The Supernatural Murders Page 4

  Significant progress in clearing up the mystery was reported in the Gazette of 17 March, although it remained obvious that full disclosure was hampered by the reticence of Medina officials. The coffee trail was still a major clue. Although the tests of the unused coffee had been negative, Fred Gienke, Jr, had observed that many relatives had become ill with abdominal pains and muscle-stiffening after drinking the beverage in his home and in the house of his grandmother Sophie Hasel – who was now for the first time identified as another murder-victim. Fred Jr had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Medina officials and Cleveland chemists to analyse the Gienkes’ blue-and-white coffee-pot, containing literal grounds that he had taken care to preserve. Despairing of the chances of interesting the investigators in his theory, he repossessed the pot and entrusted it to the city chemist of Elyria. ‘I’m certain it was the coffee,’ the young man maintained. ‘I’ll pay for the examination of this coffee and satisfy myself, at least, that the trouble was there.’

  As Fred pressed his own inquiry, there was a report that the Medina police had uncovered the possible source of the arsenic. According to the Gazette, the scribbled name of a woman who knew the Gienke and Hasel families had been discovered in a druggist’s registry; the name appeared again in the registry a week later, but then looked like ‘the work of a person attempting to disguise his or her handwriting to conform to that of the person who first signed’. About two grains of arsenic were obtained through the first purchase, and one grain through the second. Prosecutor Joe Seymour commented cryptically that the ‘finding of the registry had not been strengthened by his later investigations’, and did not regard it as definitely established that the purchaser had acquired the poison for murderous purposes, especially since there was no apparent motive for poisoning the Gienke family: ‘Administering of the poison appears at this time to have been accidental or the work of a moron. I have kept knowledge of the poisoning from the public in the hope of a tangible clue to run down, but those who have been investigating with me have found nothing to act upon.’

  The prosecutor informed the Gazette that the only poison discovered in the Gienke house was a small amount of insecticide containing a toxic ingredient different from that detected in the blood-samples of Marie and Rudolph, who remained hospitalised in Elyria. Marie was unable to talk or turn her head; Fred Jr, despite the energy he displayed in his coffee-pot crusade, was still having difficulty moving about.

  A Slaying on

  Saint Valentine’s Day

  Part of Lower Quinton, from the tower of the church

  Charles Walton

  Albert Potter

  The wych-elm in Hagley Wood

  The Widow of Hardscrabble

  Martha Wise

  The Medina County Court-House

  The Well and the Dream

  The Cleveland Press was less willing than the Gazette to accept Seymour’s guarded account of the progress of the investigation. As early as 14 March, the Press headlined that a woman was sought as a poisoner of the Medina family; the slayer was ‘a modern Borgia, who has so cunningly concealed her moves as to leave no single trace of her path of torture and death’. To the Cleveland journalists it was certain that the poison was administered ‘at the instance of someone without the immediate family circle’, and that for prosecutor Seymour it remained only to establish motive, means of administration, and ‘a definite identification of the signatures in the poison book’. Two days later the Press had more to say about the mysterious murderer whose image it had begun to sketch for its readers: she was ‘crazed by hallucinations growing out of certain deals in which the family of Fred Gienke figured’.

  On 19 March, all the hints and guesses about a solution of the Hardscrabble poisonings ended with the stunning announcement that the murderess had confessed. She was Martha Wise, a forty-three-year-old widow of Hardscrabble, daughter of her first victim, Sophie Hasel, and niece of Lillie and Fred Gienke, the next to die of her poison. Allene Sumner, a reporter who was permitted to interview the gaunt widow in the Medina jail, wrote that the cold, bare cell was filled by ‘the black breath of the dark ages when a horned personal devil roamed the world, urging men and women on to horrible crimes’. Crouched under her bedclothes, moaning and wailing, the widow ‘pointed a bony finger at the vision of the devil whom she seemed to see standing in a corner of her cell’, and held the Evil Spirit responsible for her actions:

  ‘Why did he come to me? Me who always lived right and did my best, being weak-minded as I am.

