the time of the collision.
In September 1885, Morton went to Vidalia as an itinerant printer, calling himself J. G. Martin, and got a job at the Concordia Sentinel. He was hired on for a week while another employee was sick. He claimed to know all about James Walkup and his habits, but he was such a liar that nobody in Vidalia believed him. Morton took some Sentinel letterhead stationery and wrote to Minnie and to Dora Findlay, offering his services as a witness to the depravity of James Walkup if they would pay his traveling expenses to Emporia. After his testimony, Nathaniel Morton disappeared from town, even though he was recalled to the stand the next day.
The second member of the “carnival of filth” trio was Asa Smith of Melvern, Kansas. In 1883 he had seen the victim in a store and, at that time, Walkup “bragged about making a new conquest.” “Aren’t you afraid you’ll get caught?” Smith asked (this was code for catching a venereal disease). Walkup showed him a vial of something he was taking that would prevent his getting anything. Smith said Walkup was “always very boastful of his ‘mashes’ or conquests. [He] said he couldn’t stay away from women more than a day; he had to have it.”
The last member of the Smut Brothers was H. R. Fleetwood, an African American barber from Atchison who was suspected of being a pimp. He said he had seen Walkup at various times going into “negro houses of ill fame” in Atchison and Topeka. On cross-examination, he said he had gone into one of the houses with Walkup because Walkup asked him to.
It was no wonder, then, that Bill Greer would refer to this collective testimony as “a carnival of filth . . . of a character to satisfy those of the most prurient and depraved imaginations.” Reporters unanimously criticized the women for staying through it all, writing that it should have been “ladies’ day off” at the trial. And when they came back in even larger numbers the next day (no doubt hoping for more of the same), there was a universal journalistic outcry.
The Picayune, in reading Bill Greer’s report of that day’s testimony, published an editorial criticizing the women of Emporia for attending the trial: “No such scene could ever be made the occasion of criticism upon the ladies of New Orleans.” But then the Emporia Daily News rebutted that most of the women in court that day were from New Orleans!6
Tamer testimony on that second day included that of a man from Kansas City who supposedly witnessed Walkup and Morton together in April 1884, thereby providing further proof that the two were acquainted other than just Morton’s say-so.
An Emporia resident named Parkman showed how desperate the defense was to prove that Walkup had received the fatal dose of poison in Topeka, and not in Emporia at Minnie’s hand. Parkman said he had seen Walkup outside his house on Merchants Street on Saturday, August 15, at about 10:00 A.M. This was the same morning he had arrived from Topeka. Walkup supposedly told Parkman he had been sick in Topeka and all the way home, and that his “little wife” had rubbed his feet and put him to bed. That Monday, August 17, Parkman again saw the victim, who said he was still sick.
Unfortunately for poor Parkman, someone had seen Walkup going downtown at 7:30 A.M., and at 10:00—the time Parkman allegedly saw him—Walkup was meeting with Dwight Bill and some other men. On cross-examination, Sterry was merciless. He himself had talked with Parkman on the day Walkup died, and Parkman had said nothing about having seen the deceased on the previous Saturday. Moreover, he had told Sterry at that time that, on Monday the seventeenth, Walkup told him he felt as if he had an attack of paralysis on Saturday night. Parkman, backed into a corner, denied ever having said that.
Colonel Feighan had told Parkman on August 22, the day Walkup died, that he wished he could find some evidence that would make him believe Minnie was innocent, but Parkman never said a word about this Saturday conversation—which would have implicated someone in Topeka, rather than Minnie. Parkman claimed not to remember this, nor could he adequately explain why he had not appeared before the inquest jury.
Sterry gave Parkman the coup de grace by tricking him into saying he knew James Walkup was back from Topeka because he had seen it in the newspaper, and that’s why he went to his house that Saturday morning. But news of Walkup’s return wouldn’t have been in the newspaper on Saturday (Parkman would have read it on Sunday or Monday). As soon as he spotted his mistake, Parkman tried to withdraw his statement. “What did you make it for?” Sterry badgered. “You explain it,” countered the cornered witness, at which Lambert piped in, “I can’t and I don’t think you can. Was it a slip of the tongue?” Parkman stuck to his guns about seeing Walkup on Saturday as well as on Monday, but those guns were pretty well spiked by the time he left the stand.
