A Fever in the Heartland, page 26
On the way out of the courtroom, Stephenson made it a point to walk in front of reporters and spectators to a little Red Cross donation booth that had been set up in the hallway. He dropped in a few dollar bills and was given a pin in return. “In his usual pleasant and diplomatic way,” wrote the Ledger, “he thanked the lady for the button and went over to the jail.”
25.
The Closers
NOVEMBER 1925
I am the law.”
A cold rain swept in from the north on Wednesday night and fell throughout the next day. The storm lashed against the high windows of the courthouse, an aural beat for the closing act of the trial of the century in Indiana, making it impossible to see anything in the outside world. Not that anyone would want to look away. Closing arguments had begun on Thursday morning, November 12. Every seat was filled, and the judge allowed some spectators to stand in the back, packing the room beyond its capacity. A line snaked outside, people hoping to get a chance to witness history. Many came to hear Inman, who could make an order of a hot dog at a ballgame sound grandiloquent.
By contrast, Remy was an ordinary man with an ordinary voice. His small stature seemed to highlight his shortcomings. He often stumbled or paused when addressing a jury. Judges frequently asked him to speak up. What the boy prosecutor had going for him was drive. This case had been burning inside him since the early spring, before it was a murder indictment. And he’d been seething about the Grand Dragon’s control of his beloved state since last November, when he walked out of the loyalty pledge dinner. All these elected officials kissing the ring of a Klansman. His older colleagues had urged him to conceal his rage at the infestation of the Empire in every part of Indiana, sticking with the strategy he’d adopted at the start of the trial. Just do the job. He had been methodical, even plodding. Details, details, details, following the outline in his notebook.
He came today with a plan for his closing argument: the way to counter Inman’s eloquence was to hit the jury with the blunt force of Stephenson’s own words.
“I am the law,” he said again, quoting the man who had yet to speak. If these were the only words the jury associated with Stephenson, perhaps Remy had a chance to put him away. The defense had never denied that the Grand Dragon said such a thing or assumed that kind of control. They’d let the impact settle in, by neglect or design, almost as if it were stipulated. So, maybe he was the law. He was still not guilty of homicide.
Remy was the first lawyer to take to the floor, striding with papers in hand toward the twelve men who controlled Stephenson’s fate. He asked: Why did the defense make no opening statement? Because they had nothing. Consider their witnesses:
“Their own private little coterie of men who frequented Stephenson’s home and who received their appointments at Stephenson’s hand—those were the men they put on the stand. Because they could find no others.” By contrast, the prosecution’s proofs had held. “He bit her. He attacked her. And it isn’t denied by any evidence in this case,” he said. “The statement of this girl is completely corroborated, unless you want to take the word of men like Rigdon and the old strong-armed gang Stephenson relied on when he said, ‘I am the law.’ ”
There it was again—the story of D. C. Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana in four words, a boast that might be able to bring down his confederation of the North.
“He said he was the law in Indiana, and gentlemen, I sometimes think he was not far from being the law in Indiana—that is, in some places. His word may be the law in Marion County. Thank God he can’t say he is the law here in Hamilton County.” This was a direct challenge to the jury and their regional pride. Could Noblesville actually show the guts to buck the Old Man that the rest of the state had not?
He brought up the Klansman’s throwaway line in the car while Madge was gagging from poison—“I’ve been in a worse mess than this before and got out of it.” He tossed it back at the jury, another challenge. “I suppose he got to feeling pretty big after he’d been drinking, with this girl writhing on the cushions beside him. No medical aid except the tender services of Gentry and his bottle of witch hazel and Stephenson with this bottle of milk. A pair of fine medics these two are.”
The women in the courtroom who’d sat through the trial laughed at that.
“Wouldn’t it be interesting to hear about some of those ‘worse messes’ he’d been in?”