  ‘He came to me in my kitchen when I baked bread, and he said, “Do it.”

  ‘He came to me when I walked the fields in the cold damp night, trying to fight him off. He said, “Do it, nobody will know.”

  ‘He came to me when my children were around me. Everywhere I turned, I saw him, grinning and pointing and talking at me.

  ‘I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I only talked and listened to the devil as he walked through the fields of Hardscrabble.

  ‘Then I did it.’

  The Cleveland Press photographs of Martha Wise show a plain, long-faced woman with thick, dark hair pulled upwards from a square forehead, heavy brows above pouched, staring eyes, and a puffy, almost swollen, mouth. The prisoner told reporter Sumner that the devil had begun to pester her three years before, when her husband Albert, a farmer, died, leaving her ‘alone in the house all day, with nothing around [her] but the wind and the rain and the awful stillness’. Repeatedly the widow asked Sumner to explain the infernal visitations, but the reporter, having no answer, left Mrs Wise ‘shrieking at her devil in the corner’.

  The poisoner’s signed confession, published on the following day in the Gazette, was skimpier in its assertion of supernatural pressures, stating merely that the devil was in her. On the other hand, the factual circumstances of the Gienke poisonings were elaborated convincingly: on New Year’s Eve, when Martha (whose cow had gone dry) had walked downhill to the Gienkes’ to fill her bucket with milk, she had put some arsenic in the water-pail that the Gienkes kept in their kitchen for cooking and coffee-making; she had previously poisoned her mother’s water-bucket on the day before the old lady (who had separate quarters in the house where Martha’s brother Fred Hasel lived) took ill.

  Martha had pinched more arsenic into the Gienkes’ bucket either in late January or on the first of February. But it was not true, as had been suggested, that she had administered more poison to Marie Gienke during a visit to her hospital-room; instead, she had comforted her paralysed niece with a gift of oranges.

  Mrs Wise had bought about two ounces of arsenic at a corner-drugstore in Medina, telling the ‘short, heavy-set man at the counter’ that she wanted the poison to kill rats. Whenever she had set off to put the arsenic in her victims’ buckets, she had carried the dose wrapped in a little piece of paper. Martha separately confessed to the mysterious fires and thefts that had plagued the Hardscrabble district. At first, she hadn’t thought about the risk that the fires would kill anyone, but later she had started setting them at night so that she could ‘surprise people’. She had never stayed at the scene of a fire, preferring to slip away to watch the farm buildings blaze, crackle and burn. She had set the first fire – to the Gayers’ barn – after a son of Mother Gayer had shot one of her husband’s pigs that had invaded the Gayers’ garden.

  Prosecutor Seymour opined that the arson confession ‘virtually clinches the insanity case. The possibility of arraigning her on a murder charge is now so remote as to be almost wholly out of the question.’ In view of the real danger that an insanity finding would diminish the exploitation value of the case, the Cleveland Press speedily staged a touching scene beneath the widow’s jail-window: the four Wise children, Lester, Everett, Gertrude and Kenneth, whose ages ranged from fourteen to six, were shown waiting for a glimpse of their mother. ‘She was the best ma any fellow ever had,’ Lester was quoted as saying. ‘The trouble with Ma is that she never did nothing but work with her young ‘uns.’ In a comp
anion-article, however, the Press portrayed Mrs Wise as a woman morbidly attracted to death; she had loved funerals (especially those of her three victims) and on a recent occasion had travelled to Cleveland – on roads rendered almost impassable by soaking rains – to attend the burial of a distant relative; in addition, she had nursed her mother attentively after poisoning her. The Press had learned that the widow’s attraction to death went hand-in-hand with disappointment in love. Her married life had not been happy, since her husband, ‘pressed by his heavy duties in the care of the farm,’ made her ‘a slave to her chores and housework and children’. After Albert Wise’s death, the family farm was sold under a court order to pay debts, and his widow had eked out the purchase of a small house only a quarter of a mile from the Gienkes. Soon Martha had scandalised Hardscrabble’s proprieties by gathering men-friends. The Ladies’ Aid of Zion Lutheran Church of Valley City, which had sent her compassionate gifts of flour, vegetables and clothing, had complained that she was redistributing the food among her male admirers. Local tongues had increased their velocity when the widow circulated rumours that she was going to marry Walter Johns, a Cleveland machinists’ foreman in his fifties. When that project sputtered, Martha had proposed wedlock to another man, but ‘was emphatically refused’. After those two instances of unrequited love, following years of her husband’s coldness, the frustrated widow had turned to arsenic. So said the early reports – but subsequent versions added related grievances. According to the later embellishments, Sophie Hasel, and Fred and Lillie Gienke, Martha’s uncle and aunt, had opposed her marriage to Johns, not so much because he was a decade older but because he was, of all things, a Roman Catholic.

