The Valentino Affair (33 page)

It had been confidently expected—and the defense had done nothing to counter the expectation—that Uterhart would plead his client not guilty on account of insanity. After all, back in 1906, when Harry K. Thaw, the multimillionaire coal and railroad baron, was charged with shooting love-rival Stanford White, his team of high-priced attorneys had dreamt up the novel defense of “dementia Americana” to explain their client’s actions. Apparently the chief symptom of this hitherto unknown ailment was an overwhelming compulsion on the part of the sufferer—exclusively male, red-blooded, and American—to avenge himself on any man who had violated a woman’s chastity. It worked. After two stunningly expensive trials, Thaw was found not guilty by virtue of insanity and committed to an asylum.
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Before beginning his opening address, Uterhart had one request: that Blanca be excused from giving testimony on the coming Friday afternoon. She was in very poor health, he said, and needed a weekend’s rest to prepare for her ordeal on the witness stand.

Justice Manning agreed.

Then Uterhart began to speak. Unlike Weeks, he belonged to the old-school theatrical style of advocacy, one that targeted the heart more than the brain. Even so, his opening wrong-footed everyone in court. He made not a single reference to insanity, nor did he assert that de Saulles’s mistreatment of his wife had caused this tragedy. Yes, de Saulles had been a scoundrel whose conduct toward Blanca defined the essence of cruelty from day one of their marriage, but only by inference did Uterhart dangle the possibility that de Saulles had contributed to his own demise.

No, said Uterhart, something altogether different had instigated this tragedy: a physical complaint that caused Blanca to shoot her husband! The testimony of three physicians would prove that the “mental confusion”
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that had numbed the moral sense of the young woman on the night in question was induced by a combination of physical factors. Uterhart ticked them off: the sunstroke that Blanca suffered a few summers previously at Deal Beach; a depressed fracture of the skull, one and one half inches in diameter and three-eighths of an inch deep, caused by a fall in Chile in 1902; and a second accident in 1915, which fractured the bone anew. Uterhart told the jury that Blanca had been X-rayed. “You will see the actual photograph of Blanca’s skull; you will see the depression and you will see the crack which is still ununited.”
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This depression still exists, said Uterhart, because the bones had not united, leaving a fragment of skull pressing down on one of the frontal lobes of the brain—“the place where all the highest faculties of the brain exist, judgment, reason and control.”
⁵⁵

The cumulative effect of these injuries—aggravated by the brutal heat wave in the week that de Saulles was killed, a week of stupefying headaches for Blanca—had flicked a switch in Blanca’s brain, said Uterhart. On the fateful night she had taken the gun to protect herself on the lonely road. Then, when de Saulles refused to relinquish the boy, a feeling overcame her that he was about to do “something particularly mean and vicious”
⁵⁶
—a feeling inspired by a look in his eyes that she knew of old.

“She felt as if she had been struck a tremendous blow on the top of the head.”
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Uterhart’s voice rose high as he painted a picture for the jury and an enthralled courtroom. “She felt a tremendous pain in her brain. All went blank. She knew nothing more until she awoke in the jail. She was as a dead woman.”
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Since being incarcerated, Blanca had been examined by various doctors, all of whom found her dazed and listless. “She complained of severe pains in her head,” said Uterhart. “Her temperature was low, way below normal, and they could scarcely feel her pulse beating. Her face was ghastly white.”
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The physicians, mystified by these symptoms, went looking for the cause. Uterhart gave the jury a penetrating stare. “And they found it, gentlemen. They found out that for some time she had been suffering from a disease which affects the nerve centers and the brain, and which rendered her irresponsible and brought on the mental confusion on the night of the shooting.”
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Hypothyreosis—the word rolled easily from Uterhart’s lips—was a term new to almost everyone in the courtroom. He described it as a condition of the thyroid gland that affects the nerve centers of the brain and which, if not checked, ends in hopeless mental infirmity and death. “On that night she was not responsible. She knew not the nature of her act or that she was doing wrong. She was not a criminal, but an invalid.”
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This was too much for Weeks, who had listened to Uterhart’s opening with a mixture of incredulity and utter disbelief. “Objection! Objection!” he cried. His argument—that the jury not regard this emotive address as evidence—received a bizarre response from the bench. Justice Manning said Uterhart could continue and that he, the judge, would instruct the jury later as to how much was to be considered as evidence. Manning’s directive flabbergasted Weeks. By then the damage would have been done, he protested. But the judge, whose frequent and favorable glances at the defendant had not gone unnoticed by the press, refused to budge.

“I also object,” said Weeks, “to the ungentlemanly way in which Mr. Uterhart referred to ‘old Mrs. De Saulles.’ ”

“Probably he did not mean it: it was probably made in the heat of the argument,”
⁶²
said the judge. Weeks slumped back in his chair. The trial was turning into a farce.

Unruffled, Uterhart continued on his merry way. “This defense is founded on a question of responsibility. The shooting of Jack De Saulles on August 3, 1917, is not disputed, nor is it disputed that the defendant’s hand held the pistol. But you mustn’t think that means the defendant is guilty. You who have had experience in civil cases understand that after a plaintiff proves his case and the defendant says there is no dispute about the facts, there still may be other facts to consider. You may hold my promissory note, with my signature on it, but I may prove that I gave a house and lot which discharges the note. That brings us to the line of defense we shall present.

