Fred never said much about his folks or about the people who adopted him. Born in Ohio, in Youngstown; raised outside of Columbus, on a farm Everyone knew Fred wasn’t put together right. “Tits on a bull,” country people would have said. “Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde” was how Fred explained it to the jury, once his lawyer put him on the stand in his own defense. That young lawyer of his was bright—he had X-rays and two sex experts ready to go if anyone challenged Fred. No one did, though.
Fred said he stayed on the farm until he was thirteen. Miserable, scared, ashamed, confused. He never exactly explained to the jury what parts of him were girl parts and what parts of him were boy parts, but puberty made everything stand out. That’s why he ran away. To Chicago. Lived on the streets, got high, turned tricks. In the same part of town where Carl Wanderer went shopping for his “ragged stranger.”
For every week Fred lived as a boy, six months he lived as a girl. The trade liked girls, so Fred did what came naturally: he turned into Frances. Fred was cute; Frances was a little angel.
The police arrested Frances as often as they noticed her—hauled her into Morals Court, charged her as a “delinquent juvenile,” then charged her for “operating a transient boardinghouse.”
That boardinghouse of hers was a sign of success. By 1915 Frances, age twenty-five, was working out of two adjoining apartments in a building at Erie and La Salle. At six o’clock every evening, she’d change into a low-cut gown and entertain clients. No more cheap tricks off the street. “Prominent guys, right in this city,” Frances said. None of them had any idea that Fred was inside the corsets Frances wore. A coquette, she was, with a pretty face, tiny hands, and a sweet little mouth.
By then, she was married. Legally married, by a justice of the peace in Indiana. To an out-of-work, junkie mechanic named Frank Carrick. A frail, consumptive, twitchy little guy who said he didn’t know anything about Fred until he had been married to Frances for several months. It didn’t make any difference to Frank, though.
Frances cooked, and shopped, and sewed. The double apartment at Erie and La Salle didn’t last long; the tricks got cheaper, but Frank was never jealous. Work was work. It paid the rent, bought the dope. Heroin, passed around and snorted. A nice, quick, dreamy high. Frances liked it, but Frank needed it. Frank started using needles. Life went on.
Frances kept a parrot and a cat. She had a nice contralto voice. She bought a player piano, and music for it. She loved to sing. She could put a song across—nothing special, but good enough to substitute at clubs like the Erie and the Athena on North Clark.
She loved hats—“lids” she called them. “A girl’s got to have a new lid,” she’d say. She owned dozens of hats. And wigs. Many wigs. And shoes. Size fives. For her little feet. The apartment was strewn with her things—frocks, shoes, silk undies, stockings. Bills, letters, recipes, cookbooks, official notices, whiskey bottles, cure-all pamphlets—Frank didn’t care. The next fix, the monkey on his back—that’s what Frank cared about. Frank became a problem.
In 1920, a whore named Helen introduced Frances to a sweet girl named Marie Clark. Marie and Frances looked so much alike that, later, in Municipal Court, the judge mistook them for sisters. Marie was a Polish girl, from Michigan, a farmer’s daughter who’d run away from home just like Frances. She loved heroin more than Frances did; she was more of a user, on her way to needing it like Frank.
Marie said she fell for Frances the moment they met. “She was a wonderful girl,” Marie said. It didn’t matter when Helen told Marie about Fred. “I fell in love with him,” Marie said. “We went together for a couple of months. Fred wore girl’s clothes. Swell ones, too, most of the time.”1
They got married in 1921. A minister at the Moody Bible Institute performed the ceremony. Fred wore a suit for the occasion. Frances lived like that—like Fred—for the next five months. He and Marie bought five acres of land in Elmhurst and left Frank and his needles—and Frances and her corsets—behind. Country life didn’t suit them, though. They moved back to Chicago; Frank moved in with them; Fred went back to being Frances.
