Bestial (42 page)

As Earle grew into manhood, his “crazy disposition” became even more extreme. There was something endearingly childlike about some of his habits: his fondness for outlandish clothes and “dinky trinkets,” his pleasure in playing hideand-seek and ring-a-levio with her own little ones, his bursts of boyish enthusiasm (like his offer to build a three-story apartment building for his Uncle Willis—“with plumbing and everything”—all by himself). But his darker tendencies—his morbid moodiness, religious ramblings, sullen withdrawals, and outbursts of profanity—became increasingly dismaying even to the ever-devoted Lillian, particularly after Earle’s first confinement to Napa.

In one of her most extended bits of testimony, Lillian described her relationship with Earle following his discharge from Napa in 1919. “He was with me a great deal off and on, a great deal for days at a time, and he was painting the ulterior of our home. We thought it would be good work for him to do to keep his mind off his condition and keep him around us. And he would paint quite hard for a few days, and all of a sudden he would walk out of the house
and be away for three weeks at a time. And he would walk in on me, and we would say, ‘Where have you been?’ And he would say, ‘Well, I have been looking for work.’ I thought it was foolish. And he would then start right in, and he would smile about it, as if nothing had happened at all, and I understood how he was and kept quiet, because I wouldn’t say anything to aggravate him, as I always lived in constant fear of him. And I was always careful, as I had two children and would have him sleep away from home. I would give him money to sleep in the hotels, and he would come the next day. But I was always in fear of him, on account of him being in the hospital, in Napa State Asylum for the Insane.”

By the time Lillian was dismissed at around 11:00
A.M.
, she was unable to contain her emotions. “He is my own flesh and blood, and I love him,” she sobbed as she stepped from the witness box. “I have known him all the days of his life, and I will continue to love him.”

So geniune and moving was this outburst that it provoked sympathetic tears in more than one female spectator. Meanwhile, the object of Lillian’s affection reclined in his chairarms folded, head tilted back, snoozing peacefully.

†

“A person is killed—that is killed by strangulation or by a blow by a knife. That is murder; that is criminal. But when you add to that murder an anti-social repulsive act of such enormity as we have evidence of in this case, what would you say?”

“I say I would be willing to believe, if no more evidence than you have given, that that kind of conduct was the act of a mind that was certainly not an average mind.”

“It is way below the normal mind, isn’t it?”

“Well, it is different.”

From the testimony of Dr. Alvin Mathers

M
rs. Fabian was followed to the stand by the prosecution’s main rebuttal witness, Dr. Alvin T. Mathers, head of the psychopathic ward of the Winnipeg General Hospital.

Though Mathers had a mild, almost self-effacing manner, he was a person of formidable energy and determination. As a young man, he had planned to pursue a career in internal medicine. In 1918, however, when Mathers was thirty and already regarded as one of the foremost physicians in western Canada, he agreed to take charge of the Psychopathic Hospital and spearhead the modernization of mental health services in Manitoba.

After an intensive course of psychiatric study at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Michigan, he returned
to Winnipeg and took up the post of Provincial Psychiatrist. Besides his private practice (the only one of its kind in Manitoba), he helped effect a number of sweeping changes, from the passage of a pioneering Mental Diseases Act to the improvement of psychiatric facilities in hospitals throughout the province. He also provided psychological evaluations of criminals, offering his services, gratis, to both the defense and prosecution.

At the time of Nelson’s trial, Dr. Mathers was thirty-nine-a soft-spoken, scholarly, distinguished-looking man who radiated an air of quiet authority and was viewed as the most gifted medicolegal expert in western Canada. His opinion carried so much weight that, when he took the stand on Friday, Crown Prosecutor Graham felt the need to solicit only a single assertion from him.

After establishing that Mathers had examined Nelson five times between July 27 and October 24, Graham simply asked, “And what was the result of your examinations?”

“I did not find any evidence that to me would constitute insanity,” Mathers declared.

“ No further questions, my Lord,” said Graham, reseating himself at the prosecution table.

