A Fever in the Heartland, page 22
“Here’s a little present from Steve for you,” he said.
“What’s this for?” asked Niblack. He’d met Steve at the Kresge Building, was thrown out of that interview in Kokomo two years earlier, and was now banging out multiple daily takes on the biggest story in decades. His coverage was sharp and aggressive, but every now and then he wrote something that pleased the Klansman.
“It’s for the good story you had in the Times yesterday. Keep it up!” Niblack took the bill, equal to a month’s salary, and put it in his wallet. It was tempting. He had been working long days while going to law school at night—and trying to live on his miserly salary. He often bought a pint of baked beans for a dime and made it last for two nights’ dinner. Later the same day he returned the defendant’s money.
On Sunday, August 9, Steve noticed a clot of Klansmen milling in the courthouse square, just below his jailhouse window. They taunted him. They were part of Evans’s team, in town to separate the image of the Klan associated with the man on trial for murder from the Klan that had paraded through the capital one day earlier. Though Stephenson felt threatened, he could feel assured—by the flow of gifts and the hundreds of letters—that the locals were still on his side. In Noblesville, it was more dangerous not to be a Klansman, as the hooded order showed with a farmer who’d refused to join. They paid one visit that was neighborly in tone. A second visit was less so. The third time, the man was warned that “funny things happen to farmers who don’t join. Their cattle die of a mysterious illness called bullet in the head.” The farmer ponied up his $10 and took the oath. Of late, the Noblesville Ledger’s Klan Komments could have been penned by the Old Man himself.
The look in the mirror, as Dale had urged Hoosiers to do, did not prompt a reexamination—at least not in this town. To the contrary, the paper sought to rally its considerable community of Klansmen—they had nothing to be ashamed of. The Klan could not possibly be a lawless organization because a lawless organization could never be chartered by the state, the paper pointed out. “All such charges against the Klan are false, unwarranted and unbelievable,” the paper wrote of the run of bad publicity. “It is strictly a white man’s organization—not to foster racial hatred or harm the Negro; but to preserve the purity of the white Caucasian blood, oppose the inter-marriage of races and maintain forever the doctrine of white supremacy.”
Evans drew a large crowd at the Noblesville Chautauqua on Klan Day, the women fanning themselves in the summer heat, the men eager for ideological reinforcement at this moment of confusion. Chautauqua assemblies were adult education courses under open skies, often coupled with song, musicians, sometimes a play or a reading from a political speech. The idea was to freshen the mind, sharpen perspective, punch up lazy thinking. Noblesville was thrilled to have a man of the Imperial Wizard’s standing in its little town. Though tired after the long, overnight train ride from Washington, Evans still radiated a shine from the big parade. He avoided most questions about the Grand Dragon in the jailhouse, except to remind people that Stephenson was no longer a member in good standing.
“The principles of the Klan are plain home doctrines of common honesty, decency, law and order,” Evans told the Chautauqua gathering. He ticked off the Klan’s extraordinary political accomplishments over the past year, and looked ahead to new goals. “We’ve passed this immigration bill and built a stone wall around the nation so tall, so deep, so strong, that the scum and riff-raff of the old world cannot get into our gates,” he said. Criminalizing alcohol “has resulted in a higher plane of living for all.” The attendees responded with many a nodding head and frequent applause. The Imperial Wizard had one more point to make before intellectually curious citizens of Noblesville retired to their homes and he got back on the train to Washington. He was responding to an earlier question about the Invisible Empire’s recent troubles. Some had even predicted the demise of the order. He had not answered it then. But he did now.
“If the Klan is dead,” he said, “then America is dead.”
* * *
—
When court was called to order the following day, Judge Fred Hines had two surprising announcements. One, he would be stepping down. This was just what Steve wanted. Hines, the second judge in the case, had refused to free the three murder defendants on bail, and he’d turned down their request to throw out the indictment. The fate of Madge’s dying declaration was yet to be decided, though it was not looking good for the defense team. A few weeks earlier, Inman had tried to prove that Madge was not of sound mind when she signed off on her final words. They were not even her words, he said, but those of the attorney Asa Smith—hearsay! But after a series of medical experts testified that Madge was mentally competent when the declaration was notarized, the judge indicated he was likely to admit the document. Stephenson’s half-dozen-plus-one attorneys were angered enough by early skirmishing before the trial that they had petitioned for a change of judges. A new judge, the third one to hear the case, William Sparks from Rushville, would oversee the trial in Noblesville.