Marie hated the arrangement. She was jealous of Frank. She was jealous of “the gents” Frances “dated.” Frank hated Marie as much as she hated him. They’d fight—the four of them. Frances would turn into Fred and side with Marie, then after dark he’d become Frances again, and “step out” on dates. In the mornings, Frank and Frances would go shopping at the local delicatessen. The lady who owned it remembered them well: “Frank Carrick would come in here with his wife, Mrs. Carrick, such a sweet lady. She always did the shopping and knew just what she wanted. . . . Then sometimes, in the early afternoons, Marie Clark, who lived with the Carricks, would drive up in a Chevrolet car. She would look as if she had just come from a party. And with her would be her husband—‘Mr. Thompson,’ she called him. He’d help his wife pick out stuff. . . . I knew Mr. Thompson well, but not so well as ‘Mrs. Carrick’ . . . I never suspected.”2
Marie cracked. She started using needles. She moved back to Michigan to try to kick the habit, cold turkey. Her parents took her to a hospital in Detroit. She got blood poisoning and nearly died. She called out for Frances. Marie’s parents reached her. Frances rushed to Detroit and nursed Marie back to life. Marie survived. No one meant more to Marie, no one loved Marie, as much as Frances did. Marie moved back to Chicago to live with Frances and Fred and Frank. Life went on. Until the first week of June 1923.
Richard Tesmer and his wife, Anna, came home late in the evening. They’d been visiting Mr. Tesmer’s sister. They’d had dinner, talked about work and the weather, played some cards, stayed a bit longer, then said good night. They were respectable people: their daughter was a senior at North-western; they drove a nice, sensible car; they owned their own apartment. They’d been married for twenty-five years; Mr. Tesmer had a good job with a big insurance company. He had to be up early the next morning.
Mr. Tesmer drove down the alley behind their building, parked, climbed out, swung back the garage doors. A man and a woman walked up to him. They both had guns.
“Hands up,” said the woman. She was a slim, young blonde, a flapper. She wore a modish hat with a floppy brim. She spoke to Mr. Tesmer as calmly as if she were asking him for directions or the time of day. “Hands up and be quick about it,” she said. Mrs. Tesmer remembered her voice, how soft and relaxed it was.
The man went through Mr. Tesmer’s pockets: $10 in cash; a check for another $9. The girl snatched Mrs. Tesmer’s purse: $5 and change.
“Give me your rings,” said the girl.
“But I only have my wedding ring,” said Mrs. Tesmer. Mrs. Tesmer looked the girl in the eyes. She remembered “those blue eyes . . . I’ll never forget those blue eyes. . . . She wasn’t nervous. . . . She was smiling.”
“Off with it then,” said the girl; she took Mrs. Tesmer’s hand. “I remember her eyes and a very protruding nose,” said Mrs. Tesmer. “She had a brown dress . . . I remember how she flourished her skirt.”
“Please don’t take my wedding ring,” said Mrs. Tesmer. “I haven’t had it off since I’ve been married.” She pulled her hand away.
Mr. Tesmer reached out to his wife.
“You will, will you?” said the girl. She was smiling when she shot him. He died in the alley. “The smile,” said Mrs. Tesmer. “I’ll never forget that smile.”3
Mrs. Tesmer screamed; the man jumped behind the wheel of the Tesmers’ car; the girl hopped in next to him. The Tesmers’ daughter, Clara, was at home that night; she opened her window and yelled as the car pulled away. Neighbors rushed into the alley.
Police found the Tesmers’ car, abandoned so far north on Broadway it looked as if the thieves had been heading for Evanston. Police found fingerprints on the steering wheel and the doors. They made photographs and filed them. Their first arrest came before noon the next day: Honey Sullivan, Evanston’s “flapper bandit.” They hadn’t been able to connect Honey to Leighton Mount’s murder, so they tried again with the Tesmer shooting. Mrs. Tesmer looked at Honey, but shook her head. No luck.
Detective Lieutenant Hugh McCarthy issued a statement: “The girl who pulled the gun in the alley Tuesday night was evidently a novice at it and must have been full of drugs.”4 A woman named Ethel Brown had recently been arrested in the company of a gang of thieves; the thieves had just been sent to Joliet; Ethel hadn’t been charged with anything. Police released her but, before they did, they’d caught a man trying to smuggle drugs to her in jail. McCarthy ordered his men to find Ethel and her connection.
