A Fever in the Heartland, page 27
The judge then took forty-five minutes to go over technical issues and instructions. The charges had been bundled into a central question on Madge’s death. The jurors were asked to determine whether the defendants had committed murder in the first degree, requiring the death penalty; murder in the second degree, which called for up to life behind bars; or mere manslaughter, which entailed a light prison sentence; or to find them not guilty. A few minutes before noon on Saturday, the case was put into their hands.
26.
Verdict
NOVEMBER 14, 1925
Deliberation began after lunch. Once they were fed, twelve men started arguing over the fate of the man who’d stared back at them for nearly three weeks, trying to read their intentions. After being silent for the entirety of the trial, now their voices could not be bottled up. Opinions were strong, wafflers few. The big question was murder or suicide, just as Stephenson’s legal team had framed it. If it was homicide, then what degree? If suicide, should all three defendants go free? And after hearing so much about the Grand Dragon’s power, could a dozen average men really hope to evade the long arm of the man who was The Law, should they vote to convict? It would take only a single juror to hold out and force a new trial or dismissal. One of the farmers, W. A. Johnson, was chosen foreman.
Stephenson’s extrajudicial squad—the same Klansmen who’d assembled a witness list to tell a dubious story in the trial, and planted armed supporters around the courtroom—had targeted two jurors for payoffs. Court Asher had raised enough cash to get the job done, but it was not possible to get behind the security wall and inside the panel. The courthouse, after the oratorical drama of the closing arguments, had largely emptied, with several cops guarding the jury room. A verdict was not expected for days. Remy took up temporary residence in a little room on the second floor, vowing to stay as long as was necessary. In midafternoon, he settled into a nap.
Stephenson enjoyed another fine meal from Sheriff Gooding’s wife. He was dressed in civilian clothes, pressed shirt and slacks, and in good spirits. He’d never been shackled or put in handcuffs. He always entered the courtroom in a tailored business suit, and frequently roamed the halls without guard during breaks, cigar in hand. The sheriff had started to carry some of the Grand Dragon’s grievances. He believed the trial was a hoax and witch hunt. The only way they could bring down this giant of a man was to plant a floozy on him, to entrap him. When the scheme unraveled, she killed herself. Surely, the jury could see what the sheriff saw—a great leader being railroaded.
On the other side of the courtroom, inside a small, windowless confinement that had once served as a restroom, reporters from around the nation prepared for a long wait. Niblack usually rode his 1919 Model T, with a hand-cranked starter and no windshield wipers, back and forth from Indianapolis to Noblesville. On Saturday, he planned to spend the night. It was a slate-gray day, featureless, drab, and cold. A reporter for the Indianapolis News brought in thirteen half-pints of white mule, the corrosive swill procured from local bootleggers, each wrapped in a paper tote bag. He sold all but three of them to fellow hacks for a dollar a bottle. Within a few hours, two of the reporters were under the table, blind drunk. A newsman from Chicago pressed a stethoscope to pipes leading to the jury room, a journalistic innovation that yielded no scoops. Others tried to follow a college football game on this Saturday afternoon through wire reports, Notre Dame against Carnegie Mellon. Knute Rockne’s team had started the year as national champions, after defeating Stanford in the Rose Bowl. They fully embraced the name solidified after students, including their quarterback, had routed Klansmen in South Bend in May 1924—the Fighting Irish.
Darkness fell. Around five p.m. came an electric jolt—the jury had reached a verdict. That was quick, a real surprise, and caused a combustion of movement. Remy snapped to life, smoothed his hair, and fixed his tie. He was nervous. In Stephenson’s camp, the fast return had to mean good news. The Grand Dragon lit a fresh cigar as he strolled toward the courtroom. The panel filed in at 5:21, looking grim-faced. They had been out for five hours and thirty-five minutes, and had taken eleven ballots. Judge Sparks asked them a question.
“Gentleman, have you agreed upon a verdict?”
“We have, Your Honor,” said Johnson. Stephenson stood up, along with prosecutors and defense lawyers.