The other bit of news was a gut punch to Steve, who’d expected to be out and about well before summer’s end. The case would not be dismissed. Judge Hines said court would be adjourned for the duration of the hot-weather months. Steve’s trial for murder would open in October.
21.
To Slay a Dragon
AUTUMN 1925
As he prepared for the biggest trial of his life, Will Remy appeared to be wasting away, his nervous energy and the external threats to his life sapping him of sustenance. He had few pounds to spare. Remy was a year older than Stephenson, but looked at least a decade younger. With his stick-out ears, suits that draped over him like hand-me-downs on a scarecrow, and slicked-back hair parted down the middle, he was known among the press pool as “the boy prosecutor.” As a war veteran from the lung-choking trenches of France, he thought he knew how to control his trepidations. But he went from 156 pounds when Madge died in April to 129 pounds at the start of the trial in October. And he was sleep-deprived.
Having initially faced Stephenson as the only officeholder to refuse a pledge of obedience to the Grand Dragon after the 1924 election, Remy certainly knew what he was up against. He was “surrounded by enemies,” he wrote in his unpublished memoir. He hired one other Irish cop to join the detective, McMurtry, to protect him at all hours. He trusted no one else on the Klan-thick Indianapolis Police Department. After the snub at the Severin Hotel, Stephenson had gone to see the county commissioners in the Klan’s stable. They agreed to cut funds to the prosecutor’s office. Remy was forced to reach into his own pocket to buy law books, office supplies, and stenographic material, and to arrange for transport of witnesses.
He told himself the case against Stephenson was just another criminal trial. He outlined the two sides in a black leather-bound notebook. Under “The Evidence,” he listed the dying declaration, testimony from the train porter, workers at the hotel in Hammond, the doctors and expert medical witnesses, the infected bites on Madge’s breasts. In the category of “Defense,” he wrote “suicide” and “escapade,” meaning that Madge went for a thrill ride without coercion. The prosecutorial act was one part mechanical, in the evidence and witness presentation, and one part personal, trying to humanize the victim while demonizing the defendant. As always, the most important thing was shaping a narrative—a story the jury would believe, or want to believe, by unanimous consent.
But Remy had a larger goal: to break the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana. He knew—and took seriously—that Stephenson wanted to be president of the United States, and would employ the same ruthless mix of power, threat, and fear that had allowed him to take over a state in less than four years. If he could convict Stephenson, he might also be able to drag the hooded order down with him.
Stephenson’s fate would be determined by a jury drawn from a pool filled with the waters of the Indiana Klan. Remy couldn’t put the evil of the Empire on trial, for that would put these citizens on trial. What did it say about them if they had pledged obedience to an order led by a colossus of corruption? Paradoxically, the way to destroy the Klan was to separate the man from the Klan. And for this task, up against the best legal talent in the state and the dean of criminal lawyers, Remy needed help. He brought in Charles E. Cox, a former Indiana Supreme Court judge, who agreed to work for free. Born one year before the Civil War, Cox grew up in Noblesville, a descendant of Quaker abolitionists and revolutionaries who’d fought the British in the War of Independence. He’d been married for forty years, and projected a balanced sense of moral vigor, aided by a gravity-defying shock of biblical white hair. He was the gravitas that Remy lacked. At the same time, he could slip into neighborly talk to the locals when addressing his peers—fellow Hamilton County folks.
Jury selection was not easy. By custom, though not law, only men, and only white men, were given a chance to sit on the panel. Women were considered fragile, emotional, impractical, and unable to sustain hard thinking. When voir dire started on October 12, a steady parade of citizens was brought forth and dismissed, as each side tried to find a persuadable fit. The men were asked if they knew Stephenson or Madge, and if they had an opinion about rape and violent crime and the death penalty. They were quizzed on their religious background, their reading habits, on how much they knew about the case. Remy questioned only a few about the Klan, and that was done cryptically, asking about membership in fraternal orders. After thirteen days had passed, and 260 potential jurors had been interviewed, the judge finally lost patience and brought the voir dire to a close. Twelve middle-aged white men were impaneled—Cash, Sam, Leotis, Ben, Clyde, Ralph, Harley, Larry, Bob, a pair of Wills, and a Zeno. All but two were farmers. One was a truck driver. The other managed a small gas company. After the jury had been sworn in, Cox tapped into his local connections to see what his team was up against. An insider told him that three members of the jury likely belonged to the Invisible Empire.
