Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis (18 page)

Even though Lucy found the length and depth of Alice’s torment worrisome, and did truly sympathize, she seemed to eventually regard it as self-indulgent. Lucy was a domestic worker in the segregated South. After a long day laboring for the Mitchells, she probably had just as much work, if not more, to do in her own home. The double shifts left her exhausted, and unable to lessen many of her family’s immediate concerns, no matter how hard she worked. Tellingly, Lucy tried to comfort Alice by pointing out her privilege, recalling that she tried to explain that “there was no use to worry as she had plenty of money.”
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The Mitchells also had difficulty describing Alice and Freda’s relationship before the murder, and what little they did manage to say was heavily
informed by the same sources everyone else had access to: the newspaper articles and the Hypothetical Case. The Mitchells’ unique insight came from their visits to jail, and they all agreed that Alice appeared to be unremorseful, both of her love for Freda and the brutal murder itself. They claimed Alice spoke of Freda in the present tense, as if she were still alive.

Even the
Commercial
was becoming increasingly convinced of the insanity plea:

Had she slain a man who had deceived or betrayed her, the idea of insanity may have never been presented, but she slew a girl for whom she entertained a passion such as exists ordinarily between members of the opposite sexes, and the peculiarity of the case at once gave color to the suspicion of insanity.
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Freda’s family, however, remained unconvinced. They agreed that the idea of two women eloping was strange, but they had distinct memories of Alice’s behavior in their home, and they saw no evidence of insanity. Alice should be held accountable for Freda’s death, the Wards maintained. They wanted to see her tried for murder.

William Volkmar, who had waited, Winchester rifle in hand, for a man to claim his sister-in-law the night she planned to runaway, testified that Alice was sane. She had even displayed affection toward men in his presence. Jo Ward repeated this refrain, informing the court that Alice was a member of the Pleasant Hour Social Club, and had attended its dances with male escorts.

Alice had indeed gone to such dances, but her reasons for attending were never entirely clear. A romantic interest in men may have been the obvious impetus, but perhaps it was just easier to attend and socialize. She could satisfy expectations
and
keep a watchful eye on Freda, who also attended the dances. Furthermore, Alice’s escort was one of convenience, a young man a couple of years her junior. He was not a romantic interest, and it was clear that, outside of Freda, Alice had not shown romantic feelings for anyone else, male or female.

As Wright pointed out, Alice might have gone to the Pleasant Hour dance with a young man, but she went home with Freda. Most interested parties avoided any explicit mention of a sexual relationship between Alice and Freda, which put defense in a bind; They had to find a way of mentioning the unmentionable. The more deviant Alice’s love for Freda, after all, the stronger the claim to insanity. And yet, the extreme deviance of same-sex love, the bizarreness of it, meant that it appeared to be unprecedented to most people’s minds. How does one speak of the existence of that which does not exist? It was a rhetorical tightrope walk, as demonstrated in these two highly suggestive lines from the Hypothetical Case:

Time strengthened the intimacy between them. They became lovers in the sense of that relation between persons of different sexes.

And with that, the first half of the ten-day inquisition drew to a close. The defense was still in the lead, but it had been far more of a volleying match than they had expected, with Attorney General Peters’s litigation skills proving to be a formidable challenge. The second half, however, would be decisive.

D
URING THE SECOND HALF
of the inquisition, the defense called five medical experts to the stand, while Peters, unable to lure a single physician to support his case, had only his courtroom acumen to depend upon. The expert testimony would be highly influential, but Gantt and Wright were saving the best for last—though they did not yet know it. Alice Mitchell would take the stand.
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The doctors had received the Hypothetical Case in advance, despite the prosecution’s attempts to render it inadmissible as hearsay. Judge DuBose allowed it, since each of the experts had personally interviewed Alice in jail, at least once, for no less than an hour.

All five prestigious physicians concurred with the Hypothetical Case, and did so with great authority. Dr. John Hill Callender, who had introduced the term “vicarious menstruation” to the court, was a sixty-year-old Nashville native and longtime medical superintendent of the Central Hospital for the Insane. He was also a professor at the University of Nashville and Vanderbilt University, where he earned a statewide reputation for his
work with nervous diseases.
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Dr. Frank L. Sim, a fifty-eight-year-old professor at the Memphis Hospital Medical College, was also held in great esteem, and from there, the other doctors’ backgrounds were varied enough that the defense could claim they sought opinions far and wide—at least within the state of Tennessee. It did not matter that it was hard to differentiate between each expert’s testimony. On the contrary, consistency only reinforced the impression that the opinions were objective, the result of rigorous scientific methods.
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Before they had even met Alice, the doctors agreed she had a hereditary disposition. In jail, they observed her to be of low intelligence, noted her supposedly vacant facial expression, and above all, documented a complete lack of remorse. One doctor, E. P. Sale, cited Alice’s left-handedness and slightly asymmetrical features as further proof of her condition.

The expert witnesses primarily focused on the romance between Alice and Freda, including the unspoken topic about which everyone had been wondering. Callendar, Sim, and Turner boldly revealed that they had found no evidence of “sexual love” between Alice and Freda, even though the couple had spent nights together, and had been physically affectionate. But, the doctors hastened to add, Alice’s feelings were indeed “unnatural,” and that she had formed a “morbid perverted attachment” to Freda.

