A Fever in the Heartland, page 24
The sadism did not need amplification from Remy. People in the courtroom were trapped inside that train car. Madge said she passed out, was jolted awake at Hammond, Stephenson jabbing his gun at her battered side. She remembered being dragged into the hotel, pleading with her captor to send a telegram to her mother. In room 416, she watched Stephenson stuff himself with a large breakfast. She begged him to let her go into the next room to get some rest. “You are not going there,” he told her, “you are going to lie right down here by me.” She described going to a drugstore under armed escort, getting the poison, then going back to the room.
“I laid out eighteen of the bichloride of mercury tablets and at once took six of them. I only took six because they burnt me so. This was about 10 A.M. Monday, I think. Earlier in the morning I had taken Stephenson’s revolver, and while Gentry was out sending the telegram, I wanted to kill myself then in Stephenson’s presence. This was while he was fast asleep. Then I decided to try to get poison and take it in order to save my mother from disgrace.”
Most of what happened afterward was a daze—blacking out from the poison, spitting up blood, the heat of the mercury burning her insides.
“Stephenson did not try to make me comfortable in any way. He said he thought I was dying, and at one time said to Gentry, ‘This takes guts to do this, Gentry. She’s dying.’ I heard him say also that he’d been in a worse mess than this before and got out of it.”
As Remy read, the courtroom was still, people hanging on her words—quiet but for the sobbing of Madge’s mother. The prosecutor ended as he had begun, an even-paced tone.
“I, Madge Oberholtzer, am in full possession of all my mental faculties and understand what I am saying. The foregoing statements have been read to me and I have made them as my statements and they are all true. I am sure that I will not recover from this illness, and I believe that death is very near to me, and I have made all of the foregoing statements as my dying declaration and they are true.”
* * *
—
The defense could not cross-examine or note inconsistencies in Madge’s words, this testimony from the departed. But they could continue to muddy the case, which they did with witnesses who followed on that Saturday, as Remy continued his presentation. A clerk at the Indiana Hotel in Hammond testified that Stephenson registered himself and Madge as a married couple under the name Mr. and Mrs. W. B. Morgan, while Gentry filed under his own name. A maid and a bellboy corroborated Madge’s story—an overturned room, blood on the bed and in a cuspidor, guns and half-empty whiskey bottles. Inman presented his own drawing of the adjoining hotel rooms, and walked the witnesses through the movements of people in 416 and 417.
“Are there phones in those rooms?” he asked a night clerk.
“Yes.”
“And those phones have connection to the police, mayor and fire department?”
“They have.”
The last witness of the day was Levi Thomas, described in the Indianapolis Star as “a Negro Pullman porter” on the midnight train to Chicago. While he was making up the beds, he had heard a woman vomiting in a toilet. He recalled at least one sentence from her, later on.
“She said, ‘Oh, dear, put the gun up, I am afraid of it.’ ”
Inman jumped on this. Not the gun. But the way she addressed Stephenson.
“She said, ‘Oh, dear’?”
The porter said those were the words he heard.
“Did she call him anything else?”
To Inman, and by insinuation to the jury, what the porter heard was something less than threatening. Maybe Steve and Madge just liked to play rough. Though Inman didn’t say that, it was implied in his next question.
“Did you hear her call him, ‘daddy’?”
“I never heard her say, ‘daddy.’ ”
With his points scored, Inman was done for the day. Remy had one last request. He asked the porter if he could identify Stephenson in the courtroom. The witness nodded in one direction.
“That fellow sitting in the corner.”
Levi Thomas was asked to point him out. He got out of the witness chair, strolled slowly over to Stephenson and placed both hands on the shoulders of the Grand Dragon.
“This man,” he said.
A Black man of little standing had walked across the biggest stage in Indiana and reached for the Klansman. This indictment by touch set off a spontaneous ripple of applause in the courtroom, prompting Judge Sparks to bang his gavel. For Remy, it was a good sign.
* * *
—
That night, about 7,000 people packed the Klan rally at Cadle Tabernacle, singing, cheering, and passing around sample ballots for Tuesday’s general election. Victory seemed assured in Indianapolis. But Steve was taking nothing for granted, and already plotting his next move, counting on a loyal Klansman in city hall once he’d extracted himself from his current mess. He called up Duvall’s opponent, Democrat Walter D. Meyers, with a “proposition,” as he put it from a jailhouse phone.
“I’m a little worried about the election,” he told Meyers, who had never met Stephenson. “I’ll put ten-thousand-dollars in any bank in town for you.” All he had to do was withdraw from the race.
“You’re talking to the wrong guy,” said Meyers, and hung up on him.
* * *
—
The next day, Noblesville Klansmen filled the pews of Sunday services at First Christian Church. The sermon, as usual, was given by Reverend Aubrey Moore, the Klan preacher who had warned against race-mixing and Jewish financial influence, and had asked God to “bless every Ku Kluxer who may be under the sound of my voice.” That voice could certainly reach the jailhouse.
23.