Could this panel ever convict a Klansman? That question drove William Stern, the local Civil War veteran, to fits of rage as he made his daily walks around the courthouse square. Since his boyhood in the 1840s, he’d trod over nearly every inch of ground in this county, his beloved piece of Indiana. The change of seasons, a new pet, a shopkeeper’s joke—these small pleasures still made him smile and gave him a reason to get out of bed. He’d just been feted in the Ledger for his sixtieth wedding anniversary—dating to an evening in 1865 when he and Mary Ellen Bush started a life together. It would be easier for Stern if he merely played the role of grand old man of Noblesville, a benign gray presence whose life marks were noted in the pages of the town daily along with stories of guests coming to town for Thanksgiving or “a resident with a severe cold.” But the weight of his years had only increased the weight of his sense of duty—as a lifelong Republican, he was obligated, he said, to sustain Abe Lincoln’s legacy. What he’d heard from the local Klan of the last four years—“these so-called one-hundred percent Americans,” in his words—made his blood boil. He urged fellow Republicans in Noblesville to imagine what Lincoln would think “if he stood here upon this earth with the remnants of the mighty army who yet survive” and heard the sordid tale playing out inside their own courthouse. Lincoln would find a state given over to “hypocrites and traitors.” As to the remnants of that force, Stern was the last surviving member of Company E, in the Indiana 39th.
* * *
—
Under the protection of Sheriff Gooding, Stephenson and his two underlings walked the few steps from the jailhouse to the three-story brick courthouse on the opening day of the trial. It was a small-town set piece of a building, with its tapered clock tower, pilasters of Indiana limestone, just a short stroll from the lazy crawl of the White River. It had snowed the day before, and a few inches were still on the ground. That night, the temperature had plunged to 22 degrees—tying a record low for October. The Klansman lit a cigar at the start of this stroll, and waved to people along the way. Up the marble steps they went, to the second floor, into a chamber of high ceilings, varnished oak window trim, matching wood wainscoting, and an antique grandfather clock on the wall. It was packed well before Judge Sparks brought the trial to order on the morning of October 29. The judge was known as a straight-shooter, without political ties to either side. The courtroom could hold 176 people, not counting scores of reporters gathered from across the nation. A veil of tobacco haze soon settled overhead, as people smoked their cigars, pipes, and cigarettes in the courtroom. Members of Madge’s Pi Beta Phi pledge class were also there, joining other women who would form a cohort of conscience on behalf of the dead woman from Irvington. As farmers, most of the jurors likely had dirt under their fingernails. But with the eyes of the nation on them, they were all clean-shaven and dressed in their formal best, in ties and matching wool pants and jackets.
Stephenson, in a beige tailored suit, was behind his phalanx of attorneys. Matilda Oberholtzer found a seat on the side that gave her an unobstructed angle on the man accused of murdering her daughter. Dressed in mourner’s black, she locked eyes on the Grand Dragon and never let go. In the days leading up to the trial, her family had received death threats, not unlike the chilling calls lobbed into Remy’s home. Klansmen in cars would drive slowly by the Oberholtzer house in Irvington, occasionally flashing their lights into the house.
Judge Cox, as the court addressed the aging anchor of the prosecutorial team, was the first to face the jury. After outlining the charges and assuring the panel that the state would prove the case against the three men, he summoned the deceased from the grave. The dying declaration had yet to be admitted, but the prosecution assumed it would after Steve’s team had failed to knock it out during the summer skirmishes. From the opening words of Cox, it was clear that Remy was going to bet the house on the words of a ghost.
