Notorious Nashville by Brian Allison

Author:Brian Allison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Scoundrels, Rogues & Outlaws
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2019-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Scene of the crime? The last reliable sighting of Rosa Mangrum took place here at Union Station on Broadway. The building still stands today and is now a hotel. Library of Congress.

As the defense strongly pointed out in its closing argument, all the evidence in the case was circumstantial. There was no real proof a murder had even been committed, let alone that the defendant had done it. It wasn’t even clear whether or not Mrs. Mangrum had been aboard the train that night. “I say it is slop,” attorney K.T. McConnico bluntly stated, “and I say that no jury can take this slop and mess and analyze it into proof to put a man to death.”73

It had been a grueling, three-week ordeal—long enough that several members of the jury came down sick from sitting in the freezing courtroom. They filed out to deliberate on February 15, and they were back the next day to render their verdict: guilty of murder in the first degree. There was a stunned silence in the courtroom, and Feist wilted in his seat. With preternatural calm, the judge thanked the jury and dismissed them as the sheriff took custody of the defendant. Evidently, the state’s “slop” had indeed been enough to convict a man of murder. The crowd cheered as the disgraced doctor was escorted back to jail in handcuffs. He muttered that it appeared all of his friends had deserted him. In his cell, he was placed on a suicide watch.

However, his defense team was not done yet, and a motion was filed for a new trial. The hearing was almost as dramatic as the original case, dragging on for over a week while sensational accusations were made by Feist’s attorneys. Among the most startling testimony came from the bellboys at the Commercial Hotel who had delivered a gallon of whiskey a day to the room where the jury was sequestered. Four of the jury testified that they hadn’t touched the stuff. “That leaves eight men to get rid of four quarts a day,” commented one editor. “The man that can drink a pint of ‘fire water’ in a day and not be effected [sic] by it must be old at the business.”74

But despite the charges of a drunken jury and other irregularities, the motion for a new trial was denied. Feist’s attorneys immediately began prepping the case for an appeal to the Supreme Court while the doctor’s friends made an effort to keep him comfortable during his long confinement, even hanging wallpaper in his cell to cheer him. The paper had a ribbon design on it, and attorney McConnico remarked that he thought it was in poor taste. When Feist asked him why, he replied, “Why, don’t you see, Doctor? Ropes!” “Since the sentence was death by hanging at that time, this suggestion…did not seem pleasing to Dr. Feist,” recalled one of McConnico’s associates.75 He spent his days listening to the less-than-cheering sound of hammers and saws constructing the gallows in the jail yard.

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