Dr. Snook’s case would be tried before the Honorable Henry J. Scarlett, the chief judge of the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas. He had not originally drawn the case but was forced to step in when Judge John King was incapacitated by severe dental issues. Scarlett was a capable jurist, but he was not prepared for the huge public interest in this case. Sensitive to public opinion, Scarlett agreed with Prosecutor Chester and wanted the case tried quickly. He was intent on making sure that justice was achieved and that Snook got a fair hearing, but some of his decisions during the course of the trial appear to have put expediency first.
Attorney Max Seyfert had been asked to join Snook’s defense team for several reasons: he was an expert on appellate law and, in an unusual turn of events in an already unusual trial, would be needed to question Seidel and Ricketts when they took the stand as defense witnesses to bolster their claim that Chester had abused Snook’s right to counsel and protection against self-incrimination. During the trial, Seidel and Seyfert would handle most of the questioning of witnesses when Ricketts became ill.
The prosecution team consisted of Chester and assistant prosecutors Paul C. Hicks and Myron Gessaman, who would eventually serve as mayor of Columbus and hold a seat on the Common Pleas bench. These attorneys made up three-quarters of the county prosecutor’s office, not counting secretaries and investigators.
Thanks to the newspapers’ hunger for getting the news out as soon as possible, the attorneys in the Snook trial would have a luxury that most trial lawyers today can only wish for: near-instantaneous written transcripts of court testimony. Scarlett agreed to hire extra court stenographers who would work in fifteen-minute shifts during the trial and be paid by the press. While one stenographer was taking notes in the courtroom, the others would be feverishly transcribing their notes and making copies available for the reporters and attorneys. As a result, the legal teams had transcribed accounts of the day’s testimony at their fingertips mere minutes after the words had been uttered. The Columbus newspapers took advantage of this unusual situation to publish the full transcripts (somewhat redacted to spare sensitive readers and children) each day. The papers did not mind the extra pages necessary to accommodate the testimony, as they found it quite easy to sell more advertisements because of the circulation boom brought about by the demand for any news coming from the courthouse.
By the opening day of the trial, forty reporters and illustrators had applied for press credentials, and a special press section with space for thirty reporters had to be built in the courtroom. Permission was also granted allowing the Associated Press to install a special telegraph station at the press table that allowed for news flashes to be sent across the wires as soon as they occurred. Reporters representing all the major wire services, as well as papers from New York to San Francisco, were scheduled to cover the event. A lengthy trial promised to be a windfall for the hospitality industry (both legal and underground) in Franklin County, as the reputation of national reporters for being hard-living big spenders was well deserved. The top names operated with nearly unlimited expense accounts because it was not unusual or frowned upon to pay for a story, for access to a scoop or to keep the competition from getting there first.
All of this publicity resulted in standing-room-only crowds for every open session of court. It was not unusual for the halls of the courthouse to be packed with hundreds of citizens eager to get a seat in the courtroom for even the most mundane proceeding related to the case. On most days, crowds would start gathering about 3:00 a.m. outside the courthouse, with young women making up most of the observers. When it was revealed that Snook would be testifying in his own defense the next day, 50 people lined up outside the ornate Franklin County Courthouse at 11:00 p.m. By 3:00 a.m., there were 250 people in line, and the papers reported that “peanut shells, cigarette butts, and newspapers littered the grounds” around the building.
Temperatures in the courtroom were sweltering, and no amount of fans could circulate enough air to provide the least bit of comfort. Most men not involved directly in the trial were in shirtsleeves, and on the first day of Snook’s testimony it was reported that four women fainted from the heat—including one who passed out twice but refused to relinquish her seat.
People would stand in line for hours for a chance to get a seat at the trial. Courtesy of the Columbus Dispatch.
The first order of business before the actual trial began was to settle the insanity plea question. Ricketts made the motion for the bifurcated trial, and Scarlett ordered three panels of “alienists” to examine Snook’s mental state. The three psychiatrists for the prosecution, who included the director of the State Hospital for the Insane at Columbus, reported back that Snook was not insane. The three psychiatrists who examined the doctor for the defense, headed by the chief at the State Hospital for the Insane at Athens, found Snook’s reactions “very peculiar…and that he presents a very difficult problem for diagnosis.” They asked for an additional sixty days to observe him in a clinical setting, questioning whether his evasiveness in answering their questions was emotional or pathological. Judge Scarlett received the report of the alienists representing the neutral court under seal and denied the defense motion for the additional observation time.
