Female Trouble, Conclusion

According to Edith’s public defender, William Aggeler, a state of extreme melancholia brought about by physical ailments suffered since childhood, account for her accidental shooting of Linus Worden, causing his death.

Edith’s mother recounted for the seven men and five women on the jury a litany of illnesses and conditions afflicting her daughter. She testified that at seven months old, Edith had a serious case of pneumonia; she had an attack of spinal meningitis at three; at nine they found her unconscious in a rocking chair. She remained in bed for several weeks and was in such extreme pain she couldn’t bear to be touched without screaming in agony. When she finally got out of bed, she held her head in a twisted position. A lump developed on the right side of her neck and when she walked, she dragged her right leg and complained of constant head pain. At twelve, she suffered a spasm so severe that her hands couldn’t voluntarily unclench.

After her marriage, at seventeen, her husband found her one afternoon unconscious lying between the bed and the wall. In the ten years since then, she endured many similar attacks, even having one while in jail.

In November 1920, Edith’s mother noticed her daughter’s extreme moodiness. She testified the nervous condition manifested itself in Edith’s refusal to eat and her inability to continue to work in any capacity. In the fall of 1920, her mother found a revolver in Edith’s room and removed it. She gave the weapon to her husband.

As sad as Edith’s life was, she still shot and killed a man—and that is the story the prosecution would tell. Detective Kline testified to his conversation with Edith in the hospital. He asked her how she came to be shot. She answered, “It does not make any difference.” He informed her of Linus’ death, and she said, “I shot him, but I do not believe he is dead and will not believe it until my brother-in-law, Lee, tells me so.”

Edith insisted mutual despondency was the reason for the shooting. She claimed both she and Linus wanted to die. The mutual destruction motive flew in the face of Edith’s initial statement, “I couldn’t live without him, and I couldn’t get along with him.”

Edith’s mother testified for the defense; however, her father, Mr. Vosberg, was called as a prosecution witness. His duty to testify weighed heavily on him. He loved Edith. He recalled for the jury the events of the night of Linus’ death. He said he and Harvey Clarke, his son-in-law, relaxed inside the house while Linus and Edith sat outside in Linus’ car. When they hear four shots, both men sprang into action. They found Linus dying, and Edith seriously wounded.

A packed courtroom heard Edith testify on Monday, July 25. Physical suffering made her life wretched, and she tried several times to commit suicide. Two years after she married, she tried it again. “I had been reading spiritualist books.” [Note: spiritualism was enormously popular following WWI. So many people lost loved ones and desperately wanted to contact them in the afterlife.] Edith said she read The Gateway of Heaven. “It described the experiences of a woman on the other side. After reading it, I got a desire to go and see what was there.”

Seance c. 1920

The death of her husband exacerbated her depression. “I used to walk the palisades at Santa Monica and fight the inclination to go over. I did not think it was right at that time; I had a greater understanding then than later. I got the desire in August 1920 to take my life.”

A friend of hers from Santa Barbara shot himself in the head. She thought it would be “a good way to do it.” She bought a gun in early November.

Even jail didn’t stop Edith from attempting suicide. She got a hold of a pair of scissors and tried to do herself in.

Edith described suffering debilitating symptoms every month. She lived on aspirin. Often, she shut herself away in her bedroom.

Was there a legitimate medical cause for Edith’s physical complaint and behavior? It is possible Edith suffered from Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD). In the 1920s, the diagnosis didn’t exist. In fact, they didn’t add PMDD to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 2013, and it remains a controversial. Yet, the symptoms described by Edith fit the disorder. They also fit Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). Her first suicide attempt at fourteen lends credibility to a hormonal imbalance, but that is speculation.

It isn’t surprising that Edith’s trial became a battle of expert witnesses. Alienists on both sides offered an opinion on Edith’s mental state. The question of her sanity loomed large.

