Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes (1858)
Minnie’s train had barely arrived in Kansas City when she declared that not only did she intend to get as much of her late husband’s estate as she could, but William Jay was already processing the documents necessary for that. So, even as she was telling Emporians she wouldn’t touch a penny of the Walkup fortune, she was taking steps to make sure she would get it.
While she was in Kansas City, the Times, never a big Minnie fan, kept tabs on her and criticized her craving for attention. Naturally, crowds gathered wherever she went, but instead of retiring modestly from their view, she did everything she could to make sure they would be able to see her. At the Union Depot Hotel, she dined in a large restaurant and did not hide her pleasure at the attention she was getting. She shopped in stores, rode on the cable cars, and when it was time to get on the train to New Orleans, she chose a seat next to an open window looking out on the staring masses.1
In the meantime, Minnie’s brother-in-law, Edward Findlay, reached New Orleans, having left Emporia while Minnie and her mother were reveling at the Jays’. He had been her ardent supporter from the beginning, hastening to Kansas right after Walkup died, even though his wife was in the late stages of pregnancy, so it’s hard to know how much of his information is true and how much is “puffing.”
Findlay claimed that right after the trial the defense was suddenly able to find a whole lot of druggists (all out of town) who had sold arsenic to James Walkup. Moreover, he said that Judge Graves had been in sympathy with Minnie and declared after the trial that there would have been no way to convict her on the evidence the state had. Now, while it is probable (judging from his instructions to the jury) that Judge Graves was sympathetic to Minnie, it is unlikely that he would have commented on the evidence in this way, as it was actually quite strongly circumstantial.2
Harry Hood had supposedly assured William Jay early on that he would not hire extra lawyers for the prosecution, but this doesn’t ring true: Why would Hood bring this up at all? Findlay said that when Hood got more lawyers in spite of his promise, Jay was thoroughly vexed. He wrote to Harry’s father, Major Hood, and declared that he, Jay, had “unsheathed his sword and thrown away the scabbard” and that this meant war. Now, that does sound like Jay!
What probably really happened is that Jay immediately hired William Scott to defend Minnie. Clinton Sterry, Harry Hood’s best friend, was already on the scene and doing some investigation and had assured Harry—even before he and Mattie returned to Emporia—that he would not rest until the poisoner was convicted. So Jay might have assumed that this meant Harry was going to hire extra help for County Attorney Feighan. Jay then got Thomas Fenlon, Hood responded with Isaac Lambert, and Jay evened it up with Dodds. (Minnie’s father, James Wallace, hired Edward Ward, through Mrs. Augustus Wilson, but Ward does not seem to have had anything to do with the defense, as his name is never mentioned after the hiring, nor does he appear in any of the testimony.)
When Minnie finally arrived in New Orleans, she gave an interview to a Daily Picayune reporter that she obviously (and naïvely) never intended to leave the state of Louisiana, as the article was filled with scenes of fantasy that never existed outside her own mind.3
The reporter (not Bill Greer) thought she was “a person of a peculiar type,” beautiful, but “not an ideal beauty,” seemingly voluptuous, yet not that, and with “soft, dreamy eyes.” She had large hands and long fingers, a protruding lower lip, good teeth, and black hair. Here is his typically Victorian description of her: “There is a tint of bronze richness in the sunny fairness of the face, deepening to crimson in the cheeks and darkening into a setting for large gray eyes covered with heavy eyelids and fringed with heavy lashes of jet black which make the eyes look darker than they are. The face is full and needs to be because all its features are large.”
Minnie seems to have been a compulsive liar, even telling untruths that didn’t really gain her anything. For example, she told the Picayune reporter that she first found out she was suspected of poisoning her husband when Mary Moss told her, two days before he died. But that would have been Thursday, and nobody suspected poison for sure until Friday, when Dwight Bill and the other men told her and forbade her to give Walkup his medicine. How would it benefit her to say the information came to her on Thursday from Mary Moss instead of on Friday from Dwight Bill? This is merely a gratuitous lie.
Further, Minnie said she went to her husband, told him of the suspicions against her, and he told her not to worry about it. Yet, from noon on Friday there was always someone else in Walkup’s room when Minnie was there, and we know the conversations that occurred at that time. He never told her not to worry and, in fact, said the evidence against her was strong.
Minnie said the prosecution was bitter because their fees were contingent on a guilty verdict (which was highly doubtful, especially since Feighan received a regular salary and the others were paid by Harry Hood), so they started those false stories about her staying in Walkup’s room with the body parts. (It was the neighbors and the reporters who had witnessed this.) In the biggest fantasy of all, Minnie claimed that one of the prosecuting attorneys could not bring himself to put her through a stiff cross-examination, so he passed the duty on to a colleague and advised him to get half-drunk to prepare for the ordeal! Presumably, that “half-drunk” individual would have been Sterry, who was not only perfectly sober but more than capable of attacking her on cross-examination.
