The fair defendant’s memory was a trifle at sea.
—Bill Greer, New Orleans Daily Picayune (1885)
As was to be expected, the court was more than filled to its capacity for the anticipated testimony of Minnie and her mother on Thursday, October 29. Spectators had begun showing up as early as 7:00 A.M. for the 9:00 session, and by 8:30 there was no more room—so people lined the hallways and the staircases just to be close to the action and maybe have a remote chance of being admitted at some point. Years later they would be able to say “I was there.”
A hush fell over the crowded courtroom as Elizabeth Wallace took the stand.1 Thomas Fenlon led her through her testimony, which she gave mostly in a loud, clear voice. However, she frequently sobbed, especially when the attorneys were wrangling about the admissibility of evidence. She gave some autobiographical background and presented the picture of a woman trying to do the best for her family.
Colonel Feighan did the cross-examination, and he tried to show that Mrs. Wallace was basically an unindicted coconspirator in the fleecing and murder of James Walkup by her daughter. “Have you any children?” she asked the county attorney at one point, trying to get him to sympathize with her desire to see her children well placed in life. But Feighan was having none of that: “Please leave all mention of my children out of this trial.”
Minnie’s mother claimed she had never seen Walkup intoxicated, but that can hardly have been true. His own friend Eben Baldwin said he was, and it can be assumed that Baldwin would have wanted to present him in the best possible light, so he would never have made that up. Moreover, an acknowledgment of Walkup’s drunken state on Mrs. Wallace’s part would have made it look as if she and Minnie had taken advantage of him while he was incapacitated, so she had a motive to lie about this.
When Feighan asked Elizabeth Wallace about Charlie Crushers and the other lowlifes, she became indignant. She said she had never associated with these people, and Minnie added a strong denial from the defense table. Gathering strength from her daughter’s contribution, Mrs. Wallace said that that information had been reported by a detective sent to New Orleans, and Feighan hotly replied that he had sent no detective to that city. Elizabeth said she could produce a witness sitting in that very courtroom who could testify to the fact that there had been one. (It is not clear, however, how this disproves the truth of the statements about Mrs. Wallace’s “business associates.”)
Both Feighan and Mrs. Wallace were probably not being entirely truthful in this exchange. The county may not have sent a detective to New Orleans, but two separate groups of people had gone down there to do research on the Wallaces before James Walkup had even married Minnie. And it is entirely possible that Feighan sent someone who was not, by vocation, a detective. As for Mrs. Wallace, her answers regarding the gamblers and “fast men” seemed to be focused on 222 Canal Street and not on any of the boardinghouses she had run prior to that. After this heated exchange, Elizabeth Wallace was excused amid a buzz of commentary in the audience. Now it was Minnie’s turn to tell her story.
When Minnie Walkup took the stand, it was clear to everyone in the courtroom that she was up to the task. She was calm, composed, and completely sure of herself. As she went through her direct testimony, she frequently turned to address the jury in explaining a point. She shed no tears and exhibited no nervousness. Her husky voice could not always be heard, and she was frequently admonished to speak up. She was on the stand for six hours that first day.2 Thomas Fenlon seemed to have no organizational plan of attack but was all over the board with his questions, darting here and there. Perhaps he hoped by this to confuse the prosecution and distract the attorneys from focusing on certain issues vulnerable to cross-examination.
Minnie painted a picture of herself as an innocent maiden unexpectedly charmed by this rough rustic from Kansas and had never before that thought of marriage. As for the propriety of her behavior, “I never walked on the principal street, Canal Street, with a gentleman in my life” (leaving open the possibility of walks on other streets). She said she told Walkup in May, when he made his third visit, that she would marry him in October, but the letter he sent to Edward Findlay from Emporia, telling him “Minnie has said ‘yes!’” put the lie to that: She had made sure he was rich before she married him.
As Fenlon was leading Minnie through the courtship and marriage, she suddenly stopped and asked, “May I tell you something?” “Yes, of course,” he replied. Whether the interruption were really spontaneous or orchestrated by the defense wasn’t evident. It is just as likely that Minnie thought her story about Walkup’s daughter would make it look as if Libbie had not always objected to her father’s marriage.
