Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis (9 page)

I
N THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED THE MURDER
,
nearly every newspaper in the country eagerly printed fact alongside fiction, eschewing even the most basic research efforts in favor of speedy transmission. The out-of-towners were exempt from local redress, and those newspapers took liberties with even the smallest details. The
North American of Philadelphia
aged seventeen-year-old Freda to nineteen, and reported that the young women’s estrangement began because “Freda’s friends considered Miss Mitchell ‘too fast.’”

The
New York Times
misspelled Lillie Johnson’s first and last name, identifying her as “Lizzie Johnston,” and offered a muddled timeline in which Alice first murdered Freda, and then cut Jo.
¹⁸
Memphis readers would have immediately questioned the article’s sub-headline, in which the paper of record erroneously identified Alice as a “society girl.” In the social hierarchy of the South, slave-owning families who had made millions in cotton and horse breeding were “familiar figures in society,” not a merchant’s daughter. Similarly, Freda, the daughter of a machinist who had sought greater prospects up river in Golddust—and came from a family that was far less well-to-do than the Mitchells—was not a member of Tennessee’s semi-aristocratic class. Neither girl had made the guest lists at parties the
Memphis elite staged on their sprawling estates, many of which still operated as plantations.

But local newspapers specialized in their own brand of creative reporting, including embellishments that read more like popular fiction than true crime. Judge DuBose’s former employer, the
Public Ledger
, described the murder scene with flourish:

Grasping her by the hair Miss Mitchell pulled her head back, exposing the round, white throat. Again the keen razor was brought into play, and this time it did its work with frightful completeness. The girl was almost beheaded, and fell fainting to the ground, which was soon drenched with her rushing blood.
¹⁹

The racial identifiers—the
New York Times
emphasized Freda’s “white bosom” and the
Public Ledger
spoke of her “white throat”—were visceral scare tactics used to remind readers that these were the kind of people they knew and cared about.
²⁰
Journalists knew that the story would be far less consequential to readers if the murderer and victim had been male, not white, or of lesser economic means. And if they could punctuate the scene with a subtly sexualized near-beheading, all the better.

T
O
A
MERICAN READERS IN THE
1890
S
,
the most confusing part of the Mitchell case had little to do with inconsistent reporting. The early headlines emphasized how confounding the very idea of same-sex love was in the first place. Reporters relied heavily on words like “unnatural,” “strange,” and “perverted.”

When all else failed, reporters attempted to explain that Alice was “a man” in the relationship. Though, they conceded, not masculine in her dress or countenance, her supposedly hidden proclivity toward all things male was yet another way reporters could contrast Alice with “normal” young women. In an interview with the
Appeal Avalanche
, Gantt explained that Alice had quietly, but consistently, defied gender norms her entire life:

. . . everything she has done, her peculiarities, whether during her infancy she played with dolls or other such toys in which the average female delights, whether she had a fondness for those of her own or the opposite sex, all of these will be circumstances going to show the state and quality of her mind.
²¹

Newspapers enthusiastically accepted whatever scraps of information the defense tossed at them, and relied on an abundance of loose-lipped locals to fill in the gaps. The city was overtaken with intrigue, and there were hordes of Memphians who wished to weigh in on the murder. Some sought to correct erroneous material, but more often than not, they offered subjective observations. These opinions were often based on personal experience with the Mitchells or the Wards, though as time went on, they were clearly influenced by what they read in the newspapers, too. Others, whose lack of connection to the case did not deter them from offering highly quotable views and speculation, were also tapped as ongoing sources. These unreliable perspectives were no more subject to fact checking than any of the other details making their way across the nation.

Neighbor John Perry offered what was likely a nebulous recollection of the Mitchell’s youngest daughter, combined with what he had obviously absorbed about the version of Alice now being discussed in newspapers as an insane murderess.
²²

I live next door to Mr. George Mitchell and have known Alice for nine years or more, and have never considered her strong mentally. Her manner has been always flighty and unsettled and her ways different from that of most girls. She was of an impulsive disposition, and given to doing very much as the present mood inclined her, whether it was to snatch up a rifle and stand about her yard shooting sparrows or to ride
a bare back horse at break-neck speed about the premises. I have never seen anything about her conduct that was at all immodest, nor was she the least bit fast as regards to men. On the contrary, she seemed to care nothing for them and rather preferred the society of her own sex. . . . From a long and close knowledge of Alice Mitchell her act was that of an insane woman.
²³

