CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
After lunch, when Second Lieutenant Austin Frick took the stand, he had to be asked to remove his dark glasses. Afternoon light was streaming in through the library windows, amplified by the sun’s reflection off the snow.
“It will not be a hardship for you to remove them, will it witness?” asked Kirby.
“No sir,” answered Frick.
“Then just keep them off please.”1
Frick would refrain from wearing his sunglasses for more than two hours as he gave testimony portraying Ben as a bawdy, queer man with so little self-control that he tried to caress Frick in the bathroom with Sophia downstairs, and fondled Frick’s genitals in a room full of people.
Two and a half months had passed since Ben’s arrest, time to get over the initial shock, but still, it must have been especially painful to listen to Frick’s words. Unlike Worcester, Frick was no latecomer to Plum Island. When Ben and Sophia arrived, in the autumn of 1911, Frick had been at Fort Terry since the previous spring. At first, he seemed grateful for their company, especially Sophia’s, livening up her life with cards, bowling, and tennis and making her feel young. Frick came for Thanksgiving dinner and vied for the attention of the Koehlers’ cousin. He also helped the Koehlers entertain visiting officers, sometimes serving as bartender. He had invited Sophia and Ben to be his guests at the officers’ club as recently as September 1913.2
Frick was always affable, Ben would testify. “[I]t is Lieutenant Frick’s nature, no matter what you say to Lieutenant Frick, he will pretend to be very friendly.”3
Not on the witness stand.
Frick testified that at the end of the Koehlers’ first summer, in August 1912, target exercises ran late one night and Ben invited Frick to eat dinner at his house. Ben showed him upstairs to the bathroom and, Frick said, as he washed his hands, Ben “came up to me and put his arms about me and attempted to pull my head towards his shoulder.” Then, in the bedroom, while Frick brushed his hair, Ben “reached up again and brushed his face against mine and put his arms around me.”
Inserting a dig at Ben’s height, Frick said that “being somewhat taller than he it was rather difficult for him to reach up and reach my cheek as long as I moved around at all.”
As they headed to the stairs, Frick continued, Ben again pressed his cheek against Frick and said, “‘Do you know what is the matter with Russell?’ referring to Mr. Russell who was just relieved as Ordnance officer here. He said ‘He was fucked to death.’”
Hudson objected, and Mayes told his witness, “Just limit your testimony to acts.”
Frick went on to say that Ben walked with him back to camp and asked, “Do you care to come to the tent and have a drink?” but Frick declined.
Mayes then inquired about a dance at Captain Ellis’s house in April 1913—one of the dances that Sophia had said made life “quite gay” after her return from Puerto Rico.4
“Did anything unusual occur between you and Major Koehler during the dance?” asked Mayes.
“Decidedly so,” replied Frick, repeating one of Worcester’s pet phrases. “[T]he Major proposed that we dance a rag together or our present day turkey-trot. We were dancing in the middle of the room and people all around us. The major reached down and grabbed me in the crotch, grabbed my penis and testicles and squeezed my testicles so hard that I had very much the sensation of being struck.”
Frick said he stopped dancing “as soon as I could near the edge of the crowd” but did not say anything to Ben. “I simply did not know what to say.”
“Did you consent at all to this action on his part?” asked Mayes.
“No, sir, I stopped dancing and got out of the whirl of the dancers as quickly as I could.”
During cross-examination, Frick so exasperated Hudson that Hudson apologized to the jury “for a little temper.” Frick was fuzzy on details yet did his best to score points. He cast his visits to the Koehlers as involuntary—“primarily [because] he was my Commanding Officer” or because Frick had been summoned “to come down and mix a cocktail or mix a drink” when there were guests, including some of the jurors.
The night he ate dinner with the Koehlers, Frick had said he rode his bicycle to the house and walked back to camp pushing the bike, but in response to a question from Hudson, he claimed not to remember whether it was raining or whether he walked, rode his bicycle, or took the buckboard.
He did, however, remember that he said “nothing” after the upstairs overtures.
“Made no comment at all?” asked Hudson.
“No, sir.”
“And then you went downstairs and sat down at the table?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And finished your dinner?”
“Yes, sir.”