“Please hand your verdict to the bailiff.” It was passed to the judge, who put on his glasses and read the finding:
D. C. Stephenson, guilty of murder in the second degree.
Earl Klinck, not guilty.
Earl Gentry, not guilty.
Stephenson remained on his feet, stiff and unflinching for a long moment, as if clubbed on the side of the head by a two-by-four and trying to keep his balance. The judge asked defense attorneys if they wished to have the jurors polled. One by one, each of the men repeated their finding. They were then dismissed, free to return to their farms and homes in Indiana with a story to tell for the rest of their lives.
Stephenson shook his head and let out a short, forced laugh, an incongruent response. Guilty had never been in the range of his expectations. He had the best criminal defense team in the state, the government on bended knee, the cops who answered to him. But today, at last, he was not the law. His underlings in the Klan had failed to reach the jurors for a bribe that would have set him free. Instead, the holdouts were four jurors who wanted Stephenson to be executed. They’d insisted on first-degree murder and the electric chair. Everyone agreed that the Grand Dragon was responsible for Madge Oberholtzer’s death. The only real argument was whether to put him away for life or kill him.
Women rushed to shake Remy’s hand, pat him on the back, and hug him. The Madge chorus was surprised and elated. A lone woman had put this bastard away. The boy prosecutor exhaled. He was spent.
Reporters barked into phones in the impromptu pressroom, dictating stories that would be in the hands of newsboys shouting “Extra!” within an hour or so. In its front-page treatment, the Sunday New York Times said Stephenson had owned the state, “with the backing of 400,000 Klansmen,” using the high number in the range of Hoosiers in hoods. Stephenson was defiant, the paper reported.
“Surrender?” he said, a few hours after the verdict was read, entertaining reporters in his cell while lying on his back and leafing through a magazine. “I am just beginning to fight. The last chapter has not been written.” His lawyers informed the judge they would file an immediate appeal. The two Earls were arrested on charges of arson, which had been delayed pending the outcome of this trial. This would keep them in jail for some time. Along with Stephenson, they were indicted for starting the fire at the mansion in Irvington in April—part of a scheme to get insurance money to help pay for the pricey legal talent.
Remy waved off his two Irish bodyguards and said goodbye, a skip in his step. The threat was over. Stephenson was now a sick-hearted little man in a cell awaiting a sentence. A felon. But that night, as the prosecutor made the drive back to his home in Indianapolis, he noticed a car was shadowing him—a black sedan. When he slowed down, the tail slowed down. When he sped up, the vehicle behind him did the same thing. He pulled over and turned off his motor and lights. The spy car parked not far behind him. Remy waited, nervously watching his rearview mirror. After some time, a police vehicle arrived and parked next to the two. Only then did the shadow leave. The cops escorted Remy back to Indianapolis. When he got home, his wife rushed outside to hug him—happy, she said, to see him alive. She’d received a phone call from a conscience-stricken member of Stephenson’s defense team who had overheard the Grand Dragon instruct two men to force Remy off the road to his death.
* * *
—
On Monday, November 16, Stephenson walked into Judge Sparks’s courtroom for the final time, still unshackled and dressed for success, looking as if he were a local businessman who’d wandered by accident into a criminal court. The judge asked him if he had anything to say prior to sentencing. The fresh-minted felon stood and walked toward the judge.
“I’m not guilty of murder, or any less degree of murder, or manslaughter,” he said without emotion. “No man should be deprived of his liberty without due process of law. It is universal opinion that this procedure was not due process of the law.” He called the women in the courtroom who’d hissed at him throughout the proceeding “scum.” He then switched into the third person in talking about himself, as if speaking for posterity. “Time will unfold the cold, white light of truth that D.C. Stephenson is not guilty of murder in any degree.”
Sparks said he believed Stephenson had been given a fair trial. He proceeded with the sentence. “Under the decision of the jury I find you guilty of second degree murder and sentence you to Indiana State Prison for life.”
Life.