Minnie said that before they left for Cincinnati to get married, Libbie approached her and asked if she would get James to buy his daughter a diamond ring—without, however, letting him know that Libbie had put her up to it. When they were in Kansas City, on their way back to Emporia, Minnie suggested to James that he buy a ring for Libbie. “Did Libbie suggest that?” he asked. “No, it was my own idea,” Minnie told him. She then picked out a $60 ring (equivalent to more than $1,300 today), but Walkup said he wasn’t going to pay that much, so she found a $40 one instead ($924 today). Walkup wanted Minnie to give Libbie the ring, but she told him it would mean more to her if he presented it himself.
This is an interesting tale, if true—and we must assume it so, or at least the request and the purchase part of it, as Libbie never said it wasn’t. It illustrates her own fear of being displaced by Minnie in her father’s eyes and wanting some reassurance that he still loved her. It shows Minnie’s tendency to extravagance, as even the less expensive ring would have been the equivalent of a week’s pay for many people. And it shows Walkup’s suspicion of Libbie and her intentions (“Did she suggest that?”) and his reluctance to spend a lot of money on her. He doesn’t seem to want to buy the ring at all, except that his “little wife” is asking the favor. And he doesn’t want to give Libbie the ring as coming from him, possibly so as not to let her think he was acceding to her ploy for attention. He would have bought Minnie a $60 ring, though, if she had asked for it.
When James Walkup came home from Topeka early that Saturday morning, August 15, Minnie testified, he was quite sick with nausea and head pain and couldn’t even undress himself. He seemed to be paralyzed. Minnie pulled his boots off, falling against the window in the process, then rubbed his legs for him. She wanted to get a doctor, but he said that he knew what was wrong with him, that this happened to him every summer, and that he would pull out of it. He told her he had been taken ill in Topeka.
This scene had probably happened, all right, as Clinton Sterry would later assert in his closing argument—at least the illness part of it—but not on Saturday morning. It would have happened Saturday evening when the strychnine Minnie had given him was kicking in. As for Walkup’s statement that he knew what was wrong with him and would recover, by the time she gave her testimony, she had already heard Eben Baldwin’s similar conversation with the victim on the way to New Orleans. We know that the “drawing and stretching of the limbs”—the classic sign of strychnine poisoning—did not “happen to him every summer” because he told Dr. Jacobs that he had never in his life experienced those feelings.
Now, for the first time, Minnie told the story of the two powders (calomel and snowflake) and of putting them in the lookalike pieces of pink stationery. She denied telling anyone about a woman in New Orleans who had given her calomel, despite the fact that three people heard her say it. And, she claimed, she had taken both powders to druggists Kelly and Moore for analysis, not just one.
Minnie testified that one day as James Walkup lay recuperating in bed and wanting the oysters and pop, she was looking in the mirror and despairing of all the pimples on her face, eruptions she had never before experienced. “That doesn’t look very pretty, does it?” Walkup supposedly commented. “Do you know anything that would be good for it?” Minnie told him she thought arsenic might work, since it was good for the complexion. Although she had no idea whether it could cure acne, she wanted to give it a try.
Walkup asked if she was afraid to use it. “No,” she told him, “not if I use a certain quantity.” But she never said what quantity that was, and he—the great arsenic eater—never told her what might be a safe amount or made sure that she would use it correctly. Nor did he offer her any from his allegedly prodigious personal stash; he told her to buy some arsenic downtown when she went for the pop and gave her $2 for the purchases.
Prior to this scene, after her first purchase of arsenic at Kelly’s, Minnie had dumped it all in the chamber pot when she heard him coming up the stairs, because “gentlemen are always averse to their wives using cosmetics,” a statement that probably was a surprise to many a husband and wife sitting in the courtroom that day.
