Is it a crime to dance upon the newly made grave of one suddenly stricken to the earth?
—Emporia Daily News (1885)
That Sunday, when a reporter visited Minnie in her cell, she complained of a headache and was miffed that a couple of jurors had fallen asleep every afternoon of the defense’s case. The reporter told her they were probably just closing their eyes because the sun was shining on them, but Minnie said they were snoring.1
The Kansas City Times reported that witness William Anderson of New Orleans was going to propose to Minnie if she were acquitted, but the correspondent apparently made this up out of whole cloth. Anderson, a married man with two children, was so irate he went out looking for the man who had printed this.2
Minnie’s lack of knowledge as to how much arsenic to use in clearing her complexion almost led to the deaths of two copycats who wanted to make themselves beautiful. The young women from Florence, Kansas, got arsenic from their local druggist and took too much because the correct dosage was never given in the newspaper reports. They got to a doctor in time and recovered.3
Bill Greer researched Kansas law to find out what would happen if Minnie were convicted. A conviction would mean an automatic death sentence, but hanging couldn’t take place for at least a year. After the year was up, the governor could review the conviction and issue an order for execution. However, most governors never issued these orders, and so there were few executions in Kansas. Some people felt this unwillingness to hang convicted criminals was tantamount to encouraging lynch law, such as what had happened in the recent Vinegar case.4
Sis Vinegar was a fourteen-year-old black prostitute in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1882. One of her clients was a rich white farmer, and Sis conspired with two men to rob and kill him. She and the two men were taken to jail, along with Sis’s innocent father, and the three men were eventually lynched by an angry mob of white men as the sheriff stood by and watched.5
Unlike in the twenty-first century’s justice system, in 1885 Kansas the judge issued jury instructions before the attorneys gave their closing arguments.6 Modern jury instructions are a combination of boilerplate models and those specially crafted by each side to fit the particular circumstances of the case. These special instructions are argued over in chambers, with the final decision as to wording and inclusion made by the judge. In 1885, however, it would seem that jury instructions were solely the province of the trial judge.
In that case, then, it is quite clear that Judge Charles Graves was in favor of an acquittal for Minnie. It is hard to imagine the prosecution consenting to some of them if objections had been allowed. In a nutshell, here are the instructions he gave Minnie’s jury:
1. Poison is always first-degree murder.
2. “Malice” doesn’t mean hatred, but a wicked condition of mind.
3. You must decide which witnesses are credible.
4. Don’t be afraid of circumstantial evidence, but if there’s another reasonable cause for Walkup’s death, you must acquit.
5. The facts to be established beyond a reasonable doubt are these:
a. James Reeves Walkup died from poison.
b. The poison was administered by the defendant.
c. The defendant intended to take Walkup’s life.
d. The victim died from the effects of poison the defendant gave him for the purpose of killing him.
6. Proof of motive is not necessary. Regarding extravagant purchases at Newman’s, keep in mind that it is a husband’s duty to provide for his wife and that includes the necessaries reflective of his and her stations in life. If the defendant thought her purchases were necessary for that, then they were justified.
7. If you think Walkup took arsenic at any time before his death, you must acquit. If you think someone else gave him arsenic, you must acquit. You can also consider the defendant’s age and experience.
These last two instructions were definitely pro-defense and practically directed the jury to issue a verdict of “not guilty.”
Apparently, Judge Graves gave these instructions to the Daily Republican in advance for its verbatim transcript, because the reporter in charge immediately sent them out to the other newspapers in Emporia. When the judge discovered that his instructions had been printed in the newspapers before he had read them to the jury, he was furious and banned the reporter from all further proceedings in the case. On top of that, the hapless journalist was promptly fired by the Republican for scooping his own paper!7
Spectators were just as plentiful for the oratorical showmanship of the closing arguments as they had been for the testimony.8 Later, they would evaluate the lawyers among themselves. If they could, they would have held up scoring placards after each argument.
The usual system was that the prosecution would begin and end the arguments, in this case, Clinton Sterry and Colonel John Feighan. In between would be defense attorneys and others on the prosecution team. So that the orators could get into their stride without restriction, the counsel tables were removed from the front of the courtroom.