He took the jury inside the inner circle. “There was Ralph Rigdon, loafing around the Legislature, in Stephenson’s office every day. Interested, he said, in watching them ‘manipulate the Legislature.’ There he was in Stephenson’s office with Klinck, the deputy sheriff of Marion County paid by the people. Yeah. I am the law. No wonder he said it.”
As Remy spoke, Stephenson wrote furiously on a notepad balanced on his knees. He sneered frequently at the prosecutor’s characterizations of him. He despised Remy and wanted him dead. In jail, Stephenson had met a man on trial for murder. He offered him $3,000 if he would put a bullet in Remy’s head. Stephenson would arrange for his escape to do the killing. The plan was aborted after a snitch got wind of it and relayed it to the prosecutor.
“Where is Shorty DeFriese?” said Remy, raising his voice enough to be heard throughout the courtroom. “Where is Shorty DeFriese? He would make the greatest witness in the world for the defense if this story wasn’t true.”
And another rhetorical question: “If Madge Oberholtzer went on that trip to Hammond on her own free will, why did Gentry go along?”
He expounded on each of the inconsistencies. Taking a trip without packing a bag or grabbing her hat. Returning from an overnight “date” with Stephenson so battered and bitten that her wounds would kill her. And why was she locked up in the garage without medical help, the life oozing out of her, if she had gone willingly?
After speaking for two hours, Remy asked for a recess. Court adjourned for an early lunch. The rain had not let up, forcing people to eat sandwiches in the hallways, sitting on the wide marble steps that rose from the first floor. The courthouse was abuzz with chatter. Reporters filed early takes for their afternoon editions and readers across the country who’d been kept abreast by the large contingent of the national press.
When the trial resumed, Remy still had the floor. He said nothing as he walked slowly up to face the jury. He looked each of the men in the eye, and only then spoke directly to them, not reading from notes.
“Gentlemen of the jury: Madge . . . Oberholtzer . . . is . . . dead. She would be alive today if it was not for the unlawful acts of David C. Stephenson, Earl Klinck and Earl Gentry. They destroyed her body. They tried to destroy her soul. In the past few days, they have attempted to dishonor her character. It’s easy to understand that any man who had stooped to the crimes charged against the defendants would not hesitate to assassinate a character. It was the last resort. And yet . . . Madge Oberholtzer’s story still stands. Untarnished.”
He went back to the table and retrieved the dying declaration. Slowly, he started to read it again, to bring back the ghost of Irvington one last time. He paused between paragraphs to elaborate.
“Madge Oberholtzer was looking into the face of eternity when she made her statement. All the means that were employed by the defense couldn’t bring her down. And so they tried to make you think that Madge Oberholtzer was a bad girl!” He shouted the last two words. It was loud enough, as Niblack noted in his story, “to make the rafters ring.”
He moved on to lethal negligence—this trio of Klansmen denying Madge medical help after she refused to become the Grand Dragon’s wife. “This girl’s life might have been saved,” even after she had been mangled by “the fangs of D.C. Stephenson.”
He ended with that image hanging in the smoky blue air of the courtroom, and a quiet challenge to the Noblesville twelve: “We are going to see if any man is above answering to the law.” He’d spoken for three hours.
* * *
—
Ira Holmes was first up for the defense. He’d made his name representing white homeowners who tried to keep Black families from their neighborhoods, supporting the right to fence in Dr. Meriwether. Enforcing the tenets of the Ku Klux Klan was a crucial part of his law practice. For a racist in need of muscle—especially an institutional racist such as a bank or a homeowners association—Holmes was the guy. Today, he would leave the lofty language to Inman. His job was to cut and slash. He moved quickly, without making an effort to ingratiate himself with the jury.
“Suicide is not a crime in Indiana,” said Holmes dismissively. “Therefore, to be an accessory before or after the fact would be no crime in Indiana.”
On to “the alleged dying declaration,” as Holmes put it. “I’m not saying Madge Oberholtzer lied. But this statement did not originate with her. It originated in the mind of Asa Smith, with the aim of making money.”