As for that Wells Fargo Express box that James Walkup got incensed about, here is Minnie’s explanation: She had brought some blankets of her mother’s from New Orleans and was shipping them back to her. However, Walkup told her he was planning to take her and Libbie to New Orleans in October, so the blankets could go then, and there was no need to ship them now. But why bring the blankets all the way to Emporia for just a couple of weeks (in the summer, at that), then send them back before the cold weather hit? And Minnie undoubtedly forgot that the Wells Fargo clerks testified that the box was to be shipped to St. Louis, not New Orleans (the addressee was never stated).
Over the course of her direct examination, Minnie denied many things already in evidence and claimed she did not remember many others:
• She did not remember that Kelly told her the powder could be strychnine or quinine; she only remembered the morphine possibility.
• She did not remember Kelly’s asking her if she was the one who had brought the powder in earlier.
• She did not remember Bates asking her what she wanted strychnine for.
• She denied telling Bates that she didn’t want to tell him the purpose. (How could she deny this when she didn’t even remember that he asked her what the purpose was?)
• She denied telling any druggist that she would not reveal the purpose.
• She denied telling Mary Moss to say she was going for butter, if asked by any of the family. (“Never! Never!”)
• She did not remember going to any drugstore on Friday or Saturday to get strychnine and not getting it.
• She did not remember asking Kelly not to tell anyone she had bought arsenic.
Minnie did, however, remember sitting up all night with her husband on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and that she didn’t go to bed at all, a statement that would later trip her up. And when Fenlon asked her if she had given Walkup either strychnine or arsenic, she forcefully replied, “So help me God, I did not.”
In 1947, sixty-two years after Minnie’s trial, John E. Reid, today considered by law enforcement professionals to be the top authority in interviewing and interrogation in criminal cases, developed a technique, named in his honor, to help police officers question suspects and determine when someone is being deceptive. One clue to deception is when a subject feels it necessary to add something to the answer to make it seem more believable, and invoking the deity is one of these. “So help me, God,” “As God is my witness,” and “This is the God’s honest truth” are examples. “A truthful subject will allow his denial to stand on its own,” Reid says. Hence, under this system, Minnie’s “So help me God” indicated deception, whereas if she were telling the truth, a simple “No, I did not” would have sufficed.3
The words most often uttered by Minnie in her grueling cross-examination by Clinton Sterry were “I don’t remember.” She said this regarding at least forty-seven separate topics (not counting the seven “I don’t remember”s on direct examination), and if the Daily Republican failed to print a complete transcript, then that number is higher. The word most frequently uttered by Sterry during this time was an incredulous “What?” He was a formidable questioner, but even he could not penetrate the wall of “I don’t remember”s and “No, I did not”s.4
Sterry began the session, at the tail end of the direct examination, by going right to Minnie’s statement about staying up all those nights with Walkup, even getting her to add Tuesday to the list. Then he showed that she was a liar because of the fire in Libbie’s room on Wednesday night (Libbie had said her father and Minnie were snoring when she went into their room to get the water). Minnie’s response to that was that she didn’t remember which night the fire was, but if Libbie had arrived home on Tuesday, and Minnie was supposedly up that night and every night following, her lack of knowledge did not disprove her lie. (The newspapers said she “seemed confused at the question.”)
After Minnie said she had not thought of marrying Walkup before October, Sterry produced her letter, dated June 2, in which she told him she might stay once she arrived in Emporia. Her response? “I don’t remember writing this letter.” He showed her the letter, she acknowledged that it was her handwriting, but “I don’t remember writing it.” So, of course, that prevented her from having to make up what she meant by it.
Possibly, by 1885, Clinton Sterry had figured out what John Reid would discover in the twentieth century about the invocation of the deity as indicative of deception. He asked her why she had used “So help me God,” and she replied, “My heart prompted me to.” “Is that the only way you can account for it?” “That is all,” she said.
Sterry asked questions designed to show how ridiculously suspect it was for a city girl of such a young age to entertain the possibility of marriage with a significantly older man from the country after such a short time of acquaintance. And, if Sterry had anticipated Reid, he had evidently not anticipated the equality of women:
Sterry: You knew what marriage meant, didn’t you? . . . You knew that it is the only real life to woman—did you not?
Minnie: Yes, sir.