State’s Attorney Crowe issued his own statement: The flapper with the blue eyes, the brown dress, and the floppy hat may have had the sweetest smile in all the world—“but she can’t beat the rope, this time. . . . This murder is one of the most cold blooded ever staged in Chicago.”5 Crowe ordered his senior assistant state’s attorney Edgar Jones and Special Investigator Scott Stewart to lead the hunt for the “smiling flapper bandit.” Attorney Jones made a public promise: “The list of women murderers who have been freed in Cook County is going to stop at 29. This girl will get the death penalty.”6 Crowe assigned Assistant State’s Attorney Samuel Hamilton and Assistant State’s Attorney William McLaughlin to prosecute the case against the girl once she was caught. Crowe chose McLaughlin because he’d just won murder convictions against two other women. Crowe chose Hamilton because he’d just convinced a jury to hang Arthur Foster. Whoever had killed Richard Tesmer, Crowe and his men wanted her hung: there would be no more Cora Isabelle Orthweins while Mr. Crowe held office.
Lieutenant McCarthy’s men couldn’t find Ethel Brown.
Mrs. Tesmer insisted they show her everyone they arrested, as soon as they arrested them.
“June . . . a little country girl from Michigan” became Tesmer suspect No. 3. June was known to sing in roadhouses. A sharpie named Irving Schlig had a snapshot of June in his pocket when police arrested him on Wednesday night. Police showed June’s photograph to Mrs. Tesmer. The widow shuddered when she saw it. “I’m sure that’s the woman . . . those eyes!” Police couldn’t find June.
Mrs. Tesmer said the same thing she’d said about June when police showed her a photograph of suspect No. 4: Jessie Marie Morelock. Jessie Marie was a waitress; her sister told police that a chauffeur named “Boston Red” Harlem had “virtually kidnapped” Jessie Marie from her bedroom the night Mrs. Tesmer was shot. Police couldn’t find Jessie.
Suspect No. 5: Mrs. Goldie Madsen. Mrs. Madsen had quit her job waiting on tables at the Devon restaurant the night Mr. Tesmer died. Goldie’s husband, Mars, had filed a complaint against her, charging her with abandoning him and their two children. Police couldn’t find Goldie, but they did find the man she went with on Tuesday: Thomas Boyd, a cook at an all-night lunchroom on the South Side. Boyd said he’d noticed Goldie standing in front of the Atlas lunchroom on Bryn Mawr. They’d struck up a conversation, then gone to Lincoln Park and had a few beers. After that, they’d gone to the Limits Hotel. The next morning, Goldie asked Boyd to walk her to the El stop at Fullerton. The last he’d seen, she’d gotten on the nine o’clock train. She said she was going home to Indiana to see her folks.
Suspect No. 6: Mrs. Margaret Dear, widow of Earl Dear. Earl was hanged in 1919 for killing a chauffeur named Richard Wolfe. The widow Dear began to keep company with William “Chubby” Ladner, a junkie and thief who had a record, dating back to 1914, for stealing everything and anything he could sell to buy drugs. Over the course of nine years, Ladner had been charged with—but never convicted of—stealing furs, Liberty Bonds, frocks, even money from a telephone coin box. Since he and Mrs. Dear were both addicts and had begun working as a team, police went looking for them. They never found Mrs. Dear. (As to Chubby: the FBI arrested him in 1934. They convicted him of passing counterfeit money in Boston. He spent three years in Leavenworth.)
Suspect No. 7: Mrs. Gertrude Getson, “a gunwoman of record.” When police showed Mrs. Getson’s photograph to Mrs. Tesmer, she said, “If she has blue eyes, she’s the fiend who killed Richard.” Unfortunately, Mrs. Getson didn’t have blue eyes—and was in jail in Michigan.
Suspect No. 8: “Miss Billie Conn, aged 21.” After Miss Conn was arrested, her father, Abraham Cohn of Hammond, Indiana, came forward to identify his daughter. Miss Conn’s real name was Edna Belle Cohn. She was seventeen.
Suspect No. 9: Anna Senback. Arrested, then released.
Suspect No. 10: Marge Bennet. Mrs. Bennet was shown to Mrs. Tesmer, but Mrs. Tesmer couldn’t identify her.
Morgan Collins, Chicago’s new police chief,7 announced that he was taking personal charge of the Tesmer investigation. “A chief of police should be the commander in the field as well as at headquarters. This is one of the most important cases the Chicago police have ever handled. When women . . . rob with revolvers and kill wantonly, no effort should be spared in the interest of justice.”8 Chief Collins had himself driven to the alley behind the Tesmers’ apartment. He watched as four policemen reenacted the holdup. He then returned to headquarters where, it was reported, he made preparations to issue new orders.
