Star Spangled Scandal

by Chris DeRose

  Ould rose with a startling offer. The prosecution was prepared to waive all objections to evidence of an affair, including Teresa’s confession.

  Brady asked for time to consider. We “will imitate the example we are told prevailed with some of the aborigines of the country, whenever propositions were made in the spirit of peace, never to give an answer immediately.” Brady added that “Any publicity which [her confession] has found anywhere is not in the slightest degree attributable to [Sickles], but was in direct opposition to his expressed and consistent wish.”

  “We are not responsible for its publication in any sense, form, or shape.” Ould declared.

  “There is no pretense that you had,” Brady responded.

  “The paper was never in our possession, except for a single moment,” Ould added.

  Brady knew exactly who was responsible for its publication. The only thing keeping Sickles alive was the possibility that the jury would believe the stories about adultery and use them as an excuse to acquit him. Sickles could dig in all he liked. But Brady was not going to risk his friend’s neck over this. He directed Thomas Meagher to copy the letter. Meagher handed the copy, page by page, to Reverend Haley, who passed it on to the press. Sickles never had any idea.2

  Graham complained that the offer was late and came “after we had disbanded our witnesses and sent them to the four winds of Heaven. The effect of this offer is to embarrass the defense.”

  The judge gave leave to the state to introduce rebuttal evidence while the lawyers for Sickles talked it over.

  “It is not intended as a continuing offer, but one which must be accepted or rejected tomorrow morning.” Carlisle said.

  The Evening Press of Providence thought this a brilliant maneuver, now that evidence of adultery was in. They thought the confession was damning against Sickles: look at the legalese of the confession. It looked like a cool-headed lawyer creating a paper trail for a murder.3

  The United States began its rebuttal evidence, with Congressman George Pendleton as its first witness. “I am the brother-in-law of [the] deceased.” A week after the killing, he went to No. 383. He suggested a locksmith because the front and back doors were locked. Gray sent for one. Nothing of Key’s was found in the house.

  “I called Gray and gave him half a dollar for his trouble of going for a locksmith. I never gave a direction or made a suggestion to the locksmith as to removing that lock at that time, or to anybody else. I did not see anyone taking off the lock. If it was, it was without my knowledge.”

  Pendleton received the items that had been taken from Key’s body on the day of his death. There was the case to the opera glass, two brass keys, a set of small keys, a pocket book in which were fourteen dollars and some cents, and a pair of kid gloves.”

  A week later he “received an envelope containing one or more papers, with a card from Dr. Stone, saying he was requested by Dr. Miller to deliver them, but that he was prevented from doing so sooner by professional engagements.”

  Brady said, “May I ask you the character of your feelings? Was it not one which naturally excited strong emotions?”

  “I was very much pained at Mr. Key’s death.”

  “Do you remember this slip of paper?” Brady asked, showing him one of the letters.

  “I have seen it since I returned to Washington last week. I am certain I delivered all the papers I received from Dr. Stone to Mr. Howard [Another of Key’s brothers in law]. I believe nothing is lost.”

  “When did you first learn that the lock had been removed?’

  “I heard it in court,” Pendleton answered, “the other day a remark was made by one of the counsel for the defense with regard to the suppression of evidence. I desire to say before I leave the stand, in the most positive and circumstantial manner, that I gave no intimation or direction, nor made any suggestion as to the removal of the lock, nor did I hear it had been removed until I heard it in court. And I say further, that any intimation or charge that any suppression of important or unimportant evidence had been by my participation or knowledge, by whomsoever made it, I may be permitted to say, infamously false.” The audience applauded.

  Colonel Charles Jones was the next witness. He’d gone with Pendleton to No. 383 and suggested breaking down the doors. Pendleton thought it would be more dignified to gain access by a locksmith. Nothing of Key’s was found in the house.

  “You are a member of the bar?” Brady asked.

  “I am, sir.”

  “You have been assisting the prosecution ever since the trial commenced?”

  “I am going to answer your question, but I want to understand though—”

  “I don’t mean to complain of what you have done. I ask whether you have not assisted the prosecution in this case.”

  Jones said that he had “handed two or three” cases to Carlisle, who was already aware of them.

  “I intend to treat you with all proper respect, but as to furnishing Brother Carlisle with authorities, that is unnecessary. You have, Mr. Jones, taken in this case—”

  “The very deepest interest.” Jones interrupted. “Shall I tell you why?”

  “Not at all.”

  Carlisle interjected. “You were an intimate friend of Mr. Key.”

  “From early youth to the time of his death,” said Jones.

  “I never object to a man standing by the memory of his friend as long as he deserves to be respected.” Brady said. With that, he withdrew.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  “Curious Anonymous Letters Received by the Counsel and Jury”

  * * *

  “The proceedings in the Sickles case today were interesting rather than important.”