And yet, a “morbid perverted attachment” to Freda was not what the doctors ultimately deemed insane. Their attention was drawn to Alice’s plan to marry and support Freda, “an impossible idea” that convinced doctors that she was clinically insane.
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Dr. B.F. Turner, the least tenured of these men, found Alice’s desire to be economically self-sufficient—which, in this case, meant posing as a man—totally absurd, trumped only by her preposterous idea of same-sex marriage. He shared a part of their conversation, in which he pressed Alice about the impossibility of procreation between two women. A childless home, to his mind, served no purpose, and could only be understood as another sign of unreason.

“Alice, do you not know that you could not have married another young lady?” Dr. Turner had asked her.

“Oh, I could have married Freda,” she replied.

“But some one usually has to support a family in a case like that.”

“I know it, but I was going to work and support both,” Alice explained.

“But a girl like you could not earn enough for both.”

“But I was going to dress as a man . . .”

“But Miss Mitchell, do you not know that usually when young people get married they look forward to the time when they shall have children growing up around them?”

“Oh, yes sir.”

“Well, did you and Freda propose to have children?”

“No, we were not going to have children.”

“How do you know you were not?”

“Oh, I know we were not,” Alice demurred.

Like Turner, Callender emphasized Alice’s peculiar “logic” as a way to identify which of her desires were normal, and which were abnormal; it was, for the defense, a convenient mission of nineteenth-century psychiatry. Callender found Alice’s plan to pass as a man and support Freda to be insane, concluding, “The frankness and sincerity of her manner on this topic was evidence either of a gross delusion or the conception of a person imbecile, or of a child without knowledge of the usual results of matrimony or the connubial state, or of the purpose of the organs of generation in the sexes.”
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The idea that Alice might imagine a life with Freda in childless terms was so foreign to the doctors that, in their estimation, it could only mean she lacked basic adult understanding of how sexual reproduction worked.

When it came to the act of murder, three out of the five experts believed Alice had been “dominated” by an insane desire to end Freda’s life, displaying a total loss of self-control, another hallmark of turn-of-the-century psychiatric
theory. On the stand, Turner used the analogy of a runaway horse, so strong the driver cannot control it.
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Sale, however, believed Alice was suffering from “simple insanity,” a version of “erotomania” that the defense had worked to avoid as a possible diagnosis. Interestingly, thirty-six-year-old Dr. Michael Campbell—who had almost agreed to testify on the state’s behalf—declined to offer a diagnosis. He did, however, note that there were many patients in his asylum, the Eastern State Hospital for the Insane in nearby Knoxville, Tennessee, who appeared rational on most subjects.

All five, however, not only agreed that Alice was in some way insane, but also—and most conveniently for the Mitchells—incurable. At best, they warned, an asylum would offer her relief through “treatment.”
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A
TTORNEY
G
ENERAL
P
ETERS
,
lacking a single dissenting physician, nonetheless persevered. He pressed witnesses for limited definitions of same-sex love, and challenged them to substantiate claims that it was consistently emblematic of insanity. Campbell conceded it was not, though like Turner, he associated same-sex love with passions taken to an extreme. The always suggestive Sale testified that Alice and Freda’s relationship illustrated the dangers of extreme passion, which he described as a pathological love.
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Unable to get much traction, Peters shifted his focus from love to marriage. Could two women marry? There was a known example, Peters pointed out. Annie Hindle, a male-impersonator who had performed at Broome’s Variety Theater on Jefferson Street in Memphis, had been regarded as eccentric—but not insane—despite having married a woman. Turner rejected this line of questioning, explaining that two women could not experience “physical pleasure and giving birth to children.” To his mind, these reasons alone precluded any ability to form a union.
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But could Alice and Freda have experienced “physical pleasure,” the kind a man and woman enjoyed together?

The
Appeal Avalanche
wondered at Turners’s point. After all, there had been no formal physical examination, and thus “it has not been proved that Alice could not perform the duties of a husband.” Cases of indeterminate genitals, or hermaphrodites, were rarely introduced into polite conversation, let alone written about in newspapers consumed by the masses. Peters, however, would not request that Alice undergo a physical examination. Murderess or not, she was a respectable white woman from a prominent family, and her body was off limits—even if it played a large role in the case.
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“Was Freda Ward insane, too?” asked the prosecution. It was a rhetorical question. No, Campbell conceded, even though he had never met the deceased seventeen-year-old, and anyway, “she was dominated by Alice Mitchell, the stronger-willed of the two girls.”
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“What about a man in her situation?” the prosecution further pressed. Has no man with sexual desires toward a woman ever committed murder? One need not be insane, possessed by perversion, to be driven to violence.

Sale granted that a man who committed a similar crime of passion “on the spur of the moment . . . is an ebullition that might occur in every normal man.” But this case was not comparable, he maintained, and returned to the defense’s central message, the argument that tied all of the testimony together: Alice thought she could marry Freda and work to support a childless union, that they could live like that indefinitely—an insane notion.
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After three days, the prosecution had failed to offer a convincing counterclaim, and inconsistencies did little to undermine the expert testimony. The Attorney General persevered, calling four witnesses who lacked expertise, but had actually known the deceased.

The state called Ada Volkmar, Freda’s eldest sister, to testify first, but she offered the court very little new information, as did Christina Purnell, who had witnessed the murder. The next witness, however, was not only new, but a highly anticipated arrival.

Freda’s erstwhile beau and Alice’s romantic rival, Ashley Roselle of Featherstone, Arkansas, took the stand, and the energy in the courtroom surged, with onlookers hoping for a plot twist. There was an outspoken group of spectators who shared William Volkmar’s suspicion that a man was somehow involved. In this version of the story, Alice killed Freda not out of love for her, but to clear the way to marry Ashley.