“The principal witness for the state will be Madge Oberholtzer, the dead victim of the foulest murder that stains the history of our state. Under exception to the rule which generally excludes hearsay testimony, Madge Oberholtzer, clean of soul, but with her bruised, mangled, poisoned and ravished body, standing by her grave’s edge, will tell you, so far as possible in the circumstances, the story of her entrapment, of being drugged and kidnapped, assaulted, beaten, lacerated with beastly fangs, ravished and finally . . . finally . . . forced by the loss of all a good woman holds dear to take the deadly poison which contributed to her untimely and cruel death.”
Cox pointed to Earl Gentry, the meat-faced bodyguard, his 230-pound bulk testing the seams of his suit. “She will tell you that this man, Gentry, remained in that compartment all the time until Hammond was reached. She will tell you that they threw her in the lower berth and undressed her. She will tell you of the horrors of the night drive in an automobile from Hammond.” Cox paused to run a hand through his unruly thicket of white hair, moving slowly toward the jury and then back. “She will tell you of help refused her, of her imprisonment, not in Stephenson’s palatial home, but a garage.”
Next, he played the Hoosier card, to ensure that the jurors knew the victim was one of them.
“The evidence will show that Madge Oberholtzer sprang from the soil of Indiana. Here, she first saw the light of day. Here, her childhood was passed, and here she grew to womanhood. Here, she lived an ambitious life, a useful and a chaste life. None knew her but to love her. None named her but to praise her.”
The descriptor of “chaste” was no sly hint at her character. The prosecution knew that the defense team planned to tear Madge down, to show that “the loss of all a good woman holds dear” had not happened for the first time in the rail car to Chicago.
On the other side was this invasive weed of a man, D. C. Stephenson, no Hoosier at all, a thug in a fancy suit. “He was born in the state of Texas,” said Cox, letting the word linger like gas passed in a church. “He had drifted to many parts of the country and undergone many and varied experiences. He had drifted into Indiana four years ago and took up his abode in Evansville. He quickly rose to a position of great affluence and social and political power. The evidence will show that he had a double personality; that on one side of him was the magnetic, sympathetic, cultured, attractive man of the world; that he was an impassioned orator; that there was something about him that enabled him to attract and dominate better men and good women.
“The evidence will show that there was another side of him, and that side showed him a violator of the law: to be a drunkard and a persistent seducer and destroyer of women’s chastity.” His residence, “the palatial mansion in Irvington,” in Cox’s words, also had a dual personality. “It was not a home, it had a double character like its master. There on occasions were gathered as his guests people of character and high repute, and all was propriety and decorum. But on other occasions were drinking and lascivious debauch . . . virgin girls and good women were lured to be entrapped and debauched.”
Cox tried to link the outcome of the trial to the protection of all women. “This is not an ordinary murder case. Usually murder is a deed of hate, of revenge, a deed committed with a gun, a knife or a bludgeon. This was murder committed by a man, aided by his two satellites, a man who, the evidence will show, said, ‘I am the law in Indiana.’ This case is to determine whether we are to protect the sanctity of the honor and chastity of womanhood.” Much of Cox’s story had elicited gasps from the spectators, prompting a warning from the judge.
Cox finished after an hour and fifteen minutes, and never mentioned the Klan.
Now it was the turn of Stephenson’s team to shape the narrative. Inman rose, fidgeted with his short tie, looked at the judge and scanned the jury. Then, to everyone’s surprise, he chose to say nothing: the defense would not offer an opening statement. While it was baffling that Inman would cede the first-impression battle to the maiden in the grave, he had larger legal goals, as well as strategy questions he’d yet to resolve. The quickest way to acquittal was to get the judge to dismiss the charges after the prosecution had presented its case. This was a common thing for defense lawyers to do in trials where there was some doubt, when it was obvious that the case had not been proved. As he’d claimed on numerous occasions, this was not a homicide case, but a suicide, with Stephenson having no hand in the poison Madge had taken. All Inman needed to show, he believed, was that bichloride of mercury was the cause of death, by self-ingestion—case over. The bite marks on her body were something else, but not evidence of a fatal attack. As for the kidnapping, who could say that Madge didn’t go willingly with Steve on the last train to Chicago, acting on her free will and her fascination with this magnetic man? They’d been seeing each other. They’d gone out to dinner at least twice. The train ride was simply an extension of their social entanglement. Perhaps a lovers’ spat.
