For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (24 page)

Yet Darrow’s work as a defense attorney in the Cook County Criminal Court often seemed to confound his most fundamental assumptions about the causes of crime. Some defendants seemed to have acted irrationally or, at the very least, in ways that defied easy explanation. Darrow, in his defense of such prisoners, could not make his appeal to the jury in ways that argued an economic motive, and as he took up alternative explanations for such crimes, his philosophy of criminal justice gradually began to adopt a more subtle mien.

Darrow’s philosophy of economic determinism could not, for example, account for those murderers who killed in passion and anger. Darrow himself knew that, in order to make an effective appeal to the jury in such cases, he had to abandon his concept of crime as a consequence of economic need.

R
USSELL
P
ETHICK, A TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD
deliveryman, was a case in point. On Thursday, 6 May 1915, at ten o’clock in the morning, Pethick stopped at 7100 Lowe Avenue, the house of John and Ella Coppersmith, to deliver groceries. Ella Coppersmith was in the kitchen when Pethick knocked at the door, and her two-year-old son, Jack, was playing in an adjacent room. Pethick unloaded the groceries from his wagon in the alley adjacent to the Coppersmith house and stepped into the kitchen. Ella Coppersmith, alone in the house with her child, offered a ten-dollar bill in payment. There was a dispute over the change; the dispute escalated into an argument; and, as they faced each other, Pethick suddenly reached for the woman’s blouse as though to touch her. She responded by striking him in the face with her fist. There was a butcher knife, with a wooden handle and a sharp, serrated edge, lying on the kitchen table. Pethick suddenly grabbed it and lunged at the woman. She fought back, raising her arms to defend herself from the blows, but Pethick struck at her, slashing violently at her abdomen and throat.

As Ella Coppersmith lay dying at his feet, her throat cut, blood streaming out across the kitchen floor, the child, hearing his mother’s screams, ran into the room crying. Pethick could not afford to leave behind a witness to his crime—the child might identify him to the police, he thought—and so he grabbed Jack by his shirt, pulled the child suddenly toward him, and slit the boy’s throat.
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After killing the boy, Pethick ransacked the house, looking for valuables; he then returned to the kitchen, where he sexually abused Ella Coppersmith’s body before cleaning his clothes and hands of blood and returning to work.
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There seemed to be no mitigating circumstances for the brutal murder of a young mother and her innocent child. At the hearing before the grand jury, several witnesses, including Pethick’s employer, John McCrea, testified that Pethick had shown no previous signs of insanity and that he could distinguish right from wrong. The state’s attorney, Maclay Hoyne, was confident that he had a hanging case, and he announced that he would seek the death penalty for the double murder.
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But according to a diagnosis presented by medical experts, Pethick was mentally ill. Rachel Watkins, a prominent member of the Medical Woman’s Club of Chicago, examined him in the Cook County jail. The prisoner, Watkins reported, had “degeneration of the nerve tracts…. He is very deficient in memory, reason, and judgment…. There is a disturbance throughout the entire emotional field. In general knowledge he is equal to a 5 or 6 year old child; and although he attended public school for eight years, he was unable to pass the third grade.”
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Psychologists examined Pethick in his prison cell—they agreed with the physicians that Pethick was mentally incompetent. He was unable to perform even elementary tasks, and he had the judgment and intelligence of a young child.
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It was exactly the type of case that appealed to Clarence Darrow’s humanitarian instincts. Pethick, a young man from a family of modest means, had committed a crime that was extraordinary in its violence. The murders had been entirely out of character. Pethick, according to everyone who knew him, was a reserved, quiet man who never smoked and rarely drank—he had never run wild or behaved indecently but had worked diligently to support his two aged parents.

Darrow had first learned of the case through the Chicago newspapers, and the more he read, the more incongruous it seemed that Pethick should commit such a brutal murder. The killing of Ella and Jack Coppersmith was inexplicable except as a consequence of mental derangement. Russell Pethick had acted from a compulsion to kill. Defects in his mental apparatus, Darrow believed, had removed his ability to choose his actions freely and had compelled him to murder his victims. Pethick was a suitable case for medical diagnosis, and the state’s attorney would be better advised to send him to a mental institution than to the gallows.