Suspect No. 11: Thelma Shoma. Thelma and her sister, Mildred, had been arrested, questioned, then released in 1921, after a man named James McDonough had been shot through the heart on Shields Avenue. Thelma’s family were ne’er-do-wells from Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh police had learned of the Tesmer murder and suggested Chicago police talk to Thelma. Nothing came of it.
Suspect No. 12: Lillian Erickson Page. Arrested, released, then remanded to the Sarah K. Hackett Home for Girls.
Suspects No. 13 and No. 14: Peggy Le Bean and Mrs. Bertha Schillo. Both Miss Le Bean and Mrs. Schillo had blue eyes. Miss Le Bean was said to be an actress “accustomed to registering smiles, tears, fear, and hopes on the silver screen in Los Angeles.”9
Police ordered Miss Le Bean and Mrs. Schillo to wash the lipstick and rouge off their faces, and wipe the mascara from their eyes. They were then told to walk into a darkened room where Mrs. Tesmer sat waiting. Detectives handed each woman a.38 revolver; detectives told them to smile while they aimed their weapons at Mrs. Tesmer. “In a volley of underworld jargon, Mrs. Schillo expressed her contempt for police.”10 Miss Le Bean was more cooperative: she “found it easy to curve her mouth in a beguiling smile.”11 Neither woman got the part. “No,” said Mrs. Tesmer, “they’re not the girl. That girl smiled like a fiend.”12
Then—at last—police got lucky. The papers called it “a hot tip.”
“A man whose name police would not disclose, said to have been masquerading as a woman the night Mr. Tesmer was killed, was taken into custody last night by Lieutenant Hugh McCarthy.”13
“Fred G. Thompson, identified positively by Mrs. Richard Tesmer as ‘the terrible woman who killed my husband,’ smoothed ‘her’ henna bob, deepened the masquerole under ‘her’ gimlet eyes of blue-grey, and traced a crimson cupid’s bow about ‘her’ wide spread mouth, as police locked him up last night in the men’s quarters of the Hyde Park station.
“The thirty-three-year-old man, known for thirteen years as Mrs. Frances Carrick . . . rubbed stubby fingers over a chin smeared with rouge and whiskers. Then he grunted, ‘Hell, I wish they’d give me a safety razor and a shot of gin.’ ”14
A squad of detectives led by a sergeant named Cusack had raided the Thompson/Carrick/Clark apartment in the middle of the night. Frances met them at the door, dressed in a kimono. Sergeant Cusack told her to get dressed. She changed into a blue silk skirt, matching blouse, and green straw hat. Cusack’s men dragged her out, “kicking, screaming oaths, and shouting boasts.” They drove her to Mrs. Tesmer’s apartment.
Cusack warned Mrs. Tesmer: She had to be certain, this time. Cusack handed Frances a .38 and told her to smile and point it at Mrs. Tesmer. “I ain’t ever held a gun in my hand,” Frances said. The gun wobbled. Mrs. Tesmer didn’t hesitate, though. “It was the coldest rap I ever saw,” said Cusack, “and I’ve seen many identifications. Mrs. Tesmer was positive. Absolutely positive.”15
“That woman’s crazy,” Frances said. “She already identified four or five girls. . . . She said she was waiting for blue eyes. Mine are grey.”16 No matter.
Cusack arrested Frances. Police at the station didn’t know whether to put her in the Women’s House of Detention or the men’s jail. David Jones, a city physician, and Clara Seippel, a doctor employed by the Morals Court, examined Frances. They signed a certificate: Frances was a man.
