6

THE HEARING

He Might Have Brought It upon Himself

A preliminary hearing was held on September 5, 1893, at the Kent County courthouse on Main Street in East Greenwich. The defendant entered the courtroom wearing a somber black suit and a matching cap, which was pulled tightly over his head. With him was Nathan Barber Lewis, whom he had employed to act as his attorney.

Lewis was a fifty-one-year-old native of Exeter, Rhode Island. After having been elected to the legislature in 1886, he was chosen to preside over the Second Judicial Court District of Rhode Island. A widower who had lost all but one of his four children in infancy, Lewis had been a private in the Rhode Island Seventh Regiment during the Civil War. He was well respected and staunch in his belief that Frank was insane at the time of the murder. He confidently entered his client’s plea of not guilty.

Under the law, a person must possess evil intent during the committal of a crime in order to be found guilty of such a crime. The law also states that when a person with a diseased or defective mind commits a crime, he or she has no capacity to know the quality of his or her actions and can therefore not be held responsible. It was the belief of Lewis that Frank was incapable of forming the intent to commit murder or realize what he was doing when he killed his daughter.

While the attorney made his explanations to the court, Frank sat in his chair silently, alternating between looking terribly bored and covering his face with his hands. Once Lewis was finished stating his case, the prosecuting attorney, Albert Rowland Greene, who was also the coroner, took over everyone’s attention.

Kent County courthouse, where Frank Sheffield stood trial for killing his daughter. Vintage postcard, author’s collection.

At the time forty-nine years old, Greene had graduated from Brown University, Cornell University and the Michigan University School of Law. Also a veteran of the Civil War, he had been president and a member of the Warwick Town Council for three years. Another well-respected citizen and lawyer, he was confident in the guilt of the man before him.

In front of the court, Greene displayed a brown paper bag from which he carefully removed a little girl’s dress and shoes, both darkly stained with blood. He called Officer Kinnecom to the stand and asked the policeman if he could identify the articles of clothing. As Kinnecom testified that they were the clothes Maggie had been wearing at the time of the murder, Frank removed his hands from his face and looked up at the evidence. He then pulled his gaze away and lowered his chin to his chest.

No defense was offered at the preliminary hearing, but Judge Warner pronounced Frank probably guilty and set the matter down for trial. While he was being led from the courtroom to return to his cell at the jail, Frank’s calmness disappeared and he exploded in a severe bout of emotion. Physical restraint was necessary to subdue him, and this made Lewis even more determined to prove that his client was insane.

The following day, Lewis paid a visit to fifty-seven-year-old Judge Pardon Elisha Tillinghast and asked him to order a psychological examination of Frank. Tillinghast stated that he would do so only if a petition calling for such an examination was presented to him giving him jurisdiction. Lewis immediately prepared the proper petition and went to see fifty-five-year-old Deputy Sheriff Amasa Sprague in order to get his signature.

Expecting that Lewis would soon return with the signed petition, Tillinghast contacted a Providence doctor, asking him to go to the jail and complete a thorough examination of Frank.

However, upon Lewis’s request for a signature, Sprague decided to consult the attorney general first regarding his personal opinion on an examination of the prisoner. Lewis’s ability to do anything further was delayed for several days until Sprague contacted him to say he had decided not to sign the document.

Sprague’s position could not be altered, so Lewis visited the Office of the Rhode Island Agent of Charities and Corrections to appeal for help. There, he was informed that the officer he would need to speak with had left on a trip to see the World’s Fair, and nothing could be undertaken until he came back.

Eventually, the officer returned and met with Lewis, explaining to him that if Deputy Sprague felt Frank could be cared for properly at the jail and was not suffering from his incarceration there, then he did not feel the need to arrange a transferal. Lewis pointed out that the petition was not a request to have Frank moved but merely to have him examined so that a professional determination could be made regarding his sanity or lack of it. If such an examination indicated that Frank was suffering from insanity, Lewis added, it would still have to be proven before the judge would order him moved to a hospital.

If indications of insanity were discovered and subsequently proven, Frank would leave the confines of the jail cell and be transported to a psychiatric hospital. The officer informed Lewis that he didn’t think Frank could be tried if he were admitted to the hospital, and therefore, it was best that he remain in jail. Upset by such a rationalization, Lewis asked him why the state would want to try an insane man who is not legally responsible for his own acts.

Perhaps, the officer suggested, the situation was not as simple as that. “He might have brought it upon himself,” he argued. After all, there were reports swirling around town from reputable sources that Frank had been a regular user of cocaine for at least the last five years, while others claimed it was opium he was using.