Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis (17 page)

I
DON’T CARE IF
I’
M HUNG
,”
Alice screamed during the murder, but her family did. The Mitchells’ testimony, which was unfailingly consistent with the defense’s Hypothetical Case, would not only help Alice avoid certain death, it would ensure her speedy disappearance into an asylum.

If Alice was found presently insane, it would not void the murder charge, but it would indefinitely postpone it. She would be sent to the state lunatic asylum for “treatment.” If physicians were pleased with her progress, they could reassess her, and determine her well enough to stand trial. Whether the case would be reopened or not would be up to the state, but it was unlikely to ever reach that point. Once Alice went into the asylum, she had very little hope of ever getting out. It was as good as a life sentence.
⁹⁸

With that goal in mind, George Mitchell was the first witness to be heard at his daughter’s long awaited hearing. He was motivated on that summer morning, and delivered a moving performance on the stand. George spoke to the court with great emotion, sharing the history of his wife’s puerperal insanity, and the way it seemed to intensify with each birth, just as Alice’s
own odd behavior had progressed each year. And yet, despite his most valiant efforts, he had failed to save his women from themselves. The saga was so painful to relive, it brought George to tears.

Isabella Mitchell, who bore him seven children, was not in the courtroom that day. She did not hear her husband, or the doctor who had committed her time after time, painstakingly review how Isabella’s body had been poisoned by her own family, just as she had unwittingly poisoned her youngest daughter’s body. The puerperal insanity had turned Alice into someone capable of perverse, unnatural love and, ultimately, murder. Isabella was noticeably absent throughout the hearings, but she could read all about her own insanity in a variety of newspapers—as could all of her friends and family, her church, and neighbors. Everyone was now familiar with her medical history, and its consequences.

I
T WAS ONE THING TO SATISFY
the hereditary component, but quite another to support the defense’s claims that the murderess’s body had displayed physical symptoms of insanity. Gantt and Wright called older sisters Mattie and Addie to the stand, and asked them about Alice’s nosebleeds. Both sisters remembered that the bleeding had begun when Alice was twelve years old, or as the Hypothetical Case placed it, “around the time her womanhood was established.”

Of course, Mattie and Addie were quick to point out that
they
had not suffered from nosebleeds—it was a condition unique to Alice. Whenever possible, the Mitchell family was sure to juxtapose their own normalcy with Alice’s strangeness, an approach that served a dual purpose; the family maintained respectability while drawing attention to Alice’s illness. For their own sake, it had to be clear that Mattie and Addie had escaped their mother’s insanity.
⁹⁹

Alice’s nosebleeds had not been diagnosed at the time. It was not until a certain Dr. Callender, one of the doctors who interviewed Alice in jail, offered his professional opinion, declaring it “vicarious menstruation.”
¹⁰⁰

The Mitchells could offer far more examples of behavior that transgressed gender boundaries than evidence of bodily symptoms. They focused on Alice’s preference for her brothers’ physical activities, and indifference to her
sisters’ comparatively domestic pursuits. Mattie and Addie’s dolls had never excited their youngest sister, but their brother Frank admitted Alice “could pump in a [baseball] swing” better than he could. Their half-brother, Robert, took the stand armed with the props of boyhood—baseballs, marbles, and other decidedly unfeminine evidence—taken from Alice’s bedroom. His youngest sister had always favored her brothers and preferred to play with boys, Robert said with the authority of a man twenty-one years her elder.
¹⁰¹

By the time Lillie confirmed that Alice had been on the baseball team at Miss Higbee’s, as if it were a revelatory admission, Attorney General Peters had heard enough. He took issue with the defense’s emphasis on sports, asserting that it had nothing to do with insanity, nor was it even rare. After all, Alice had not
started
the baseball team at Miss Higbee’s. It existed before she enrolled, and when she joined, her name was added to a roster of other young women who enjoyed sports, but still acted in an otherwise non-homicidal manner.
¹⁰²

Still, Alice’s preference for boys as playmates, not romantic interests, was a surprisingly persuasive argument in the courtroom. It suggested that she had not formed appropriate associations as a child, and subsequently developed aggressive behaviors alongside her male counterparts. Later in life, when it was time for her to experience romantic yearnings, Alice continued to mature as a boy would—by developing an interest in girls.

Despite the courtroom presence of Alice’s friend, Lillie, whose material importance to the case was undeniable, experts agreed that Alice suffered from an inability to
develop proper attachments. She was confused by her early proclivities, they said, and was unable to differentiate between female friendships and prospective suitors.

Lillie’s brother, James Johnson, age twenty-one, shared a personal anecdote to illustrate Alice’s unresponsiveness to men. He recalled the time he approached her, outstretched in a hammock with Lillie, and asked her to dance. Alice refused James—who, for all we know, smelled of garlic and told bad jokes—preferring to lay alongside his sister.

Addie confirmed that Alice showed no interest in the men who came to court her, and refused to receive their calls. She was capricious, the Mitchells added, and sometimes refused to speak with the family at all.

After that, the personal testimony given during the first five days of the hearing—by family, friends, and neighbors—became progressively vague. “I felt as if there was something wrong with her, but I couldn’t say what it was,” testified Mrs. Charles Mundinger, who attended the same church as the Mitchells. The family’s butcher made a brief appearance, recounting the time he called Alice a tomboy. Her damning reaction? She did not balk, testified the butcher.
¹⁰³

H
EREDITARY INFLUENCE, SOMATIC EVIDENCE
,
and a history of odd behavior all played a significant role in establishing Alice’s supposed insanity, but the single most important factor—the one that dominated the Hypothetical Case—was Alice’s relationship with Freda.

“The attachment seemed to be mutual, but was far stronger in Alice Mitchell than in Fred[a],” read the statement. The theory was supported by a variety of physical evidence, including the engagement ring bearing the engraving “From A. to F.,” as well as what the public was most desperate to see: the love letters.

Having kept aloof from Alice during her darkest period, the Mitchells could barely speak to her obvious heartbreak—but Lucy Franklin could. The “Negress,” as she was identified by the press, testified to Alice’s anguish and despair, and how she suffered after the estrangement. Her behavior was consistent with what was known as “love sickness,” a popular term used in nearly all articles on crimes of passion during the nineteenth century. It served as a kind of justification for any violence that might ensue after heartbreak. The prosecution repeatedly argued that it applied to the case, but the disconnect between Alice’s same-sex love and the traditional model of love-sickness-turned-crime-of-passion (forsaken woman murders temptress over a man’s love) rendered it irrelevant.
¹⁰⁴

Alice seemed to have trusted Lucy more than anyone else in the Mitchell home. She showed her the contents of the secret, locked box in the kitchen, and told Lucy dramatic stories about her devastating loss, and how it made her want to die. There was the laudanum incident, of course, when Alice had intentionally ingested the potentially lethal poison. But Lucy divulged another unsettling incident, in which Alice held the family’s rifle to her own ear. In the excitement, she had accidentally let out a few shots, but remained unharmed.