Frances was less upset by the doctors than by Mrs. Tesmer. “When I saw her,” Frances said, “I felt sorry for her. Honest—I wanted to just put my arms around her. . . . Then the damned fool went and tried to hook me for this. . . . I was at home that night . . . I know it was that night because I was sick [from drinking bad moonshine] the day before. I had to leave the [Windsor] theater in the middle of the movie because I was sick. . . . I never shot a revolver in my life. All I ever done was drink. . . . I was never out on the streets. And look what comes to me. . . . I’m going to fight this damned mess. . . . ‘Fair heart ne’er won fair lady’ ”17
Police arrested Frances’s husband the next day. Lieutenant McCarthy and Sergeant Cusack searched the Carricks’ apartment: wigs, hairpieces, face paint, and powder; a pair of frayed Russian boots, several expensive corsets, hundreds of player piano music rolls; piles of lingerie; a bird’s-eye maple dining room set—table, sideboard, and chairs; a huge victrola; a shelf of cookbooks; a recipe for chocolate fudge; an insurance policy naming “Frances Carrick, wife” as beneficiary; a draft board notice exempting Frank from military service because of “the dependency of wife, Frances.” Frances’s closets were packed with clothes, but she didn’t own a single brown dress. There were hats, all sorts of hats, scattered everywhere, but not a single bonnet with a floppy brim.
“It’ll take me a long time to listen to that racket about Mrs. Carrick being a man,” said the lady who lived in a little house behind Frances’s apartment building. No one in the neighborhood believed that Frances was the sort of person who’d carry a gun. “Not a chance,” the lady said. “We’d’ve known if she was up to that kind of stuff.” There was only one thing that people thought was strange about Frances: her beard. “But,” the lady said, “I knew she drank a lot, and I thought that when she got crazy from cheap moon, she might’ve shaved her face, once. Then she would’ve had to keep on.”18
Chief of Detectives Hughes and Assistant State’s Attorney Jones decided to be nice to Frances. They didn’t let her shave, but they did let her change her clothes. On her second day in jail, Frances appeared in a black dress with a low-cut, oval neck and short, slit sleeves. Frances told Hughes she had a sensitive stomach, so he had detectives get her a bottle of milk to drink while he questioned her. Frances took a sip, pulled up her stockings, and denied everything. “Believe me,” she said, “I don’t know a damned thing about this mess. You help me and I’ll help you. We’ll go through the dope joints and we’ll get the girl who killed Tesmer. That Tesmer woman—she’s crazy. Why don’t she give me a white man’s chance? Let me doll up, shave, wash my eyes, get my rainbow garden [of makeup] working—then see if she could recognize me. Not a chance.”19
Frances may have had an ulcer—but Frank had a habit. After two days without a fix, and another day of nonstop questioning, Frank cracked. Hughes hoped he’d get a confession—instead he got “the ravings of a dope fiend. . . . The tiny, anemic, wild-eyed man didn’t seem to know what he was talking about . . . he twisted in his chair. . . . Occasionally, he would cough, dryly. Sometimes, he trembled and startled at imaginary sounds. . . . At noon, taken back to his cell . . . the frail-looking man began to talk wildly of shots, bullets, guns, murders, and automobiles. His ravings were a cross-section of all the questions that had been shot at him. From them, he constructed a weird story of having seen the shots that killed Tesmer. . . .”20 Police had a hunch that a tall man with wavy hair named Slim had been Frances’s accomplice. “ ‘Yeah,’ said Frank, ‘Slim did it. Sure, Slim did. I seen him . . . The bullet grazed the side of the automobile . . . Then he ran down the alley like the cops said he did,’ ”21 Hughes had Frank taken to the city’s Psychopathic Hospital.
Meanwhile, Frances gave interviews. Social workers, socialites, psychoanalysts, and curiosity seekers “thronged the Detective Bureau to see the creature with the duplex psychology.”22
All of Frances’s visitors were women. They all asked her the same—eternal—question:
“A girl in a modish fawn-colored suit rushed up to Freddie [Frances] to ask him, ‘Which gets away any better in this world, man or woman?’ ”23
“Believe me,” said Frances, “a woman can get away with murder. You know what I mean, honey. She can get anything from a new hat to a new husband if she knows how.”
Frances spoke as if she were sitting in her kitchen, chatting over coffee. A middle-aged social worker asked Frances what she’d learned from her experience: “If you had to do it over again, would you dress like a woman?”
Frances arched her brows, took a sip of milk, and answered without hesitating: “Not a chance . . . Look what it’s brought me to. But it’s [been] good for me. It’s like driving. . . . You’re never . . . careful until you have an accident.”24
The newspapers published photographs of Frances in her male and female incarnations. The Chicago Tribune reproduced a copy of the marriage certificate issued to Fred Thompson and Marie Clark. The paper published a snapshot of Fred, wearing trousers and a T-shirt, next to a snapshot of Frances in a housedress. Every day, the papers published photos of Frances, before, during, and after her interrogations. A portrait of Frances made on the day she was arrested was striking: beautiful, dark eyes, a lovely mouth, a pale oval face framed by dark, hennaed hair. Frances was no blonde; her eyes weren’t blue; she hadn’t been a twenty-year-old girl for thirteen years.