Since lunchtime was approaching, James Stitt, who clearly intended to keep Mathers on the stand for a while, asked permission to put off his cross-examination until the afternoon session. Judge Dysart granted the request. At 2:00
P.M.
, following the recess, Mathers was back in the witness box, this time facing an interrogator with a reputation for tenacity that matched his own.

For more than an hour, Stitt hammered away at the witness. But Mathers was unflappable, calmly insisting that, though Nelson’s actions were certainly symptomatic of a disordered personality, they did not add up to insanity.

“And what is the supreme test of insanity?” asked Stitt.

“The supreme test of insanity is the social test,” Mathers explained. “The ability or not of a person to live in conformity with the rules and regulations of Me. We ordinarily consider insanity as an entirely social concept. It is not a disease.”

“Is disordered conduct a sign of insanity?” Stitt asked. “Well, not any disorder of conduct.”

“Well now,” said Stitt, folding his arms, “such conduct as this: if an individual was rather inclined to be melancholy, and would sit in a chair and look for hours at the wall, and not speak to people coming in or people going out, and stay in that staring condition, what would you say?”

Mathers lifted his eyebrows. “I would want a lot more information than that before I would say he was insane.”

Stitt’s tone grew more challenging. “And if he would do
these
things: if he was inclined to disappear without any notice to his relatives and reappear and make no explanation; if he lacked, for instance, a sense of the social fitness of things; if he would eat gluttonously in company; if he would mix up his food and pour lavish amounts of olive oil on it; if he would, for instance, appear at a public school in the afternoon in a full dress suit without any collar on, or without any tie, and with just an ordinary steel pin in his collar; if he was a man who was insanely jealous of his wife to the point that it aroused his anger when she paid her fare to a streetcar conductor; if this individual had never held a job for any considerable time; if he was filthy and dirty in his habits; and if all this followed after concussion of the brain, and a sufficient concussion at ten or eleven years of age to render him unconscious for four or five days with the frequent reoccurrence of tremendous headaches, what would you say? And also with a very decided nomadic tendency and extremely melancholic episodes, sometimes punctuated with what you might call exalted moods and sickly piety?”

Mathers took a moment to absorb this lengthy hypothetical question before responding. “I don’t think anybody could say as to that particular man just what the influence of that accident or that concussion was,” he said in the same mild tone that had characterized his entire testimony. “Symptoms such as you have mentioned, or at least modes of life such as you have mentioned might readily occur, and do occur in people who have no concussion whatever.

“As to the number of different episodes that you have mentioned,” he continued, “not any of those would to my mind constitute or make me willing to declare that such a person was insane. I think I know people who have done every one of those things and who would be horribly incensed, and their families and everybody else would be
highly incensed, if they were considered insane. They are willing enough to have them considered perhaps a little queer and eccentric∪unstable. But as to having them declared insane, which carries with it the presumption that their liberty must be curtailed, I doubt very much if that could be done.”

The remainder of Stitt’s cross-examination proceeded in much the same way, with Mathers maintaining that—in spite of Nelson’s “viciously anti-social conduct,” his extreme “sexual abnormalities,” and his weird beliefs (including his conviction that the guards at the Provincial Jail had been using some sort of sinister “electrical device” on him)—there was no justification for regarding him as legally insane.

“But, Doctor,” Stitt protested, waving Nelson’s medical records from Napa. “As he has been previously found to be a constitutional psychopath with psychosis, you would agree, wouldn’t you?”

Mathers shook his head. “I agree with the first part, not the second.”

“Not with psychosis?”

“Not with psychosis,” Mathers confirmed. As for the phrase “constitutional psychopath,” Mathers explained that it was a vague and ill-defined catchall, used to describe “a person who does not lack in intelligence but whose willpower is defective and who is likely to act very often, in fact most often, with his own ends in view, with not a great deal of regard for other people.” Such individuals were “likely to have unstable feelings” but could not be considered insane.

“But you admit that this man is not normal,” Stitt persisted.