A farmer named Miller from Hutchinson, Kansas, saw Walkup on a train in the spring of 1885 (which would have been after the victim met Minnie). James told him he’d been quite sick over the winter and was taking arsenic, which he thought had come close to killing him. The witness was not allowed to relate the reason Walkup gave him as to why he had to take the arsenic, which is strange, as all kinds of hearsay against the dead man had been allowed before this, including that from Morton on the same topic (that he was taking arsenic for syphilis).
Dr. John Filkins, formerly a doctor and presently a broker (he seemed surprised that the defense discovered he had once been a physician), said he saw James Walkup that Saturday, August 15, and they had a conversation about his having been sick in Topeka. Walkup had supposedly gone to Filkins a couple of years before that and complained of vomiting, pains, and a burning in his throat. While he was relating these symptoms in that earlier visit, he was eating a can of cove oysters, whereupon he threw them up and was sick for an hour.
Filkins was asked about the woman he treated for syphilis at Walkup’s request, and he admitted it “under protest.” He said Walkup was keeping the woman in a room over the doctor’s office. On cross-examination, Filkins admitted that Walkup had never said he was taking arsenic, nor did he think the man was suffering from poisoning when he saw him. He did not know the name of the woman he was asked to treat.
After that, there were some witnesses as to Walkup’s feeling ill, or saying so, when he got off the train in Emporia on his return from Topeka, and a doctor in Topeka who said that Walkup had consulted him—on Thursday, August 13—about his taking arsenic for syphilis for the past five or six years.
A deposition from the druggist in Cairo—the one who had filled Walkup’s prescriptions on his trip back from New Orleans—revealed that the drugs were not arsenic and were not for syphilis. (They were for “certain disorders,” but it was not stated what these were.)
Sheriff Jefferson Wilhite had to take the stand that day and admit to a serious breach of duty. Colonel Feighan and Isaac Lambert had told him to search the Walkup house for any evidence and turn it over to them. Wilhite now claimed he did not remember their telling him this. And he did find something: two bottles containing medicine, which he promptly turned over to . . . William Scott, Minnie’s defense attorney. Even without having been specifically told to turn evidence over to the prosecution, common sense would seem to dictate that he do so. Certainly, no self-respecting law enforcement officer would turn it over to the defense. Yet, this is what Sheriff Wilhite did, and both the Daily News and the Daily Republican—rivals in other respects—joined forces in encouraging Emporia citizens not to reelect him.
As it turned out, the bottles contained a prescription for a “common private disease” (the name of which is maddeningly omitted from records), but it was not syphilis. Still, as the newspapers pointed out, the bottles were the kind of evidence that could have been used to avoid an expensive trial if they had contained arsenic (which they did not), which would have supported the theory that Walkup was taking the poison on his own.
A Dr. A. N. Connaway of Toledo, Kansas, both a doctor and a farmer, started out the third day of the defense. He said he had known James Walkup since 1871 and had a conversation with him in the fall of 1880 regarding his relations with women and how he “kept up.” Walkup said he had a preparation of arsenic that helped him “keep up.”
But the defense had a problem with all these witnesses to Walkup’s arsenic use: Not one of them was from Emporia. It is to be assumed that the lawyers and their detectives had searched the poison registers and interviewed Walkup’s local associates regarding arsenic use, all in vain—until William Jay came forward with his outlandish story. Surely, he had heard Scott and the others bemoaning the lack of an Emporia witness and how essential it was to find one, so Jay found himself.
On the stand that third day, Minnie’s staunchest defender was energetic, feisty, contentious, ungrammatical, immensely entertaining, and almost certainly a perjurer. Asked what his business was, he spoke about the lumber and farming, but then said his “business” for the past two months had been “devoting [my time] to the cause of this innocent girl.” When the prosecution was successful in getting this remark stricken from the record, Jay was incensed. He supposed he was to tell the whole truth. “Is part of that to be suppressed?”
Jay’s story was that one day in July 1885, prior to Walkup’s marriage to Minnie, he encountered the victim on the street. The two went into Jay’s office to transact some business, whereupon Walkup complained of not feeling well and asked Jay for some water and a knife. After this, Jay turned away for a moment, and when he turned back, he saw some white powder on the knife. Walkup put the powder in the glass and then drank it down. When he gave the knife back to Jay, he cautioned him to wipe off the blade. Jay asked, “Why, it ain’t poison, is it?” “Yes, it’s arsenic,” Walkup told him. “What!” Jay supposedly exclaimed. “Arsenic,” Walkup repeated with a smile.