And if Pethick had not chosen to kill, then what could justify a death sentence? He was not responsible for his actions, Darrow reasoned, and under the circumstances, capital punishment would serve no purpose except to satisfy the bloodthirsty mob. The execution of Russell Pethick would not bring Ella Coppersmith or her son back to life; it would not deter other murderers; and, of course, it would neither redeem nor rehabilitate the murderer.

That summer, as Pethick awaited his trial in the Cook County Criminal Court, Darrow volunteered his services as defense attorney.

George Pethick, astonished that Chicago’s most famous lawyer should take up his son’s case, quickly consented; and on 24 September, the opening day of the trial, Darrow and his cocounsel, Alice Thompson, stood in front of George Barrett, judge of the Criminal Court, to plead their client’s case.
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Might Darrow have submitted a motion for a change of venue? Even if Darrow could succeed in moving the trial away from Cook County, he would, he believed, be unable to secure a sympathetic jury. Even the most objective jury would find it difficult to look beyond the brutality of the murders and the intimations of sexual depravity.

There was little chance, moreover, that a jury would find the prisoner not guilty by reason of insanity. The defendant may have been mentally disturbed, but in appearance at least, he presented no obvious signs of derangement. Pethick was lucid and coherent, and the state’s attorney would no doubt present a surfeit of witnesses to testify to Pethick’s ability to perform everyday tasks in a satisfactory manner.

It would be futile, Darrow realized, to use insanity as a defense. He had a better strategy, a strategy so simple that it caught the prosecution entirely by surprise. On the opening day in court, he said that his client pleaded guilty and asked the judge to consider Pethick’s mental condition in mitigation of his punishment. Pethick, Darrow stated to the judge, was capable of distinguishing right from wrong. He did not, therefore, meet the accepted test of insanity. But on the other hand, Darrow insisted, Pethick was suffering from mental illness. This medical condition should be taken into consideration in determining the appropriate punishment.

Pethick, by admitting his guilt, would avoid a jury trial. The judge would first listen to the psychiatric experts present their evidence that Pethick was mentally diseased. On the basis of that evidence, he would then sentence Pethick either to death or to a prison sentence of not less than fourteen years.

Darrow’s gamble paid off. H. I. Davis, the former superintendent of the Psychopathic Hospital, testified for the defense that Pethick was subnormal—“His mental capacity is far below par. I wouldn’t call him an idiot, but he is feeble-minded”—and that Pethick had a diminished sense of responsibility. Other physicians took the stand to support Davis’s assertion that Pethick was mentally diseased.

James (Jimmy) O’Brien, the assistant state’s attorney, countered the defense testimony with a reading of the defendant’s confession and a recital of the numerous stab wounds found on the victims’ bodies, but to no avail. Darrow had saved his client from the gallows. The judge handed down a life sentence in the penitentiary for the murders of Ella Coppersmith and her son.
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E
VEN WHEN A DEFENDANT CONFESSED
that he had acted for the sake of money, Darrow preferred to explain the crime as a consequence of mental derangement. On 5 April 1916, Edward Hettinger, a nineteen-year-old factory worker, had slit the throat of Agnes Middleton after breaking into her apartment looking for money. At his trial later that year, Hettinger denied his guilt and claimed that the police had tortured him to obtain his confession. Hettinger’s attorney, Guy Walker, offered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, but the jury, after listening to the testimony of the medical experts, found Hettinger guilty of murder and sentenced the prisoner to hang.
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Clarence Darrow had played no role in the case. Yet enough had been written about it in the newspapers to convince him that Hettinger was mentally unbalanced. One year before the murder the authorities had committed Hettinger to the Psychopathic Hospital because of his eccentric behavior. The jury had made a mistake, Darrow believed, in sentencing the boy to hang.