* * *
—
Five days later, Stephenson was roused from his cell at four a.m., placed in an open-air car and driven by Sheriff Gooding 155 miles north to the state penitentiary in Michigan City, just off the shore of the big lake. The night before, he’d been given a haircut and shave, and one last lavish meal from the lawman’s wife. He also spoke to the press, calling his opponents “zero-intellect individuals who have arrayed themselves against me—some through envy, some through jealousy, some through fear, more through political disappointment.”
On the same day, a court hearing was held in the case of his first wife, Nettie Stephenson Brehm, still seeking more than $16,000 in child support from the man who’d deserted her a decade earlier. Stephenson’s attorney, Ira Holmes, was fresh off the big trial. He denied that his client had ever been married to Nettie. She would eventually be awarded the full amount, though she’d never collect it.
An hour from Noblesville, the prisoner’s escort stopped in Kokomo for a breakfast of ham and eggs, and a look at the place where Stephenson was made a king of the Midwest two years earlier.
Behind the gates of the prison where he was expected to spend the rest of his life, Stephenson exchanged his fine clothes for a blue uniform and was given a new identity: convict No. 11148. His pockets were emptied of a few almonds, a white gold watch chain, cuff links, and $26.87 in cash.
“Will I be permitted to have cigars?” No, he was told—they were forbidden.
A master of self-invention to the very end, he lied to the authorities who checked him in, saying he was thirty, not his actual age of thirty-four, and listing his profession as “lawyer.” Before he was locked away, a tape measure was taken of his head for the Bertillon system, which was used to identify criminals by body patterns and skull size. As Stephenson had said in one of his speeches on eugenics, science could explain why people with certain physical characteristics were born into degeneracy.
* * *
—
Putting away the top Klansman for life was Remy’s victory, the state’s victory, but it was also Madge Oberholtzer’s victory. Her voice from the beyond, preserved on paper during one of her last days—as I am about to die—was not only in the courtroom, as Remy had intended, but had followed the jurors into their cloister. They’d deliberated as fathers of daughters, and husbands of wives. The Civil War veteran, old Bill Stern, could hope that his neighbors had listened to his pleas to shame the inheritors of the ideas he had fought against. It would make it easier to walk around Noblesville, the air smelling fresh again, the sky scrubbed clean. But would the Klan still burn a cross on the hillside west of town at Christmas? Wishful thinking was medicinal.
It appeared that the message sent by the jury was not intended to be political or a grand coda to a decade of sophisticated domestic terror. Perhaps one of the jurors had an added incentive for putting Stephenson away; it came out later that a lone man on the panel was a Catholic. He’d slipped through the defense team’s sieve during voir dire. To their credit, the prosecutors had brilliantly drawn a line, challenging the jurors’ sense of pride: Was the Grand Dragon the law in your county, as he was throughout the state? Stephenson was an evil man who’d committed a heinous crime, the jurors decided with easy unanimity—nothing more.
And yet it was much more. He had battered, bitten, and raped women without consequence because his power—wrapped in sanctimony from Sunday pulpits in idyllic towns, crowned in the Fourth of July glory of the cornfields of Kokomo, displayed for all to see at the governor’s inaugural ball—had insulated him. He might have feared federal investigators or someone from his inner sanctum going over to the other side. But he’d never dreamed that one of the women he’d kicked around could bring him down, especially not a schoolteacher, a postal clerk’s kid—this girl. Madge was nothing in his mind. But her words had just destroyed the Grand Dragon, and perhaps could do the same for the Klan in Middle America.
27.
Dirt from the Dragon
1925–1930
In prison, he was master of nothing, not his time certainly, and not the dead-eyed convicts who shared tin plates of watery mush at dinner with him. Nor was he well liked. One man pushed him down the stairs, he claimed. Another tried to poison him. If he still thought of himself as the reincarnation of Napoleon, his exile was nothing like the Emperor’s life beyond his kingdom. He whined about the food, about the damp floor in his cell, about the chill coming off the lake, about the poor light and his failing eyesight, about being able to bathe only once or twice a week. But Stephenson maintained a tight hold on those outside the penitentiary whose secrets he kept. He still believed the governor was his fastest way to freedom, knowing that he could blackmail Jackson with his cache of secrets. As to his guilt, at the end of 1925, his attorneys filed a motion asking for a new trial, listing 387 reasons why he had been wrongfully convicted.