  —New York Herald

  DAY SIXTEEN—Thursday, April 21, 1859

  A carriage of ladies from the countryside arrived to see the trial. No females, they were told, “other than witnesses, had visited the trial room.” After “making some inquiries as to the ‘handsome prisoner,’ ” they had lunch instead, of “a fare more wholesome, if not quite so highly seasoned, as that of the trial.”1

  The Vermont Chronicle asked: “When will reform come” to government? “Never till men of moral worth wake up and unite in the name of the people, of humanity and justice, sternly demand that no immoral man shall have public promotion.” Until then, “Brooks may assault who he pleases in the senate chamber, Key seduces his neighbor’s wife, and Sickles murder his fellow under the wing of the United States Capitol.” Wicked men did not arrive in office by some foreign power. “We, the people have done it.”2

  Day sixteen began with a mystery. A letter bearing a New York postmark had been sent to one of the jurors. “The letter was filled with abuse of the prisoner,” wrote the Herald.3

  “It proceeds from the very worst motives,” said the judge. “It is an impertinent, improper, and unwonted interference with a court of justice.” The juror “knows nothing about it or the writer,” the judge said.

  Brady “remarked that the manuscript was similar to that of the anonymous letter to Mr. Sickles.” The letters were compared. It was agreed by the lawyers that they came from the same hand.

  “It is a matter of extreme regret that the author of the letter is not known,” said Judge Crawford, speaking for everyone. In addition to its condemnation of Sickles, it contained slander against his lawyers.

  “It is agreed on all hands,” said Carlisle, “that it is an atrocious interference with the course of justice. If its author were known, he would deserve to be prosecuted for an act as high as a misdemeanor. But as it is written from a distance, and there is no probability of its author being known, it is not worth preservation.”

  “Only with the view of punishing the author,” said an agitated Judge Crawford. “With all the rigor that could be applied to the case.”

  Of all the claims in the letter, Brady said, “There is but one thing stated [in] relation to which I have any personal knowledge, and that is an atrocious falsehood. If that is a fair c
riterion of the whole letter, it shows how much its statements are worth.”

  Ratcliffe suggested: “Your honor might preserve it for some day and perhaps the author may be found out. I think that may be advantageous.”

  Some day, perhaps. But not yet. R. P. G. is the unseen hand that set this story in motion, and it will never be complete until he or she is known.

  I partnered with a board certified forensic document examiner who came to an interesting conclusion. R. P. G. may have preferred to stay anonymous, but they did not attempt to disguise their handwriting. The handwriting is consistent from beginning to end, whereas a person attempting to hide their true handwriting would lapse into familiar and subconscious “tells.” This leaves two possibilities: they didn’t care about getting caught or they were confident of not getting caught. We can safely eliminate the former. The letter was anonymous. R. P. G. refused to answer Sickles’s ads asking for a meeting. It’s clear he or she did not want to be identified. This means that the writer was not someone close to him, as Sickles could identify the handwriting of someone who was.

  William Swanberg, an early biographer of Sickles, wrote that Rose O’Neal Greenhow was suspected of being R. P. G. After Greenhow was exposed and revealed as a Confederate spy, one who may have made the difference at the Battle of Bull Run, she was an easy mark. Plus, they share the same first and last initials. But her handwriting positively excludes her from being R. P. G. Handwriting samples of Butterworth and Wikoff were examined and they too were excluded.

  Even when newspapers were starved for Sickles content, the identity of R. P. G. was subject to limited speculation. Under the headline “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” the New York Times wrote: “There is a lady here who knows a certain widow in Washington, to whom Mr. Key had for some time been quite devoted who has been made miserable, for a twelvemonth, by the pangs of jealousy. Did she play the part of Iago in the bloody drama? Perhaps.”4

  If the goal was to break them apart, the letter to Key makes sense but the letter to Sickles does not. Sickles would almost certainly divorce his wife, thus freeing her to be with Key, or harm Key, which would limit his ability to be with the writer. Warning Key increased the chances of his being armed, which may have led to him killing Sickles. In that case, he would either be free to be with Teresa or incarcerated.

  What if the writer was a Washington woman with a different motivation: to dethrone Teresa Sickles from her place in society? Teresa’s sweet and welcoming nature may not have been enough to deter someone motivated by social jealousy. But Teresa’s public ruin had been accomplished well before Day 16 of the trial, when the third anonymous letter was received.5

  In fact, the letter writer is probably not a woman at all. Both Henry Watterson of the Philadelphia Press and James Shepherd Pike of the New York Tribune interviewed different witnesses who saw the Man in the Shawl observing Key and Teresa on Wednesday, February 23. Sickles and Key received their letters the following day. It is reasonable to conclude that the Man in the Shawl is the letter writer. Pike believed he was, as did the people he interviewed, but he did not reveal his name.

  Stephen Beekman makes the most sense of the possible suspects. He had stalked Key and Teresa once before. Beekman had moved back to New York, but DC was easily accessible. Beekman was in love with Teresa: pitting Sickles and Key against one another makes sense. If he was lucky, they would kill each other, or one would kill the other and go to jail. It follows that he would tell Sickles of the affair and warn Key to be on his guard. If Beekman were R. P. G., it would explain the New York postmark of the letter sent during trial. But would I ever get a handwriting sample to prove it? As it turns out, Beekman served in the Civil War, and a letter was found in the papers of his regiment at the National Archives. But he too was not R. P. G. Or at least not the writer of the letter. A scribe could have been used to cover their tracks—but it would have to be the same scribe on all three letters.