Hettinger had a mental ability, according to the medical experts at the Psychopathic Hospital, equivalent to that of a child, and it would be a retrograde step, Darrow protested to the judge, Hugo Pam, to execute a boy with such a low intellectual capacity. “I don’t believe any mental defective should be hanged,” Darrow stated. “To hang this boy would leave the community cold. It would be a brutal thing to hang him. He is only 19 years old and his mentality is the most important thing to determine what punishment he should get. I believe the jury overlooked those facts.”
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Pam listened to Darrow’s words sympathetically, and a few days later, he announced that he would commute the sentence to life imprisonment, but only if the prisoner confessed his guilt. Hettinger was initially reluctant to concede guilt—he had had nothing to do with the killing, he protested. The police had beaten a confession out of him with their truncheons, and he now repudiated it. But Hettinger, after a long talk in his jail cell with Clarence Darrow, eventually agreed to confess in exchange for a life sentence in Joliet Prison.
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T
HROUGHOUT THE
1910
S AND INTO
the early 1920s, Darrow defended countless clients on murder charges and avoided the death penalty in every instance. A murder might seem premeditated and deliberate, yet Darrow needed only to bring on the psychiatric experts to explain his client’s action for the jury to accept his defense. Most typically the jurymen would accept Darrow’s insistence that the defendant was not guilty by reason of insanity. Even on the infrequent occasions when the jurors found the defendant guilty, they refused to hand down a death sentence, specifying instead incarceration in the penitentiary.
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Emma Simpson, a wealthy socialite charged with the murder of her husband in 1919, looked to Clarence Darrow as her best hope—her only hope—of avoiding the death penalty. Emma had separated from her husband in 1912 after discovering him in bed with another woman. She had refused a request for a divorce—why should she give him the freedom to marry her rival?—but in February 1919 she filed suit in court charging her husband with infidelity and requesting payments for separate maintenance.

Elmer Simpson regarded his wife’s demand as preposterous. She was a wealthy woman, from one of Chicago’s most affluent families, he told the judge. He was making a modest living as a telegraph operator. The demand for maintenance payments was fueled more by jealousy and rage than by any need for the money. He taunted his wife, sitting directly across from him, with a cutting remark; but the words were the last he ever uttered. In front of a crowd of witnesses, Emma Simpson drew a revolver from the folds of her dress and fired four shots at her husband. Two bullets struck Elmer Simpson in the face, one lodged in his shoulder, and the fourth went wide, narrowly missing the clerk of the court, Gus Wedemaier.
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Emma Simpson had no regrets at killing her husband. As the bailiffs hustled her out of the court, she waved and smiled to a courtroom photographer from the
Chicago Daily Tribune
while he snapped her picture. Later that day, she explained her action to the newspaper reporters as entirely justified: “I took the gun to court with me, but I didn’t expect to shoot. He said something to me—something nasty, indicative of his whole nature. It made me boil—I couldn’t stand it any longer…. I will tell my story to the jury and they will free me. I am perfectly confident of that.”
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Clarence Darrow announced that he would defend Emma Simpson as a victim of partial insanity—his client, he proclaimed to the newspapers, was rational in all aspects save one. Her husband’s philandering, his provocative behavior, his cruel taunts and needling remarks, had driven Emma Simpson into a condition of insanity whenever she contemplated his behavior.
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Later that year, at the trial in the Cook County Criminal Court, Darrow produced numerous witnesses to testify to Emma’s obsessive neurosis with her husband’s infidelity. Ida Will, a close friend of the defendant, related that Emma would talk incessantly about her husband. She had driven all her friends to distraction with her talk. It had caused the dissolution of a card circle—no one could enjoy the card games while Emma complained endlessly about her husband.

Harry McCormick, a business associate of Emma’s uncle, recalled the physical changes in Emma’s appearance after her troubles began. “She haunted my office asking my aid…. She became insane over the subject of her domestic life. I often found her in the office, her hair disheveled, her eyes staring, using violent language.”
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