A Fever in the Heartland, page 23
Outside the courtroom, the defense attorneys promised that a “startling revelation” would be forthcoming.
One big question was whether Inman would allow Stephenson to testify or speak to the jury at trial’s end. Steve wanted to take the stand and to make a closing argument. Forceful flimflam had never failed him. As the world’s “foremost mass psychologist,” as he’d called himself, he could move any audience to see his way. He was a spellbinder. People who’d packed into auditoriums, grange halls, barns, and churches were held in his hands, rapt guests to a maestro of words. By trade, he was a salesman; selling himself to save himself was the ultimate test of his only real skills. But Inman knew that if he took the witness stand, he would be fair game for questions about his unsavory character. The prosecution could destroy Stephenson—showing him to be a liar, drunk, rapist, con artist, blackmailer. For years, he’d been telling war stories about Belleau Wood, a fabrication that incensed two genuine war heroes, Remy and Asa Smith, one of whom had been gassed at Belleau Wood. Since Stephenson’s lockup in Noblesville, more women had come forth to give Remy detailed accounts about the Old Man—a pattern of drunken sexual assaults that made the attack on the train look anything but anomalous. If Steve opened the door to his character, these women would be called to step through it.
Finally, Inman was counting on the worldview of the jurors. “Say, dear readers, which crowd are you in?” the Noblesville Ledger had asked just before the trial started. “The one described as qualified for membership in the Klan, or the measly, motley mob of miserable misfits listed under our enemies?”
Like the prosecution, Steve’s attorney didn’t have to bring up the Klan; it was there in the jury box. If they were not all Klansmen, surely they sympathized with the Klan. Their neighbors were Klan. Their kin were Klan. Their ministers were Klan. They attended churches where Klan values were preached and Klan members blessed. They shopped in stores with “TWK” stickers. They subscribed to the Fiery Cross. They voted the straight Klan ticket, following the guidance on clothespin-clipped ballots sent out by the man on trial for murder. They boycotted Catholics, berated Jews, shunned Blacks, feared immigrants. For several years, their lives had been influenced by the words of the Old Man well before they looked out at one David C. Stephenson in the docket. The Klan must protect its own. Inman could hope that the oath would hold, even under this trying circumstance. I swear that I will most zealously and valiantly shield and preserve by any and all justifiable means and methods White Supremacy. I will seal with my blood by Thou my witness, Almighty God.
* * *
—
The first person to testify, Matilda Oberholtzer, was dressed in black, as before. She looked worn-out, eyes red, with bags of grief underneath. Remy walked her through Sunday night, March 15, when her daughter was led away sometime after ten p.m.
“When she left the house did she have a hat on?”
“No, just the coat.” Madge had left quickly. “I heard the voice at the front door. It was a man’s voice. I heard the door close, and she left. I went to the window and looked out, and saw her and a large man cross the street to the other sidewalk.”
“When did you next see her?”
At this, Madge’s mother began to weep. She tried several times to regain her composure, but the sobs came in fresh waves as she dabbed at her tears.
“I saw her on Tuesday afternoon.”
“Just what was your daughter’s condition?”
She bowed her head in tears. After several minutes, she drew a word picture. “Oh, she was torn and bruised. She was bruised, and an open wound on her left breast . . . Round bruises on her cheeks and both sides of her face . . . Her breasts had open wounds all over.”
Remy asked her about the phone number left that Sunday night. There had been four messages, all from the same source. She remembered Irvington 0492.
On cross-examination, Inman asked routine details about Madge’s life. As soon as the questions turned personal, the judge ruled them out of order.
Next up was Eunice Shultz, who lived at the Oberholtzer residence with her son, a teacher at Butler. She recalled Tuesday, preparing lunch. “I heard a terrible groaning at the front door . . . I dried my hands and went in and saw Madge being carried upstairs.” The man quickly hurried down the stairs, facing Shultz.
“I asked the man, ‘Is Madge hurt?’ The man said, ‘She’s been in an automobile accident.’ ”
“I said, ‘Bad?’ ”
“He said, ‘I don’t think any bones broke.’ ” She asked the big stranger his name. “He said, ‘Johnson from Kokomo.’ ” With that, he dashed out the door. Asked if she got a good look at this face, she said she did. Then she pointed to a row behind the defense attorneys. “I see him. Behind Mr. Stephenson. That’s him, the man with the dark hair.” This Johnson from Kokomo was Earl Klinck.
Mrs. Shultz was the first to see the victim after Klinck had dumped her upstairs.
“Describe her condition.”
“Very deplorable.”
When Remy asked if Madge had said anything, the defense objected. The lawyers huddled with the judge. After a few minutes he waved them off and the witness was allowed to continue.
