Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis (26 page)
Read Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis Online
Authors: Alexis Coe
105
“Alice Mitchell Laughs,”
New York World
, July 20, 1892, 1.
106
“None but Freda,”
Memphis Commercial
, July 22, 1892. “Is This Murdered Girl Insane,”
New York World
, July 1892.
CHAPTER 16: AN IMPOSSIBLE IDEA
107
“Not Love at All,” July 24, “More Evidence,” July 26, and “They All Agree,” July 27,
Memphis Commercial
, 1892. “An Analysis of Love,” July 24, “Diagnosis of Insanity,” July 26, “The Deed of a Maniac,” July 27,
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
, 1892. F.L. Sim, “Alice Mitchell Adjudged Insane,”
Memphis Medical Monthly
(August 1892), 377-429.
108
Dr. Callender was best known for testifying in the case of Charles Guiteau, who was on trial for the assassination of President Garfield in 1881.
109
“The Deed of a Manic,”
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
, July 27, 1892. “More Evidence,”
Memphis Commercial
, July 26, 1892.
110
F. L. Sim, “Alice Mitchell Adjudged Insane,”
Memphis Medical Monthly
(August 1892).
111
Ibid.
112
See Janet Ann Tighe, “A Question of Responsibility: The Development of American Forensic Psychiatry, 1838-1930.” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1983).
113
“The Deed of a Maniac,”
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
, July 27, 1892.
114
Ibid.
115
“More Evidence,”
Memphis Commercial
, July 26, 1892.
116
F. L. Sim, “Alice Mitchell Adjudged Insane.”
117
Ibid.
118
“The Deed of a Maniac,”
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
, July 27, 1892.
119
“Her Own Best Witness,”
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
, July 28, 1892.
CHAPTER 17: HER OWN BEST WITNESS
120
Their attention to her features was just another thing to speculate about, but they may have been influenced by pseudoscience, such as physiognomy or phrenology. Physiognomy was the practice of assessing a person’s personality traits from his or her outward appearance. Phrenology was focused on the human skull; the brain was considered the organ of the mind, thus certain areas have localized and specific functions. In order to determine an individual’s psychological attributes, the skull must be felt and observed.
121
“Her Own Story,”
Memphis Commercial
, July 28, 1892.
122
“Now a Murder,”
Memphis Commercial
, July 31, 1892.
123
“The Mitchell Case,”
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
, July 31, 1892.
124
“Her Own Best Winess,”
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
, July 28, 1892.
125
“The Last of Alice Mitchell,”
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
, July 31, 1892. “Not a Murder,”
Memphis Commercial
, July 31, 1892, and “Alice Mitchell Is Crazy,”
New York World
, July 31, 1892. “The Mitchell Case,”
Memphis Appeal Avalanche
, July 31, 1892.
126
Alice had been somewhat inconsistent with the defense, but had ultimately helped Gantt and Wright achieve their aim. Her testimony made her lack of interest in young men abundantly clear. It also made clear her overwhelming love for another woman, so great she had intended to live out the rest of her life in costume, just so they could be together. Dr. Sim, one of the medical experts, would later write that she returned to the defense table with “an expression of satisfaction,” but given that her last moments on the stand were spent describing her longstanding desire to die and a blood-soaked thumbstall, that seems like a dubious observation. Alice’s testimony had satisfied the jury. It was the jury who made it known that they were prepared to deliberate immediately. Dr. Sim wrote they returned within moments, but most newspapers time it at twenty minutes.
CHAPTER 18: THAT STORY WAS NEVER PRINTED
127
Report of the Board of Trustees of the Western Hospital for the Insane, 1890/92, 1892/1894, 1896/98.
128
“Alice Mitchell is Insane,”
Bolivar Bulletin
, Aug. 5, 1892. Patients who had entered an asylum by way of homicide charge were rarely discharged. For more information,
see Thomas Mader,
Crime and Madness: The Origins and Evolution of the Insanity Defense
(New York: Harper and Row, 1985).
129
If Alice had wanted to set the record straight without her father’s intervention, she had but a few years to do so. George Mitchell died in 1896, and was buried in the family plot at Elmwood Cemetery. Two years later Alice joined him, followed by Isabella in 1917. If Gantt and Wright’s legal fees took a toll on the Mitchell family, their headstones did not indicate it as they were carved in the ornate fashion of the day, but by the time Addie and Mattie joined in the late 1940s, the Great Depression may have taken its toll. Their graves are plain, lacking the roses that adorn Alice’s headstone. It is worth noting the elder Mitchell sisters appeared unmarried, perhaps a realization of the fear that their family’s supposed matrilineal insanity would taint their own prospects.
130
Edward H. Tayor, “Alice Mitchell,” as excerpted in the
Bolivar Bulletin
, March 10, 1893. Also, see the hypothetical case in the appendix.
