CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
James Ward liked to talk. On his way back to Baltimore after testifying on Saturday, he stopped to chat with a reporter waiting in New London. Ward declined to reveal his testimony, but when asked, “[A]t Fort Terry did you form a personal enmity for Major Koehler?” he admitted, “There was a grudge.” 1
That may have been his most honest statement all day.
Ward, the former sergeant who had made the tepid attempts to warn Ben in July and October, testified that Ben “used to come in my room occasionally in the morning before I got up and talk with me on the subject of women and the like of that and once he opened the fly of my trousers and took out my penis and handled it.”2 He gave an approximate date, early August 1912, conceding that he was not sure, may have given Mills a different date or no date, and did not recall being asked for a date by Mayes.
Ward first said he did not try to thwart Ben because Ben was his commanding officer, but later, under cross-examination, he said he “sort of moved away a little bit.” The same was true of his testimony. It moved away from its original presentation. By the end, the incident may have occurred around noon, not in the morning before he got up, and he was fully dressed and standing, not lying in bed, though he couldn’t remember where he was standing.
A former schoolteacher at the post, Ward was the first witness to allege that he and Ben actually spoke about sex: “I told the accused that I didn’t care for any relations like that. He must have misunderstood me because he said well, he would do anything at all.”
Ward initially placed this exchange in his room at the same time as the grope, then said, “I believe it took place in his own home, in his office,” and finally said, “I withdraw that, this happened over in the Post Exchange.” There was another inconsistency. If Ward did not feel free to resist Ben’s unbuttoning his pants because of Ben’s rank, why did Ward feel free to tell Ben he did not “care for any relations like that”?
The bigger mystery was why Ward would be warning Ben of a plan by others to bring him down if Ben had already made an advance on Ward. “I told him I heard something was coming off,” Ward testified. “I would give him a chance.”
If Ward had been groped, why would he want to give Ben a chance? And wouldn’t the warning be more like “people are planning to report you” than “something is coming off”?
Hawthorne, not Hudson, was questioning Ward, and due to his persistence, Ward provided information about how the gathering of stories proceeded after Davis told Robinson in July that more information was needed before action could be taken. Ward described Frick as a good friend and said that when Ward visited Plum Island in July, Frick spoke to him about testifying against Ben. As Ward put it:
Lieutenant Frick called me aside and asked me if I knew anything about a certain individual, mentioning no names, and I said “Of what nature?” and he said “Now you know who I mean,” and I said “no.” “Well” he says “I mean irregularities of high standing at Fort Terry.” Then I grasped his meaning and I said “yes” and he said “You know something about this?” I said “Yes.” He said “Would you be willing to get up and testify to what you know?” I said I would be willing.
It is understandable that Frick, like Worcester, would have used such circumspect language—“irregularities of high standing” and “[y]ou know something about this?”—allowing the members of the group to create their own stories, so that when Mayes asked Ward whether Frick told him what to say, Ward answered, “No, sir.” Yet if Ward had previously mentioned an advance by Ben, there would have been no need for artifice. It would have been natural for Frick to refer to the incident directly and ask Ward if he was willing to testify about it.
“Had you ever spoken to anyone or had any one spoken to you about the alleged misconduct of the accused prior to the time Lieutenant Frick approached you concerning a pending investigation?” Kirby asked.
“No, sir,” said Ward, “only as to common gossip of the post.”
In other words, if Frick had no reason to believe that Ben had made an advance on Ward, the more it looked like Frick was fishing or planting a suggestion in Ward’s mind.
It was after the conversation with Frick, Ward said, that he wrote to Ben, inviting him to New York because he had “something very important to say to him”—the meeting Ward wound up canceling. “Major Koehler was a member of my lodge and that was the reason I put him wise to himself,” Ward said. That association did not keep Ward from telling Mills, Mayes, and the jury a dubious story to go along with his friends, but months earlier, it apparently made him feel some moral pangs—just as he told a reporter, but not the jurors, about his “grudge.”3
What was the source of the grudge? The jurors would have to wait until Ben testified to hear about that.