“What’s this for?” asked Niblack. He’d met Steve at the Kresge Building, was thrown out of that interview in Kokomo two years earlier, and was now banging out multiple daily takes on the biggest story in decades. His coverage was sharp and aggressive, but every now and then he wrote something that pleased the Klansman.
“It’s for the good story you had in the Times yesterday. Keep it up!” Niblack took the bill, equal to a month’s salary, and put it in his wallet. It was tempting. He had been working long days while going to law school at night—and trying to live on his miserly salary. He often bought a pint of baked beans for a dime and made it last for two nights’ dinner. Later the same day he returned the defendant’s money.
On Sunday, August 9, Steve noticed a clot of Klansmen milling in the courthouse square, just below his jailhouse window. They taunted him. They were part of Evans’s team, in town to separate the image of the Klan associated with the man on trial for murder from the Klan that had paraded through the capital one day earlier. Though Stephenson felt threatened, he could feel assured—by the flow of gifts and the hundreds of letters—that the locals were still on his side. In Noblesville, it was more dangerous not to be a Klansman, as the hooded order showed with a farmer who’d refused to join. They paid one visit that was neighborly in tone. A second visit was less so. The third time, the man was warned that “funny things happen to farmers who don’t join. Their cattle die of a mysterious illness called bullet in the head.” The farmer ponied up his $10 and took the oath. Of late, the Noblesville Ledger’s Klan Komments could have been penned by the Old Man himself.
The look in the mirror, as Dale had urged Hoosiers to do, did not prompt a reexamination—at least not in this town. To the contrary, the paper sought to rally its considerable community of Klansmen—they had nothing to be ashamed of. The Klan could not possibly be a lawless organization because a lawless organization could never be chartered by the state, the paper pointed out. “All such charges against the Klan are false, unwarranted and unbelievable,” the paper wrote of the run of bad publicity. “It is strictly a white man’s organization—not to foster racial hatred or harm the Negro; but to preserve the purity of the white Caucasian blood, oppose the inter-marriage of races and maintain forever the doctrine of white supremacy.”
Evans drew a large crowd at the Noblesville Chautauqua on Klan Day, the women fanning themselves in the summer heat, the men eager for ideological reinforcement at this moment of confusion. Chautauqua assemblies were adult education courses under open skies, often coupled with song, musicians, sometimes a play or a reading from a political speech. The idea was to freshen the mind, sharpen perspective, punch up lazy thinking. Noblesville was thrilled to have a man of the Imperial Wizard’s standing in its little town. Though tired after the long, overnight train ride from Washington, Evans still radiated a shine from the big parade. He avoided most questions about the Grand Dragon in the jailhouse, except to remind people that Stephenson was no longer a member in good standing.
“The principles of the Klan are plain home doctrines of common honesty, decency, law and order,” Evans told the Chautauqua gathering. He ticked off the Klan’s extraordinary political accomplishments over the past year, and looked ahead to new goals. “We’ve passed this immigration bill and built a stone wall around the nation so tall, so deep, so strong, that the scum and riff-raff of the old world cannot get into our gates,” he said. Criminalizing alcohol “has resulted in a higher plane of living for all.” The attendees responded with many a nodding head and frequent applause. The Imperial Wizard had one more point to make before intellectually curious citizens of Noblesville retired to their homes and he got back on the train to Washington. He was responding to an earlier question about the Invisible Empire’s recent troubles. Some had even predicted the demise of the order. He had not answered it then. But he did now.
“If the Klan is dead,” he said, “then America is dead.”
* * *
—
When court was called to order the following day, Judge Fred Hines had two surprising announcements. One, he would be stepping down. This was just what Steve wanted. Hines, the second judge in the case, had refused to free the three murder defendants on bail, and he’d turned down their request to throw out the indictment. The fate of Madge’s dying declaration was yet to be decided, though it was not looking good for the defense team. A few weeks earlier, Inman had tried to prove that Madge was not of sound mind when she signed off on her final words. They were not even her words, he said, but those of the attorney Asa Smith—hearsay! But after a series of medical experts testified that Madge was mentally competent when the declaration was notarized, the judge indicated he was likely to admit the document. Stephenson’s half-dozen-plus-one attorneys were angered enough by early skirmishing before the trial that they had petitioned for a change of judges. A new judge, the third one to hear the case, William Sparks from Rushville, would oversee the trial in Noblesville.