Somewhere in here, two things happened to prevent the Emporia Daily Republican from giving readers the complete transcript of the arguments: First, there was a stacking-up effect: Things were happening so fast that the transcript of some of the speeches often had to be completed the next day. For example, Sterry spoke for three and a half hours that first day, but the newspaper also wanted to give readers the benefit of reading what the other orators had to say, so it carried the conclusion of his argument over to the next day. Ultimately, the Republican was still presenting closing arguments in the newspaper when the jury had retired to deliberate. The second event was the illness of the court stenographer, Miss Lane, no doubt incredibly worn out by the end of the trial. There were no reports of some of the lawyers’ speeches, and the transcripts of others’ were incomplete. Eventually, the Republican just gave up on it and declared that it had fulfilled its promise of a verbatim transcript by doing so for the witness testimony.
Sterry argued the facts regarding the presence of poison in Walkup’s system at the exact times following Minnie’s purchases downtown, but most of his speech was directed at the inappropriateness of her behavior: her encouraging of “this old man,” her cool composure on the stand, and her failure to shed a tear as her husband lay dying and after his death. Why didn’t she produce the letters Walkup had written her? She had all those he had sent to her brother-in-law, Edward Findlay, because they showed her in a good light. So it seems the other letters must have somehow hurt her case or she would have made sure they were put into evidence.
Also, Sterry said that Minnie had to keep saying “I don’t remember” because otherwise she would have had to contradict all those other witnesses (especially the druggists) who had no reason to lie, as she did. And then Sterry made a gross error: He postulated that Minnie switched from strychnine to arsenic because she knew that Walkup took arsenic. Since Judge Graves’s instructions had already been given to the jury, and one of these was that an acquittal was automatic if it were determined that Walkup had ever taken arsenic before his death, this admission could have guaranteed a victory for Minnie.
Young defense attorney George Dodds of Mississippi followed Sterry and provided what Bill Greer characterized as “one hour of Southern eloquence” (although it was later reported that Dodds had spoken for two hours). The lawyer called Sterry a “bar room bully” and said Sterry was “not a gentleman,” the ultimate southern insult. Harry Hood had hired Sterry, and so he was out for “private vengeance.” Dodds’s argument was very poetic and somewhat melodramatic (“this one lonely little soul transplanted from her Southern home”), with very little arguing of the facts of the case.
Dodds insinuated that either Libbie Walkup or Mary Moss could have poisoned James Walkup, but it is hard to see what their motives would have been. If either was angry at being supplanted by Minnie, it would seem more logical to get rid of her rather than the object of their affection. Poison is not a heat-of-passion instrument of murder. While someone could be so angry at a loved one that she could shoot or stab him, it takes cold calculation to set up a poisoning.
Isaac Lambert decried the smearing of a good man’s name by the defense, a man against whom nobody had had a bad thing to say for seventeen years. Now his family would have to bear that burden for the rest of their lives. The defense seemed to be focusing on returning this young defendant to her family rather than presenting any evidence to show she hadn’t poisoned Walkup. What about the victim’s family? Even though Libbie might not be as beautiful as Minnie, didn’t she deserve sympathy, too? Lambert didn’t mince words about “old man Jay,” saying he had told a lie “from beginning to end.” Calling him “our enthusiastic friend,” he pointed out that Jay was the only one out of an entire county of 20,000 people to see Walkup take arsenic. Defense attorneys could not come up with a single druggist anywhere who had sold Walkup arsenic in any form, not even the fairly ubiquitous Fowler’s Solution.
Judge J. Jay Buck for the prosecution gave a closing argument so mild that it was considered more helpful to Minnie than to the state. In fact, after he concluded, Minnie went to him, shook his hand, and thanked him! The newspapers commented that there had been two speeches for the defense and one for the prosecution that day, even though two prosecutors and one defense attorney had spoken.
Thomas Fenlon for the defense showed his strategic savvy when he began his argument, then feigned illness a few minutes into it. He realized that he would complete his speech at the close of the court session, then Feighan would begin the final prosecution argument the next day. Overnight, the jurors would have forgotten what Fenlon had said, and he wanted them to have his points fresh in their minds when they began their deliberations. When he showed up the next day, he was in perfect health.
Prosecution attorneys were unanimous in their denunciation of the defense witnesses regarding Walkup’s arsenic use and debauchery as liars—with the possible exception of William Jay, who had obviously had a momentary lapse of reason. Some characterized him as crazy, while Feighan maintained that Jay was an honest man who had deluded himself into believing his own story about the arsenic powder on Walkup’s knife, a story desperately needed by the defense, though merely a hallucination on his part. At that point, Jay interrupted with, “Is that in evidence?” “No,” Feighan told him, “but it’s a pretty good theory.”
