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Author: Harry Paul Jeffers
vivid tapestry of the Roaring Twenties, a case that Damon Runyon called "the dumbbell murder" provided a boisterous and uninhibited decade with a show involving a brigade of free-booting reporters that Runyon called "the best show in town." Its seemingly mundane central character, Ruth Snyder Brown, became a national fixation.
Also on the scene was a fledgling court reporter by the name of James M. Cain, who would base his book Double Indemnity and the movie of the same tide in part on the case. The murderous housewife was played by Barbara Stanwyck with a sultry cunning that Ruth Snyder would have envied. In the role of the hapless helper in homicide, however, Fred MacMurray had seemed much too smart to have been patterned on Ruth's hapless paramour, Judd Gray. Ruth then claimed one more niche in criminal history. She was the last woman executed at Sing Sing.
The year she and Judd began their fateful journey into the annals of criminal trials had been a time of triumphal pageantry and spotlight for a man known for acute shyness. And in a case of life imitating art, aviator Charles Lindbergh was launched on an odyssey that would validate the words of one of the 1920s' most successful novelists. F. Scott Fitzgerald had declared, "Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy."
In the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnap and murder of Lindbergh's infant son the court proceedings were the first to be covered by newsreel cameras and radio.
Almost as sensational as the Lindbergh case was the "thrill killing" of a young boy by a pair of brainy young sons of wealthy Illinois families. But the central figure of the trial of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold in 1924 was their controversial defense lawyer—Clarence Darrow—whose strategy was to introduce psychiatric evidence and to challenge the use of the death penalty.
In 1943 the murder of Manhattan socialite Patrica Lonergan and the trial of her husband, a pilot of the Royal Canadian Air Force, marked the crime-journalism debut of Dorothy Kilgallen. The daughter of a respected Chicago newspaperman, "Dotty" broke the story of a homosexual relationship between Wayne Lonergan and Patricia's wealthy father. The trial provided Americans a respite from the news of the Second World War. Did Wayne really kill Patricia? A jury said he had. Many people doubted it.
Kilgallen would be at the heart of the murder trial of a handsome doctor in 1954. The case of Sam Sheppard provided the inspiration for The Fugitive on television and in a movie. An appeal of the guilty verdict had freed "Dr. Sam" and introduced America to a lawyer who became as famous in defense as Clarence Darrow—F. Lee Bailey. Had Dotty not been busy writing a book on the Sheppard case, had she not been in failing health, had she not been promising to reveal "the truth" behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and had she not died under rather mysterious circumstances, she certainly would have covered the 1965 trial of Dr. Carl Coppolino, also defended by Lee Bailey, and the one that had catapulted to fame another brilliant young phenomenon in the ranks of defenders—Theodore Roosevelt Janus.
The arrest of Richard Edwards for the shotgun murder of one of the guards of an armored car as it made a delivery of half a million dollars to a bank in a suburban shopping mall had led to a nest of 1960s revolutionaries. The result of Janus's portrayal of Edwards as victim of society's failings rather than a criminal was transformation of the prosecution's straightforward murder case into a political show trial. Convicted only of manslaughter, Edwards served a mere eight years.
A decade after the Edwards trial another involved a doctor. This time it was Jeffrey MacDonald, a physician serving with the U.S. Army's elite "green beret" special forces, tried for the murders of his wife and two small daughters. MacDonald's case was the subject of a best-selling book by Joe McGinnis that elevated a new style for
Also on the scene was a fledgling court reporter by the name of James M. Cain, who would base his book Double Indemnity and the movie of the same tide in part on the case. The murderous housewife was played by Barbara Stanwyck with a sultry cunning that Ruth Snyder would have envied. In the role of the hapless helper in homicide, however, Fred MacMurray had seemed much too smart to have been patterned on Ruth's hapless paramour, Judd Gray. Ruth then claimed one more niche in criminal history. She was the last woman executed at Sing Sing.
The year she and Judd began their fateful journey into the annals of criminal trials had been a time of triumphal pageantry and spotlight for a man known for acute shyness. And in a case of life imitating art, aviator Charles Lindbergh was launched on an odyssey that would validate the words of one of the 1920s' most successful novelists. F. Scott Fitzgerald had declared, "Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy."
In the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnap and murder of Lindbergh's infant son the court proceedings were the first to be covered by newsreel cameras and radio.
Almost as sensational as the Lindbergh case was the "thrill killing" of a young boy by a pair of brainy young sons of wealthy Illinois families. But the central figure of the trial of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold in 1924 was their controversial defense lawyer—Clarence Darrow—whose strategy was to introduce psychiatric evidence and to challenge the use of the death penalty.
In 1943 the murder of Manhattan socialite Patrica Lonergan and the trial of her husband, a pilot of the Royal Canadian Air Force, marked the crime-journalism debut of Dorothy Kilgallen. The daughter of a respected Chicago newspaperman, "Dotty" broke the story of a homosexual relationship between Wayne Lonergan and Patricia's wealthy father. The trial provided Americans a respite from the news of the Second World War. Did Wayne really kill Patricia? A jury said he had. Many people doubted it.
Kilgallen would be at the heart of the murder trial of a handsome doctor in 1954. The case of Sam Sheppard provided the inspiration for The Fugitive on television and in a movie. An appeal of the guilty verdict had freed "Dr. Sam" and introduced America to a lawyer who became as famous in defense as Clarence Darrow—F. Lee Bailey. Had Dotty not been busy writing a book on the Sheppard case, had she not been in failing health, had she not been promising to reveal "the truth" behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and had she not died under rather mysterious circumstances, she certainly would have covered the 1965 trial of Dr. Carl Coppolino, also defended by Lee Bailey, and the one that had catapulted to fame another brilliant young phenomenon in the ranks of defenders—Theodore Roosevelt Janus.
The arrest of Richard Edwards for the shotgun murder of one of the guards of an armored car as it made a delivery of half a million dollars to a bank in a suburban shopping mall had led to a nest of 1960s revolutionaries. The result of Janus's portrayal of Edwards as victim of society's failings rather than a criminal was transformation of the prosecution's straightforward murder case into a political show trial. Convicted only of manslaughter, Edwards served a mere eight years.
A decade after the Edwards trial another involved a doctor. This time it was Jeffrey MacDonald, a physician serving with the U.S. Army's elite "green beret" special forces, tried for the murders of his wife and two small daughters. MacDonald's case was the subject of a best-selling book by Joe McGinnis that elevated a new style for