Annabelle and Flo at the Snook Trial was one of the many cartoons produced by the press during the sometimes-tedious testimony.
Faced with the likelihood that Snook would very likely not meet the insanity standard of not knowing the difference between a right act and a crime at the time of the alleged offense, the defense withdrew its motion for a two-part trial in return for a two-day postponement. Ricketts was not completely ready to abandon the idea of trying to show that Snook was insane when he killed Theora and was planning an unusual way of bringing the question in through the back door.
Snook was severely injured during the insanity observations when one of the defense alienists was attempting to draw spinal fluid to determine if the professor had any venereal disease. The spinal tap was botched, and for several weeks Snook was unable to sit upright and suffered from blinding headaches. When Scarlett refused to delay the proceedings to allow for his convalescence, Snook was brought to court wearing dark sunglasses. Scarlett ordered that a canvas beach chair be brought into the courtroom, and during much of the opening portion of his trial, observers could only see the top of Snook’s bald head as he reclined in his chaise lounge wearing his sunglasses.
A little more than a month after Theora’s murder and Snook’s confession, seventy-five Franklin County citizens were summoned by Sheriff Harry Paul to report to the courthouse for possible jury duty. Those who received the summons had no doubt of what they might be asked to sit in judgment. This was normally the summer recess for the Common Pleas Court, and there was only one trial scheduled—the case of James Howard Snook for the murder of Theora Kathleen Hix. Ricketts and his fellow defense team members wanted as few female members on the jury as possible and nearly succeeded in having an all-male jury. Potential jurors and observers had a little hint of what might come up at the trial when they were asked whether they would be able to discuss “many matters concerning sex, sex relations and matters perhaps disagreeable to talk about” with jurors of the opposite sex.
Character sketches of the jury by Milton Caniff.
The voir dire, or jury selection, began on July 24, 1929, and was expected to take less than three days. Instead, the process took until August 1 and required questioning 106 potential jurors (a second summons of veniremen was necessary) until a jury of 11 men and one woman was seated. The official transcript of voir dire takes up one thousand pages of the three-thousand-page trial record and includes little more than seemingly endless iterations of nearly unintelligible exchanges like this:
Question by Mr. Seyfert: Now Miss Dysinger, have you any feeling or would this in any way influence you if in evidence it were shown that the accused had on different occasions committed adultery, and the deceased fornication—I might say that adultery is the illegal sex act of a married person; fornication is the same type of illegal sexual act of a single person—so the one is called a fornication on the part of the one that is not married and adultery on the part of the one that is married—if the evidence should show that on June 13, immediately prior to the—
Mr. Ricketts: The alleged homicide.
Question by Mr. Seyfert: To the alleged homicide, that the accused had committed the act of adultery with the deceased, would that in any way create in you a feeling of disgust or hatred towards the accused different than if the evidence wouldn’t show that? I mean the adultery part as distinguished from the alleged homicide.
The Court: The question as to whether it would tend to prejudice or bias?
Mr. Seidel: Yes.
The Witness: No.
With Dr. Snook uncomfortably reclining in his beach chair, opening arguments began August 2 and set the stage for the fireworks that would follow. Chester opened for the State of Ohio with a dry and straightforward recitation of the facts he intended to prove establishing Snook’s guilt of first-degree murder. As Ricketts expected, Chester did not mention Snook’s signed confession but did refer to the interview he gave to the Citizen and Plain Dealer hours later.
When his turn came, Ricketts opened with the assertion that he intended to “prove along the lines of the alleged admissions of the defendant himself, as we believe, will come under the rule of ‘involuntary confessions.’”
Chester was on his feet in an instant with an objection.
“The state of Ohio has never offered—and never mentioned confessions,” he shouted.
“I know you have not,” Ricketts replied, ignoring the rule that his comments should be directed to the bench. “I know you have concealed it but we are going to open it up now. With the permission of the court.”
Ricketts successfully argued that the question of the voluntariness of the confession and the interview involved matters of law (decided by the judge) and fact (decided by the jury), and in such cases, the question should be answered by jurors with proper instruction by the court. In other words, he did not want Judge Scarlett to decide whether the evidence was admissible; he wanted the jury to use its judgment and sense of fair play.
A sketch of the courtroom.