Sterry: You knew that married life and motherhood was the one thing almost, that a young girl had in the future for herself?
Minnie: I don’t know that I regarded it that way.
Sterry seemed to have been under the misconception that Minnie had caused the shootout at the Mascot, not Dora. When he realized his mistake, he nonetheless tried to implicate a relationship between Minnie and the much older Judge Houston:
Sterry: [The Judge] was constantly visiting you during the time you were [in jail]?
Minnie: Yes, all my friends visited me in that hour; I had very few friends.
Sterry: Yes, that is very nice. Did I ask you anything about that?
Minnie: You did not.
Sterry: Then confine yourself to answers to my questions, if you please.
Minnie had testified on direct examination that before Walkup left New Orleans on that first visit, he had asked if they could write letters to each other. In fact, Eben Baldwin had said the same thing, adding that Walkup was quite drunk during this exchange. But now, when Sterry broached the subject, she claimed she couldn’t remember whether it was that visit or not! Sterry couldn’t believe it:
Sterry: Didn’t you testify in answer to Mr. Fenlon that you did arrange a correspondence with him on his first visit?
Minnie: I don’t remember.
Sterry: Your memory is not bad, is it?
Minnie: No, not generally.
Sterry: You can’t even recollect back during this examination of yourself as to whether you testified that it was on Mr. Walkup’s first visit that you arranged to carry on a correspondence with him, is that correct?
Minnie: I don’t know. I think it was, though.
Minnie tripped herself up by saying that she wanted to write to Walkup because she couldn’t make up her mind whether to marry him, even though she’d only seen him a few times in her life, then telling Sterry that she wasn’t very serious about the whole thing. Walkup hadn’t made any promises about caring for her family until his second visit, so her supposed motive of marrying him to make that happen couldn’t possibly have existed on this first visit. So, Sterry wondered, what other motive could she have? Her answers were vague and not responsive.
Further, Minnie said she had absolutely no idea of getting married before October, and she was adamant about this. Yet when Sterry asked her (prior to showing her the letter she had written to Walkup) if she had suggested to Walkup that she might do that, she said, “I don’t remember.” She must have suspected he would produce that letter, so she had to back down from her definitive stance.
When Sterry got to the papers of calomel and snowflake, and Minnie had gone through a litany of “I don’t remember”s, she obviously felt she needed a time out. Claiming she was chilly and needed her shawl, she was allowed to go to her cell, adjacent to the courtroom, accompanied by Deputy Wooster.
On direct examination, Minnie had said she took both powders in for analysis, but now she told Sterry that she wasn’t certain whether she had taken them both in:
Sterry: Didn’t you state yesterday that you took them both? Minnie: I don’t remember.
Sterry: Did you take them both to Dr. Moore’s drug store?
Minnie: I don’t remember.
Sterry: You had no difficulty in answering the questions asked by Mr. Fenlon, had you?
Minnie: I don’t know about that, either.
Sterry: You don’t know about that; what would be your best guess as to whether you took them both to this place or not?
Minnie: I don’t remember. I don’t know that I care to guess at it.
Sterry went on to point out that there would have been no need to take both powders in: If she knew she had calomel and snowflake, she would only have to have one analyzed to know what the other was. Yet, when Kelly said it was morphine, quinine, or strychnine, Minnie never said, “It can’t be any of those. It’s either calomel or snowflake.” And when Moore told her it was quinine, she never acted surprised, never said, “That’s odd. I had only calomel and snowflake.”
Another of Minnie’s preposterous statements was that although she had known that both strychnine and arsenic were poisons, she had no idea they were deadly poisons. She had to say this, ridiculous as it sounds, because she had to have a reason why those purchases and the thing about signing the registers were not very memorable. For most people, purchasing poison and having to sign the register would be remarkable events, but Minnie was in the middle of an “I don’t remember” litany, and it wasn’t terribly believable.
Sterry: Did you suppose a person could take it without killing him, in a large quantity like a teaspoonful?
Minnie: I don’t know that I ever thought about it.