“She said, ‘I’m dying, Mrs. Shultz.’ ”
Steve never flinched during the testimony. He seemed to wear a different suit to court every day, and flashed the diamond in his Shriner’s pin. When the trial opened, he appeared nonchalant, whispering back and forth with his attorneys—“not a care in the world,” as one reporter noted. But he looked away when the first two witnesses took the stand, furiously scribbling notes on a pad. “Stephenson sat at the defense table with his chubby fists poked into his face and a trace of worry visible on his countenance,” Niblack wrote, ignoring the earlier threat after he’d described him as “pudgy.”
In the courtroom this week was a white-haired little man, the seat of his pants worn to a sheen, dandruff on the shoulders of his suit jacket, a chomped-on cigar sticking out of one pocket—George Dale. The editor was broke from the constant pressure of the Klan judicial and police authorities in Muncie—so much so that he’d taken to begging people to help him keep going “on behalf of free speech.” But he was not broken. Women of the Klan still spit on him in the street. Still, as he’d written earlier in the year, he sensed that Indiana’s time in the farthest reaches of Hell was about to end. Now, he scribbled a note, tore out the page, and handed it to a bailiff, asking him to pass it to the defendant. The Grand Dragon appeared startled when he read the contents:
Though the mills of the gods grind slowly, yet they grind.
Steve looked back, searching the crowd, and there he met George Dale’s gaze.
Later that afternoon, Dr. Kingsbury took the stand. He relayed the whole story as Madge had told him on the day she was returned home. The Sunday-night forced drinks. The kidnapping, guns in her rib cage. The rape and ride to Chicago. The unbearable pain of her wounds. The decision to take poison. The even greater pain caused by the bichloride of mercury eating away at her insides. The long auto ride back to Indianapolis, and Stephenson’s refusal to get her any aid or even allow her to seek help on her own. Her captivity in the garage. All of this took some time, and Remy walked the doctor through it with careful deliberation. At the end of the story, Dr. Kingsbury answered a series of medical questions.
“From the appearances of the bruises and lacerations would you say they might have been inflicted by human teeth?
“In my opinion, yes.”
Remy asked him to elaborate.
“He bit her, he chewed her, he pummeled her.”
Remy asked, where, specifically, she had been bitten.
“The lacerations on the left breast and the right cheek.” These wounds became badly infected, he testified, swelling and oozing pus, eventually leading to blood poisoning.
“Was the infection one that might have resulted from a bite?” For the prosecution, this was a crucial distinction—teeth were the murder weapons. Remy framed the question several ways. One of the defense attorneys, Floyd Christian, was quick to object.
“The death was not the proximate result of any act of the defendant,” said the attorney. The lawyers huddled again. The judge allowed a narrow answer, without a definitive conclusion.
“It most certainly hastened her death,” said Kingsbury.
The doctor had held up well. But Remy was less confident of his next witness, the family attorney Asa Smith. During the summer bail hearings, Inman had rattled him; he appeared so confused that the court took a long recess to give him time to recover. He lost his temper as well, snapping at Inman. The Great War had nearly destroyed Smith. The constant bombardment and machine gun fire at Belleau Wood, where the marines held off one of the last offensive drives of the German army in 1918, had left 9,777 American casualties—the biggest battle of U.S. forces since the Civil War. The mustard gas, the sickness and infections, the weeks of convalescence around dying men with missing limbs and melted faces, had shattered the young Hoosier. Now, Inman intended to gut him.
On Friday morning, Smith was the first witness to take the stand. He outlined his role as family attorney, sitting at Madge’s bedside every day, preparing a final document of her words, serving as liaison first to Stephenson and then to the prosecution. Worried that Smith would unravel under defense questioning, Remy asked the veteran to tell the jury about his war experience. Then he moved on to his role in preparing the dying declaration. Remy had to dance around the actual statement, not mentioning any of Madge’s words, because it had not been admitted.
“I wrote down the substance myself, from memory, of her entire story as she told it to me at different times.” He then took the pages to Madge. “I read it very slowly and distinctly. Every word. Every sentence. Every paragraph. And every page, slowly and distinctly. Every sentence I stopped and asked her if it were true. She interrupted me several times in the midst of sentences to say, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ ”
“Did she request any corrections?”
“Yes, three or four times.”
When it was Inman’s turn, he tore into Smith and the document. These were not the dying words of a lovely woman, but the skilled hearsay of a conniving lawyer. He implied that her signature was a forgery.
“You wrote the first draft of this statement,” he said.
“No, sir.”
“You dictated the statement . . .”
“No, sir, that’s not right.”
Inman quickly jumped into another controversy, hoping to catch Smith off guard. He wanted to show that it was money—a shakedown attempt—not loyalty to Madge or the cause of justice that motivated this lawyer.
“I ask you, Mr. Smith, if you didn’t go to Mr. Stephenson’s office to extract money from him?” Spectators murmured and reporters scribbled.
“No.”
Inman asked him his role—bagman, or legal go-between?
“Mr. Oberholtzer employed me to sue, or do anything I thought proper.”
“Did you go to the office of D. C. Stephenson and demand $100,000?”
“No, sir, I did not.”