For the next week, few surprises were unearthed as twenty-one prosecution witnesses ranging from farmer Johnson to coroner Murphy told their stories. The discovery of Theora’s body was covered in excruciating detail, with special emphasis on Murphy’s conclusion that the wound to Theora’s throat had caused her death and chemist Long’s analysis of the contents of Theora’s stomach. Courtroom observers, many of whom had waited hours just to get inside the courthouse, learned the hard lesson that in reality, criminal trials are filled with hours of tedious testimony. Besides the constant bickering between defense and prosecution counsel and the obvious mutual dislike they shared, the one bit of exciting testimony during the state’s case came when Murphy (gently) showed on assistant prosecutor Hicks how he believed Snook had administered the hammer blows and sliced Theora’s throat and then, with more gusto, demonstrated the amount of force needed to crack a skull.
Even the reporters were so bored by the endless back-and-forth discussions of putrescence and cadaverine, phenolphthalein and cannabis indica, that they took to entertaining themselves as best they could and filing the results with their editors. Kenneth Tooil conducted an interview with a Blister Beetle eager to refute its species’ reputation as an aphrodisiac (“I am glad to have this opportunity to defend myself against the slander that has been hurled at my good name,” the bug said), while Caniff drew a scholarly study of Snook’s hands at various points during a day in court.
Not to be outdone by Tooil, a competing columnist, George Tucker, “allowed” a “cell mate” of Snook’s to use his space in the paper to explain “the real reason” why Snook killed Theora: “Say, youse guys is nuts. They been tryin’ to find out why the doc done it fer a couple o’ weeks and they ain’t hit the nail on the head yet,” the “jailbird” wrote. “Kin I tell you? I kin—an’—but lemme think.” Tucker’s con goes on to explain in the arcane cant of the underworld that just like “my poor brother Frank, the jumpinest old crab you ever lamped,” Snook was the victim of shell shock as the result of firing so many pistol rounds during his life. Tucker’s best work, however, was when he summarized the trial in doggerel verse:
“The Way of the Transgressor.” A drawing that appeared in the Columbus Citizen drawn during Dr. Snook’s preliminary hearing.
For he had slain
With cruel main
A woman—and they say
When murder’s done,
The murderers must pay.
There is a room
Of death and doom
Where murderers “go west,”
And in it there
A ghastly chair
Beckons: Heaven rest.
The evidence
Was quite immense.
Piled up by Chester’s crew
It had the knife
That spilled her life
and blood-stained hammer, too…
Chester rested his case-in-chief by calling reporters Fusco and Howells to discuss what Snook told them during their midnight interview. He did not introduce the signed confession from Snook.
The defense called more than forty witnesses during the presentation of its case and highlighted the interrogation methods used to extract the first confession and the quality of the work performed by Murphy and Long. Defense chemists asserted that there was, in fact, no cantharides in the contents taken from Theora’s stomach and that the cannabis indica had a negligible potency.
In particular, Murphy’s reputation as a coroner was savaged, and the defense was able to produce four pathologists who contradicted the coroner’s claim that it was possible to distinguish the particular wound that caused Theora’s death. The defense claimed it was possible that a blow to Theora’s temple that drove bone fragments into her brain was responsible.
In a surprisingly anticlimactic lead-in to the main event—the testimony of Dr. Snook—Ricketts called Snook’s wife and mother to the stand to discuss their lives with their husband and son. Neither added anything of substance to the defense case, but Kenneth Tooil used the opportunity to wax eloquent about the event:
Realizing fully that the placing of Mrs. Helen Snook, the wife, and Mrs. Albert Snook, the mother, upon the witness stand was a bid for sympathy and nothing else and that so far as aiding Dr. Snook is concerned their testimony was virtually valueless, the incidents of the morning served to impress upon us that here is a living, breathing human drama and not a show of puppets or shadows on a screen.
It carried with it the undying loyalty of women for their men and mothers for their sons. It ripped bare two souls in torment and, in at least one instance, gave us a picture of how a woman will throw all to the winds in order to protect the man she once considered hers and hers alone.
Fully recovered from his spinal injury and looking as calm and collected as ever, James Snook took the witness stand before a packed, standing-room-only courtroom where the temperature approached that of a sauna in the late morning of August 7, 1929. By order of Judge Scarlett, no one under the age of eighteen was allowed inside, and the press reported that a majority of the spectators were young flappers anxious to hear the salacious details that had previously only been hinted at.
The defense, however, was not going to be rushed, and used most of the day discussing Snook’s background, teaching history and the benign early days of his relationship with Theora. Seyfert spent nearly an hour questioning Snook on how he taught Theora to shoot and went into exacting detail about what types of weapons they used and at what distance they shot until he was prodded by Judge Scarlett to move on.
“Is there a point to this?” Scarlett asked. “I think we’ve covered it well enough.”