Defense witness, Dr. Allen, believed Edith was insane at the time of the murder. In fact, he referred to her case as one of “psycopathic (sic) personality.” He said, “In considering her mental state, it is necessary to view it in the light of the history of her case. In this case, there is a very marked history of abnormality, or eroticism. I don’t think this woman was at any time mentally normal. Because of her physical condition, she was predestined to become mentally unbalanced in a crisis.”

Dr. Allen’s conclusion isn’t surprising given how often women were characterized as hysterical and insane.

The coincidentally named Dr. Wordens female pills for women. Advertising for the pills read: Thousands of women suffering from the nerve and health-racking ailments peculiar to their sex have been restored to full health and strength by this great remedy after they despaired of ever being well and strong again.

I’ll digress for a moment. Women’s menstrual cycle has a long history of being misunderstood. In fact, the word taboo comes from the Polynesian word tapua, which means both sacred and menstrual flow. Ladies, if we ever learn to harness it, menstruation is our super power. Why? Ancient Romans believed a woman’s monthly flow could turn new wine sour, wither crops, dry seeds in gardens, kill bees, rust iron and bronze. Dogs who taste the blood become mad—their bite poisonous. There is some good news. Hailstorms and whirlwinds are driven away if menstrual fluid is exposed to flashes of lightning.

Don your capes and prepare for battle. Now back to Edith.

Edith’s conflicting stories of the murder are troubling. At first, she said Linus wanted to die. During her trial, she said it was an accident. Before she and Linus went out for a drive on the fatal night, she slipped into a small room off the parlor. Linus noticed her come and go twice before he asked her about it. She said she would explain later. She didn’t tell him it was where she kept her revolver. He didn’t see her slip the gun into her coat pocket.

When they returned later and sat in Linus’ car, Edith said she kept thinking about taking out the gun and shooting herself. She communicated some of her unease to Linus. He said he would see her the next night. Making future plans doesn’t sound like a man ready to kill himself.

Edith continued her testimony, “All kinds of emotions went through me. I remember him turning away from me. He laughed and said: ‘You will be all right.’ I shook my head and felt the gun. The first thing I knew there was a flash. I saw his face in front of me. The report frightened me.”

Did Linus laughing at her trigger a rage?

The defense hoped the jury would believe Edith’s ill health made her mentally irresponsible for Linus’ death.

“Many people suffer from illness, including headaches, but it doesn’t justify taking a life,” argued the prosecution. The D.A. asked the jury not to be swayed by “technical insanity,” nor sympathy, but to administer the law as it is written.

It took the jury an hour and a quarter to acquit Edith.

The following day, shortly after 2 PM, police rearrested Edith at a downtown department store on an insanity warrant sworn to by Detective Sergeant Eddie King of the district attorney’s office. Accompanying him was future LAPD chief, Louis Oaks. [Oaks served from 1922 to 1923 until they showed the hard-drinking the door. It’s an interesting tale for another time.]

Was the D.A. a sore loser? Maybe. But he pointed out that the attacks of melancholia Edith suffered were a recurrent affliction, and a recognized form of insanity.

In early August, five physicians of the Lunacy Commission found Edith sane. While subject to depression, the doctors didn’t consider her a menace to society. However, they recommended six months of probation rather than confinement in an institution.

Judge Weyle said, “you have suffered enough.”

EPILOGUE

Following her acquittal, Edith resumed the use and spelling of her maiden name, Edythe Vosberg.

The 1930 census shows her living with her parents in a home at 858 N. Curson, in West Hollywood. She works as a stenographer in the motion picture industry. Her brother-in-law Harvey, and her brother Gayne (born Alfred D. Vosberg), worked as actors. Either of them may have helped her get the job. Her brother changed his name to Gayne Whitman after WWI to avoid the negative association with his German birth name. Gayne had a long career, from 1904-1957, he appeared in 213 films. On radio, he played the title role in Chandu the Magician and also worked as an announcer.

The 1933 city directory for Santa Monica, has Edythe working for the H.C. Henshey Company. Henshey’s was a major Santa Monica department store. Sadly, it went out of business years ago.