Now, there are several things wrong with this story right from the start. First, if the other arsenic witnesses are to be believed, the only forms of the poison seen in Walkup’s possession were pills and vials of liquid, never powder. Next, why would someone used to taking powders be without his own knife, if that’s what he used to measure the correct amount? And wouldn’t he use the knife to stir the powder into the water? Assuming he did as Jay said—just dumped the powder into the glass and drank it without stirring it—the polite thing to do, especially when dealing with a venerable citizen like Jay, the second most important man in Emporia after Major Hood, would be to wipe off the blade before returning it.
Sterry’s cross-examination immediately revealed the weakest flaw in William Jay’s oh-so-timely story: He had not come forward with it before this when he knew there was even talk of getting together a lynch mob for Minnie. He was at the inquest, and the chatter all around Emporia was about nothing other than this case and whether Minnie could have done it, yet Jay kept this important piece of evidence to himself. Sterry did not even try to conceal his disbelief:
Sterry: Then it suddenly popped into your mind that the matter of his taking poison in your presence had occurred?
Jay: Will you be kind enough to define the definition of the word “popped”? Sterry: Don’t you understand English?
Sterry reminded Jay that he, Jay, had gone to Colonel Feighan shortly before the beginning of trial to lay out the facts that showed Minnie to be innocent. Why had he not brought up this evidence of Walkup’s arsenic use at that time? Jay said that Scott had told him not to, but, Sterry pointed out, “Why? What harm could it do?”
Jay was then asked to take his knife and a bottle given to him by Sterry and put the same amount of white powder on the knife as he had seen Walkup use. When he had finished, affirming that this was the amount as he remembered it, Sterry informed him that it was four grains of arsenic—two more than the minimum lethal dose. Not even an arsenic eater would take that much at one time.
On redirect, William Jay concluded his testimony with the statement “Nothing will keep me from doing what I think is right,” and therein probably lies the rationale behind his obvious perjury. He was absolutely convinced that Minnie was innocent and undoubtedly thought his tale was in the nature of a “white lie” designed to prevent a greater wrong. Jay seems otherwise to have been an honorable man, and, as we shall see, his fellow citizens considered him to be such.
It must be said at this point that, while perjury is regarded as a serious offense today, it does not seem to have been looked on in the same light in the nineteenth century. In fact, a perusal of cases indicates that it happened fairly often when a witness judged a piece of testimony to be irrelevant to the guilt or innocence of someone, wanted to put a defendant behind bars or prevent that from happening, or even wanted to prevent embarrassment to oneself. The main goal seemed to be the conviction or acquittal of the accused, and the means of accomplishing this was not nearly as important. Hence, all was fair in love, war, and criminal trials.
Dr. H. W. Stover, forty-four, an Emporia physician, told of treating Walkup for gonorrhea twice, once in 1883 and again in May of 1885, just before his marriage to Minnie. He had also, at Walkup’s request, “doctored a lewd woman kept by him” for syphilis. He had never, however, doctored Walkup for syphilis—just gonorrhea. On cross-examination, Dr. Stover refused to divulge the name of the woman, insisting she was at that time married and now a respectable citizen. There followed a hot debate between the defense and the prosecution as to whether this question should be answered, but Stover continued to insist that he would not reveal the patient’s name, and Scott ultimately withdrew the question.
There is, of course, the chance that the defense staged this entire testimony, knowing that the prosecution would want the name of a possibly nonexistent patient. Withdrawing the question would do no harm, because the jury would already have heard the testimony and “you can’t unring a bell.”
The sole expert witness for the defense was twenty-six-year-old Dr. S. Emory Lanphear of Kansas City, whose direct examination was long, tiring, and boring for everyone in the courtroom, but whose cross-examination provided many humorous moments. Dr. Lanphear, who had been in practice for “four years, six months, and twenty-six days,” was also editing a medical journal. He spoke of the beneficial effects of arsenic, including as a booster of male sexual powers, citing many authorities for this. Although his testimony differed from that of the other physicians, it did not do so markedly in important areas, and he did no real harm to the state’s case.