Inside and Outside
NOVEMBER 1925
In politics, the Old Man always said, the only sure way to win an election was with suitcases of “cold, hard cash,” as he’d shown with his bribe attempt in the mayor’s race. He’d spent a quarter of a million dollars getting Jackson the governor’s seat. The same held true in a criminal trial. Throughout October and into November, Stephenson was moving money around the jailhouse. He bribed Sheriff Gooding, giving him enough to pay off the mortgage on his Noblesville house. To show his gratitude, the county’s top cop not only kept the good food coming to the man on trial for murder but also allowed anyone inside his prisoner wanted to see. Women spent the night with him, sharing his fine liquor and home-cooked suppers. While Niblack of the Times had refused the Grand Dragon’s hundred-dollar bill, Stephenson managed to pay off other reporters. It showed in coverage that highlighted the doubts his legal team had raised thus far. But more needed to be done. He had to bring down the sainted Madge. Stephenson planted stories of her personal life, hoping one would be messy enough to send her voice back to the grave. He told people she was part of a plot by his Klan rival, Evans. She was a flapper, a party girl, a lush, begging for Steve’s affections. The poisoning was a clumsy attempt to give herself an abortion. The defendant just went along for the ride. Much of this made its way into the papers in some form.
Still, spreading cash and lies with the press was speculative. He wanted a guaranteed outcome. One of his Klan enforcers, a state police operative named Carl Losey, was enlisted to corral a list of witnesses to dirty Madge’s image. He rounded up dozens of people who had been on the Klan payroll or done its work. With freedom of the Grand Dragon on the line, it was their duty to save him. Losey presented this as an imperative, backed by the force of the Indiana State Police. These witnesses were given stories and drilled on the details. They would tell these stories under oath. Madge would be presented as a slut on the make against a great man. Stephenson assured this loyalty from his Klan brothers by purchasing witnesses in myriad ways, from blackmail to direct payments.
But even with this elaborate scheme, the only sure way to acquittal was to bribe a few of the jurors. Niblack and Harold Feightner, reporting at another paper, were tracking leads that Stephenson was working to pay off men on the judgment panel. As most of them were farmers, they were probably just scraping by after the rural recession of the early 1920s. It wouldn’t take much to get a few jurors to see things Steve’s way.
The twelve citizens holding the fate of D. C. Stephenson in their hands were hard to read. Yes, there had been noticeable grimacing, headshaking, and brow furrowing as Remy brought Madge’s words to life. The biting of a young woman, murder by an enraged man in a cannibalistic sex act, was a hard thing to hear. But the doubt planted by Inman during his cross-examinations also showed in other facial reactions; jurors seemed to be with the defense when they questioned Madge’s story.
Outside the courtroom, Imperial Wizard Evans was still dashing around the country trying to counter the terrible image coming from the dateline of Noblesville, Indiana. He was getting hit from the inside and the outside. A disgusted Klansman in Muncie wrote Evans to say Stephenson had pressured him into joining two years earlier, under false pretenses that it was a fraternal bond of men of high character. “I found your man was a man in disrepute,” he wrote, “and drunkards were common in your official family.” He sent copies of his letter, as he’d promised, “to every paper in America.” Many printed it. In the Klan-cozy heart of Missouri, a local paper urged men in sheets to reconsider their loyalty oaths. No doubt, many had joined because they thought the Klan “stood for high American ideals,” wrote the Star Journal of Warrensburg. But now, clearly, “it’s the greatest source of blight socially, commercially, educationally and religiously upon every community into which it has gone.”
During a meeting of Grand Dragons from throughout the Midwest at Buckeye Lake, Evans said it was imperative for these state leaders to return home with a message that the Klan was now resuming “its rightful place in the social life of the nation as a dignified, dependable agency for the achievement of civic righteousness.” He also rushed out a pamphlet—“The Klan: Defender of Americanism”—restating the guiding principles of this far-reaching brotherhood of hate. “We believe that the pioneers who built America bequeathed to their own children a priority right to it, the control of it and its future,” he wrote. “Also, we believe that races of men are as distinct as breeds of animals; that any mixture between races of any great divergence is evil; that the American stock, which was bred under highly selective surroundings, has proved its value and should not be mongrelized.”
But headlines of horror kept rolling out of Noblesville. After nearly six months in jail, Stephenson could no longer give a damn what happened to the secretive fraternity he had once hailed as “the greatest organization ever created under God.” His only concern was saving his own skin. His fallback plan could be found in his mailbag, which had plenty of good tidings among the nasty missives. Klansmen wrote him to say they were with him all the way. Ministers offered their blessings and their prayers. Curious readers from throughout the country suggested legal advice. There was no end to the fascination some people had with a beast. But his most reassuring material was the correspondence he kept with a tight circle of well-paid loyalists who knew where his secrets were buried. In nearly four years as a dominating force in Indiana, Stephenson had bought and sold many a Hoosier in high places, from Daisy Barr to Governor Jackson. And he’d kept the receipts—his currency of coercion—in canisters in the ground.