Then, to the doubts raised by his team. “Why didn’t she make an outcry when she was taken through Union Station?” And what about her trip outside the hotel in Hammond? “She was allowed to go out and purchase a hat and a little later went to a drug store, unguarded, and bought the poison. Couldn’t she have sent another telegram refuting the one ‘dictated’ by Stephenson?”
And what of Madge the woman? What kind of person was she, really? “We have done nothing to blacken her character any more than the evidence of what she did during her life serves to blacken her character.”
He ended where he began. “If you find Stephenson guilty of murder you must find he forced her to take poison. And there was no evidence like that.”
* * *
—
The rain let up Friday morning. The ground was saturated and many a muddy footprint was left on the staircase leading up to the courtroom. Charles Cox, the former chief justice of the Indiana Supreme Court, was slow to get out of his chair, and had some trouble finding all his notes. He ran his hand through his pelt of white hair and cleared his throat.
“If I had my choice, I would have nothing to do with this case.” This admission startled courtroom spectators. “I am too old of a man to carry the heavy burden of a five-weeks trial. I am now closing the last argument before a jury in my life.” He had agreed to assist Remy with his case, he said, “because the law must be reinstated on its throne.” He compared Stephenson to a medieval tyrant, ruling at a time “when there was no law but the law of force, and when outrages, the despoiling of women, were the general course of events.”
Cox nodded in the direction of Madge’s parents. “I told you at the beginning of this case that Madge Oberholtzer would be the principal witness.” For a second time, he outlined the story of her life, slowing to draw out an image of a mother dressing her little girl, comparing that with Klinck dressing a battered Madge in the Klansman’s garage. “There is a man and a woman in this courtroom now, a broken father and mother who brought Madge Oberholtzer into this world, who rejoiced at her coming, who cared for her in babyhood, in her infancy, in her childhood, their only little girl . . . I ask you, gentlemen of the jury, in the name of the law, in the name of this sorrowing father and mother, in the name of virtuous girls, in the name of daughters of us all, in the name of good women everywhere, in the name of justice, I ask you to write your verdict with a view of stopping the sort of thing that has been going on. Write it so that it will be impossible again for one coming as he did to the state of Indiana and in two or three years boasting that he is the law and the government of Indiana.”
The old attorney pointed a gnarled finger at Stephenson.
“Look at him! Look at the sardonic grin on his face! You can’t get him.” Klinck laughed; Steve’s face was somewhat blank. Cox seized on the moment to characterize each of the men.
“Stephenson, the degenerate. Klinck, the gorilla. And Gentry, the iron man.” He shook his fist at the trio.
“These men would not have treated one of Stephenson’s dogs like they treated Madge Oberholtzer!”
When Floyd Christian rose to take a quick turn for the defense, low hissing filled the courtroom before he uttered his first word. The sentiment of spectators, with women still making up a majority, was clearly against Stephenson now. The defense counsel seemed to relish getting in a few licks of innuendo about Madge.
“This girl wasn’t dragged to Stephenson’s house,” he said. “She went to the home of a bachelor alone at 10 o’clock at night. Isn’t that a little strange? Why didn’t she take her mother along? Why didn’t she have a chaperone?”
He was swift in his dismissal of a few select witnesses for the prosecution—the Black witnesses.
“That coon,” he said of Levi Thomas, the railroad porter who had identified the Grand Dragon. “He’s no different from those four poor n——s they brought up here to testify.”
After the racial smear, the attorney went in another direction, comparing the murder defendant to a divine martyr. Stephenson was a victim of “forces out to get him,” persecuted, not unlike Christ or Joan of Arc. He ridiculed the idea that Stephenson bore any responsibility for the desperation that drove Madge to suicide.
“If your father turned you out of your house and you felt so bad you committed suicide, your father would not be a murderer.”