At the conclusion of the seemingly unending closing arguments, the jurors were taken to the Park Place Hotel for dinner, then brought back to the courthouse for deliberation.9 Some enterprising spectators discovered that the left gallery had a crack in the floor, directly over the jury room. The spies began issuing reports that the first vote was 10–2 for acquittal. But then the bailiff locked the door that led to the gallery.
All over town, the only thing on people’s lips was speculation about the verdict. And Emporia was not alone in this. The Boston Daily Globe declared in its November 16 edition, “There has been as much interest taken in her trial as was ever manifested in a presidential election.”
More rumors surfaced that the 10–2 vote was inaccurate, and that it was actually 6–6. In the afternoon, the vote supposedly changed to 7–5 for acquittal. William Jay was, once again, flitting about nervously. Cruel pranksters would tell him that the jury was coming back with a guilty verdict, upon which poor Jay was sent into a veritable frenzy. They succeeded in this three times. While the jury was still out, someone estimated the cost of the trial to Lyon County to that point, and came up with $4,000 (over $92,000 today).
Minnie was asked about her post-trial plans, should she be acquitted, and she disingenuously claimed that she had not even thought about it. “It’s time enough to think about that when the verdict is read,” added her mother. When the reporter told her the current rumor was 9–3 in her favor, Minnie pouted, “I think there were two or three of those jurors who slept yesterday until after Mr. Feighan had got started to talking, and then just waking up in time to hear him make me out a perfect fiend, and they must be the ones who are holding out.”
Even if Minnie wasn’t making any plans for herself, plenty of men wanted to make some for her. One hundred of them in Cottonwood Falls said they would post her bond for her in any amount if she had to have a new trial. “Cinnamon Pete,” a nearly illiterate cowboy in Dodge City (the supposed scene of some of James Walkup’s sprees with Nat Morton), communicated the admiration he and his colleagues felt for Minnie:
Deare Madam,
All ov the boyes is betting on you coming off cleer. Your a pritty little darlen with more sand [guts] than that snoozer ov a law sharp [presumably Sterry]. Doant you giv in and if you want help let us know.
Cinnamon Pete [amazingly, he could spell “cinnamon,” but not “of,” so perhaps this was a hoax]10
At last, fifty-two hours later, it was announced that the jury had reached a verdict. And so, at 3:50 P.M. on Friday, November 6, the judge, the lawyers, the jury, the spectators, and Minnie trooped back to their places in the Lyon County courthouse.
Citizens in 1885 obviously did not consider the jury deliberation process as sacrosanct as we do today.11 Leakages of voting results in a modern-day case would be grounds for a mistrial. But people in the Gilded Age seemed to think of it as a game of Capture the Flag between themselves and the bailiff in charge of the jury. Hence, when Sheriff Jefferson Wilhite went to collect Minnie for the announcing of the verdict, a full ten minutes before it was read in court, he told her it was “not guilty.” “My God! Is that so?” she responded, and her eyes filled with tears. But those tears never fell, and Elizabeth Wallace seemed much more overcome than her daughter.
When Minnie came into the courtroom, she already knew what the verdict was, and she was smiling and happy. At the official announcement of “not guilty,” a loud shout erupted from the crowd, most of whom had thought perhaps it would be a hung jury, necessitating another trial. Out on the street, special edition newspapers were snatched up quickly. Bill Greer spoke with Kansas senator Preston B. Plumb, just in from Washington, who said that, in his travels, most of the people he encountered believed that Minnie would be acquitted, so the verdict would not be a big surprise to the rest of the country.
In the courtroom, Minnie shook hands with the judge and all the jurors, but it was Mrs. Wallace who was delirious with joy. She hugged and kissed Mr. Jay, thanked the jurors, then threw herself down on her knees before Judge Graves: “God bless you, Judge, God bless you! You have saved my child!”
Feighan, a good sport, thanked the jurors and told them they had done a good job even though he didn’t agree with their verdict. William Scott declared that he would go home and get some well-deserved sleep.
