Arsenic and Clam Chowder by Livingston James D.;

Author:Livingston, James D.; [Livingston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 3407147
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2010-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE PEOPLE REST

On the day the prosecution's second chemical expert took the stand, another city luminary visited the trial and, like Parkhurst a few days earlier, was invited to sit next to Recorder Goff during the proceedings. This was Joseph H. Choate, a prominent corporate lawyer active in both the earlier anti-Tammany reform movement that ousted Boss Tweed and in the recent reform group that led to the election of the Strong-Goff fusion ticket. In the 1870s, Choate had been among the founding fathers of two important city institutions, the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and three years after Mary Alice's trial, President McKinley appointed him ambassador to Great Britain. During the trial testimony, Choate, like Parkhurst before him, intensely studied the face and demeanor of Mary Alice, the remarkable woman he had been reading about for weeks.

Another visitor to the trial that week was William Howe, the lawyer who in 1883 had led the defense for Henry Fleming in Mary Alice's first breach-of-promise trial. In his dramatic closing of that trial, he had unsuccessfully tried to convince the jury that Mary Alice was not the innocent young woman she then appeared to be, but was in reality a loose and very villainous woman. The intervening thirteen years had brought Mary Alice three more illegitimate children and a charge of matricide, perhaps convincing Howe that his earlier assessment of Mary Alice was not far from the mark. Yet Howe himself could be charged with some responsibility for contributing to Mary Alice's social decline with his trial tactic of unproven but widely publicized claims that she was a prostitute.

Chemist Walter T. Scheele followed Henry Mott in the witness chair. When Scheele was first sworn in, swearing to tell the truth with his hand on a Bible, Brooke complained, “He did not kiss the book.” Scheele was sworn in again, this time kissing the Bible. This was the first hint by Brooke that Scheele's veracity would be questioned. As with Mott, Scheele's testimony was often interrupted with objections by Brooke. In his first objection, Brooke twice referred to Scheele as “O'Scheele.” This caused Recorder Goff to laugh and several jurors to smile, but Scheele was not amused. Brooke offered an abject apology to Scheele, and explained to the court that his mistake resulted from the fact that he was always thinking about O'Sullivan, who was then questioning Scheele. But his “mistake” was probably not innocent. A week later, it became clear that one of Brooke's defense witnesses, Max Mansfield, had used the name “O'Scheele” in a vitriolic article he had written attacking both O'Sullivan and Scheele. Brooke was very angry with both O'Sullivan and Scheele, who had each worked with him on several earlier trials, because these former colleagues were now working against him. Mansfield had different reasons to be angry with both O'Sullivan and Scheele, as the court soon learned.

The name Scheele had been famous in chemistry since the days of Carl Wilhelm Scheele

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