Asked about the size of the strychnine bottle she got from Bates, Minnie said she didn’t remember. Was it large? Was it small? How was it in relation to the size of the bottle shown to her (the one found in Libbie’s room)? “I don’t remember.” Sterry must have been ready to tear his hair out at this point: “Haven’t you memory sufficient to even form a judgment?”
Minnie told Sterry that she had unpacked her trunk when she got to Emporia, saw the dress with the stain on it, and decided right then that she would try the strychnine-and-urine recipe. Yet, a few minutes after that, she told him she never took the dress out of the trunk at all!
Sterry: What? . . . Didn’t you tell me a little while ago that you unpacked your trunk after you got back from your marriage and then took it out?
Minnie: I don’t remember. I suppose so.
Sterry: What?
Minnie: I don’t remember.
Sterry: You don’t remember whether you unpacked the trunk after you got home?
Minnie: I remember unpacking my trunk . . . I don’t remember whether I took out this particular dress or not.
Sterry: You had taken it out on that day upon which you got this strychnine. Is that correct?
Minnie: I don’t remember that.
Sterry: Didn’t you just now say that you had taken it out that day?
Minnie: I don’t remember.
Sterry: What?
Minnie: I don’t know.
Sterry pressed her as to why she suddenly abandoned the quest for strychnine and switched to arsenic. Well, they were for different purposes, she told him blandly. Yes, of course, they were, but why not continue in the quest for the strychnine? Didn’t she want it just as badly on Sunday afternoon, when she went downtown for the arsenic, as she had wanted it in the morning when she sent Mary Moss down to Bates for more? “I don’t remember.”
Minnie showed her cunning when Sterry began asking about the pimples on her face, which she gave as the reason for wanting the arsenic (although she had told Dr. Jacobs and the men in the parlor that she wanted it to change her complexion). She was able to anticipate where the attorney was going with his questions:
Sterry: How long had [the pimples] been there?
Minnie: I don’t remember how long. After I came they commenced on my face.
Sterry: So that anybody could see them sitting off from you as far as I am sitting?
Minnie: Yes. I don’t remember whether Mrs. Sommers saw them or not.
Sterry: I did not say anything about Mrs. Sommers, did I? What made you suggest that?
Minnie: Why, I thought of something that suggested it to me.
Sterry: You were afraid I was going to ask you about Mrs. Sommers.
Minnie: No, I was afraid of nothing of the kind.
Questioned about the “friend in New Orleans” who used arsenic all the time, Minnie must have realized that it was not believable that she didn’t know the proper proportions and had not asked, so she threw out vague answers about a “pinch” added to a bottle of undetermined size. When Sterry asked her again how much arsenic she was supposed to use, she said it was a teaspoonful—thereby proving, if there was any doubt, that there was no friend in New Orleans who used arsenic: One-quarter teaspoonful of arsenic is approximately twenty grains. Two grains is considered a lethal dose. Minnie’s imaginary friend would have her take eighty grains at one time to clear up her complexion.
Sterry: When you were at the drug store, did it occur to you to make any inquiries as to whether it was poison or not?
Minnie: No, it did not.
Sterry: Did it occur to you to make any inquiries as to how a person ought to use it and use it safely?
Minnie: I think not.
Minnie said that it had been so long she couldn’t remember which days her husband was sick, which days he was well, and in what order many of the events took place. Sterry did not hide his disdain at a wife who claimed she had come to love her husband, yet could not keep in her mind the occurrences of the last week of his life. “Why can’t you recollect that just as clearly as you can recollect all of his symptoms the day that he got home from Topeka?” he asked sarcastically.
As Minnie had said during her direct examination that Walkup told her he knew what was wrong with him when he was so sick coming home from Topeka, she repeated that when Sterry asked about it.
Sterry: Did he tell the physician he knew what was the matter with him?
Minnie: I don’t remember hearing him.
Sterry: Did you tell the doctor . . . that Mr. Walkup had told you he knew what was the matter with him?”
Minnie: No, I don’t remember that I did.