“What do you mean by normal?”

“Well, you agree that he is a constitutional psychopath.”

Mathers shrugged. “Yes—and there are thousands of them walking around the streets of Winnipeg today.”

†

R. C. Graham

My learned friend made a stirring appeal for the tempering of justice with mercy, but that is far outside your province…. Mercy is no part of a jury’s deliberations.

E
xcept for the sobs of Lillian Fabian, who had wept throughout much of Mathers’ testimony, there was absolute silence in the overpacked courtroom as the psychiatrist stepped from the witness stand. Moments later, James Stitt rose from the defense table and approached the jury box to deliver his final summation.

His speech lasted just twenty-five minutes. Looking earnestly from one juror to the next, he began by reminding them of their obligation—as the upholders of “British justice”—to rid their minds of prejudice and render a verdict purely on the basis of the evidence.

“What is the evidence?” he asked, raising his hands for a moment, then letting them drop to his sides. “It is entirely circumstantial. Circumstantial evidence may look strong. But remember this—that any chain of evidence is no stronger than its weakest link.”

Stitt then proceeded to discuss the ostensible “weak links” in the evidentiary chain. But his argument only underscored the weakness of the defense, since he could come up with little more than Sam Waldman’s poor eyesight and a minor discrepancy between Jake Garber’s and Mrs. Hill’s sense of chronology.

As if to acknowledge the flimsiness of this approach, Stitt quickly switched to another tack. In a voice charged with emotion, he beseeched the jury not to condemn a man who was so clearly insane.

“Can you say, after looking at the evidence, that the accused has any moral responsibility whatsoever?” he entreated. “Does he know the difference between right and wrong? The man’s whole life has been a life of aberration, the life of a man whose mind is disordered.

“Gentlemen,” he said, with an incredulous shake of his head. “It is rather extraordinary that you have to determine upon the guilt or otherwise of a man who has escaped from a lunatic asylum. The evidence is that the man has escaped. It is all there in the documentary evidence! It was agreed to by the Crown. He has been in an asylum twice, and he has escaped several times. There is no doubt that this man has a mind diseased and that he was irresponsible.”

As Stitt continued, be seemed to concede that, based on the evidence, Nelson was undoubtedly the perpetrator. But the very nature of the crime—brutal strangulation followed by postmortem rape—was flagrant proof of insanity. “If you find him guilty, you
must
find that he is a maniac,” he exclaimed. “It could not be done by a man with an ordered mind. It is absolutely impossible.”

He paused, as though to bring his emotions in check. When he resumed again, his voice was tinged with sorrow.

“Gentlemen,” he said softly. “Some of you have sons. Some of you have little boys around the farm or around the home. If your little boy was struck by a streetcar and suffered concussion of the brain and grew up in your home abnormal, unfit, without any responsibility whatsoever, what kind of justice would you expect to be meted out to your son?”

Bringing his summation to a close, Stitt made a heartfelt appeal to the jurors’ sense of Christian mercy and national pride, striking the first notes of genuine eloquence that had been heard at the trial.

“I do not know the justice that can be rendered without the element of mercy,” he proclaimed. “There is no man or woman under heaven who does not need to pray for mercy. What was the whole spirit of our civilization in the war that
we have just gone through? It was against the ruthless exercise of power. It was to show that there was something in life besides power. That there was a spiritual element and that man does not live by bread alone but by the finer things of thought and being.

“I trust it shall never be said that in this case a Canadian jury found a lunatic responsible and sent him to doom without a full consideration of that fact. It would be a terrible thing to tell the people of the United States of America that, because of publicity and vengeance, we held a lunatic responsible and placed him on the gallows. As I speak, I have visions of people with disordered minds. Some of them pluck my gown, and they say, ‘Mercy!’ Others howl in their maniacal way. Others can say nothing. They have only got staring eyes.”

Stitt paused for an instant before offering a final, humble appeal that was meant to convey the awesome responsibility that rested on all their shoulders, his own no less than the jury’s.