  The autopsy performed on the exhumed body of Lillie Gienke revealed a quantity of arsenic sufficient to kill three people; and, as Fred Gienke, Jr had suspected, the belated inspection of the coffee-pot disclosed the presence of the poison in scrapings of the outside metal surface, though the grounds appeared to be harmless.

  The prosecution therefore decided to proceed against Mrs Wise for the murder of Lillie Gienke, leaving the prisoner’s sanity as the sole issue.

  Mrs Wise showed little interest in the legal proceedings that bound her over to the grand jury, and only twenty or so spectators turned out for the hearing in the extravagantly mansarded courthouse that dominates Medina’s main square. Since no new sensations were produced in the courtroom, the Gazette interviewed Coroner E.L. Crum, who had helped secure the confession. Crum got dangerously close to prejudicing the pending determination of Mrs Wise’s legal responsibility by classifying her as a ‘mental and moral imbecile whose normal side knew little of her subconscious acts,’ and then explaining:

  This type usually displays a genius for evil. It is not surprising that she picked holidays – Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day – to administer the poison. A flair for the dramatic would dictate that.

  The coroner’s observation that Mrs Wise favoured ‘holiday killing’ was acute, but he failed to notice the special opportunity that family reunions marking festive occasions provided to a woman bent on mass-murder.

  In early April, the grand jury, as expected, indicted Mrs Wise for the murder of Lillie Gienke. The prisoner, who until recently had behaved calmly, now began to indulge in little ‘tantrums’, suspiciously as if she were laying the foundation for her insanity defence. Twice she had summoned Mrs Ethel Roshon, the jail matron and wife of the county sheriff, with a false alarm that she had swallowed a safety-pin.

  In advance of the trial, set for 4 May, Martha Wise’s relatives made the first effort to demonstrate the widow’s mental incompetency by applying to the Medina probate court for the appointment of a guardian. The petition, signed by Merton G. Adams of Liverpool Township (husband of a sister of Albert Wise), stated that Martha had $1800 deposited in a Valley City bank, and 18 acres of land worth $1500. In the hearing, Mrs Wise stated that she ‘did not know what she was doing’; and Joseph Pritchard, Mrs Wise’s criminal defence lawyer from Cleveland, cited as evidence of the need for guardianship the conflicting instructions his client had given regarding use of her funds for the defence. Although the petition was not seriously opposed, premonitions of the coming battle over the prisoner’s criminal responsibility could be heard. Dr Wood of Brunswick, the Wise family’s physician, testified emphatically that Martha was not insane, while her attorney Pritchard still more emphatically rejoined that ‘she is one of the craziest persons on the American continent’. Arthur D. Aylard, the president of the Medina Telephone Company, was appointed as the widow’s guardian.

  The murder trial began with arduous efforts to select open-minded jurors. Since many local residents had fixed views about the defendant’s guilt, the court adjourned on Monday afternoon, 4 May, with two panels of prospective jurors (totalling seventy-four) exhausted, and only eleven tentatively seated. Mrs Wise, who attended in the company of the jail matron, Ethel Roshon, ‘was dressed in a simple blue gingham gown, over it a heavy brown coat and with a simple, old-fashioned black hat. She appeared much pressed, but no different than on her former public appearances.’