Here is how he answered the ten hypothetical questions: Arsenic could only stay in the stomach for, at most, a few days before death. It is possible that the arsenic that killed the hypothetical victim on a Saturday was ingested a week or more before that (an answer that directly contradicted his previous one). The cause of death would be acute arsenic poisoning, with the fatal dose being taken just before the final attack. The victim as described in the hypothetical would have taken a total of three doses of poison, although it was possible that he had taken the fatal dose a week or more before his death. The fatal dose would have to have been very large for there to be four grains still remaining in the victim after death. He could have been given the fatal dose several days before death, even as long ago as the previous week. Lanphear agreed with all the other physicians that the antidote would have been useless once the victim’s system collapsed.
Dr. Lanphear, then, supported the prosecution’s medical witnesses in all answers except for the ones that supported the defense’s theory: questions 2, 6, and 9. He subscribed to the defense’s encystment theory, which would be expected, as they were paying him to testify, but he couched his answers in so many qualifications that he was mostly in line with what the prosecution’s doctors had said. For example, while he gave the defense its encystment with one hand, he took it away with the other when he said it could not happen with soluble arsenic, but only with powders (which no one other than William Jay had seen Walkup take). And when asked as to whether it would be possible that tertiary syphilis might not show up in an autopsy, Lanphear said it was entirely possible—if the examination were a superficial one (which, of course, the Walkup autopsy was not). On cross-examination, there were indications that Dr. Lanphear had legal troubles of his own regarding the selling of liquor from a drugstore he owned with some other people. Whatever the truth of this, he would definitely have run-ins with the law in the future (see chapter 17, page 206).
In giving the history of his pharmaceutical and medical careers, Dr. Lanphear could not recall when exactly he reached Hartford, Connecticut, where he began his practice, as “I was courting my wife and do not remember.” Asked to draw a human stomach, he asked Sterry if he should “draw it hungry or full.” When Dr. Lanphear spoke about the distention capabilities of the stomach and said it “is sometimes tolerant of considerable abuse,” Sterry—who was very large—commented, “I know that myself.”
After Sterry asked Dr. Lanphear if the inside of the stomach looked like tripe and he responded that he did not know what tripe was, the crowd’s raucous laughter was too much for Judge Graves, who had put up with an almost constant uproar throughout the cross-examination of this witness: “There is too much disposition to levity in this court,” he said sternly; “it must stop or I will cause the sheriff to eject those who are so full of laughter that they cannot control it in court.”
Certainly, Judge Graves was aware that some of the hilarity was caused by the lawyers themselves. Earlier, Sterry and Fenlon had begun bantering back and forth, and Graves had to step in and break it up: “Gentlemen, I don’t like this cross-firing between yourselves. Confine yourself to the business before you and let the case go on.”
The Emporia Daily News published a poem entitled “Experience of Ladies Attending the Walkup Trial” by a gallery-occupier named Naomi Nottingham. It began:
There is something fascinating in the storm
And “war of words” which in this case we hear;
So strange the court proceedings, and so new the legal form
That we stay to listen, ’spite of all we fear.
Plain language from the witnesses oft fills us with disgust,
And our faith in humankind is sorely tried;
And in view of testimony, we feel ’twould be but just
If James Reeves Walkup’s friend [presumably Morton]
had also died.7
The poem goes on to praise the wit and acumen of the attorneys on both sides, the quick thinking of Judge Graves in making decisions, and the “business-like stenographer . . . ladylike throughout [Miss Lane], though position, age and wealth give others [probably William Jay] an excuse for petulance and anger.” That there is sympathy for Minnie’s plight is obvious in the poem’s reference to “the quiet, graceful manners of the prisoner at the bar, her child-like blooming face and lovely eyes.”
The reporter for the Kansas City Times, however, did not think Minnie was very “child-like.” He had been watching her throughout, and his judgment was harsh: “At no time during the trial was she forgetful of her personal beauty. The self-conscious use of her charms, her want of regard or even respect for the memory of the dead and her obtrusive vanity were at all times painfully noticeable and evidence a heartlessness and shallowness of nature.”8
There was much excitement in the courtroom at the end of day three of the defense because everyone knew that the witnesses for the next day—Thursday, October 29—would be Mrs. Elizabeth Wallace and then Minnie herself. Since Minnie had not testified at the inquest and had been forbidden by her attorneys to talk about the case with anyone, there was much discussion as to what her explanations would be. And, after the voluminous testimony about James Walkup’s licentious habits, the sympathy of most of the inhabitants of Emporia was most definitely with her. In the words of one of them, “[He] ought to have been killed.”9