The other bit of news was a gut punch to Steve, who’d expected to be out and about well before summer’s end. The case would not be dismissed. Judge Hines said court would be adjourned for the duration of the hot-weather months. Steve’s trial for murder would open in October.
21.
To Slay a Dragon
AUTUMN 1925
As he prepared for the biggest trial of his life, Will Remy appeared to be wasting away, his nervous energy and the external threats to his life sapping him of sustenance. He had few pounds to spare. Remy was a year older than Stephenson, but looked at least a decade younger. With his stick-out ears, suits that draped over him like hand-me-downs on a scarecrow, and slicked-back hair parted down the middle, he was known among the press pool as “the boy prosecutor.” As a war veteran from the lung-choking trenches of France, he thought he knew how to control his trepidations. But he went from 156 pounds when Madge died in April to 129 pounds at the start of the trial in October. And he was sleep-deprived.
Having initially faced Stephenson as the only officeholder to refuse a pledge of obedience to the Grand Dragon after the 1924 election, Remy certainly knew what he was up against. He was “surrounded by enemies,” he wrote in his unpublished memoir. He hired one other Irish cop to join the detective, McMurtry, to protect him at all hours. He trusted no one else on the Klan-thick Indianapolis Police Department. After the snub at the Severin Hotel, Stephenson had gone to see the county commissioners in the Klan’s stable. They agreed to cut funds to the prosecutor’s office. Remy was forced to reach into his own pocket to buy law books, office supplies, and stenographic material, and to arrange for transport of witnesses.
He told himself the case against Stephenson was just another criminal trial. He outlined the two sides in a black leather-bound notebook. Under “The Evidence,” he listed the dying declaration, testimony from the train porter, workers at the hotel in Hammond, the doctors and expert medical witnesses, the infected bites on Madge’s breasts. In the category of “Defense,” he wrote “suicide” and “escapade,” meaning that Madge went for a thrill ride without coercion. The prosecutorial act was one part mechanical, in the evidence and witness presentation, and one part personal, trying to humanize the victim while demonizing the defendant. As always, the most important thing was shaping a narrative—a story the jury would believe, or want to believe, by unanimous consent.
But Remy had a larger goal: to break the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana. He knew—and took seriously—that Stephenson wanted to be president of the United States, and would employ the same ruthless mix of power, threat, and fear that had allowed him to take over a state in less than four years. If he could convict Stephenson, he might also be able to drag the hooded order down with him.
Stephenson’s fate would be determined by a jury drawn from a pool filled with the waters of the Indiana Klan. Remy couldn’t put the evil of the Empire on trial, for that would put these citizens on trial. What did it say about them if they had pledged obedience to an order led by a colossus of corruption? Paradoxically, the way to destroy the Klan was to separate the man from the Klan. And for this task, up against the best legal talent in the state and the dean of criminal lawyers, Remy needed help. He brought in Charles E. Cox, a former Indiana Supreme Court judge, who agreed to work for free. Born one year before the Civil War, Cox grew up in Noblesville, a descendant of Quaker abolitionists and revolutionaries who’d fought the British in the War of Independence. He’d been married for forty years, and projected a balanced sense of moral vigor, aided by a gravity-defying shock of biblical white hair. He was the gravitas that Remy lacked. At the same time, he could slip into neighborly talk to the locals when addressing his peers—fellow Hamilton County folks.
Jury selection was not easy. By custom, though not law, only men, and only white men, were given a chance to sit on the panel. Women were considered fragile, emotional, impractical, and unable to sustain hard thinking. When voir dire started on October 12, a steady parade of citizens was brought forth and dismissed, as each side tried to find a persuadable fit. The men were asked if they knew Stephenson or Madge, and if they had an opinion about rape and violent crime and the death penalty. They were quizzed on their religious background, their reading habits, on how much they knew about the case. Remy questioned only a few about the Klan, and that was done cryptically, asking about membership in fraternal orders. After thirteen days had passed, and 260 potential jurors had been interviewed, the judge finally lost patience and brought the voir dire to a close. Twelve middle-aged white men were impaneled—Cash, Sam, Leotis, Ben, Clyde, Ralph, Harley, Larry, Bob, a pair of Wills, and a Zeno. All but two were farmers. One was a truck driver. The other managed a small gas company. After the jury had been sworn in, Cox tapped into his local connections to see what his team was up against. An insider told him that three members of the jury likely belonged to the Invisible Empire.