  On Wednesday, 6 May, when the jury selection was at last complete, the prosecution began to put on its case. By the afternoon, however, the courtroom proceedings were overshadowed by the tragic news that the Medina murders had indirectly claimed a fourth victim. Edith Hasel, the wife of Martha’s brother Fred, had slashed her throat that morning in an outhouse near her Hardscrabble home. Ethel, who reportedly ‘was never strong mentally’, had brooded over the family deaths and ‘imagined that people were pointing to her as the guilty person’. Apparently defence attorney Pritchard had intended to call Ethel Hasel as a witness, for evidentiary purposes that he never revealed, but quite possibly with a view to implanting a seed of doubt in the jury’s mind as to whether the right family member was on trial. With the news of the suicide scurrying around the courthouse, the evidence offered by the state could not fail to be anticlimactic, particularly when the prosecution surprisingly declined to introduce Martha Wise’s signed confession. Instead, Joe Seymour relied on the live testimony of Mrs Roshon, the sheriff’s wife – to whom Martha had first admitted her guilt after her arrest at Fairview Hospital, where she was awaiting a minor operation on her arm.

  The highlight of the state’s brief presentation was the testimony of Marie and Rudolph Gienke concerning the effects of the poison they had taken and other incidents regarding their illness. Marie, recently released from the hospital, was brought into the packed courtroom on a cot, and prosecution counsel Arthur Van Epp (who was assisting Joe Seymour, his successor as Medina County prosecutor) had to hold up her hand so that she could take the oath; Rudolph needed to be supported by Sheriff Roshon as he entered. It was on the appearance of her two young victims that Martha Wise gave her first sign of emotion during the trial.

  As the defence case opened, the spectators braced themselves for the parade of 139 witnesses whom Pritchard had subpoenaed to support the insanity plea. Martha’s close relatives and neighbours portrayed her as a woman who could well have believed that the Devil had chosen her as his instrument. Emma Kleinknecht of Valley City, a sister, blamed Martha’s disorder on a dog-bite she had suffered when she was fifteen: after this mishap, she had frothed at the mouth and her body was curved tautly backwards in the shape of a rainbow; she had believed that ‘the gates of Heaven flew open to her’ and that she conversed with angels while a cloud of white doves enveloped her. One day during the previous summer, a gentleman caller, encountering Martha lying on the floor of her house, with foaming mouth and glassy eyes, had deduced that her disability had not passed. Another witness swore that he had once heard her bark like a dog, and Emma Kleinknecht said that the widow used to roam the countryside at night.

  At the beginning of Friday’s session, Pritchard recalled Ethel Roshon in an attempt to emphasise irrational elements in the misdeeds confessed by the defendant. Mrs Roshon confirmed that Martha had admitted burning several barns and stealing
a purse. The defence lawyer, however, lost more ground than he gained in focusing the jury’s attention on the defendant’s quarrel with Sophie Hasel: Mrs Roshon recalled Martha’s having told her, in the intelligent manner she displayed in the entire course of her confession, that the dispute with her mother concerned the prospect of Martha’s marrying a man of a different religious belief.

  Martha’s brother, Paul, remembered that as a child she was ‘awful wild and had a temper’. To defend Paul against Emma, who had begun to beat him for some boyish misbehaviour, ‘Martha flew at her and cleaned up on her. Emma had scars for a long time from where Martha scratched her face.’ Many childhood friends remembered Martha as a slow learner who cried easily in school. Two of her arson victims testified charitably that Martha’s husband had not been affectionate and had spoken abusively to her.

  On Monday afternoon, 11 May, Pritchard called Martha’s suitor, Walter Johns, to the stand. Although the prosecution speculated that Johns would deliver surprise testimony, Pritchard did not ask the Clevelander a single question. When Judge McClure rejected Pritchard’s request to cross-examine Johns on the basis of his alleged hostility to Mrs Wise, the lawyer abruptly dismissed the witness and closed his case, although only about a third of the persons summoned by the defence had been heard.