The Valentino Affair (29 page)

If Rodolfo Guglielmi got wind of this latest development he must have shuddered. After almost a year of scuffling around in Hollywood, knocking on agents’ doors, and most of those doors slamming in his face, he had finally landed a part as a dress extra in
Alimony.
The job paid only five bucks a day, but one casting director at least had noticed the young actor with the elegant moves and the moody good looks.

He was also making useful contacts elsewhere. Among his fellow extras in
Alimony
was a delicate young beauty named Alice Taafe. The couple hit it off immediately and often went out dancing. In time she would change her name to Alice Terry and become one of the silent screen’s most accomplished leading ladies—but she didn’t forget her young dancing partner. Just a few years later, when cast by her husband, the director Rex Ingram, in
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,
she mentioned that Rodolfo, with his dark appearance, would be ideal for the leading role. The rest, as they say, is movie history, but for now the last thing that the struggling actor needed was any connection with the most sensational murder trial in a decade.

T
HE
T
RIAL,
D
AY 4

But the bad news kept on coming.

The next morning’s newspapers announced that Deputy County Clerk William B. Selden, of New York, had been served with a subpoena from the Nassau County district attorney’s office, requiring the production in court of all papers and records connected with the divorce action brought by Mrs. de Saulles against her husband. The required papers were sent to Mineola in the custody of a court messenger. Weeks, convinced there was something buried in these documents that would weigh heavily against the defendant, dropped heavy hints to reporters that he might introduce details of the divorce at the conclusion of the state’s direct evidence.

Blanca clearly wasn’t fazed by this news as she entered court that morning. On the contrary, she had a glow about her that acquaintances attributed to the visit of her son the previous evening. At eleven o’clock the eleventh juror, George Siles, sixty-one, a decorator, was selected. When asked if he worried that Siles, unlike all the other jurors, was childless, Uterhart laughed and said that he liked Mr. Siles’s face “particularly well” and was sure he was a man of “human sensibilities.”
⁴⁷
An hour later, the final juror, Alexander S. Norton, a fifty-four-year-old retired firefighter, joined the panel. As he took his seat, Blanca nodded slightly, as if in approval. Although both sides expressed their happiness with the jury’s makeup, a glance at the avuncular, silver-tinged jury and then at the gamine defendant left no doubt in observers’ minds that in the vital battle of jury selection the state had been decisively routed. Some of these men had grandchildren almost as old as Blanca.

After the twelfth juror was sworn in, the court took a lunch break. An hour later, everyone returned to the packed room, and District Attorney Weeks stood to make his opening address. The
Atlanta Constitution
had forecast A
M
URDER
T
RIAL THAT
W
ILL
R
IVAL [
H
ARRY
K
ENDALL]
T
HAW’S.
⁴⁸

It was time to test the accuracy of that prediction.

TWELVE

Someone’s Lying

T
HE
T
RIAL,
D
AY 4

R
EPORTS THAT A JURY HAD FINALLY BEEN SELECTED AND THAT THE TRIAL
proper was about to begin galvanized the crowd milling on the courthouse steps and caused a stampede for seats in the public gallery. But before anyone gained admittance to the court, court attendant William B. Purcell searched them for weapons, irrespective of social standing. This extra layer of official security resulted from yet another threatening letter to Justice Manning, this time warning him to be “prepared to meet your God if this young woman is not acquitted.”
¹
Manning might have shrugged off the letters as being of “no serious import,”
²
but, judging by the heavily armed presence in the corridors and around the courthouse, someone was taking the threat seriously. Despite these delays, the court quickly filled, mostly with fashionably dressed women. Given the crush and the unseasonably mild weather, it was fortunate that this was one of the few courts to be ventilated by fresh air from open windows.

Amalia and Guillermo resumed their customary position immediately behind Blanca. Next to them sat Suzanne Monteau and Dr. Wight. Across the courtroom sat the de Saulles family, grim-faced, steeling themselves for the battle to come. Against doctors’ orders Major de Saulles had struggled into court, maintaining his soldierly appearance, determined not to succumb either to his physical pain or the bitter pangs of loss from which he was so evidently suffering. He had arrived from South Bethlehem the previous day but was so weak that he’d had to retire early, and was attended through the night by his daughters. On this day, Caroline, in deep mourning, her face shrouded in a thick black veil, was acting as nurse in attendance.

As soon as the lunch break ended, Weeks rose to make his opening speech. He didn’t have a flowery delivery, and in twenty minutes of rapid, somewhat perfunctory narrative, he outlined the state’s case. It hinged on one simple question: Why had Blanca taken a gun with her? He looked directly at the jury. “We intend, gentlemen, to prove to you that the defendant committed murder in the first degree when she killed John Longer de Saulles”
³
because it had been a clear case of premeditation.