Henshey’s

Edythe’s mother passed away in 1939. By the 1940 census, 49-year-old Edythe is living at 2630 St. George Street with her father and her nephew, 22-year-old Harvey Clark. The house is off Franklin Avenue, near the Shakespeare Bridge in Los Feliz.

In 1950, 56-year-old Edythe works as a record keeper for the city police department. It doesn’t say which city, she appears to be living in North Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley.

I don’t know what Edythe did from 1950 until her death in 1971. I know she never remarried, and never had any further run-ins with the law. She is buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale.

Clara Eunice Barker, Vampire: Conclusion

clara eunice barker_cropMrs. Grace Munro, wife of Charles W.S. Munro, an eastern zinc magnate, had filed a lost-love (alienation of affection) suit against her husband’s young paramour, Clara Eunice Barker.

love notes Grace hoped to win $50,000 in the suit, but Clara had a trump card to play; a bundle of love notes written to her by none other than Charles Munro. Clara had hidden the letters in the attic of the Glendale home she had shared with Charles while they were pretending to be cousins for the benefit of Glendale society. The bundle was an unpleasant surprise for Charles who had been under the impression that all of his letters and Clara’s had been destroyed. Clearly neither Clara nor Charles had fully grasped the truth of the old maxim, never put anything in writing that you wouldn’t want to have read in open court.

The lawsuit was about to get steamy, and Angelenos must have been anticipating a knock-down, drag-out fight between Munro’s wife and mistress. I know I would have been happy to wait in a queue for a seat at the trial.

Clara Barker took the stand and according to the L.A. Times she testified to: “bare the sordid romance that she says ruined her young life”. She told the court how she and Charles Munro had met.

“I met him at the corner of Montgomery and Front streets, Trenton (New Jersey). I was working in a Trenton pottery and was on my way to the post office to mail letters for the potter. A big automobile nearly struck me. The driver stopped the car and asked me if I was hurt. When I told him no, he kindly offered to drive me home, after ascertaining where I lived. He said it was on his way.”

According to Clara, Charles persuaded her to get into his car.

“He asked me where I was employed, my house address and telephone number. He did not enter the house.”

Clara testified that after their initial meeting Charles phoned her every day and he finally invited her out for dinner. He said that his name was Darrell Huntington Stewart and that he lived at Wayne Junction, PA.

For three weeks the couple dined at the same restaurant nearly every night until Darrell proposed to Clara.

Clara was won over by the generosity and sweetness of her suitor. She’d been swept her off her feet.

As lovers will do, Charles sent two photos of himself to Clara and he had inscribed them on the backs:

“With all my love to my future wife, Clara Eunice Barker. Your own, Darrell.”

Soon after sending Clara the photos he asked her to accompany him on a business trip to New York, and she agreed to go.

Clara was given her own room which led her to believe that Charles’ intentions were honorable. They were not.

Late in the afternoon on the first day of their trip Charles came to Clara’s room. Clara testified that:

“He told me there was no harm in his being there, as we were soon to be married. Whatever happened was all right; it would make no difference; we would be married within a week. I believed him.”

A few weeks after the trip Clara at last became suspicious of Charles. He’d made no move to set a wedding date, and she said that he always seemed to be in Trenton; he never phoned from Philadelphia where he supposedly lived.

The clue to Charles’ true identity came accidently when she overheard some men say:

“There is only one man in Trenton who owns a brown automobile of a certain make, and that man is Munro.”

Knowing that her lover, the mysterious Darrell, drove a car matching the description of Munro’s she decided to do a bit of sleuthing.

Clara phoned the zinc works and asked for Charles Munro — when he answered the phone she recognized his voice as belonging to her fiancee, Darrell.

Clara testified:

“I was horrified. I asked him how he could have done such a thing. He said he fell in love with me the first time we met. He said before he met me he was preparing to run away with another girl, May Pierson, who was his stenographer…now that he had met me, he would not run away with her. He would get a divorce. He said he had a miserable life.”

After his identity had been revealed, Charles cajoled, sweet talked, and threatened Clara in an effort to keep her — and Clara stayed.