“Then you went back and asked $50,000, then $25,000 and finally got down to $10,000, did you not?”
“I did not,” said Smith. He had been calm but was starting to fidget, crossing his legs several times and wiping his brow.
“You didn’t collect anything, though, did you?”
“No, sir.”
Inman returned to the dying declaration. He was nearly eight hours into his interrogation. The witness looked exhausted.
“Now, Mr. Smith, are you sure, sir, that Madge Oberholtzer wrote that name [on the affidavit]?” Again, Inman insinuated forgery.
“Yes, sir, she did.”
With no further questions, Smith was done. But Inman had planted two seeds of doubt. The jury was excused and the lawyers argued one last time on the admissibility of the core evidence in the case against Stephenson. Judge Sparks said that he would rule in the morning.
It was dark outside as the courthouse emptied, daylight now slipping away well before five p.m. Dark and cold. Tomorrow was Halloween. The jack-o’-lanterns were out on the porches of Noblesville, and windows outfitted with ghosts and goblins. The displays of the holiday of the dead were even more pronounced in Irvington, named as it was for the author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Remy went home and tried to close his eyes for the night. The wind blew cold, kicking up some of the snow still on the ground. He had done well, in the estimation of the press, but it had been a rough day for the prosecution. Inman had painted Madge’s lawyer—and by extension, her family—as money-driven schemers, trying to blackmail the Old Man. Indeed, the banner headline in even the most anti-Klan of the Indianapolis papers implied something nefarious: oberholtzer lawyer denies bribe.
At a morning session on Saturday, the last day of October, Judge Sparks called the attorneys into court without the jury. Remy had not slept, and appeared uncertain of himself, more frail than usual. Inman towered a full head over him. The judge ruled that the dying declaration could be admitted, a decision that merited headlines around the country, including one in the Sunday New York Times. “There is no doubt but that the dying declaration should go in,” the judge said. Further, he would allow the entirety of Madge’s story to be read to the jury except for a few paragraphs about her first reaction to Stephenson, after they’d danced at the governor’s inaugural.
It was a blow for the defense, which wanted to show that Madge was enthralled with Steve and that they had a romantic relationship. But removing the part about Steve’s ability to save Madge’s job took away the reason she would spend any time with this repulsive man, a small advantage for Stephenson’s team.
It was now up to Remy to bring her back to life. An Irish American barrister, a tireless Muncie editor, the leading Black publisher, and the outgoing mayor of Indianapolis had all taken big swings at Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan. None of the blows had landed. It fell to Madge Oberholtzer—in spirit, in words that might outlive her—to slay the Grand Dragon.
22.
She Said
NOVEMBER 1925
In court on Saturday morning, Remy read Madge’s dying declaration to the jury. It was the biggest day of the trial, and the prosecutor knew he could not fail his star witness. That same day, the Klan scheduled a get-out-the-vote rally at Cadle Tabernacle in Indianapolis. Once again, election season was in full swing, competing now with the trial in Noblesville of the man who would have led that rally had he not been in jail. At first, Remy was visibly nervous, clutching the sheaf of papers that held her words, the indictment of the Klansman told in two days of terror. His cadence was deliberate, without special emphasis.
“I, Madge Oberholtzer, being in full possession of my mental faculties and conscious that I am about to die, make as my dying declaration the following statements:”
The basic story of the crime was familiar by now, if not to every member of the jury, then to most who packed the courtroom, a standing-room-only crowd. She told how she met Stephenson, her job at the state, his insistence that she shouldn’t resist him. He seemed a decent enough man except in those times when something strange and vaguely threatening would come out of his mouth. And he certainly could charm, telling Madge how much he liked her and wanted to be with her. As well, she’d attended a party at his house “with several prominent people, both gentlemen and ladies.” She went through a tick-tock of Sunday night, March 15, starting when Gentry took her from home to Steve’s compound.
“Soon as I got inside the house I was very much afraid, as I first learned then that there was no other woman about, and that Stephenson’s housekeeper was away or at least not in evidence.”
As Remy read, he appeared to gain confidence, moving along with the momentum of the story, the forced drinks, the kidnapping. She described being shoved into a car, guns poked into her sides, the drive to the hotel to get the tickets, then to Union Station.
“I did not know what to do. Stephenson would not let me get out of the car and I was afraid he would kill me. He said he was the law in Indiana . . . I cannot remember clearly everything that happened after that. I know Gentry got into the top berth of the compartment. Stephenson took hold of the bottom of my dress and pulled it up over my head. I tried to fight but I was weak and unsteady. Stephenson took hold of my two hands and held them. I had not the strength to move. What I had drunk was affecting me. Stephenson took all my clothes off and pushed me into the lower berth. After the train had started, Stephenson got in with me and attacked me. He held me so I could not move. I did not know and do not remember all that happened. He chewed me all over my body, bit my neck and face, chewing my tongue, chewed my breasts until they bled, my back and legs, my ankles and mutilated me all over my body.”