“Mildred, Darling,” he wrote one of his facilitators in Indianapolis, “You hold, absolutely, my liberty and you will be approached by many people who will ask you for those papers . . . Do not give anything to anyone until I tell you in person to release them.” He did not say what “those papers” were, or mention Mildred’s last name, but both sender and recipient knew. “I wanted to see you tonight, but something happened that no one would be admitted. The sheriff was wonderful and will continue to be tomorrow . . . My love—wholly and completely, my gratitude completely, my devotion always goes out to you.”
One night, Court Asher arrived at the prisoner’s cell with a suitcase full of cash. He’d made the rounds to those who owed the Old Man a favor, or who feared disclosure from what he knew. The community of the compromised was vast. But when Steve opened the suitcase, he flew into a rage. It was $17,000, no small amount by the standards of the day. He was in a cash crunch, and had expected much more. When the Klan membership spigot was open at full blast, he spent the big bills as quickly as they flowed in. Now he was facing legal fees greater than the cost of the mansion in Irvington. He’d been unable to collect insurance money from the recent fire because of arson suspicion. He needed help to keep The Bank full. All these people—they owed him! Steve clutched a fistful of cash and threw it back in Asher’s face. Get more, he told him.
* * *
—
On Tuesday, November 3, Remy brought his medical experts in to testify. First up was Dr. J. A. MacDonald, who made a couple of crucial points for the prosecution. Most people who suffer the harsh effects of bichloride of mercury seldom have a high fever, he said on the stand. Madge’s temperature topped 106 degrees in the days just before she died. MacDonald also said the poison usually killed people within twelve days. Madge had held on for twenty-nine. She died of toxic nephritis (inflammation of the kidneys), “with a terminal infection,” he said. In other words—the poison alone was not enough to kill her. Stephenson’s teeth were fatal.
Dr. Virgil Moon, who conducted an autopsy on her body, made the same point. The cause of death was infection from her wounds, which was carried by her bloodstream to her lungs and kidneys. On cross-examination, Inman was unable to shake Moon’s conclusion.
Inman did better the next day with Dr. J. H. Warvel, who treated Madge with a blood transfusion on April 8. He said she seemed “much improved” afterward. This was very curious, Inman said. He reminded the jury that Madge had signed her dying declaration on March 28, when her doctors had told her she had no chance to live. And yet there she was, ten days later, perking up. Why the rush to sign a murder indictment when death was not imminent?
This testimony seemed to please Stephenson, perhaps nearly as much as the results of Tuesday’s election. While waiting in the hallway for the jury to return from lunch on Wednesday, he was observed going over the election returns in the papers. In Indianapolis, it was a clean sweep for the Ku Klux Klan. Duvall won the mayor’s race by 9,000 votes. The slate that promised to keep Black children out of most public schools, and to formally segregate city neighborhoods, scored a complete victory. Mayor-elect Duvall promised to stuff city hall with members of the hooded order—from the parks department to the police rolls. In hundreds of small ways these loyalists could make things worse for those who were not white Protestants. In where you could live and where you could send your kids to school, in enforcement of the law, in deciding who would be hired and who would be shunned, in garbage pickup and parade permits and health department inspection of restaurants—all of this would have to go through Klan filters. On January 1, “city hall will be turned over to the Ku Klux Klan,” wrote the Indianapolis Times. But one promise would be difficult to fulfill, at least under the present circumstances. The new mayor had vowed to make Earl Klinck, now on trial with Stephenson, the city’s chief of police. That appointment would have to wait.
24.
He Said
NOVEMBER 1925
Remy rested his case on Wednesday. On Thursday morning, the defense opened with a medical expert of its own, a doctor who’d studied death by poisoning. Again, the Klansmen’s team opted to waive an opening statement and go straight at the evidence. From the beginning, they thought the state’s case was thin; the trial had backed up their hunch. Their aim now was to prove the point they’d been trying to drive home: that Madge alone was responsible for her own death. There was nothing Stephenson could have done to save her. And by giving Madge milk, the defendant had actually tried to keep her from dying. As had Gentry, offering her a concoction of witch hazel as she was vomiting in Hammond.
“Now, Doctor,” said Inman to his first witness, Orville Smiley, “after concealment of the fact that she had taken poison for six hours or more, in your judgment would medical aid have saved her life?”
“The patient would have been beyond the aid of medical science.”
“Is milk a recognized antidote for bichloride of mercury?”
“Yes.”
“Is pouring a quantity of milk into the stomach the proper thing to do?”
“Yes.”
“But after six hours had elapsed, could even that have saved her life?”
“No, sir.”
Inman had made his initial point. Now, to another one.
“If the poison solution came in contact with the tongue, would it affect it?”
“Yes.”
“The throat?”
“Yes.” He added further what Inman had been leading him up to: that the infections on Madge’s breasts, cheek, and lower body might have been caused by her vomiting the mercury—it was toxic to the touch. Or perhaps she had used it as a prophylactic in her vaginal area and it had spread, and this would explain the inflammation in her lower body.
On cross, Remy let his older colleague, Cox, make a run at the doctor.
“Do you know any of the defendants?” he asked Smiley.
“I’ve seen Stephenson a few times.”
“Have you ever been in his house?”
“Why, yes.”
Cox let that sink in. The Irvington mansion, as Cox had said in his opening statement, had a dual character, just like the man on trial.