Someone hired an attorney named Frank McDonnell to represent Frances. McDonnell served Chief of Detectives Hughes with a writ of habeas corpus. The result: three days after Frances’s arrest, she made her first public appearance—in the court of Judge Joseph David, the same judge who’d presided over Carl Wanderer’s insanity hearings.
People from every office in the County Building left their desks to get a look at Frances. Three times, Judge David ordered bailiffs to clear the crowd from the courtroom. Three times, they tried and failed. After fifteen minutes of shoving and shouting, the bailiffs cleared a small space in front of the bench.
McDonnell’s writ had specified that “Mr. and Mrs. Fred Thompson” be produced to stand trial before a judge. Judge David reviewed the writ, looked at the defendant, whom the prosecutor referred to as Fred-Frances, and asked, “which is which.”
“Stand up,” Attorney McDonnell said to his client.
Police had let Frances freshen up for the occasion. She was closely shaved, freshly powdered and rouged; hennaed hairpieces framed her face. She wore the same black dress she’d worn since her second day in jail. A reporter noticed that Frances wore high heels. Size 5, the reporter guessed.
“Very well, be seated,” said Judge David. An attorney from Mr. Crowe’s office presented a warrant charging Frances with murder. Attorney McDonnell stepped forward to object to the warrant’s $10,000 bail.
“That’s preposterous,” said Judge David. “If it’s murder, there is no bail.”
“That’s the point,” said McDonnell. “The state has no case.”
McDonnell had been alternating pronouns as he spoke about his client—sometimes Frances was a “she,” sometimes a “he.”
“Which is it?” asked Judge David.
McDonnell said he didn’t really know.
“Well,” said Judge David, “whichever it is, take this man or woman—take her—before Judge Burgee within an hour, arrange for a hearing in Municipal Court tomorrow—and have the bail canceled.”
Police escorted Frances and McDonnell through the crowd to Judge Burgee’s courtroom. Burgee wasn’t there. Frances’s escorts were so flustered, they began to present their request to a bailiff. Fortunately, a judge named Walker stepped into the room. He’d been looking for his secretary. His secretary was in the crowd. Gaping at Frances. Walker took the bench, accepted the state’s warrant, canceled Frances’s bail, and ordered a Municipal Court hearing for the next day.
Police took Frances back to a holding cell in the Detective Bureau. Chief Hughes had agreed to keep her there since she refused to dress or behave like Fred.
The next morning, Frances shaved, curled her hair, applied fresh makeup, and stepped into the bureau’s briefing room wearing a pink silk slip. The sergeant who’d been in the middle of roll call stopped in mid-sentence.
“Don’t you know it’s against the rules to parade around a respectable jail dressed in a teddy bear,” he said.
“It isn’t a teddy bear,” Frances said. “It’s a step-in. I’m saving my blue dress so it won’t be wrinkled for the hearing. So much depends on making a good appearance.”25
Frances needn’t have gone to the trouble.
Frank Carrick and Marie Clark were brought to court and ordered to stand with Frances when her hearing began. A crowd filled the hallways outside the courtroom, but bailiffs wouldn’t let anyone in. Judge Rooney looked at Frances and Marie and said they looked like sisters. Marie had been charged with disorderly conduct the night detectives arrested Frances. Marie had posted bail; she was expecting to be arraigned. Judge Rooney told her that would happen later. She was free to go—but Judge Rooney reminded her: when Frances’s case came to trial, she would not be—she could not be—required to testify against her husband.
Frank was calmer than he’d been in days. There had been some talk about charging Frank with draft dodging—claiming Frances as his wife. Nothing came of it: as far as Judge Rooney and the federal government were now concerned, Frank had no spouse and therefore no spousal privileges. Judge Rooney told Frank he was free to go.