The jurors revealed some inside information about the deliberations, who voted for what and when. When they first began, two of them nearly ended up in a fistfight because one of them said that “Jesus Christ could not make him believe that Mrs. Walkup was not twenty-five years old.” Another juror declared, “It ain’t so bad, after all. We got $2 a day and board, a good place to sleep, and plenty to eat and drink.” And a third revealed, “If I had voted for that little girl’s conviction, her face would haunt me to my dying day.”
What was it that convinced the jury of Minnie’s innocence? As it turned out, they weren’t really all that sure she was innocent. But they were angry at the prosecution’s depiction of William Jay, one of their most important citizens, as either crazy or a liar. They didn’t really believe all those out-of-town witnesses, specifically Dr. Scott and Nat Morton, because they didn’t know them. But they did know Jay, and they even took a separate vote as to his arsenic-on-the-knife story: It was evenly divided, 6–6.
In the end, the jurors thought that Walkup had probably ingested arsenic somewhere at some time, but they seem to have used that as an excuse to find Minnie not guilty (“I won’t say that we believed the girl innocent, but there was room for doubt”). Their real reasoning appears to have been their reluctance to submit her to the death penalty and wanting to spare the county the expense of another trial or a lengthy appeals process.
Before we leave the trial completely, it might be beneficial to wrap up what is known and what can be reasonably assumed about the death of James Reeves Walkup:
1. Walkup was not an arsenic eater.
a. No arsenic was found in the home.
b. Not even an arsenic eater would have taken such a large dose (twenty grains).
c. He would have told Dr. Jacobs he had taken arsenic so he could be saved.
d. He would have given some to Minnie for her pimples (assuming she had any).
e. No one could be found who had sold arsenic to him in any form.
f. There were none of the signs of chronic arsenic use in his organs.
2. Even if Walkup were an arsenic eater, Minnie did not know it.
a. She would have brought this up immediately when arsenic poisoning was suspected.
b. She would have used this as her “reason for purchase” in the poison register. (“My husband sent me to buy it for him.”)
c. She would have told the investigators this was her purpose in getting arsenic, even if it were not true.
d. She would have asked him for some if she really had those pimples.
e. She never brought up the issue of Walkup’s arsenic eating until after the September 5 newspaper article containing the interview with Dr. Scott in Kansas City.
3. Minnie poisoned James Walkup.
a. She bought strychnine on Thursday when her husband was in Topeka, and the very same day he returned home he got strychnine poisoning.
b. There was no other strychnine in the Walkup house except for the empty bottle from the Bates drugstore, where she had purchased the poison.
c. Not even an arsenic eater would take strychnine for any purpose.
d. She bought arsenic on Sunday, and he got arsenic poisoning on Tuesday.
e. She did not poison him on Sunday or Monday, because Reverend Snodgrass was coming on Monday to hear the fake suicide story.
f. She bought arsenic on Thursday, and he got arsenic poisoning that night.
g. Nobody else gave him his food or medicine during this time except Minnie.
h. By Friday noon, when she was kept out of the sickroom, Walkup was already beyond the point of being saved, so nobody else could have been responsible for poisoning him after that time.
i. Nobody else in the household had made any purchases of poison.
4. Elizabeth Wallace was not involved in a conspiracy to murder James Walkup.
a. Her shock was so great at his death that she became sick from it.
b. At first, she doubted that the story was true.
c. She wanted her daughter to marry Walkup to avoid the clutches of the lustful and controlling Judge Houston. Murdering James Walkup would not promote this.
d. Her grief over her daughter’s situation was so profound that she could not possibly have faked it.
5. Walkup did not have syphilis.
a. He had no mercury in his body, which was traditionally used to treat syphilis in the nineteenth century.
b. At autopsy, there were no signs of any of the stages of syphilis.
c. None of the medicines belonging to him were for the cure of syphilis.
6. Walkup liked sex and alcohol.
a. Eben Baldwin, a reliable witness, testified to both.
b. Two doctors, probably reliable, testified to both.
c. His affair with Lina Burnett seems to have been common knowledge.
d. It is probable that he did have gonorrhea.
Minnie probably had several motives in poisoning her husband. If she had married him for his money, she would have—in the ordinary course of things—been content to spend that money in the years to come. What could have happened in the space of a month that made her want to end that marriage immediately? Quite possibly she was somewhat overwhelmed by his enormous sexual appetite. Also, if it is true that Walkup had gonorrhea as late as May 1885, two months before their marriage, she might have discovered this and would not have wanted to subject herself to venereal disease.
