The Valentino Affair (41 page)

According to Wight, “On August 9, I noticed that she was restless and made complaints concerning people in the room.”
⁴⁷
She also began to suffer hallucinations; for example, she asked if her husband could take her baby away from her, then stared vacantly when told that Jack was dead. The following day, Wight decided to X-ray Blanca’s skull.

At this point Wight called for a projectoscope—an early form of projector—to be set up beside the witness chair. The jury, which hitherto had veered between bemusement and boredom while listening to Wight’s testimony, shifted forward. This looked interesting. They watched as Wight loaded a glass plate showing the X-ray of Blanca’s skull in profile. Justice Manning moved from his chair to inspect the X-ray plate more closely, and he invited the jury to join him, but they declined, saying they could see everything clearly from where they sat. Blanca permitted herself one brief glance, then dropped her gaze and looked no more.

Wight pointed to the area he was describing and said that the damaged frontal lobe exerted pressure on that region of the brain “where reason and judgment are seated.”
⁴⁸
Even after beginning treatment, Blanca continued to be depressed and confused, and not until September 4—one month after the shooting—did Wight find her mind “clear and bright.”
⁴⁹
Only then was she able to share with him her family’s ill-starred medical history: a father who had succumbed to TB when she was one year old, a sister dead at ten months, and a brother who was thrown from a horse and killed when he was only twelve. None of this, of course, had any bearing on Blanca’s alleged hypothyreosis. (Significantly, none of the medical witnesses used this term, only Uterhart.)

It had been an eventful morning and Wight was still on the stand when Justice Manning broke for lunch.

Continuing after the recess, Wight elaborated on Blanca’s medical history. In 1913 she had spent thirteen days in the Sloane Maternity Hospital following an operation for a condition caused by sunstroke at Deal Beach (the exact nature of this ailment was not revealed). The following year the headaches returned, then came the car accident in Chile, after which she was laid up for five days. When Uterhart tried to get Wight’s opinion of the injuries Blanca sustained in childhood, Justice Manning stepped in. “This is beyond all reason. We want all possible light—but fifteen years ago and a witness who never saw her then? We must remember that what we are trying to find out is the condition of her mind at the time of her act—whether she knew the act was right or wrong.”
⁵⁰

Wight now dealt with this question. Blanca had told him that her health had declined this past summer; she had suffered stomach pains, neuralgia, and periods of forgetfulness. On the night of the shooting, when she went to The Box, she was “astonished”
⁵¹
to find de Saulles there, and that when told she could not have the boy, she felt a great pain in her head. “I questioned her further, but she said she remembered nothing after that.”
⁵²

Weeks rose to cross-examine. “Is it not true that the average person has a depression in his skull?”

“No.”

“Is not the location of what you call a fracture at about the same spot as the anterior fontanel?” (The “soft spot” in the skulls of children, which generally closes by eighteen to twenty-four months, can remain soft into maturity in some instances.)

Wight said there could be no mistake.

“Isn’t it possible that the mark you call a fracture in the photograph might be the shadow of a vein?”

“It is not; veins do not cast shadows.”

“You are sure of this?”

“Yes.”

“When did you first give the patient thyroid extract?”

“On the second day after the examination.”

“Will not this extract cause headaches?”

“If enough is given, yes.”

“Does the condition of the skull you describe still exist?”

“Yes.”

“Is there still encroachment and pressure on the frontal lobes of the brain?”

“Yes.”

“But not sufficient to cause any great harm?”

“No.”

“That’s all.”
⁵³

The next witness provided a textbook example of why medical evidence struggled to gain a foothold in early twentieth century courtrooms. Dr. Louis C. Johnson, who lectured at the Long Island College Hospital, seemed utterly oblivious to the fact that he was addressing a jury of laymen and not some postgraduate class. He was pompous, used incomprehensible medical jargon, and had an irritating habit of lapsing into Latin whenever the mood struck him, which was far too often, judging from the glazed expressions on jurors’ faces. In the end Justice Manning, as baffled as anyone, halted the witness and told him to tell the court what he had found in “plain English.”

“May I say—” Johnson began.

“Don’t say anything except what I have told you.”

Visibly smarting from the rebuke, Johnson continued. “Mrs. De Saulles was in bed in the jail when I saw her. I felt at the time that the general body processes—metabolism—were at a very low ebb. It was such a condition as I believe might arise from a severe disease of the blood—anemia, or a condition where toxic substances ordinarily secreted by the kidneys might be stored up in the body. She was a typical picture of hypothyroidism.”
⁵⁴

Oddly enough, unlike most in court, Blanca paid close heed as Johnson droned on. Various bloods tests, coefficients, Johnson provided lengthy coverage of them all, and he was just about to favor the jury with extracts from a speech delivered by some obscure French scientist when Weeks butted in: “How do we care about that?”
⁵⁵

Justice Manning agreed. “We don’t care anything about the lecture. Let us hear just what were your conclusions about this particular patient.”

