Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis (10 page)

W
HO WAS
A
LICE
M
ITCHELL
?
Why did she kill Freda Ward? Was she a masculine murderess? A pervert? A fast and jealous young woman? Or was she insane, like her mother?

Just as the Mitchells insisted that the defense argue for Alice’s insanity, the Wards pushed the prosecution to maintain the opposite. “She was no more crazy than I am,” asserted Ada’s husband, William Volkmar, an “old Memphis boy” who had hosted Alice in his home.
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Alice said “I don’t care if I’m hung,” Jo Ward recalled, insisting the murder was premeditated, and carried out in cold blood. Neither quoted the writer Mark Twain, but they would have found agreement in his essay, “A New Crime—Legislation Needed.” Two years before Alice was born, Twain bemoaned the rise of the insanity plea, and how it allowed for otherwise unremarkable behavior to be recast as proof of an unsound mind.

Of late years it does not seem possible for a man to so conduct himself, before killing another man, as not to be manifestly insane. If he talks about the stars, he is insane. If he appears nervous and uneasy an hour before the killing, he is insane. If he weeps over a great grief, his friends shake their heads, and fear that he is “not right.” If, an hour after the murder, he seems ill at ease, preoccupied and excited, he is unquestionably insane.

But it was the prosecution’s case—and not the defense’s plea—that newspapers characterized as inconsistent and unconvincing. Attorney General Peters called Alice “fast,” citing jealousy over a man as a possible motive, but also claimed she was indifferent to men. At the very least, he argued that she was ill-tempered and vindictive, but certainly not insane.
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By questioning Alice’s moral character, Peters challenged readers’ cherished notions of the Mitchell family’s respectability, and few outside the Ward family were interested in that perspective. The
Appeal Avalanche
soon reported that “the preponderance of public opinion is in favor of the theory that Alice Mitchell is insane.”

Months before the lunacy inquisition would officially commence, the defense could claim public opinion as its first victory. Mass media played an influential role in regulating the boundaries of American modernity, and such a high-profile domestic tale on public display provided a means to do so. The defense offered editors a message they wanted to propagate: Alice was a well-to-do white woman from a pious family who was neither bad nor fast, and did not deserve to be in jail among base miscreants of every race and class. The public most certainly refused to see her hanged, with her fine family looking on.

Of course, the papers could not uniformly align themselves with the defense. Debate was a useful strategy when it came to selling copies; it was in the newspapers’ interest to see that all positions were argued for vociferously.
In Memphis, the
Appeal Avalanche
supported the case for insanity in lockstep with Gantt and Wright, while the
Commercial
often challenged them. If Alice had indeed loved Freda, the paper contended, she should be judged as a man would be, had he committed a crime of passion. She was legally responsible, they argued, “because she cowardly ran away. Had she been wholly irresponsible and insane, she might have acted differently after drawing the razor across Miss Ward’s throat.”
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The
Appeal Avalanche
countered that the ability to function in daily life was irrelevant, as was any talk of treating a woman like a man, maintaining that Alice was “the slave of a passion not normal and almost incomprehensible to well-balanced people.”
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On that point, the
Commercial
almost always retreated.

Before Alice even entered the courtroom, newspapers across the country had latched on to every detail, real or imagined, of what they considered a particularly lurid murder. But national fascination with the case was about far more than the death of a seventeen-year-old girl, or a desire for entertainment and spectacle. Same-sex love, passing as a man, and alternate domesticities challenged everything Americans understood, and were desperately holding on to, in the late nineteenth century. During the next six months, this domestic drama would put issues of morality, individual liberty, and mental health front and center, forcing people to have a stance.

But first, Lillie Johnson would have to be arrested, and Freda Ward laid to rest.

W
HILE SOME REPORTERS
waited outside the jail, others sought answers from the families themselves. They visited the Mitchell residence, where knocks on the door went unanswered. A few intrepid reporters managed to talk their way inside Lillie Johnson’s home on Vance Street. Out of respect for her father, J. M. Johnson, local journalists promised they would leave—right after they had a quick look at Lillie, just long enough to describe her as “prostrated with grief” in the next print editions.

The Ward family lived up the river, but reporters would not find them in Golddust. Jo had sent word home with officers on the
Ora Lee
—the very steamer she and Freda were supposed to take home that day—instructing the Wards and Volkmars to board the next boat bound for Memphis. It is unclear whether or not, upon arrival, they knew that their youngest had died, or thought Freda had been injured, but would survive. They may have gone to the widow Kimbrough’s house first, where they would return later that night as mourners taking refuge, but either way, someone directed them to Stanley & Hintons. The undertakers had already begun sealing the long, deep wounds on Freda’s face and neck with wax.