Could this panel ever convict a Klansman? That question drove William Stern, the local Civil War veteran, to fits of rage as he made his daily walks around the courthouse square. Since his boyhood in the 1840s, he’d trod over nearly every inch of ground in this county, his beloved piece of Indiana. The change of seasons, a new pet, a shopkeeper’s joke—these small pleasures still made him smile and gave him a reason to get out of bed. He’d just been feted in the Ledger for his sixtieth wedding anniversary—dating to an evening in 1865 when he and Mary Ellen Bush started a life together. It would be easier for Stern if he merely played the role of grand old man of Noblesville, a benign gray presence whose life marks were noted in the pages of the town daily along with stories of guests coming to town for Thanksgiving or “a resident with a severe cold.” But the weight of his years had only increased the weight of his sense of duty—as a lifelong Republican, he was obligated, he said, to sustain Abe Lincoln’s legacy. What he’d heard from the local Klan of the last four years—“these so-called one-hundred percent Americans,” in his words—made his blood boil. He urged fellow Republicans in Noblesville to imagine what Lincoln would think “if he stood here upon this earth with the remnants of the mighty army who yet survive” and heard the sordid tale playing out inside their own courthouse. Lincoln would find a state given over to “hypocrites and traitors.” As to the remnants of that force, Stern was the last surviving member of Company E, in the Indiana 39th.
* * *
—
Under the protection of Sheriff Gooding, Stephenson and his two underlings walked the few steps from the jailhouse to the three-story brick courthouse on the opening day of the trial. It was a small-town set piece of a building, with its tapered clock tower, pilasters of Indiana limestone, just a short stroll from the lazy crawl of the White River. It had snowed the day before, and a few inches were still on the ground. That night, the temperature had plunged to 22 degrees—tying a record low for October. The Klansman lit a cigar at the start of this stroll, and waved to people along the way. Up the marble steps they went, to the second floor, into a chamber of high ceilings, varnished oak window trim, matching wood wainscoting, and an antique grandfather clock on the wall. It was packed well before Judge Sparks brought the trial to order on the morning of October 29. The judge was known as a straight-shooter, without political ties to either side. The courtroom could hold 176 people, not counting scores of reporters gathered from across the nation. A veil of tobacco haze soon settled overhead, as people smoked their cigars, pipes, and cigarettes in the courtroom. Members of Madge’s Pi Beta Phi pledge class were also there, joining other women who would form a cohort of conscience on behalf of the dead woman from Irvington. As farmers, most of the jurors likely had dirt under their fingernails. But with the eyes of the nation on them, they were all clean-shaven and dressed in their formal best, in ties and matching wool pants and jackets.
Stephenson, in a beige tailored suit, was behind his phalanx of attorneys. Matilda Oberholtzer found a seat on the side that gave her an unobstructed angle on the man accused of murdering her daughter. Dressed in mourner’s black, she locked eyes on the Grand Dragon and never let go. In the days leading up to the trial, her family had received death threats, not unlike the chilling calls lobbed into Remy’s home. Klansmen in cars would drive slowly by the Oberholtzer house in Irvington, occasionally flashing their lights into the house.
Judge Cox, as the court addressed the aging anchor of the prosecutorial team, was the first to face the jury. After outlining the charges and assuring the panel that the state would prove the case against the three men, he summoned the deceased from the grave. The dying declaration had yet to be admitted, but the prosecution assumed it would after Steve’s team had failed to knock it out during the summer skirmishes. From the opening words of Cox, it was clear that Remy was going to bet the house on the words of a ghost.