But the defense had a three-year love triangle to explore and carefully tried to invoke an image of Theora as a controlling woman of loose morals. When Seyfert questioned Snook about the relationship between Marion Meyers and Theora Hix, all three prosecutors objected at once, arguing that Theora’s character was off limits.
“We want to show the whole picture of this affair with two men and one girl,” Seyfert replied.
“What does that have to do with the murder?” Scarlett asked.
“It shows the character of the decedent,” Seyfert said.
“That’s it!” Chester shouted. “You cannot do that.”
Seidel then spoke up, explaining that the defense intended to show that the details of the three-way relationship would help bolster its claim of insanity. When Scarlett asked what that had to do with any question of insanity, Ricketts said, “No sane man could have entered into such an arrangement as existed between these three persons. They were all insane.”
“You mean they were insane all the time?” asked an incredulous Chester.
“We intend to show that the mental derangement had its inception at the outset of the intimacies between Dr. Snook and the girl and at the point where Meyers entered the picture,” Seyfert said. “We contend that in the spring of 1927, the gradual unbalancing of Dr. Snook’s mind was under way. When all this started Dr. Snook was a normal, hard-working man, but the gradual change in his mental ability finally brought about the breaking point.”
Seidel added that the defense had to show this gradual breaking down of Dr. Snook’s mental attitude to place its hypothetical questions of insanity before the psychiatrists and alienists. Scarlett ruled in favor of Snook but admonished the jury only to use the testimony as it pertained to the sanity of the defendant and not to determine Theora’s character.
For the rest of the afternoon, Snook told about how the three parties in the relationship got along, emphasizing that Theora told him in no uncertain terms that she intended to keep seeing both men. “She told me that she had been going out with him and she intended to continue so inasmuch as I couldn’t go,” Snook testified. “I asked her something about whether it would be satisfactory to her, and she said ‘very much so.’”
The triangle broke apart, Snook testified, when Meyers proposed marriage and Theora turned him down.
Testimony then turned to a second prong in the defense’s insanity argument—drug use by the lovers. Up to the time he took the stand in his own defense at his trial, Snook claimed that Theora was “hounding and hounding” him for narcotics and once injected cocaine in his presence. Legal access to cocaine was still possible in 1929 but was closely regulated by the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, which allowed physicians to prescribe the stimulant (cocaine was included in the law despite not being a narcotic) under limited circumstances.
Trial testimony explained why cannabis indica in powder form was found in Theora’s stomach. C. indica was a normal component of any drugstore or physician’s pharmacopoeia in both liquid and pill form. It was also regulated by the Harrison Act and available by prescription. The news that Theora used cocaine as an anesthetic and marijuana was not as shocking to the public as one might expect. The cannabis was prescribed as a tranquilizer and sleep aid. Unlike modern medicinal marijuana, in the 1920s the drug was not distributed legally in its natural vegetable form.
Regarding other drugs, Snook was unequivocal in his claims that Theora used them and encouraged him to do so, as well.
On the stand, Snook was questioned about these drugs and said the pair shared “thyroid extracts and thyroxine,” which Theora was taking for a thyroid condition. “She had a test that her metabolic rate was low and that if it was brought up to normal she would be pepped up some,” Snook testified. “So we took some of that and then she urged me to try some, that it might pep me up, not knowing if my metabolic rate was low or not.”
Snook testified that Theora also used a more dangerous drug that was a holdover from the Victorian era: belladonna and its active ingredient, atropine. Other side effects of belladonna are blurred vision and visual distortions. Prolonged use was linked to blindness. The alkaloid toxins in the leaves of belladonna, also called “deadly nightshade,” cause hallucinations and delirium. Used for centuries as a cosmetic, belladonna was put in the eyes, causing dilated pupils that were considered attractive. Although by the late 1920s belladonna and atropine had been long discarded by the cosmetics business and was being phased out in favor of safer sedatives by the pharmaceutical industry, its popularity as an ornamental plant made it easy to find.
“Veronal (a barbiturate) was used,” he testified. “Barbatol they call it and neanol, and there were a few others that they used in laboratory experiments that I really cannot name now.”
Theora’s interest in drugs was aroused by the pharmacology courses she was taking in late 1928, Snook said. “As quickly as the drugs were revealed to her, she experimented with their use,” he testified. “She wanted me to take them too, but I was unacquainted with their reaction on the human body. When she insisted I finally took some tablets that affect the action of the thyroid. They pepped me up quite a bit.”