Harry Wilson held no obvious grudge against Ben, nor was Ben his boss. A former deckhand on the Nathaniel Greene steamer, Wilson testified that one morning, Ben, who had never taken any notice of him, came into the empty civilian cabin where Wilson was washing windows, “put his hand on my back or shoulder and said I was quite a stocky young fellow and his hand went down a little further and I picked up my bucket of water and went out of the after cabin . . . and wiped the windows off and he asked me to come over and see him, so I came over to Fort Terry and he showed me around his place and his chickens.”4
“He went down around my privates,” Wilson elaborated, encouraged by Mayes to “speak plainly to the court.”
“Did he squeeze your privates in any way when he touched them?” asked Mayes.
“Only pressing, that was all . . . He didn’t grab them in any way,” answered Wilson.
Grabbing would have been difficult, considering how Wilson said he was dressed, wearing underwear, trousers, denim overalls, and a sailor’s jumper.
Like Ward, Wilson placed the incident as occurring during the busy month of August 1912, though he couldn’t say what day “because I never gave it a thought again at all.”
Wilson was not one of the original accusers. His charge was added as a result of Mayes’s investigation, prompting Kirby to ask, “How could Captain Mayes have known that you had anything to tell him about the accused if you had never spoken to any one prior to that?”
“I don’t know sir, only I knew that Sergeant Moody told me that somebody wanted to see me.”
“Had you ever told Sergeant Moody about this?”
“No sir I never told anybody.”
“When did Sergeant Moody tell you that Captain Mayes wanted to see you?”
“I believe it was two nights before I went up to the place where he was at.”
“Up to that time you had never said one word to anybody that you knew anything against Major Koehler.”
“No, sir.”
Charles Moody was another friend of Frick’s and a member of Robinson’s company on Fishers Island. He served as provost sergeant on one of the boats, where he sometimes slept, along with Frick, and that was how he knew Wilson. Wilson said that Moody delivered a subpoena to him in New London to testify, and Frick’s roommate, Walsh, followed up with a second subpoena when Wilson said he was too ill to honor the first.
Kirby asked why Wilson had not reacted more strongly when the grope happened. “You could have shoved him away and been perfectly in your rights?”
“I suppose I could in a way. I might have got discharged from my job, or something like that for instance.”
“Had he anything to do with employing you?”
“No, sir.”
Kirby also wanted to know why Wilson had visited Ben’s home “[i]f you felt that you had been improperly treated by the accused.”
“I went over to see the hens, sir.”
Later in the trial, the jury would hear from Ben that the first time he ever saw Wilson was in mid-June 1913 when Ben was pulling lettuce from his garden and Wilson showed up “and asked for a pass to see the fortifications.”5 The jury would also hear from the captain of the Nathaniel Greene that due to Wilson’s unreliability he was “mighty glad to get rid of him” when Wilson quit after a year. The captain would have fired Wilson sooner, he said, except that Wilson’s father-in-law was the boat’s cook “and a cook is a hard man to hold.”6
By the end of Saturday, four witnesses had testified. How many were among the four that Mayes reported to Garrison had a motive to lie? Surely, he must have counted Frick, who acknowledged several “differences”—or maybe he didn’t, because Frick said he “personally liked the major.” Did he count Ward, who reported his “grudge” to the press but not the jurors? Did he count Worcester?
However credible Mayes thought his witnesses, the early verdict of the press was not favorable. “It is said that the case, as so far developed against Koehler is so weak as to lend color to the stories that he is a victim of personal hatreds,” wrote the Washington Times.7 Another reporter wrote of the “hard grilling” Worcester had received.8
That had to make Ben and his counsel feel good as they prepared not for a day of rest but for an unusual Sunday session of court.9 They didn’t know that there was a back channel and that what they were hearing in court was not all that was being said.