After Dr. Jacobs testified for the prosecution, Minnie told the reporter, he changed his mind and believed her innocent. (In truth, Dr. Jacobs never stopped thinking her guilty.) He and his wife then supposedly sent a bouquet of flowers with a note in which he declared his belief (a note, by the way, she didn’t share with the reporter). And, during deliberations, an elderly juror—who was so impassioned about Minnie’s innocence that he actually wept when the prosecution attacked her at trial—cold-cocked a fellow juror who voted for conviction. Another was in debt to Major Hood and had been planted on the jury by the prosecution—yet even he voted to acquit. (She was attempting to make them think that her innocence triumphed even over a setup.)
Minnie said that George Dodds was very popular, especially with the women, but Judge Houston had not made a good impression. (This was her revenge for his abandoning her without providing any money for her defense.) In the opinion of her friends in Emporia, Houston was “too French and polished,” whereas William Scott wanted a guy who could “get up and swear like a good fellow when it was needed.” Judge Houston gave her sympathy, but Minnie’s friends informed him that sympathy also meant he should put his hands in his pockets and part with some money. Houston said he had none to give, so he went back to his vacation at Long Branch, “to resume some pleasant acquaintances he had there,” she concluded dismissively.
Also, Minnie showed the reporter some of the messages she had received from admirers around the country. There was one from “the ladies of the Southern Hotel” in St. Louis (which actually sounds as if they could have been prostitutes). She had received many offers to go on the stage and “Bob” (nobody ever referred to him as Bob) Ingersoll’s manager wanted to represent her. Adam Forepaugh would make her the new “$10,000 Beauty,” but all of this was supposedly not to her taste.4 Minnie declared she would be lying low and staying in New Orleans with her family. (Years later, Minnie would tell a reporter in Chicago that James Walkup had sent her to get arsenic for him and instructed her to tell the druggist that it was for her complexion, but in November of 1885 she had not thought up that lie yet.)5
Naturally, this article wasted no time in making its way to Emporia, where the Daily News retaliated with great sarcasm because the whole affair made the city look bad. It asked which prosecution counsel had to get drunk to question her. As for the old juror who knocked the other one down, “Who was this Adonis? And where was the sheriff during this terrible fracas?” Possibly there was a connection between this incident and the death of the juror. As for Minnie’s going on the stage: “Is there a chance of her being mixed up with the fat girl and the skeleton?”6
The Barber County (Kansas) Union printed a bitter denunciation of Minnie and couldn’t resist a dig at William Jay: “We notice by the New York Clipper that Minnie Walkup contemplates doing the dime museums. As to what figure she will represent in that category of living wonders and freaks of nature we cannot say, unless it would be in the character of the Lightning Husband Exterminator; or the Handsome Face Catches the Jay.”7
Emporians probably hoped they would never again hear of Minnie Wallace Walkup. But they couldn’t have been more wrong.
Shortly after Minnie’s return to New Orleans, her sister, Dora, and the Findlay family moved to New Mexico and Minnie went to visit them. At the same time, she embarked on a tour of the Southwest with former Louisiana governor and then-current U.S. senator William Pitt Kellogg, a carpetbagger from the North. On trains and in hotels, they stayed in the same room or the same Pullman car. Sometimes Minnie registered herself as “Mrs. M. A. Wallace of Chicago” but her disguise was soon penetrated, and newspapers around the country began publishing accounts of their travels. One paper claimed they were passing themselves off as husband and wife.8
Minnie said that she and Kellogg were accompanied by his sister, but it was obvious to observers that he was acting like a “decidedly ‘gone’ lover.” Nobody but Minnie ever mentioned the presence of a sister.
William Pitt Kellogg, like Judge Houston and James Walkup, was older than Minnie (by thirty-nine years) and very rich. He was also very married. Kellogg had served as governor of Louisiana from 1873 to 1877, but it was a turbulent tenure that included a challenge to his government’s legitimacy and an attempt at impeachment for misappropriation of state funds.
Minnie and Kellogg went to Texas, New Mexico, Illinois, and the District of Columbia together. They may have gone to Europe as well. It was probably due to Kellogg’s influence that Minnie later decided to settle in Chicago, as he had practiced law in Peoria and had commanded an Illinois cavalry brigade in the Civil War. He was also willing to finance her move there.
In December 1885, as Minnie’s application for James Walkup’s estate was proceeding, two Emporia teenagers came forward with a scandalous tale. Because Minnie was still, four months after her marriage to Walkup, hinting that she might be “enceinte” to gain an extra portion of her late husband’s estate, the two young men claimed that they had had sex with her while she was in jail. This would cast a cloud on the legitimacy of any heir. The teenagers were put under oath for a deposition and made fully aware of the dangers of perjury.9
Oscar Milton (“Mit”) Wilhite, nineteen-year-old son of the sheriff, and Edward Gutekunst, a seventeen-year-old janitor (and former inmate) at the Emporia jail, testified that Minnie had invited them into her cell and seduced them. This had happened more than once for each boy. Gutekunst’s story was that Minnie had asked him to carry some trunks to her cell and, on occasion, to do other errands for her. He once brought her a dress and put it on her bed while she was in a partial state of undress, as she was at other times when she invited him into her cell. Eventually, at her instigation, he had sex with her a few times.