Nor, Frick said, did he make any comment when Ben grabbed him at the dance. Unlike Worcester, Frick claimed that Ben’s grope hurt, but he did not yell or cry out and did not say anything about it until “after Colonel Mills came.”
Meanwhile, Frick was engaged in finding out what other people were saying, or were willing to say, about Ben’s “moral character,” as Hudson phrased it. Frick said he first heard something negative in 1912—the content went unspecified—and then talked about Ben in April 1913 at a dance at Fort Wright.
“[W]ith whom did you talk?”
“Lieutenant Putney and Sergeant Byers. No discussion, just simply they asked me the question if I had heard certain reports. I said that I had.”
In addition, Frick acknowledged discussing “the rumors or talk about Major Koehler” with Walsh, Robinson, a retired sergeant, and “then Captain Worcester.” Frick also said he asked a sergeant named Archer “if he knew anything irregular about the Major.”
“Did you give those names of the persons you talked with to Captain Worcester before the arrival of Colonel Mills?” asked Hudson.
“I did,” answered Frick.
Before the trial, Colonel Hawthorne had invited the accusers to speak to him one on one. It was voluntary, they were not under oath, and no court reporter was transcribing their answers—as would occur today in pretrial depositions—but the sessions gave Ben’s counsel an idea of what the defense was up against. Frick had apparently told Hawthorne that he spoke to ten men before Mills arrived, but now Frick claimed not to remember what he had said to Hawthorne.
“He asked me so many questions I don’t remember what I told him on any of them.”
Hudson turned to Frick’s “trouble” with Ben, a word Frick said was too strong. “I think we had one misunderstanding, but not what I consider anything in the sense of trouble.”
“Have you had more than one misunderstanding?”
“Not that I would consider a misunderstanding.”
“Well, have you had more than one difference?”
“I suppose I have.”
Mayes objected to further inquiry, but Kirby overruled him. Obliged to answer, Frick minimized his “differences” with Ben, just as Worcester had: the dispute over the hop committee, Frick’s dismissal as athletic director, his failing to try to rescue the private who fell overboard, his gossip about others’ sex lives, and the times Ben found Frick “studying” instead of carrying out instructions. “I personally liked Major Koehler,” Frick maintained, though he admitted Ben was “quite nettled” about being excluded from the hop committee’s decision to hold a dance.
When it came to Frick’s having allowed an officer’s daughter to socialize with the woman Frick told Ben he had slept with, Frick again gratuitously portrayed Ben as a drinker.
“I did not consider it a reprimand. I was told I had made a mistake,” said Frick. “The fact of the case is the statement was given to me while the Major was drinking a high ball sometime after this night in which he grabbed my person.”
Hudson returned to the supposed overtures in the Koehler house, asking Frick a variant of the question he had refrained from asking Worcester: “What did you think he was trying to do?”
“I am not sure,” Frick answered. “I don’t know; I am not used to doing things like that.”
“What did you think when you went in to the room he was trying to do?”
“I was still more puzzled, really panicky.”
“You did not say anything to him in criticism of it at all?”
“It is not wise to criticize your Commanding Officer at any time much, especially not to his face.”
At that point a juror interjected, “I wish he would answer that question.”
And Frick did: “I said nothing.”
Another juror offered some help, asking Frick, “Did Major Koehler attempt to kiss you in his quarters?”
Frick answered coyly: “I interpreted the fact that he pressed his lips against my cheeks that that was the intention.”
Yet Frick had earlier said that Ben was too short to reach his cheeks. Frick stood at five foot eleven. Ben Koehler was five foot three. Hudson might have pointed out the discrepancy, but perhaps he thought it was obvious. Nor did he ask Frick why, if he was the one prodding Robinson in July 1913 to report Ben to Colonel Davis based on supposed advances to an absent lieutenant, Frick did not mention that he himself had twice been victimized by Koehler.
With all the damning statements coming out of Worcester’s and Frick’s mouths, a lawyer could do only so much, and Hudson had to give the jurors some credit. While Enoch Crowder had pronounced Frick’s claims particularly strong after reading the Mills report, Hudson had to hope that seeing Frick in the flesh would cause the jurors to think otherwise.