Star Spangled Scandal by Chris DeRose

Author:Chris DeRose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery History

Chapter Thirty-One

The Implements of Death

* * *

“This dreadful affair is the theme of conversation in every social community in the country. No event of a similar kind in our remembrance has excited so much comment.”

—Louisville Daily Courier

DAY FIVE—Friday, April 8, 1859

Coroner Thomas Woodward was the first witness. He produced the Derringer pistol that he had been handed the day of the shooting.

In Key’s pockets, he’d found a handkerchief, the case for the binoculars he had thrown at Sickles, and two brass door keys “about three inches long.” He held them up. Every neck in the courtroom stretched forward.1

Woodward testified to Key’s wounds. “One ball had entered his side; another the thigh, near the great artery; and there was a bruise on the right side; also, a slight wound on the hand.”

Woodward then unfolded a bundle, holding up a blood-stained white shirt and gray striped pantaloons. “There is where the ball entered the right thigh,” he pointed. “The place is stiffened and stained with blood.”

He continued. “This sir, is the vest. There is the hole made by the ball, on the left side.”

“Is there any other mark in the vest?”

“Yes. Here is another hole on the right side.”

The bloody vest was handed to the jury.

Woodward then produced Key’s overcoat. It was tweed with a brownish hue. He held up the coat to the light so that it could shine through the bullet hole. A reporter thought he resembled “an old clothing auctioneer in a dingy shamble in Chatham Street.”2

“I do not see the materiality of this examination,” Brady objected.

“We are through with this witness,” Ould replied.

Dr. Coolidge was the Army surgeon who had been the first to examine Key at the Club House. Key had been wounded on the left side, between the tenth and eleventh ribs, he said. Two inches below the groin was another wound, passing through the thigh and exiting “in the groove of the buttock and the thigh.”

The wound to the chest was fatal. At least a quart of blood had filled the cavity. Coolidge had examined Key’s heart, and it was healthy.

Ould asked: “From the course and direction of the ball, please state what was the position of the descendant at the time the shot was fired.”

“The course of pistol balls is at times very tortuous and difficult to trace, but my opinion” is “that the body must have been in a semi-recumbent posture. In other words, that Mr. Key must have been lying on his right side, the body turned a little over to the right, and the shoulders a little higher than the hips.” The spleen and liver had also been damaged.

Brady asked Sickles to stand. Was the prisoner about the same height as Mr. Key? Coolidge thought he was. “If Mr. Key was falling, and his body was in the same position that the witness assumed,” the result would be the same. Coolidge agreed that Key could have been falling at the time of the shot.3

Ould handed the witness a pistol ball. Was this the one he had removed from Key?

“To the best of my knowledge and belief, it is.

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