  But it is just as likely there was a second man who stalked Key and Teresa and who wrote a letter informing her husband, a letter warning Key, and then a letter from New York during trial encouraging Sickles’s conviction. As Iago told Othello, “what you know, you know.”

  Brady responded to the proposition of the day before: to allow the confession as well as all evidence of adultery. “We do not accept it. The case of the accused is closed and the prosecution must therefore pursue such course on their part as they may deem advisable.”

  Francis Doyle, one of the Club House members who had responded to the shooting, was recalled to the stand.

  “Mr. Doyle, state what was the appearance of Mr. Sickles at that time.”

  “When I came up to Mr. Sickles, he turned round almost immediately. I thought his manner was self-possessed. More than his speech indicated. There was more excitement in the expression than in the manner.”

  “I don’t know to what extent you have given yourself to the study of men,” Brady said. “Have you ever been in a lunatic asylum?”

  The witness was hurt by the question. “No, sir,” and expressed his hope that the judge would cut this off.

  “He does not mean as an inmate,” Ould said, “but as a visitor.”

  Everyone laughed, including Doyle, who now understood.

  “Have you ever spoken to a person unmistakably insane?”

  He had not.

  Doyle testified that Key’s overcoat stayed in the dining room at the Club House for a week.

  Officer Jacob King was the next witness. “Did you observe the manner and expression of Mr. Sickles at the time of Mr. Key’s death?”

  “I did.”

  “State what it was.”

  “I thought he was exceedingly cool, as far as I could judge. As soon as we got up to him, he desisted, turned round, and made the remark I have already sworn to. I did not see any indication of great excitement that I am aware of.”

  “Were you familiar with Mr. Sickles’s countenance before that?” Brady asked.

  “Had seen him I suppose fifty times.”

  Tidball, another of the Club House group, was recalled to the stand. “My attention at the time of the homicide was directed more to Mr. Sickles’s manner than anything else. I thought it was rather cool and deliberate. His face was somewhat pale, of course.”

  “Have you ever visited a lunatic asylum?” Brady asked.

  “Not that I recollect.”

  “Talked with an insane person?”

  “I do not recollect that I have.”

  Charles Howard, one of Key’s brothers in law, was given a letter removed from Key’s body four or five days after the murder. It was written in cipher, but he believed he had cracked the code. It was not complicated: one letter of the alphabet was exchanged for another. The judge carefully read the translation.

  “What is it to rebut?” Brady asked.

  “Not to rebut anything,” Carlisle said. “It was brought out by the defense.”

  “Then we ought to offer it in evidence,” Brady said, “not you.”

  Carlisle pointed out that the defense had referred to items removed from Key’s body at the time of his death, and that they now planned on explaining the content of one of those items.

  Brady pointed out that while many people had access to Key’s body and that more than one individual had taken items from his person, the prosecution had access to all of them even before the indictment was handed down. “What had disappeared from the person of Mr. Key and what appeared was left in a state of the greatest confusion and doubt.”

  Crawford excluded the cipher letter and translation from evidence. It was reported that the cipher was a coded love letter from Teresa to Key.6

  Officer William Daw was next to testify: “I heard no unusual sounds. Nothing like shrieks or moans. Mr. Sickles invited us to take some brandy just before starting for the jail. Offered to everyone there. Nobody drank but Mr. Sickles and Mr. Butterworth.”

  Officer James Suit was next. Did you hear Sickles make
any “unusual noises” at his house before leaving for jail?

  “No, sir.”

  John McBlair took the stand. Sickles’s neighbor in Lafayette Square was present at the house after the shooting and traveled with him to jail. He “heard no unusual noises.” He spoke with Sickles after he came downstairs, right after telling Teresa that he had killed Key. “Mr. Sickles was extremely calm. I thought it the calmness of desperation. He appeared to be suffering internally and to be endeavoring to restrain his feelings I thought him and still think him to be a man of remarkable powers of endurance or he never would have been able to withstand the relentless persecution extended to him.”

  Ould asked: “Is it not a fact about Mr. Sickles that this appearance of calmness attends him even when under the strongest excitement?”

  “I have always found him calm.”

  “He is a man of great command over his feelings?”

  “I do not know that he has a great command over his feelings. He has great command externally.”

  Brady asked, “Your attention had been drawn to Mr. Key’s maneuvers about that house?”

  “Yes,” McBlair answered. “For twelve months.”

  The mayor of Washington was the next witness. “There was a very brief examination [of Sickles] at the jail. His manner was composed under the circumstances.” He did not see any “exhibition of grief.”

  The judge concluded the day by seeking the jury’s thoughts on whether to meet the next day, Good Friday.

  We have a solemn duty to perform, said one juror.

  “The better the day, the better the deed,” Graham quipped.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  “The Case Drawing to a Close”

  * * *

  “This disgusting, demoralizing farce is still continued in Washington.”

  —The Wooster Republican

  DAY SEVENTEEN—Good Friday, April 22, 1859