Attorney McDonnell announced he was prepared to call the widow Tesmer to testify. “I’ll undermine the state’s case; I’ll force them to show their hand.26 . . . The only evidence the police have is the identification of Mrs. Tesmer and she has identified half a dozen other girls.”27
Crowe’s office didn’t give McDonnell a chance to undermine anything. An assistant state’s attorney asked Judge Rooney for a “continuance to enable the police to make a complete investigation of certain important phases of the case which need to be cleared up.”28
Rooney postponed the hearing until July 11. In the meantime, he accepted McDonnell’s request that Frances be transferred from police custody to the county jail. “I want my client referred to as ‘Miss,’ ” said McDonnell. “That’s my defense.”
Wesley Westbrook, the warden of the county jail, took one look at Frances and made up his own mind. If Frances was his responsibility, then Frances needed to act properly: off with the dress, the heels, the rouge, and the hairpieces. Fred was given a pair of prison overalls and a jumper and sent to the men’s quarters. “And so it was that legal authorities restored Thompson to the masculinity he had practically discarded as a boy.”29
Four days later, Oscar Wolff convened a coroner’s jury.
Mrs. Tesmer came to the inquest, escorted by her brother, her sister, and her daughter. A crowd, twenty deep, pressed forward to see her. Women and children, some as young as five, some as old as eighty, fell silent as Mrs. Tesmer began to testify. She pointed at Frances and said in a voice so frail it was almost a whisper, “That is the person that killed my husband. God will help me. God is with me.”
Frances sat at a table next to her attorney. Warden Westbrook had let Frances wear a dress and makeup to the inquest. McDonnell leaned over to her and whispered, “What do you think of this?” Frances answered, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Aw—it’s awfully well staged.”
McDonnell asked Coroner Wolff’s permission to cross-examine Mrs. Tesmer. A deputy coroner and two assistant state’s attorneys objected as strongly as if McDonnell had asked Mrs. Tesmer to disrobe. “This girl’s life and liberty are at stake!” McDonnell cried as he pointed at Frances. “Is this Russia that a person can be accused and not permitted to defend himself?”30
McDonnell kept changing his pronouns.
The result: A debate began about the name and gender of the prisoner. Sergeant Cusack, who’d arrested Frances, took the stand. He said that Frances was a man. A man named Fred Thompson. “Frances Carrick” was nothing but an alias. “Freddie-Frances” was the way police referred to him. Attorney McDonnell asked Sergeant Cusack if he was a “sex expert” as well as a police detective. Coroner Wolff told Cusack he didn’t need to answer.
The coroner’s jury took less than a minute to return a verdict:
“Fred G. Thompson” alias “Frances Carrick” had shot and killed Richard Tesmer during a robbery. The jury ordered Thompson’s case be sent forward to the grand jury. By the time the grand jury returned its own murder verdict, the Criminal Court had recessed for the summer.
Frances’s murder trial began on October 1, 1923. Her case was the first on the court’s docket. Her judge was Chief Justice John Caverly—the same judge who’d ruled against Harvey Church. The same judge who would, a year later, decide that Leopold and Loeb were juveniles whose youth spared them from the death penalty. (Leopold later remarked that everyone would have been saved a lot of time, trouble, and money if Judge Caverly had simply asked to see their birth certificates on the first day of their trial.)
“One of the largest [crowds] ever seen in the Criminal Court building”31 packed the courtroom and overflowed into adjacent corridors. “The crowd was composed for the most part of women with a fair sprinkling of males of the so-called ‘cake eating’ type.”32
Frances had grown stouter and stockier during her months in jail. Instead of a silk dress, hose, heels, and a hat with a veil, she wore bluedenim prison trousers, “a woman’s georgette shirtwaist,” and hairpieces over each ear.33 A reporter wrote that Frances wore her blue jeans “with a feminine bearing as if they had been silken Turkish pajamas.”34
Jury selection was uneventful. The trial began just after noon.
“With burning eyes . . . Mrs. Anna Tesmer . . . arose from the witness chair . . . and pointed out Fred G. Thompson as her husband’s killer. . . . Thompson, the she-man with the Mona Lisa smile, bent a glance of withering scorn at his accuser, straightened his [hair] puffs, and cracked his gum. . . . ‘The bunk,’ he commented in a girlish voice. ‘The poor thing is hysterical.’