Early in her relationship with Charles, in January of 1915, Clara had received a telephone call from Grace Munro. Grace said that Charles was “a liar and a hypocrite”. Mrs. Munro knew her husband well.  Although, given Charles’ behavior, Clara had every reason to believe that Grace was telling her the truth, she would not give him up.

Charles must have had some uncomfortable moments after his wife and mistress spoke to one another on the telephone. It would have served him right if they’d joined forces and fleeced him for every cent. Sadly, they continued to fight over him instead. To keep the two women apart Charles had warned Clara to steer clear of his wife whom he characterized as a terrible person. He told Clara that Grace was likely to hurl acid into her face!

Charles continued to string Clara along with promises of marriage. The pair moved around finally arriving in Southern California where, masquerading as cousins, they started a new life in Glendale. But Clara grew tired of waiting for Charles to make good on his promises to divorce his wife, and in a fit of despair she swallowed poison — though not a fatal dose.

Charles had written many dozens of letters to Clara, and in each one he declared his undying love for her. But even Charles began to realize that Clara might not wait for him indefinitely:

“I know, darling, you are not made of stone, and that you cannot wait very long, and I am pushing everything to the limit so we can soon be together.”

If Charles’ love talk didn’t work its magic on Clara, perhaps threats would. He wrote to her about a dream he’d had:

“I told you if you were not true, I would kill you. But I changed my mind as I wanted to see you suffer. I woke with the most awful yell, and was laughing. But, oh, what a laugh.”

After a trial lasting nine days, the jury of eleven men and one woman prepared to deliberate. It took them fewer than six hours to find Clara “not guilty of the love theft”.

girl cleared of guilt

Surprisingly, the battle of Wife vs. Mistress had not ended with the verdict — a new trial was granted because a judge determined that the judgment in favor of Clara was against the weight of the evidence.

Revitalized by the opportunity for a new fight, and another chance at $50,000, Grace Munro declared that Clara was a vampire who had enticed Charles away from his marriage. Grace obviously intended to drive a financial, if not an actual, stake through the heart of her rival.love dollar

Grace was victorious in the second trial, but instead of the $50k she’d asked for, the judge awarded her one measly dollar! The judge assessed $1000 damages against Clara, making the total award $1001.

The judge obviously disapproved of both Charles and Clara. He said:

“The tie that bound Mr. Munro and Miss Barker was low and degraded.”

price of sinLow and degraded she may have been, but Clara was successful in her lawsuit and recovered the “love nest” in Glendale in addition to furniture, bonds, and other gifts given to her by Charles.

The Munro’s attorneys felt Clara didn’t deserve a penny. They said that her hands were not clean, and that the property given her was the “price of her sin”. Sounds like they would have sewn a scarlet letter to her dress if they had been allowed to.

Judge Wood didn’t entirely disagree with the statement, but seemed to feel that sin is a matter of degree:

“If I distinguish between the two, she is the lesser sinner.”

And to the lesser sinner, go the spoils.

The Girl is Deranged!

deranged girl3

Because little boys are made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails they get into mischief.  And if you put a group of five year old boys together the end result can be mayhem.

Fifteen year old Elizabeth Lowe was walking through Echo Park near the lake on an October day in 1920 when she was set upon by several small boys who pelted her with stones. 

deranged girlElizabeth quickly decided that she was not going to be a passive target for a gang of diminutive thugs.  She grabbed her nearest tormentor, five year old Danny Lewis, and hurled him into the lake. Danny was rescued when his cries were heard by some men who were nearby enjoying the park.

Elizabeth later told police that she hadn’t intended to drown Danny she just wanted him, and the other boys, to stop throwing stones and leave her alone. Of course the cops quizzed Danny, who, in the manner of tiny terrors confronted with a misdeed, probably had his fingers crossed behind his back when he said that he’d never throw stones at a girl.deranged girl2

Police decided to hold Elizabeth in Juvenile Hall, which was just fine with Danny — he told the cops that the girl was deranged.