The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (75 page)

Shortly after Jessie pinned a poppy on the coat lapel of William J. Costello, they began courting. Four years later they were married.

Now it does not require a skilled psychologist to opine that a girl of Jessie’s characteristics and mentality was a piece of human dynamite to which to be hitched—unless the husband could manage her with a firm hand.

Bill Costello, we are informed, was a bit on the staid side. Compared with his exuberant bride, he looked like one of the Pilgrim Fathers. He had not told the life-loving Jessie beforehand that he spent several hours every day on his knees; that he was given to brooding not only on his God but on his stomach: for Bill, the fireman, was both religious and suffered from chronic indigestion. Furthermore, Bill was not much of a one for talking. In this he clearly resembled the late President Calvin Coolidge who, when asked by his wife what the Sunday sermon was about, briefly answered: “Sin”, and when further asked what views the preacher had expounded, coughed up the laconic rejoinder: “He didn’t approve of it.”

To be fair, as every historian should be, I must say that Bill Costello could not have been by any manner of means a lovable character—he was too grim, too rugged, too introspective for that. Apart, altogether, from his unfashionable habit (in these days) of praying for hours on end, his indigestion, and his introspection, he had a somewhat nauseating habit of taking his boots off when he got home from duty and propping his socked feet on the radiator. It does not require much imagination to agree with the
New Yorker
writer already quoted, Mr Richard O. Boyer, that “Bill had little of the tender sparkle of the heroes Jessie read about in
True Stories
.”

But whatever failings the Peabody fireman possessed, he must have satisfied—at least, for the time being—his wife’s requirements as a husband. He did his duty—perhaps grimly, perhaps introspectively, but he did it: after the marriage, we are told, “there were four children in a sequence almost as swift as biology would allow”.

But children bring diapers—and diapers weren’t much in Jessie’s line. She regarded them as an unpleasant adjunct of modern civilization. What was more, four young children, all requiring a mother’s loving care, cramped her style; she was now no longer the admired girl on the sidewalks; marriage had caught her fast in its toils, and she was buried and lost amidst the multitude of other young housewives of Peabody. It was a melancholy reflection—especially as she had gained forty pounds in weight and had now passed her thirtieth year. Oh, dear!

In a word, Jessie was ripe for mischief when Fate sent across her path the man who was destined to become nationally known as the “kiss-and-tell-cop”.

This shortly-to-be-blazoned-abroad personage was a pouty-mouthed and tow-haired patrolman (constable, in this country) called Edward J. McMahon. This ornament to the Peabody Police Force moved through life in the typically lethargic manner peculiar to his kind; he could aptly, we are told, be described as both mawkish and moon-calfish; nevertheless, he was a great favourite with the ladies. There was, no doubt, a reason.

Almost immediately after our heroine made the acquaintance of McMahon, she was seen to undergo a renaissance. Questioned on the matter, she said—only in plainer, blunter terms—that the relationship between her and the patrolman (“Big Boy”) was entirely spiritual, and that she admired McMahon only in a platonic way. When this statement is compared with the astonishing confessions of lecherous intimacy, which McMahon, surely one of the strangest self-accusers who ever stepped into a witness-box, made at the trial, Jessie’s love of the truth was, with some degree of fairness, questioned.

But the main thing is that “Big Boy’s” admiration and adoring tactics provided a much-needed tonic for Jessie. She might have posed at this stage of her life, as a “before” and “after” witness: if the patrolman had had some rejuvenating pills named after him, his testimony would have sold a wagon-load at every street corner.

Yes, Jessie bloomed again. Once again she came to the forefront, glorying in the limelight. Leaving her dishrags and diapers, she set out to “go places and do things”. She sold tickets for Policemen’s Balls; she participated in Penny Bazaars; she collected funds for the Unemployed, and was a member of several committees. Altogether, a remarkable recrudescence was hers.

“Love had planted roses in her heart,” the newspapers later said. The newspapers
would
. . .

And then came that fatal February. Up to this time, any thought of a hand of the Law—that same Law with which she was at this time so intimately connected—reaching out to grab her, was unthinkable, but—

The actual date of Jessie’s arrest was 17 March 1933. This was exactly a month after the death of her husband, who—poor man!—a long, lank, lugubrious corpse, as in life he had been a long, lank, lugubrious fireman—was found sprawled outside the bathroom of his home on Fay Avenue, a rosary lying near it.

In her dim, fumbling way, Jessie had always dreamed of Greatness—and now the newspapers thrust this dubious quality upon her with unstinting hands.

Disregarding the fact that she had passed the age of physical perfection (remember the extra forty pounds motherhood had thrust upon her) it pleased the US journalistic world to portray her as “Beauty in Distress”. We are informed that “reporters unable to talk to the widow because of gaol rules, were forced to create their own version of her.” Thus, they thrust upon her all the seductiveness of Helen of Troy, one paper going demented and declaring that “all the modest sex appeal of Lady Godiva plus clothing but minus horse was hers”. For a few hectic weeks, Jessie thrust all the fashionable film stars away from the front page; she became the shopgirls’ ideal. Photographs in abundance were published: “Male members of lonely hearts’ clubs all over the country went to bed thinking of Jessie!”