Just before leaving Noblesville, the prisoner had issued a final statement from the county jail. He was the sole victim of this entire episode, he said. Again, he compared himself to Jesus, martyr of a monumental injustice. The trial was a farce, “the most appalling persecution to which man has been subjected to since the days that civilization abandoned the bludgeon.” He hinted at retribution to come. “I will not be the sacrificial lamb that will be offered up as the political scapegoat for the whole state of Indiana.”
Indiana got off easy. And in that sense, the Klansman in the cell was on to something. All the wrongs of the last four years could be blamed on D. C. Stephenson, who wasn’t even a Hoosier—not one of us! Fellow Klansmen, from Imperial Wizard Evans on down, claimed no role in building up this man, in giving him control of the North, in his making of them and their making of him. Evans was in a panic as people now shed their robes and masks by the thousands, many of them choosing to burn them in backyard bonfires. The Klan had reformed itself, Evans wrote in another manifesto hurried into wide circulation. It was “a movement of the plain people.” But it was too late to dislodge what everyone had seen of the Klan in the Heartland. It was Evans, after all, who had put a crown on the head of a killer in Kokomo. The Klan still stood for hatred of the other, for ranking humans by skin color and faith and place of birth, this elaborate caste system that was no liability in many quarters. But now it also stood for rape, murder, political corruption, for the monster of the Midway and his huddle of gangsters.
Across the country, another prominent Klansman was embroiled in a sordid tale that defied the hooded order’s professed values. Dr. Ellis O. Willson, a dentist who’d been a leader of the large Klan chapter in La Grande, Oregon, was charged with raping his clerical assistant, and then killing her accidentally during a botched abortion. He was found guilty of manslaughter just as Stephenson was sentenced to life. The biggest achievement of the Oregon Klan—the vote by a majority of the people to essentially outlaw Catholic schools in the state—also fell. In 1925, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the measure was unconstitutional. By the end of the year, the Portland chapter of the Klan, which once had 15,000 members as part of a statewide organization that was the largest, per capita, outside Indiana, went out of business.
In Colorado, three Klansmen were charged in separate cases of child molestation and statutory rape. The Grand Dragon, Dr. John Galen Locke, was implicated in the kidnapping of a nineteen-year-old who had refused to marry his pregnant girlfriend—a violation of the Klan’s professed values of sexual purity and the sanctity of marriage. These scandals, and infighting among the leaders, contributed to the swift collapse of the Rocky Mountain Klan.
As membership plunged nationwide, the Klan was quick to scrub the Indiana Grand Dragon from institutional memory. In Noblesville, a pair of children found two bags floating down the White River. Inside were tightly bundled records of the Empire. The sacks held letters, membership lists, telegrams, and directives from the Old Man—the written proof of a thriving, secretive, masked political order staffed by the leading citizens of the state. At the same time, the Fiery Cross went silent and folded, dragged down by internal strife and a decline in advertising.
At year’s end, Kansas became the first state to legally oust the Klan, led by a crusading newspaperman, William Allen White. The state withdrew its charter and outlawed Klan activity. “What was once a thriving and profitable hate factory and bigotorium [is] now laughed into a busted community,” wrote White. “The Kluxers in Kansas are as dejected and sad as last year’s bird’s nest.”
In Muncie, another small-town editor felt a measure of vindication. But George Dale also recalled, with considerable bitterness, his own time in captivity. He’d been frog-marched into jail by Klan deputies in the sheriff’s office. He’d faced a Klan prosecutor and a Klan judge. Stephenson had used a vast fortune to “employ the best legal talent in Indiana,” while Dale could not find a lawyer in Muncie brave enough to take on his defense of free speech.