It was reported that Thomas Ward was “pitiable on beholding the body of his dead daughter and fears are entertained for his mind.”
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It is highly unlikely that any reporter was allowed inside the room that held Freda’s body, let alone present at the unveiling. But they were crowded outside, and some of them may have seen Thomas’s face on the way out of Stanley & Hintons. In the first of many more instances of hypocrisy, reporters criticized citizens who waited beside them, displaying an “almost ghoulish” desire to see Freda’s “mutilated face”—a sight they themselves seemed desperate to record.
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After a doctor had stitched Jo Ward’s wounds closed, she joined the rest of her family at the undertakers, but the day she watched her sister murdered was hardly over. The coroner insisted there be an inquest, and so Jo told her story once again, from the very beginning, going all the way back to Miss Higbee’s. It was Jo who placed Lillie, the girl with whom she had once been chumming, at the scene of the crime.

By ten o’clock the next morning, Lillie was arrested at her home, escorted past the throngs of spectators outside the jail, and placed in a cell with Alice. According to newspaper accounts, J. M. Johnson accompanied her to the jail, but unlike George Mitchell, he remained there long after she was booked, lingering as close to his daughter as he was permitted, for days on end. Lillie was of a sensitive disposition, and her father remained nearby to offer whatever comfort he could. Reporters, however, had their own take on his extended stay: “He is fearful that Alice will do to his daughter some bodily harm and this fear is shared by all of his family.”
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The papers would later criticize Lillie for offering no objection to sharing a cell with Alice, ignoring the fact that there were only two private cells in the whole jail. Alice and Lillie occupied one, and the other cell held attorney H. Clay King, charged with murdering another lawyer for sleeping with his wife—but his crime of passion was of little interest.
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With the single exception of Freda’s funeral a few days later, the largest gathering of all occurred outside of the grand jury proceeding in downtown Memphis. As usual, a large, boisterous crowd gathered without the slightest hope of admittance; and, as usual, reporters denounced the public for showing interest in the very frenzy their newspapers were helping to fuel.

The press expressed particular vitriol toward African Americans. They were certainly allowed to be there, but in the 1890s, their role as spectator while a well-to-do white woman met her downfall presented a challenge—however slight—to the South’s strict racial hierarchy. To diminish the power of their presence and reassert white superiority, the newspapers strained to characterize African American interest in Alice’s case as more sordid than that of white courthouse voyeurs. To hear the press tell it, black Memphians had only shown up because “their favorite weapon was used.”
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The grand jury proceeding was closed to the public—and the records have been lost to time—but the outcome was soon known to all: Alice was indicted for murder. This was no surprise, but the fact that she did not bear the charge alone was; Lillie was indicted as well. She was generally regarded as an innocent bystander, a naïve friend in the wrong place at the wrong time, with one powerful voice of dissent: The attorney general argued that Lillie knew Alice intended to kill Freda, and did nothing to prevent it. Under Tennessee law, the burden of proof fell on the defendant, not the prosecution. In order to be released, Lillie would have to prove she had no prior knowledge of the murder. Her lawyer filed a writ of habeas corpus, but it would not be heard for weeks; Lillie’s imprisonment had just begun.

In the few days since the murder, the legal stage for the case had only grown, and the plot had only thickened. Due to the local and national attention the Mitchell case was receiving—and the needs of his own ego— Judge Julius DuBose ordered that the courtroom be expanded.

F
REDA’S FUNERAL BEGAN AT THREE O’CLOCK
—
the same hour when, just three days earlier, Alice had spotted her leaving the widow Kimbrough’s house. The memorial service was held at Grace Episcopal, the church where Alice and Freda had planned to wed, and was led by Dr. George Patterson, the reverend they had hoped would marry them.

Freda had been a cherished member of Grace Episcopal, and was “in general request whenever a church entertainment was given, having a decided turn for amateur theatricals.”
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On Sundays, she sang with the church choir, many of whom would perform somber hymns at her memorial. And she had attended Sunday school there, too, socializing with the young men who would now serve as her pallbearers.

But on that Thursday afternoon, the lurid circumstances of Freda’s death meant that the pews held more than just family, members of the church and community, sympathetic friends, and acquaintances. The church was filled to capacity, and it was difficult to tell mourner and voyeur apart in the vestibule where her casket was displayed a half-hour before the service began.

The
Public Ledger
showed great restraint, avoiding descriptions of Freda’s face in favor of just one comment about her body, which was “almost hidden from view in a profusion of white roses, emblematic of the maiden purity of the dead.”
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It was a brief, but significant editorial remark meant to reassure the public: One of their promising daughters had indeed lived her life honorably. Her pure, lifeless body could be covered in white roses because it was untainted by perverse longings, her life cut tragically short before she was able to achieve her potential as wife and mother.

The
Appeal Avalanche
was far less brief, complimenting the work of Stanley & Hintons as an unsubtle excuse to indulge in the grotesque.

The face wore a look of peace very different from the expression of despair that marked it before the skillful hands of the undertaker had closed the eyes and mouth and hidden the ghastly wounds through which the life blood ebbed away. The gash on her throat was entirely concealed, and the wounds on her check, chin and mouth were hardly discernible.
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