Concerned citizens, and those with other sorts of motives, reached out to the authorities as well. The attorney general’s office received many letters, both signed and anonymous, riddled with suspect details, outlandish claims, and transparent lies. While the offices of the court and the police privately dismissed the more outrageous reports, they were more than willing to turn around and discuss them with reporters. Attorney General George Peters was constantly asked about a popular rumor that Alice Mitchell had sent the office a letter from jail, but Peters shunned it as “the ebullition of a crank.” Likewise, a Memphis detective relayed a phone call he received from an agitated man in Cincinnati who informed him that three years prior to Freda’s murder, Alice had “made love like a man to his daughter, now deceased.”
²⁴

Relentless messages concerning the supposed unnaturalness of Alice’s motives were clearly working. In the mind of the public, she seemed endowed with an almost supernatural power to commit heinous acts, no matter the time or place.

T
HE PROSECUTION OFFERED
very little information beyond stating that Alice was of sound mind—a decidedly insipid claim next to the defense’s adamant plea; dramatic presentation of sensational, anecdotal
“evidence”; and aggressive campaigning. Public opinion was leaning toward the defense, but Gantt and Wright had yet to play their wild card: the most incendiary part of Alice’s statement.

The
Appeal Avalanche
published this part of Alice’s statement under the headline, “WHO IS THIS JESSIE JAMES?”

Today’s readers are likely to interpret this confession as the unfortunate saga of a troubled, teenage romance turned deadly: Alice believed she had found her one true love, and that their commitment could withstand any challenge—or be immortalized by death. For some time, Freda felt the same way, or at least proved convincing enough that the withdrawal of her
affections truly broke Alice’s heart. Her only solace was the assumption that Freda was bowing to familial pressure, and when she learned this was not the case, that Freda’s love had been fickle, Alice was determined to hold her to their agreement. If any part of her statement casts a doubt on Alice’s sanity, it is the conclusion, in which she claims to know Freda is happy to have been murdered.

But to Americans in 1892, her insistence on loving and wishing to marry and support a woman were, in and of themselves, clear signs of lunacy, and there was no shortage of physicians willing to corroborate that assumption. Still, in their efforts to create an airtight case, Gantt and Wright scoured Eastern Tennessee in search of the most prominent and influential physicians for supporting testimony. The prosecution had far less luck finding doctors to refute the plea, while the newspapers, sensing readers wanted some medical context, readily printed any theory that called itself scientific.

The first “prominent physician” quoted in a newspaper—or at least, the first one who made it to press—diagnosed Alice with erotomania, defining it, inaccurately, as “unnatural affection between two persons of the same sex.” Other doctors, also unnamed, would assert erotomania was a “malady of the mind” that could easily “lead on to murder.”
²⁶

Whether or not the unnamed doctors’ quotes were fabricated by overzealous newsmen, their alleged interpretations of erotomania were as legally convenient as they were medically creative. For more than two centuries before Alice murdered Freda, erotomania had described “forms of insanity where there was an intensely morbid desire to a person of the opposite sex, without sexual passion.”
²⁷

While the Mitchell case would eventually produce new meanings, Gantt and Wright would not rely on the diagnosis of erotomania. In fact, the lawyers would avoid any argument that contained even a hint of the erotic, and most certainly any that acknowledged actual sex acts. Sex between two women was not entertained, even as a theoretical proposition.
The defense and prosecution, as well as most newspapers, tacitly agreed on this point: There would be no public discussion of anything even faintly sexual. Three years later, the English press would similarly cover the libel case Oscar Wilde lodged against the Marques of Queensberry, who left the writer a calling card inscribed, “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite
[sic]
.” Wilde’s sexual preference was never explicitly identified, but simply suggested through vague euphemisms, which included the very words the press seized upon and frequently applied to Alice—“unnatural,” “immoral,” and “indecent.”
²⁸

That should not suggest the papers were unwilling to test the waters, even granting that Alice and Freda had experienced some “gratification of the perverted mental passion.” The defense, however, was always quick to push back against these claims, insisting Alice and Freda’s love was “purely . . . mental.”
²⁹