Reading the transcript of this cross-examination, the modern reader wishes that Sterry had followed through with some of Minnie’s obvious inconsistencies instead of abandoning one issue and moving on to another. However, one can also sense what must have been a high level of frustration for him in the absolute stubbornness of this witness, in the face of all reason, to deny everything that incriminated her, to plead ignorance every time she got cornered, and to claim she could not even remember her own testimony given minutes or hours before. Sterry was right to push her as hard as he did, and it was impossible for him to rein in his disdain, his sarcasm, and his incredulity. Yet, to the audience, he came across—as one defense attorney would later say—as a “bar room bully.”
Sterry was the big, bad prosecutor attacking the poor, defenseless little girl. One senses in the next day’s newspaper reports the growing admiration and sympathy for Minnie. “Nerve!” shouted one headline. “The little lady [is] a brick!” And what spunk she had when she stuck up for her mother during Elizabeth Wallace’s cross-examination. “Mrs. Walkup is the bravest of the brave. Is there another?” How many sixteen-year-olds could have stood up to that? Apparently, the spectators were more impressed with how Minnie handled herself, without tears, without breaking down, than with the myriad contradictions, nonsensical statements, and “I don’t remember”s.
Even our New Orleans friend Bill Greer was impressed: “Her story was told with the accent of truth itself, and with all possible simplicity and innocence.” Some of the prosecution attorneys told Greer that Minnie was “an exceptionally good witness.”
The growing sympathy for Minnie can be seen in the lyrics of a song sung everywhere in Emporia at this time:
Oh, the judge and the jury
And the lawyers in a fury
Are walking up the court house stairs;
For Mr. Walkup he got sick,
Because he took some arsenic,
And now he’s climbing up the golden stairs.
Chorus:
Don’t you hear the bailiff calling,
He calls so mournfully,
Don’t you hear them lawyers pleading,
Walking up the court house stairs.
’Cause she couldn’t get the bail,
Walking up the court house stairs.
But when they put her on the stand
She played a very cunning hand,
Walking up the court house stairs.
Mr. Jay is her guardian,
And he’s very often seen
Walking up the court house stairs;
He hasn’t much to say
But he’s thinking every day
’Bout taking Minnie down the court house stairs.5
It seems that everyone was “hoodooed” by the girl from New Orleans.
The only testimony left was in the form of rebuttal and surrebuttal. Since Minnie said she had told Julia Sommers and Sallie McKinney she wanted the strychnine for a dress, not underpants, as they had testified, they came back to say that they were standing together when Minnie told them she wanted the poison for menstrual stains on underwear. Eben Baldwin denied ever seeing Nat Morton on the boat to New Orleans, and Dr. Charles Gardiner testified that arsenic would not make someone’s urine smell bad.6
The defense came back with a New Orleans man named William Anderson, who claimed to know Nat Morton and said Morton also used the name G. W. Rigley, a name found in the Dodge House register during the Cattlemen’s Convention in April 1884 and supposedly in Morton’s handwriting. But Morton had never said he used this name, and he was nowhere to be found, so Feighan objected to this testimony: “This is the first time the name Rigley has wriggled into the case.”
Anderson said he was a friend of the Wallace family and worked for a company that sold school furniture and other commission items. The name of the business was Ginerally & Company, so Sterry got a big laugh by asking, “Gineral what?”
Another man said that the name “T. H. Butler” of La Junta, Colorado, found in the Dodge House register at that same time, was in James Walkup’s handwriting. But it turned out that Butler was known in Emporia, and even Clinton Sterry knew who he was: a claims adjuster for the AT&SF Railroad.
S. S. Warren, a former mayor of Emporia, was staying at the Dodge House for the 1884 Cattlemen’s Convention. He never saw James Walkup at either the hotel or the convention. The secretary of the convention testified that it had begun on April 2 and closed April 4, and Emporia city council records showed that Walkup was there for the April 1 elections and at the council meetings on April 4 and April 7—so it was highly unlikely that he was on a “jamboree” with Nat Morton and a couple of girls in Dodge City at that time.
At last, on Saturday, October 31, testimony in the Walkup case came to a close. It had taken just two weeks.