131
Sherre Dryden, “That Strange Girl: The Alice Mitchell Murder Case,” DARE I (July 29-July 5, 1988): 4.
132
The patient rolls were numbered, with the first being the healthiest. She appeared on the last roster in July of 1897, though she was back up to the middle roster in January of the following year. Tennessee State Library and Archives: Department of Mental Health Record Group no. 94, Series no. 7: Lists/Rolls of Employees, Inmates, Patients, Pupils and Veterans, box no. 3, folders 1-10.
133
“Alice Mitchell Dead,”
Memphis Commercial Appeal
, Apr. 1, 1898.
134
1896/1898 Biennial Report of the Western State Insane Asylum.
135
Paul Coppock, “Memphis’ Strangest Love Murder Had All-Girl Cast,”
Memphis Commercial
, Sept. 7, 1930.
EPILOGUE: SEXUAL MONSTERS
136
These two quotes come from
Psychopathia Sexualis
p. 428, 430. The first edition, published in 1886, listed four “cerebral neuroses,” including parethesia, which Krafft-Ebbing defined as “misdirected sexual desire.” Under that heading, he placed fetishism, masochism, sadism, transsexualism, and homosexuality.
137
R. E. Daniel, “Castration of Sexual Perverts,”
Texas Medical Journal
9, no. 6 (Dec. 1893): 255-71, quoted from page 263.
138
R. French Stone.
Biography of Eminent American Physicians and Surgeons
(Indianapolis: Carlson and Hollenbeck, 1894), 234-237.
139
Hughes also made quite a few mistakes in his editorial. He misunderstood Alice’s
plea as “not guilty” by reasons of insanity, when Gantt and Wright sought that she be declared unfit to stand trial. He also confused Krafft-Ebbing’s definitions of sexual perversion with other sexologists’ definitions, and continued to do so in subsequent articles on the case, introducing biblical and evolutional frameworks.
140
Charles H. Hughes, “Alice Mitchell, the ‘Sexual Pervert’ and Her Crime,”
Alienist and Neurologist
13, no. 3 (July 1892): 554-57.
141
Editorial by “H.” from the
Medical Fortnightly
, excerpted in the
Alienist and Neurologist
13, no. 2 (Apr. 1892). The article certainly left an impression on Hughes, who not only repurposed it, but was still wondering, a year later, how much “mutual masturbation” had occurred between Alice and Freda, and how much it influenced their relationship’s violent end. See Charles H. Hughes, “Erotopathia—Morbid Eroticism,”
Alienist and Neurologist
14, no. 4 (October 1893), pg. 535.
142
James G. Kiernan, “Sexology: Increase of American Inversion,”
Urologic and Coetaneous Review
(1916).
143
In the 1970s, Alice Mitchell’s story was finally recast. After the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, civil rights, women’s liberation, and second wave feminism, the past was mined for lesbians, and Alice, who had so clearly informed modern conceptions of female same-sex love, became an important person within this history. She remained a murderer, but one who had been fundamentally misunderstood during her lifetime, and for almost a hundred years after. Jonathan Ned Katz included the case in his groundbreaking
Gay American History
in 1976, which finally cast a critical eye on the original newspaper articles and publications, including Dr. Frank Sim’s own
Memphis Medical Monthly
. In Tennessee, Fred Harris’s 1975 essay, “Lesbian Slaying Shocked ‘Gay Nineties’ Memphians” appeared in the collection
Gaiety…Reflecting Gay Life in the South
, and Sherre Dryden’s “That Strange Girl: The Alice Mitchell Murder Case” was published in DARE in 1988, Nashville’s lesbian and gay newspaper. That same year, “Alice and Fred,” a play by Dan Ellentuck, ran in New York City’s oldest theater, the Cherry Lane, though the playwright moved the tragedy from Memphis to Albany, and seemed to amplify her interest in baseball.
144
Richard von Krafft-Ebbing described female inversion as “the masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom.”
145
Ellis was influenced by his wife, Edith Lees. When they married, he was a 32-year-old virgin, and she openly preferred women. Ellis recounted her case in
Sexual Inversion
, as well as five first-person narratives she found on his behalf. None of those accounts contained the same-sex love as violence plot favored by American newspapers, or even cases in asylums. Lees had not found these women on the pages of
newspapers or in articles written by doctors in asylums, but out in the world, and they were women the Ellis’ were likely to socialize with; all of the women, like Alice Mitchell, enjoyed at least a middle class existence. Ellis’s analysis, however, was a mix of naturalizing and negative, an attempt at carving out a space without threatening the traditional home or domestic roles within it. He reinforced the idea that there was some masculinity to be found in the female invert, which made her easier to identify than her feminine counterpart, but this was easier to maintain in theory than practice.