The Boston Press, usually reflecting the real New England modern puritanism, cast aside all its former restraint and went stark, raving mad. Here was a chance to cash in on their own special sensation, and they did so with such wild abandon, that their
confrères
all over the American Continent followed suit. To quote the spirited Mr Boyer once again: “The Boston Press beat the tomtoms so wildly that their echoes were heard by the journalistic brethren from coast to coast and brought them on the run. Perhaps some genuine
aficionados
of the murder trial ran a bit reluctantly. One might not have expected to find the perfect American trial, with all the hoopla and idiocies the genre require, in austere New England. Salem, where the House of the Seven Gables
³⁹
still casts its bleak Puritan shadow, seemed to lack the lavishness of temperament that was needed.”

When the alleged murderess (for the charge against Jessie was the specific one of poisoning her husband by means of cyanide of potassium) made her appearance in the dock, she was seen wearing a black dress, ornamented simply with white collar and cuffs. This dress soon became as well known as her smile. (She smiled throughout the trial, let it be added.) The jury, we are told, did not at first display that goggling undisguised admiration that they were to evidence later. They were coy to respond; the Costello magic took time to cast its spell. The bailiff who shortly was to send a bouquet of roses to the prisoner each day, on the opening morning behaved as official decorum dictated; in other words, he looked straight ahead of him and concentrated purely on his duty. Nor did the crowd, who were to cheer Jessie wildly each day as she made her triumphant progress from gaol to court-house, develop these maniacal tendencies until later. In short, the opening morning of the trial gave small indication of the tempest of excitement which was to follow.

Indeed, had it not been for the striking personality of the accused, this might have been just another murder trial. But, and here again I have resource to Mr Boyer,

Word of the wonderful things that were to be witnessed at the Salem court-house soon got abroad; with his finger characteristically on the American reading-public’s pulse, that overlord of the printed word, W.R. Hearst, began to press buttons. He sent such notable United States writers as Will Irwin, Katharine Brush and Adela Rogers St John thither to write their flowing cadences. The Hearst papers, we read, “were full of typographical aphrodisiacs. Every phrase describing Jessie as a glamorous siren, irresistible to men, seemed to increase the irrelevancy of her guilt or innocence.”

Stimulated by reading such purple prose, was it any wonder that the crowd panting to get into the court-house increased every day—indeed every minute? Once the populace, led by the Press, had firmly come to the opinion that Jessie was the most lovely feminine creature that had been reared in New England for a decade, was it any wonder that the jurors caught the general infection? After all (as Mr Boyer so sapiently points out), they were only men, and Jessie was merely a woman.

Sentiment—mawkish, heavily-scented, sex-pulsating, dreamy-eyed—ruled the camp. Justice went overboard—and who can wonder at it amidst such an atmosphere? It is recorded that one of the jurymen actually inquired if he could send the prisoner a box of candies as a slight gesture of his esteem! So crazy had become the atmosphere of the court-house that, during the recesses, the jurors formed a male voice quartette, and the hot summer air vibrated to their renderings of such songs as “Sweet Adelaide”, “My Wild Irish Rose”, and “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”.

If Jessie became the heroine, her “Big Boy”, the “kiss-and-tell-cop”, became the villain—after all, you can’t have two heroes in a murder trial: that’s asking too much! Even the Hearst papers jibbed at printing all of McMahon’s testimony; this was so sizzling in character that strong men were seen to blush, and haughty matrons to (pretend to) swoon. A particularly daring publisher put the moving words into a little red booklet, and this sold in cartloads. Meanwhile, “Jessie, heady with adulation and resembling some buxom
prima donna
entering the opera-house amid the cheers of her admirers, cantered through the crowd from limousine to court-house and back again.”

The American male is a chivalrous if simple creature—and seeing Jessie as the heroine of this sordid piece, he commenced to write letters to the prisoner at the rate of five hundred a day. Here are two which were read in Court—both of them in verse, it will be seen.

A Mr J. E. Hazeltine was responsible for this much more mature effort.

Mr Hazeltine, whilst pouring out his admiration for Jessie, poured out also a liberal dose of verbal prussic-acid for the man who had confessed that he went to bed with Jessie on innumerable occasions—especially when Bill the fireman was out looking after his fires. He wrote of McMahon in the following blistering words: “I would not give him a job cleaning out a pig-pen. I would have more respect for the pigs.”

Mr Hazeltine was evidently a deep and profound thinker.

This astoundingly egregious criminal farce wound its way slowly to a close. Every day the radiant happiness of Jessie could be seen depicted more clearly on her dimpled face. For by now there had entered another element: inspired by what they had read in the newspapers, and getting all hot under their vests at the photographs they had seen printed, agents for the burlesque theatre (where “art” is confined to shapely women provocatively taking off their clothes, piece by piece) arrived on the scene. They all carried contracts in their hands.