Also, Minnie may have found that, once they were married, James Walkup was not quite so pliable and eager to please her as he had been in his New Orleans visits. And then her “consolation prize,” the unlimited shopping trips, had been cut off and in a most humiliating way. This might have been a lifestyle she was not ready to take on for the duration. This was not what she had signed up for.
Minnie probably made the decision to get rid of her husband around the time of the Newman’s incident, when he refused to allow the box to be sent to St. Louis. However, there are two indications that she may have preplanned this: the alleged purchase of strychnine in Cincinnati (where she was actually given quinine) and her buying of extra items at Newman’s when she found out they would not appear on her husband’s bill until September—if she knew he would not be alive to see that month.
William Jay had intended to give Minnie a “blowout,” as he called it, replete with brass band, music, and dancing.12 Instead, he had to content himself with a quickly cobbled get-together that began almost immediately after the verdict was given and Minnie was released from custody. His intentions were good, but the party was ill-advised. Just as the jurors resented prosecution attorneys calling Jay a crazy liar, so, too, did the citizenry resent what they saw as “dancing on Walkup’s grave.” It was unseemly on the part of William Jay, but even more so on that of the Widow Walkup.
Minnie provided the entertainment at the party, hobnobbing with the guests and playing the piano. Mary Jay teased her about having kissed attorney William Scott and two of the jurors (the latter were elderly men who pleaded for a kiss), and Minnie demurely acknowledged that she had but said, “I didn’t do it in the courtroom.” Elizabeth Wallace, looking as if a great burden had been taken from her shoulders, proudly read the fifty congratulatory telegrams sent to her daughter. And Minnie insisted that she would not seek a single penny of James Walkup’s fortune, something she had initially said in the courtroom at her acquittal. When a newspaper reporter at the party commented that he probably wouldn’t be seeing her again, Minnie was disappointed: “Oh, I hope the newspapers are not going to drop me so soon as all that.”
The next day, Minnie and the Jays (father and daughter) drove downtown while Minnie, dressed up in a “blue serge dress with scarlet trimmings and a white veil over her small round hat” (no widow’s weeds for her), called on some of the people who had remained loyal to her and had her portrait taken at Delia Rich’s studio. She ordered two dozen for herself and told Delia she could make copies available for anyone who wanted them. When people stared at her, she stared right back.
None of this sat well with the people of Emporia or, for that matter, the state of Kansas. They had thought Minnie’s retirement from public life, not this tasteless, brazen display, would be more proper. She was accused of being “on a picnic” since the trial, which no “modest, sensitive woman” would have done: “A great deal has been said about her nerve, but to anyone who has studied her character, another name suggests itself.”
Minnie’s post-trial behavior even led people to believe that she was, in fact, guilty of murdering her husband. An editorial in the Kansas City Times presented a lose-lose proposition: either she was “entirely deficient in moral perception and womanly delicacy” or she was guilty.
A particularly vicious (but not inaccurate) letter to the editor in the Emporia Daily News (signed only “Justitia”) said that most people are good and assume others are likewise, so they are easily duped by those who are not. Minnie, declared the writer, hid “a vicious, relentless, and cruel disposition behind a pretty face, large lustrous eyes and a countenance always wearing a serene look and a pleasant smile.” She never seemed to get angry but had a disposition of equanimity and a childlike purity on the surface. Underneath, however, she was vindictive. If Minnie had been an ugly old woman, people would not have been so quick to lionize her.
There were hints of a wrongful death civil suit (probably being pondered by Mattie Hood and Libbie Walkup), in which a jury would not have to consider the death penalty and the standard of proof was much lower than that in a criminal trial. But nothing ever came of this.
Within a few days of the verdict, one of the jurors, forty-three-year-old Michael Myers, was dining at the home of some relatives when he suddenly collapsed and died of a heart attack. He had voted for acquittal right from the start, and it was said that the stress of the trial ultimately killed him.13
All too soon, from William Jay’s point of view, Minnie and her mother packed up their belongings and departed on the AT&SF train for Kansas City, from whence they would proceed to New Orleans. And so Emporia would eventually return to what Bill Greer called “its wonted state of stagnation after a two months’ sensation that has eclipsed all others in the known world.”