Inman was the closer. With his first words, he seemed a much more appealing face to the jury than any of the defense attorneys who went before him. He took his time, smiled, and rubbed his head, a world-weary man who spoke now in the staged role of an avuncular guide.
“There probably has been no case like this in the history of the American union. There has been none in the world, so far as I know . . . I wish that you and I, the thirteen of us, could sit down and talk about this case, that you might ask questions of me, and we could clear this thing up.”
He had nothing but the deepest sympathies for the family of the deceased. But a murder case should not be tried on sympathy.
“I’m not here to blacken the character or the name of Madge Oberholtzer. I’m here to be of some service to you, if I can in my own feeble and humble way.”
It was Inman’s great skill to appear feeble and humble, and in this way, try to move the crown of morality from the victim to the defendants. He asked the jurors to think of how much Steve and his associates had already suffered. “And yet . . . Through the bars of prison, the best people in this country have come to grasp their hands. They have come with hearts beating with sympathy.”
The last pitch was as close as Stephenson’s lawyers came to reminding the jury of the “greater good” of the Klan community stitched to Indiana and much of the nation in 1925. It was the appeal of belonging because the “best people” belonged, as Daisy Barr had said, the appeal that ministers made on Sunday mornings to like-minded congregants, the appeal that Steve’s parties were harmless because such fine folks were in attendance. Inman wanted the twelve men to think not of murder, rape, or kidnapping, not of corruption, blackmail, or a state government under siege of aggressive intolerance, but to consider his image of outreach through the jail bars: The best people in this country have come to grasp their hands.
He implied that the rape on the train was consensual sex and wondered if Madge shouldn’t share some of the blame for allowing herself to be put in such a situation. Inman paused, forcing a half moment of silence before the last gasp of his appeal to save D. C. Stephenson.
“Maybe someone feels that I say these things because I am engaged in the defense of these men. It is true that I am so engaged. But, after a long service in the great profession of the law—and, I pray, an honorable one—my heart gives utterance to this: that I have not, in all my professional life, defended one for murder where I felt in my soul there was a complete absence of justification for such a charge as there is in this sad case . . .
“Gentlemen, I am done. I give this great issue, the safety of my clients, to you. By the law of reason, by the law of courage, by the law of right, I feel your consciences will not allow any harm to come to these men. They have already suffered much—too much—by far. And I am grateful to heaven in the confidence that they are now approaching the end of it all. I thank each one of you for your patience, your infinite patience. And may there fall upon you the blessings of Almighty God.”
It was Ralph Kane’s bad luck to follow the blessings of Almighty God from the state’s best-known criminal attorney, whose closing had lasted four hours without break. But Kane had until Saturday morning, in the last sliver of time allotted for closing arguments, to prepare his speech.
When Judge Sparks opened the trial on its final day, Kane offered faint praise for Inman’s eloquence, mentioning his talent to speak for so long without saying much at all.
“Are you going to let this unparalleled, unequal painter of words take the brass brush of scandal and paint the scarlet letter on Madge Oberholtzer’s tomb?
“Are you are so credulous that you will believe their theory that this girl went along on that trip with those men willingly?”
He mocked the defense contention that Stephenson was victim of an intricate plot by his political enemies.
“And as a part of that conspiracy I suppose Madge Oberholtzer was to commit suicide,” he said.
“We can’t bring Madge Oberholtzer back to life and restore her to her bereaved parents. But we can make an example of them for the protection of other daughters . . . You are going to write into your verdict whether your daughter, my daughter, will be protected from the vandals and the criminally inclined. That is the responsibility of you.”
He defended the Black witnesses who’d been smeared by the Grand Dragon’s lawyer. “Take that colored bellhop in the Hammond Hotel—how are you going to get away from that testimony?”
Without mentioning the Klan by name, Kane put the weight of a nation on the dozen Hoosiers in the Hamilton County jury box. “The eyes not only of Indiana but of the whole country are on you, on this courtroom.”