On the whole, they are women who are not very robust and well developed, physically or nervously, and who are not well adapted for child-bearing, but who still possess many excellent qualities, and they are always womanly. One may, perhaps, say that they are the pick of the women whom the average man would pass by. No doubt, this is often the reason why they are open to homosexual advances, but I do not think it is the sole reason. So far as they may be said to constitute a class, they seem to possess a genuine, though not precisely sexual, preference for women over men, and it is this coldness, rather than lack of charm, which often renders men rather indifferent to them.
146
The 1915 edition of
Sexual Inversion
is included as volume I, part 4, of Havelock Ellis,
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
(New York: Random House, 1942). Quoted from pp 201-2.
147
Alfred C. Kinsey et al,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Co. (1948).
148
Of course, I am not suggesting this is exclusively an American problem. The degradation and exclusion I refer to in the epilogue exists all over the world, including many countries that still deny the very existence of same-sex love. For example, in 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a broad anti-gay bill just months after police were given the right to arrest foreign nationals they suspected of being gay. It classifies “homosexual propaganda” as pornography, and warned that any parent who tells their child that same-sex love is acceptable is subject to arrest, and can be fined by the state.
APPENDIX
149
As with the additional letters, only minor spelling errors have been corrected.
150
ILY was one of their more obvious ciphers, meaning I love you. We do not know
how Jim responded, or whether or not the post office held the letter for Freda, as it was addressed to her. Did she, always delighted by attention and intrigue, find the impersonation flattering, entertaining, or worrying? We do not know the answer to that, either. But we do know that Alice penned another, much longer letter to Jim just two days later—and that she played a convincing Freda. She wrote with an ambivalence that encouraged Jim’s affections while also introducing a rivalry. Among her various supposed liaisons, he was, of course, her “favorite,” just as Alice was Freda’s. The emphasis on “keeping promises,” however, sounds very much like the voice of Alice herself, as did her insistence that Jim thought of her less than she thought of him.
Alice and Freda.
See also
Mitchell, Alice; Ward, Freda: eloping night for,
47
–
51
; engagement of,
32
–
37
; media adaptations of,
207
,
213
; openness of,
25
,
34
,
48
; proposal of,
32
–
33
,
156
,
201
; separation of,
51
–
53
,
54
–
63
; sleepovers for,
27
,
48
; Volkmar’s discovery of,
47
–
53
American modernity,
101
,
133
–
134
,
208
,
213
arraignment,
91
–
94
arrests,
68
,
85
Astor, Vincent, 13 Austen, Jane,
50
–
51
Bernhardt, Sarah,
207
Borden murder,
202
Buckskin Lou.
See
Davis, Sarah
Callender, John Hill,
146
,
153
,
156
,
210
Campbell, Michael,
157
Carmack, Edward W.,
206
castration,
181
Chartrand, R. F.,
187
Civil Rights Act of 1875,
99
,
205
Comstock, Thomas Griswald,
141
,
142
,
143
,
209
Cooper, Duncan and Robin,
206
crimes of passion,
111
,
149
,
158
,
163
cross-dressing,
26
,
31
,
35
–
36
,
157
Daniel, F. E.,
181
Davis (chief of police),
68
Davis, Katherine Bement,
184
death.
See also
murder: of Mitchell, Alice,
176
–
178
; of Mitchell family,
212
; suicide plans,
27
–
29
,
103
,
177
; threats,
27
–
29
,
37
,
42
–
44
,
165
depression: love sickness,
57
–
59
,
149
,
207
; melancholia,
141
–
142
,
209
; of Mitchell, Alice,
57
–
59
; of Mitchell, Isabella,
70
,
97
,
141
–
143
,
144
–
145
,
209
; postpartum,
70
,
142
–
143
,
209
DuBose, Julius: background of,
98
–
99
,
130
; grave of,
204
; on habeas corpus of Lillie Johnson,
118
,
119
,
125
–
126
; in lynchings,
130
,
133
; media drama of,
71
–
72
,
88
,
105
–
107
,
125
–
126
; on testimony of Alice Mitchell,
161
–
162
,
168
; on testimony of Jo Ward,
116
; on women’s place in court,
107
–
109
Duggan, Lisa,
208
Ellentuck, Dan,
213
Europe, same-sex love in,
26
Evans, Henry Clay,
206
Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women
(Davis, K. B.),
184
flirting: by Johnson, Lillie,
113
–
114
,
119
; legislature for,
206
; by Ward, Freda,
27
–
28
,
38
–
41
,
45
Foucault, Michel,
143
Gantt, George: background of,
68
–
69
; insanity defense by,
70
–
73
,
75
–
76
,
79
,
138
–
143
; media control tactics of,
70
–
73
,
110
,
138
Gay American History
(Katz),
213
gender norms.