He took the jury briefly through the prisoner’s turbulent marriage and then, in greater depth, through the terms of the divorce decree. “Bear in mind that this was the legal agreement. In April of this year, as the time approached when the boy was to go into his father’s custody, Mrs. De Saulles started proceedings.”
⁴
To placate her, Jack de Saulles agreed that “in alternate months, May, July, and September, she was to have the boy and the father was to have him in June and August.”
⁵
It was also stipulated that either party could have the boy for three hours by mutual consent at any time during the other’s period of custody, provided it didn’t interfere with the boy’s welfare. This became known as the “Three-Hour Agreement.”
⁶
Weeks made a great play of stressing that out of the 378 days preceding the shooting, Jack had only had custody for 66, and that “on August 3 the boy was properly in the custody of his father.”
⁷

All through this opening, Weeks could barely get a sentence out without being interrupted by the defense. The trial-savvy Uterhart’s strategy was plain: break up the flow, don’t let Weeks settle into a comfortable rhythm, keep the jury distracted. In this disjointed fashion, Weeks outlined the events of the evening of August 3. First came the phone call that Blanca made to The Box and her being told that her ex-husband was out at his club. The response hadn’t fooled her in the slightest, said Weeks. She had “sensed”
⁸
that Jack really was at home, and she was determined to confront him. Every act that night was carried out in a deliberate and methodical fashion: the urgent phone calls to the taxi company, the fast drive to The Box, taking care to park some distance from the house where she couldn’t be seen. “She had the chauffeur turn the taxicab around and then walked toward The Box, and as she walked she held her hand under her sweater this way.”
⁹
Weeks mimicked the gesture as he spoke.

For some reason this act of pantomime startled Blanca. Previously her attentiveness had varied between bored and catatonic, but now she sat upright and, turning in her chair, leaned forward to better watch the district attorney. Weeks warned the jury that the defense would claim that Blanca drove to The Box that night in the belief that Jack was not at home, and yet her first words to the valet were: “ ‘Where is Mr. De Saulles?’ If she had believed he was not there, there would have been no reason to ask for him.”
¹⁰
It would have been a telling point, had not Weeks overlooked one factor: Blanca had already seen Jack’s car parked in the driveway, reason enough for her to surmise that he was still at home.

Weeks continued. He described how, having cunningly smuggled a gun into the house, Blanca entered the living room and confronted her ex-husband. A brief argument broke out, and “she shot him in the back and said she hoped he would die.”
¹¹
Weeks paused for effect and then pointed at the prisoner. “She used servants, automobiles, and money. Her revolver had a safety catch. It was necessary to release this catch before firing each shot. But she did it. She fired five shots, and she knew what she was doing.”
¹²
Moreover, Blanca’s actions after the shooting only added to the state’s contention that this shooting was not the irrational act of some unhinged mind. Consider her remarks to the valet, the arresting officers, the chauffeur, and Thorne, telling him where she had left the gun.

And there were plenty of other incidences to demonstrate that here was a woman in full control of her faculties and aware of the consequences of her actions. For instance, on the journey to Mineola jail, she had made the remark about the electric chair. She had also asked the driver to stop so she could buy a bottle of milk from a roadside seller, whom she told to keep the change, and she drank this milk quite calmly while the car was still in motion, even joking, “How gruesome that we should stop at such a place at this time,”
¹³
when the auto stopped near a graveyard. At the jailhouse she had acted in a similarly normal fashion, trying to obtain bail for her maid, and she also phoned Crossways to arrange for clothing to be delivered. All this, according to Weeks, showed that Blanca was perfectly sane at the time of the shooting. He finished by saying, “The people, accordingly, will ask that you find a verdict of murder in the first degree.”
¹⁴
As Weeks made his demand for the death penalty, Blanca “raised her head defiantly and glared at him.”
¹⁵

Weeks called his first witness. George A. Fairfield, a surveyor, had drawn up a huge floor plan of the house that showed the hallway, living room, and location of the telephone, as well as the surrounding grounds. Uterhart objected to the floor plan, saying it didn’t represent the condition of the property on the night of the shooting. He was overruled, as he expected, but he was continuing his policy of disrupting the prosecution’s flow at every opportunity. Bad law: good advocacy. Fairfield was allowed to proceed. He described The Box as lying in a lonesome spot in a sparsely populated neighborhood. The distance, he said, from Valentines Road, where Blanca had left her cab, to the front porch in a direct line was 240 feet, and from the porch to the shrubbery where Blanca was arrested was another 300 feet. A murmur greeted these numbers; it was the first indication for many in court of just how large the de Saulles estate was.

Next came William H. Pickering, who had taken photos of the house a week after the shooting. While the various diagrams and photographs were being displayed and argued over, Blanca sank back into her semistupor. Nor did she display any curiosity or, indeed, abhorrence when Dr. Henry M. Warner described what he had found during the autopsy. He produced, identified, and catalogued each of the five bullets. Then, with the aid of a lead pencil and a court policeman, he indicated the course followed by each projectile. All the shots had been fired either at the side or the back of the victim, who had probably raised his left arm to shield himself. During this testimony, Uterhart bounced up and down like a jack-in-the-box, repeatedly disputing the witness’s evidence that the victim had been shot in the back. In the end, a weary Justice Manning gaveled Uterhart to silence, saying that Warner’s evidence had entered the record and was going to stay there, no matter what defense counsel might think.