“Mrs. Tesmer held to her identification despite a sharp cross examination by Attorney Frank C. McDonnell. . . . [McDonnell’s] hint that the widow had not always referred to the murderer as ‘the one dressed as a woman,’ brought sharp objections from the attorneys for the state. The objections were sustained.”35
The state called three more witnesses after Mrs. Tesmer, then it rested its case.
Attorney McDonnell began by calling character witnesses. Some had known Frances for twenty years. They spoke of a “thoroughly domesticated housewife,” “a talented seamstress,” “an exceptionally fine cook.”
The trial grew even more interesting when McDonnell called Frank Carrick to the stand.
As soon as Frank was sworn in, Assistant State’s Attorney William McLaughlin jumped to his feet.
“I ask the court to halt this questioning until defense counsel has asked what relation he has to the defendant.”
McDonnell tried not to smile as he objected—strenuously.
Judge Caverly ordered McDonnell to ask Frank McLaughlin’s question.
“Are you and the defendant, man and wife?” The state had just helped McDonnell convince the jury that Frances did more than just dress like a woman.
“Yes, sir,” Frank answered. He didn’t seem upset by the question. “Freddie and I were married May 23, 1913 . . . it was several months before I learned that my wife was a man.”36
Judge Caverly intervened. “Not another word,” he said. He ordered Frank to step down.
“The ruling, said to be without parallel in American jurisprudence, was based upon the law that no husband may testify in his wife’s behalf at a murder trial . . . Judge Caverly held that the fact that Thompson was a man did not affect his status as a wife in so far as the interpretation of the law is concerned.”37
Frances took the stand the next day. She’d asked permission to wear a dress, but the state had objected. Judge Caverly told her to wear what she’d worn when the trial began. Attorney McDonnell made his objections public: “The state charges my client is a man who, when the alleged crime took place, was masquerading as a woman. The defense will prove the defendant is a woman.” McDonnell said he had medical experts and a set of X-rays that would prove Frances was who she said she was.
In the meantime, Frances told the jury the story of her life. Tears and sobs interrupted her testimony. She spoke of her marriage to Frank Carrick—”My man,” she said—and then her marriage to Marie Clark. She said she’d married Marie to save the girl’s soul. She described how she and Marie left Chicago, bought land in Elmhurst; how they’d tried to farm it; how she’d tried to live as Fred. How none of it had worked. She laughed as she cried. She began to describe her boyhood. She spoke of how lonely and ashamed she’d been, how she’d dressed as a boy, then dressed as a girl, back and forth, until finally she ran away. To the streets of Chicago. She wept as she said this.
McDonnell asked her:
“Did you ever change your clothes to conceal a murder?” “No,” Frances said. She turned to the jury. “Gentlemen,” she said. All the jurors were men. “Gentlemen,” she said, “I didn’t kill Mr. Tesmer. I couldn’t kill a cat or a dog.” She broke down. Women in the crowd began to weep. For five minutes, the only sounds in the courtroom were their sobs and Frances’s weeping.
The jury took two hours to reach a verdict. Their first ballot was 8 to 4 for acquittal. Their second was 9 to 3. Then it was 11 to 1. Then it was: “Not guilty.”
“My God!” Frances screamed. “I’m glad!”
Judge Caverly had ordered extra bailiffs posted in the room, but they couldn’t control the crowd. Women engulfed Frances, patted her, tugged at her, embraced her. A three-year-old girl fell to her knees and was nearly trampled by her own mother.
“I’ve got things wrong with me, sure,” said Frances. “But—hell—that don’t make me a killer. Just because a man has cross eyes don’t make him a pickpocket. A guy can have adenoids and not be a murderer. What the hell’s the big idea!”
Frances thanked each member of the jury, then she and Frank and Attorney McDonnell made their way through the crowds. Outside the courthouse there were more crowds.
“I’ve learned a lot,” Frances told reporters. “Everybody’s been swell to me—but, my goodness!—I’ll be glad to get some hair pins!”
Back at McDonnell’s office, Frances changed into a navy blue suit trimmed with lace. Someone asked her if she had any plans. All the ladies who’d visited her in jail had asked the same question. “Write a book or go into the movies” was what Frances had said, then. Now all she wanted was a new hat. “It was June when I went on my little trip and it’s winter, now. Must have a new lid.”
By State’s Attorney Jones’s count, Frances was the thirtieth woman in Cook County to get away with murder.