See also
men; same-sex love; women: case importance for,
100
–
101
,
133
–
134
,
180
–
184
; masculinization and,
74
–
77
,
82
,
183
–
184
,
214
; sports defined,
140
,
147
habeas corpus, of Lillie Johnson,
104
–
126
; arraignment before,
94
; defense,
112
–
113
,
117
–
119
; DuBose’s ruling of,
118
,
119
,
125
–
126
; Mitchell’s, Alice, appearance at,
110
; prosecution,
113
–
116
,
119
,
123
–
125
; testimony of Jo Ward at,
116
–
120
; testimony of Lillie Johnson at,
121
–
123
; verdict of,
105
,
126
; women spectators at,
107
–
109
Henning, Z. B.,
123
hermaphrodites,
158
Higbee School for Young Ladies,
25
,
30
Hindle, Annie,
157
homosexuality.
See
same-sex love
household, women’s role in,
30
–
31
,
70
,
95
Hughes, Charles H.,
181
–
182
,
213
,
213
Hypothetical Case,
139
–
143
,
152
,
209
indictment,
86
insane asylum, Alice Mitchell in,
172
–
176
insanity defense: erotomania,
79
–
80
,
157
; establishing,
138
–
157
; hereditary influence on,
141
–
143
,
144
–
145
,
183
–
184
; Hypothetical Case for,
139
–
143
,
152
,
209
; marriage desire as,
154
–
156
; media coverage of,
70
–
82
,
150
; medical experts on,
153
–
157
,
181
–
184
; Mitchell family’s testimonies on,
145
–
149
; Mitchell’s, Alice, testimony for,
167
–
168
,
211
; same-sex marriage as,
154
–
156
,
167
; timing of,
204
insanity of pregnancy (puerperal),
70
,
141
–
143
,
144
–
145
jail: Johnson, Lillie, in,
85
,
115
; Mitchell, Alice, in,
70
,
127
–
129
James, Jessie Rita (alter ego),
113
,
125
,
191
–
192
Jim (of Wellsville, Mo.),
187
–
191
,
215
jobs, for women,
31
Johnson, J. M., Mrs.,
98
Johnson, James,
148
Johnson, Lillie: arraignment of,
94
; arrest of,
85
; defense of,
112
–
113
,
117
–
119
; flirtatiousness of,
113
–
114
,
119
; gun buying with Alice by,
42
–
44
; habeas corpus hearing for,
104
–
126
; indictment of,
86
; in jail,
85
,
115
; as Jessie Rita James,
113
,
125
,
191
–
192
; letter to Jo Ward from,
116
; letters from Alice to Ashley by,
59
–
60
; letters to men from,
113
,
187
,
191
–
192
; media on,
83
,
85
,
94
,
112
–
113
,
126
; at murder scene,
22
,
102
–
103
,
121
–
123
; prosecution of,
113
–
116
,
119
,
123
–
125
; stalking with Alice by,
20
,
63
; testimony of,
121
–
123
; testimony of Jo Ward on,
85
,
116
–
120
; verdict for,
105
,
126
Katz, Jonathan Ned,
213
Kiernan, James G.,
183
Kimbrough, Mrs.: media depiction of,
98
; stalking Freda at,
20
–
21
,
60
King, H. Clay,
85
Kinsey, Alfred,
184
Krafft-Ebbing, Richard von,
180
,
212
Lees, Edith,
214
lesbianism.
See
same-sex love
letters: from Ada,
51
–
53
; from Alice, as alter egos,
56
–
57
187
–
193
; from Alice to Freda,
33
,
41
–
43
,
54
–
56
,
61
–
63
,
185
; to Chartrand,
187
; in court,
110
–
111
,
206
; discovery of,
48
–
50
; from Freda to Alice,
21
,
39
,
62
,
185
–
186
; to Jim (of Wellsville, Mo.),
187
–
191
,
215
; from Lillie to Jo,
116
; from Lillie to men,
113
,
187
,
191
–
192
; matrimonial classified ads,
113
; to Roselle,
40
,
59
–
60
,
165
; to Virg (of Carbon, Tx.),
192
–
193
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth,
25
Madness and Civilization
(Foucault),
143
marriage: Alice and Freda’s eloping night for,
47
–
51
; Alice and Freda’s engagement for,
32
–
37
; Alice and Freda’s proposal for,
32
–
33
,
156
,
201
; childless, idea of,
156
; classified ads for,
113
; same-sex, as insane,
154
–
156
,
167
; same-sex, example of,
157
; social expectations of,
30
,
50
–
51
,
154
–
156
,
167
masturbation,
182
McGalloway (colonel),
168
medical experts: history of same-sex opinion of,
180
–
184
; journals,
141
,
180
,
209
; media influence on,
138
,
174
; phrenology and physiognomy,
211
; testimonies by,
153
–
157