“By reason of other facts, the fact of a killing may be recognized under the law as justifiable and excusable—a defendant may be excused for an act otherwise criminal.”
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In a shrewd move, Uterhart lavished extravagant praise on the physicians whom he intended to call to the stand. “These doctors are not experts,” he said. “They are not brought into the case for the purpose of testifying. They are the doctors who were called in because she needed medical care and advice. They are the doctors who treated her and who are now treating her and are now curing her of the very conditions which I have described.”
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Uterhart picked up the pace. “Our defense does not consist of anything like brainstorms or emotional insanity, or the so-called unwritten law.”
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No, said Uterhart, instead, “We are going to prove this woman innocent under Section 1120 of the Penal Law, which says that no person shall be held responsible for an act which was committed under such a defect of reason that the person did not know the nature or quality of the act, or that it was wrong.”
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He elaborated. “Many people think that a person to be so excused must be a raving lunatic, with no more reason than a wild beast. That is not the law. The object of the criminal law is not to take revenge, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; it is to deter evil persons. We expect to prove that this defendant was not responsible mentally or legally within the language of the Penal Law.”
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Blanca’s actions on the night of August 3 were rooted in her traumatic marriage, said Uterhart, and he made a solemn promise: “The things I tell you, you will hear largely from the lips of the defendant herself. I merely outline the facts to which I expect her to testify.”
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Then came a blistering attack on the life and morals of Jack de Saulles. It took the form of a chronological account from the time that Jack met Blanca, how de Saulles had been a ruthless fortune hunter only to discover that his heiress wife was nowhere near as rich as he hoped or thought. “It was in South Bethlehem that her heart and spirit were broken,”
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as she came to realize that Jack had married her for money. And Jack’s heartlessness toward Blanca was mirrored by his callous parents. “The old folks did not like her and did not hesitate to say so,”
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said Uterhart. “The mother constantly asked Blanca how long she was going to stay and when she would leave—saying it was unfair for Jack to saddle them with the care of a foreign girl and a baby.”
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Uterhart portrayed Blanca as the devoted wife, staying home with the baby while her husband was out every night drinking and bedding the good-time girls of Broadway. And on those rare occasions when he did consent to a home visit, he constantly let Blanca down, promising to show up and then not arriving. But de Saulles’s most shameful acts involved money. Uterhart recounted the incident in which Señora Errázuriz-Vergara refused to advance Jack the necessary funds to close a real estate deal in Chile. “Blanca de Saulles was already in a condition when the cruelest of men are kind to women. Yet on receiving this reply her husband dragged her away to Paris.”
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As Uterhart piled on the emotion, some jurors were seen to wipe away tears.

According to Uterhart: “On July 1, De Saulles called her at the Hotel Wentworth: he wanted the boy sent out. She said she wanted to keep him all the minutes she was entitled to. She said: ‘If I let you have him for the first three days of July, will you let me have him for the same time in August?’ De Saulles gave his word of honor that he would do this. On July 6, De Saulles sent her the boy and on the same day he wrote her that the boy was hers until August 6.” At this point Uterhart pounded the table. “This letter will be introduced in evidence,”
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he roared. This was the first public suggestion that such a letter existed. Then he sat down.

Weeks jumped to his feet immediately, demanding that medical experts for the state be allowed to examine Blanca. “If you had made that request at a reasonable time it would have been granted,” Uterhart replied sweetly. “But coming after she has been five days in this room it must be refused.”

“I made the request some time ago,” protested Weeks.

“You never did until yesterday.”

“Your word against mine.”

“I’m sorry, we have to disagree”
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was Uterhart’s parting shot as he sat down.

The courtroom buzzed. Uterhart’s line of defense had completely thrown the prosecution and everyone else present. It had been confidently expected that an insanity defense would be mounted—as per the Thaw case—but the claims of a fractured skull and the thyroid atrophy were described as “amazing innovations.”
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Suddenly, Uterhart’s strategy became blindingly clear to Weeks: If Blanca were acquitted by virtue of insanity her chances of gaining custody of Jack Jr. would be zero. At the very least she would spend time in a mental institution, and that would be long enough for the de Saulles family to gain control of the boy. As Weeks packed his papers in readiness for the weekend, he knew that Uterhart was pinning all of his hopes on a clean acquittal.

FOURTEEN

Blanca Takes the Stand

T
HE WEEKEND WAS A TIME FOR ALL SIDES TO REGROUP.
F
OR
B
LANCA
—
THE
“white widow”
¹
as the press was now calling her—it meant a rare opportunity to see her little boy. At twenty minutes before noon on Saturday, Jack Jr. arrived, shepherded by his perennial bodyguard, Harry Dougherty. A few minutes later they were joined by Señora Errázuriz-Vergara, Amalia, and Guillermo, who arrived at the jail bearing lunch in a basket. There was almost a carnival atmosphere in Blanca’s room as she and her son played together. Unlike in court, where her cast-iron self-possession never wavered for a moment, Blanca permitted herself the occasional faint smile as she gave her son some picture books, two toy boats, and a drum. He, in turn, handed her a large red rose before going off to sail his little boats in a tin bathtub. The party went on until 4:30 p.m., at which time Dougherty returned the boy to the custody of Mrs. August Heckscher. According to Amalia, everyone had a “dandy time,”
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and, if the doctors had their way, it was an exercise that would be repeated regularly. Frequent visits, they thought, would greatly benefit Blanca’s still fragile health. But the lawyers were unbending. They had agreed to a rigid timetable that allowed for visits on Wednesday and Saturday only, and there would be no deviating from this provision.