San Francisco's Queen of Vice by Lisa Riggin

Author:Lisa Riggin [Riggin, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO006000 Biography & Autobiography / Historical
ISBN: 9781496203052
Publisher: UNP - Bison Books
Published: 2017-07-25T04:00:00+00:00

18

The End of the Road

A long, gruesome, bloody, macabre road.

—Judge Edward P. Murphy

Defense Attorney McGovern always insisted that “the little lady” (as he called Inez Burns) and her four codefendants were anxious to take the stand and tell their side of the story. But in the final days of the trial after the prosecution finished with their witnesses and presented their evidence McGovern announced, as he did in the first two trials, “In view of the total insufficiency of evidence, we, too, rest.” Later, he assured frustrated journalists that it was the proper thing to do when the prosecution did not prove their case, either legally or in substance.

Nevertheless, McGovern’s closing statements always delighted reporters, courtroom enthusiasts, and zealous followers of the case. He thundered around the courtroom pointing out co-conspirators and corrupt officials while accusing Pat Brown and the district attorney’s office of turning the case into a personal crusade.

“This persecution,” McGovern told the jury, “has all the background of a private, personal fight—an unfair, unequal, unjust, and un-American conflict! And you should refuse to take part in this political conspiracy.” Then with hands thrust deep into his pockets, eyes reverently downcast, and pacing back and forth, McGovern painted graphic pictures of a wartime city, conjuring up vivid memories all too fresh in the minds of the jurors.1

“These women were caught up in this war just like our soldiers,” he told them, and they too wanted to do something patriotic, and yes, some of them went overboard, he admitted, sadly shaking his head. Others even went to bars, lonely during the war, and were seduced, and some were even raped—but all were “particular victims of the war.”

Stopping directly in front of the jury box, McGovern brought his narrative full circle by creating a hypothetical girl “close to each of you,” he said while pointing at the panel. What if she became “the victim of an assault by a man whose race or physical background she did not know?” he asked. Now, with the men and women of the jury theoretically in need of Burns’s services, he held their attention. McGovern then brought it home. “Ask yourself,” he challenged them, “if you would allow this girl, who you are responsible for, to bring a child into the world, or would you take steps to stop it?”2

Unable to discount the damning testimonies of salespeople, repairmen, bank clerks, and clients, McGovern admitted Burns’s establishment ran “wider open than City Hospital or San Francisco General Hospital.” But he appealed to them as citizens of San Francisco, a city known for tolerance and cosmopolitanism, to recognize that it allowed Burns to operate as “a necessary evil.” Furthermore, he reminded them, if the city’s officers seemed in agreement with this trial it was only because they went along with the “peanut politician,” Pat Brown, who sought to further his political ambition over the broken bodies of unfortunate women. “Don’t be taken in by stool pigeons,” he begged the jury, pointing to the former employees who turned “traitors and crossovers”—Madeline Rand, Levina Queen, and Kathryn Bartron.

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