Prior to Mit Wilhite’s sexual encounters with Minnie, she had given him “some dirty talk” and suggestive behavior, such as exposing herself to him. The two times he had sex with her were Saturday and Sunday nights, October 3 and 4.
Minnie’s response was that Ed Gutekunst had sent her a note, signed “Ed the Fool,” and told her to send $250 for him to keep quiet about an unspecified event. She said she had no idea what it was about and gave it to William Jay, who went to the sheriff and demanded an explanation. The insurance company for the AOUW, with which James Walkup had a policy, was in the process of trying to determine which portion of the $2,000 belonged to each beneficiary (Minnie and the three Walkup children). And, although Minnie would now claim she had never said she was definitely pregnant, and still didn’t know this for sure, she had apparently stated quite clearly to the insurance company that she was—hence, the legal confusion as to the portions of the payoff.
Needless to say, this whole saga caused a great deal of turmoil and anguish in Emporia, which now found itself once again in the limelight because of Minnie Walkup. Minnie said she was surprised that Mit Wilhite would be involved in such a lie, but Ed Gutekunst was an illiterate hoodlum who was beneath her notice. Were these allegations true? While it is tempting to want to believe every piece of negative press about Minnie Walkup, the charges do seem preposterous—not necessarily because she was above such behavior (Harry Hood found sources in New Orleans who labeled her a “public woman”) but because sexual dalliance with two working-class teenagers would not fit her modus operandi. What would she have to gain? At the same time, she stood to lose quite a bit if these two decided to talk before or during her trial.
Did someone put the boys up to this? Minnie, not surprisingly, claimed that Libbie and the Hoods had done so. But it is more likely that Wilhite and Gutekunst were trying to get some money out of her, and she called their bluff, after which they invented the sexual encounters. Here’s another clue that they were lying: In his deposition, Gutekunst, when asked whether he had had sex with Minnie, answered, “I believe I did.” John Reid, the interrogation expert, calls this an “estimation phrase” because it gives an estimation rather than a definite answer. But when coupled with something that the subject should know for sure, it signals deception. Certainly, Gutekunst would know definitely whether or not he had sex with Minnie, so with “I believe,” he was likely not being truthful.10
But, under the “fool me once/fool me twice” principle, Emporians would cut Minnie no slack this time. The Daily Republican, claiming the two boys had no reason to lie about the encounters, declared, “It leaves the widow and those who sympathized with her during the trial in an unenviable position.” The title to a letter to the editor of the Daily News said it all: “Minnie Again.” The writer, “Country Lass,” bemoaned how so many of the ladies were taken in “by her childish face and her luminous eyes, her pouting lips and pearly teeth that made her the envy of her own sex.” She felt sorry for “that poor old man, her guardian” and hoped he did not see this new filth.11
Eventually, Wilhite and Gutekunst recanted their testimony, never revealing their motivation for it.
By 1890, Minnie was back in New Orleans, living with her mother in the house at 222 Canal Street. In the fall of that year, she went down to the New Orleans Vital Statistics office and registered the births of her two nephews and her niece, which had not been done when they were born, for some unknown reason. Since this would normally have been the province of their father, Edward Findlay, he was either dead by that time (as he certainly was by 1900) or the family was still living in New Mexico. Why the children needed birth certificates in 1890 is unclear.12
Apparently, Minnie’s time in New Orleans after the trial was filled with “many startling incidents,” but not sufficiently outrageous to have made the newspapers.13 Around 1891, Minnie took her mother to Europe. She had received $250,000 from the Walkup estate, plus her husband’s monthly Civil War pension. Despite her disparaging statements about the stage, she made some attempts to get bookings but was turned down each time.14
Minnie spent a lot of her money in New York City as “the center of a brilliant and wealthy, if somewhat profligate, crowd.” She was a woman of leisure there and abroad, “if pursuing pleasure at a furious pace can thus be called.”15
Minnie and Elizabeth Wallace eventually moved to Chicago, just in time for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Dora, now a widow, moved to New York City with her remaining children, Edwin and Minnie Jay Findlay (Milton, who had gone to Emporia and Cincinnati that fateful July with his aunt and his grandmother, had died by then).16 Willie Willis, Minnie’s cousin, died at 222 Canal Street a year and a half after the end of the Walkup trial, on March 24, 1887, of an inflammatory bowel.17
A year after the trial, Libbie Walkup married John Martin, the son of a U.S. senator from Kansas and himself later mayor of Emporia. When reports of the engagement were published, the Arkansas City Republican, erroneously thinking that Martin was marrying Minnie, commented, “It is hard to beat a Kansas man for bravery and pure sand.”18 In what must be considered a blessing, in light of what was to become of his protégée hereafter, William Jay passed away in 1892.
And, exactly eight days short of the thirteenth anniversary of the death of James Walkup, a newly divorced woman committed suicide by poisoning herself in the very same bedroom in which Walkup had died.19