“I concluded she was a typical picture of hypothyroidism.”
⁵⁶

The judge sighed in relief. “That’s what we want.”
⁵⁷

After deciphering Johnson’s Latin-laced verbiage, this diagnosis emerged: Mrs. de Saulles was anemic, with a low blood count, and suffering from an underactive thyroid. He was happy to report that since treatment began, her thyroid complaint had improved markedly.

Finally, to the relief of everyone—especially those journalists who were struggling to turn this labyrinthine testimony into usable copy—Johnson was excused and replaced by Dr. Smith Ely Jeliffe, a Manhattan-based specialist in nervous disease and an experienced expert witness. Unlike his predecessor, Jeliffe used short punchy sentences and simple words that the jury could understand. He explained that Wight gave him no advance knowledge of Blanca’s condition, but merely asked for a second opinion. Jeliffe first saw Blanca on August 11. “She saw well and did not hear well. Her hair broke easily, her skin was scaly . . . thick and rubbery.”
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He pinched his own skin by way of demonstrating what ordinary skin should be like. “Her skin was cold and more or less like marble. Her pupils dilated and then contracted; instead of getting smaller rapidly when a light was brought close to her eyes, they were sluggish. The tongue was swollen to twice normal size.”
⁵⁹

Like Wight, Jeliffe had found the patient unusually sensitive. “She winced when the nerve trunks were touched. . . . When a fingernail was drawn across her skin the white line that ought to fade away did not, but was followed by a deep red line, showing marked instability of blood vessels. There were bumps on the lower and upper extremities.”
⁶⁰
Blanca, he said, had refused to cooperate in the medical examination on August 11. She became fatigued, had a dreamy look, and asked him not to bother her. He also diagnosed a distinctly hypothyroid condition.

On November 9 he saw her again. The swellings or bumps had subsided; she was extremely weak but getting stronger; mentally she was normal. “She was bright and could cooperate.”
⁶¹
Justice Manning asked if the X-ray showed the skull accurately and he said it did. Rather than proceed at the current time, Weeks said he would defer cross-examination of the witness until after the hypothetical question to be asked by the defense. At this point Uterhart said he wasn’t ready to ask the question today.

Justice Manning sighed. Uterhart’s announcement guaranteed that the trial would now run into the following week. The hypothetical question would be read to each of the expert witnesses and would probably consume an entire session. In the Thaw trial, the hypothetical question took three and a half hours to read, a record for length. Uterhart refused to speculate on how long his estimated twenty-thousand-word epic would last. All he was prepared to say at the moment was that it would end with the query: “If you knew such evidence had been introduced and if such were the acts of the defendant, would you hold that she was of sound mind when the act was committed.”
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Because the medical experts were all on the defense payroll, it was a foregone conclusion that their answer would be “No.”

It was also a monumental waste of time, as Justice Manning made clear. Wearily, he turned to the jury. “I had hoped that we could make this proceeding move with such celerity as to close it up here. I thought of sitting tonight and tomorrow, but that is beyond you and me. We shall have to give the people and the defendant more time in which to handle the medical situation in an effort to get at the true situation. . . . They hope to get the medical evidence in such condition that it can be presented on Friday. In the end we may save time by wasting a little time now. I now have to tell you to take the day off.”
⁶³

After the usual admonishments to the jury against discussing the case among themselves or with outsiders, he wished them a happy Thanksgiving and then adjourned the hearing until 10:00 a.m. Friday.

SEVENTEEN

The Hypothetical Question

A
S PROMISED,
B
LANCA PROVIDED
T
HANKSGIVING
D
AY DINNER FOR THE
other
inmates of Mineola jail, and a truly splendid affair it turned out to be. Fifty-five prisoners sat down to the most extravagant banquet ever given in this most exclusive section of Long Island real estate. Amalia and two of the sheriff’s daughters, Ethel and Ellie, took up their positions in the jail kitchen, alongside the chef, Arthur Benton, basting the turkeys, testing the cranberries until they jellied, making the coffee, and jabbing forks into the browning sweet potatoes. “Let everybody forget their troubles for just this one day,”
¹
said Blanca that morning as the turkeys were pushed into the jail’s brick oven. A long pine table had been moved into the corridor that led to the “thirty day room”
²
—ordinarily used to house those prisoners serving a month or less—and covered with a linen tablecloth.

Even on so egalitarian an occasion as this, a strict jailhouse hierarchy was observed, with head of the table slots being reserved for the most serious offenders. Pride of place among these went to Dominick Damasco, already convicted of killing a man in a fight and awaiting sentence the following day. Next came Frank Sniegoski, a moody Polish immigrant from Great Neck accused of killing his wife after a long, drawn-out domestic dispute. It was a charge he bitterly denied and the merriment cut no inroads into his sullen nature as he remained taciturn throughout the entire meal. Alongside him sat Thomas O’Brien, who had shot his wife with a rifle and was awaiting trial. By a peculiar coincidence, O’Brien had gunned down his wife at almost exactly the same time as Blanca pulled the trigger on her ex-husband. And his defense was uncannily similar, too—a claim that amnesia had erased any memory of the event, which had been provoked by jealousy (his wife had been sleeping with a younger man).