Poor Innocent Lad by Mike Farris

Author:Mike Farris [Farris, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime
Publisher: Untreed Reads
Published: 2018-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen: The Defense

“They call him cool, calculating, cunning. Can you imagine a rational human being doing the things he did?”

—Defense attorney Eugene Beebe

The admission of Myles’s confession, as well as the stipulation that he had killed Gill, was viewed with what verged on amusement by some in the press. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin published nearly the entire confession in its evening edition on October 3, under the headline FUKUNAGA SANE WHEN HE SLEW YOUTH, DOCTOR SAYS; CONFESSION GIVEN TO COURT. On October 4, using purple prose, Thornton Hardy of the Honolulu Advertiser wrote:

In five giant strides, diminutive Myles Fukunaga, marching in the seven-league boots of the law, climbed all the way yesterday from his narrow cell in Oahu prison to the edge of the scaffold and boundless eternity beyond.

***

Of the five steps to the scaffold, the apparent collapse of the defendant’s case, though first in crushing importance was last in time. The others were:

His confession was admitted in evidence and read out against him.

Three psychiatrists pronounced him indubitably sane and none can be found to declare to the contrary. With the pronouncement was coupled the fatal finding that Myles is wholly competent to distinguish right from wrong. Short of that, being not yet twenty, he could not be hanged.

As evidence of an unsound mind, the defense introduced a weird and incoherent clutter of torn and patched pages in Myles’s handwriting headed:

SCHEDULE OF UNDERTAKING

OKAY

But that weapon cuts both ways. It is possibly the evidence of an unsound mind, it is certainly the evidence of premeditation.

The October 4 issue also reported that, across the Pacific, the St. Louis Cardinals of the National League had been tabbed as five-to-three favorites to defeat the New York Yankees in the 1928 World Series. Subsequent events proved the oddsmakers wrong as the Yankees swept the Cardinals in four games, led by Babe Ruth’s .625 batting average in the Series, including launching three home runs in Game 4 in St. Louis.

On Thursday at 8:40 a.m., Eugene Beebe called Dr. Robert Faus back to the stand as his first witness for the defense.

“In your conversation with the boy, did you get a history of masturbation?” Beebe asked.

“I did.”

“A history of excess along that score?”

“According to his statements, he said he had excessive.”

“Did you also get a history, if I may put it, of hatred of Japanese women?”

Faus shook his head. “Not of Japanese women. He said he had been educated in American schools and learned to dislike everything Japanese, that is referring to old Japan.”

“Did you also get history of being pleased with the looks of white women, particularly motion picture actresses, or a feeling somewhat akin to that?”

“He stated he had learned to love the characters in the books he had been reading, and he liked the characters that had been pictured on the screen. He stated nothing about women in particular.”

Faus seemed puzzled as to the purpose of these questions, as did most everyone else in the courtroom. Beebe got more relevant.

“Is incoherency in that an

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