“The principal witness for the state will be Madge Oberholtzer, the dead victim of the foulest murder that stains the history of our state. Under exception to the rule which generally excludes hearsay testimony, Madge Oberholtzer, clean of soul, but with her bruised, mangled, poisoned and ravished body, standing by her grave’s edge, will tell you, so far as possible in the circumstances, the story of her entrapment, of being drugged and kidnapped, assaulted, beaten, lacerated with beastly fangs, ravished and finally . . . finally . . . forced by the loss of all a good woman holds dear to take the deadly poison which contributed to her untimely and cruel death.”
Cox pointed to Earl Gentry, the meat-faced bodyguard, his 230-pound bulk testing the seams of his suit. “She will tell you that this man, Gentry, remained in that compartment all the time until Hammond was reached. She will tell you that they threw her in the lower berth and undressed her. She will tell you of the horrors of the night drive in an automobile from Hammond.” Cox paused to run a hand through his unruly thicket of white hair, moving slowly toward the jury and then back. “She will tell you of help refused her, of her imprisonment, not in Stephenson’s palatial home, but a garage.”
Next, he played the Hoosier card, to ensure that the jurors knew the victim was one of them.
“The evidence will show that Madge Oberholtzer sprang from the soil of Indiana. Here, she first saw the light of day. Here, her childhood was passed, and here she grew to womanhood. Here, she lived an ambitious life, a useful and a chaste life. None knew her but to love her. None named her but to praise her.”
The descriptor of “chaste” was no sly hint at her character. The prosecution knew that the defense team planned to tear Madge down, to show that “the loss of all a good woman holds dear” had not happened for the first time in the rail car to Chicago.
On the other side was this invasive weed of a man, D. C. Stephenson, no Hoosier at all, a thug in a fancy suit. “He was born in the state of Texas,” said Cox, letting the word linger like gas passed in a church. “He had drifted to many parts of the country and undergone many and varied experiences. He had drifted into Indiana four years ago and took up his abode in Evansville. He quickly rose to a position of great affluence and social and political power. The evidence will show that he had a double personality; that on one side of him was the magnetic, sympathetic, cultured, attractive man of the world; that he was an impassioned orator; that there was something about him that enabled him to attract and dominate better men and good women.
“The evidence will show that there was another side of him, and that side showed him a violator of the law: to be a drunkard and a persistent seducer and destroyer of women’s chastity.” His residence, “the palatial mansion in Irvington,” in Cox’s words, also had a dual personality. “It was not a home, it had a double character like its master. There on occasions were gathered as his guests people of character and high repute, and all was propriety and decorum. But on other occasions were drinking and lascivious debauch . . . virgin girls and good women were lured to be entrapped and debauched.”
Cox tried to link the outcome of the trial to the protection of all women. “This is not an ordinary murder case. Usually murder is a deed of hate, of revenge, a deed committed with a gun, a knife or a bludgeon. This was murder committed by a man, aided by his two satellites, a man who, the evidence will show, said, ‘I am the law in Indiana.’ This case is to determine whether we are to protect the sanctity of the honor and chastity of womanhood.” Much of Cox’s story had elicited gasps from the spectators, prompting a warning from the judge.
Cox finished after an hour and fifteen minutes, and never mentioned the Klan.
Now it was the turn of Stephenson’s team to shape the narrative. Inman rose, fidgeted with his short tie, looked at the judge and scanned the jury. Then, to everyone’s surprise, he chose to say nothing: the defense would not offer an opening statement. While it was baffling that Inman would cede the first-impression battle to the maiden in the grave, he had larger legal goals, as well as strategy questions he’d yet to resolve. The quickest way to acquittal was to get the judge to dismiss the charges after the prosecution had presented its case. This was a common thing for defense lawyers to do in trials where there was some doubt, when it was obvious that the case had not been proved. As he’d claimed on numerous occasions, this was not a homicide case, but a suicide, with Stephenson having no hand in the poison Madge had taken. All Inman needed to show, he believed, was that bichloride of mercury was the cause of death, by self-ingestion—case over. The bite marks on her body were something else, but not evidence of a fatal attack. As for the kidnapping, who could say that Madge didn’t go willingly with Steve on the last train to Chicago, acting on her free will and her fascination with this magnetic man? They’d been seeing each other. They’d gone out to dinner at least twice. The train ride was simply an extension of their social entanglement. Perhaps a lovers’ spat.
