by Brad Ricca
On January 11, Grace appeared before a panel that consisted of the governor, the chancellor, and the six lay judges of the court of appeals. Grace wasn’t the only one fighting for Antoinette. A few states over, the Cincinnati Enquirer had gathered two hundred thousand signatures in her favor from Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh after an incendiary editorial. Various counts and countesses from the Italian consulate were also present. And an anonymous letter had been sent to the county saying the jail would be blown to smithereens by dynamite if Antoinette was not released. Another letter said that if the hangman left his Newark home for Hackensack on the day of Antoinette’s execution, he would be killed before his arrival. The Italians didn’t mess around. But it was only when Grace showed the court the gun that they ordered an immediate thirty-day reprieve for Antoinette Tolla.
Grace was elated. At the same time, she knew that she still had lots of work to do. She now had to disprove that Antoinette Tolla had shot Sonta in the back of the head in cold blood, as had been initially stated in the case. Grace went straightaways from the capitol to the jail. As she turned the corner with an interpreter, Grace saw Antoinette Tolla in person for the very first time in her life.
When Grace told Antoinette Tolla the unbelievable news, it was several minutes before the pretty woman with long black hair regained enough composure to hear the particulars. Then, as considerately as possible, Grace urged her to tell the details of her story. Grace was sure her translator was better than the court-appointed one.
“Sonta’s overtures toward me began some five months before the tragedy,” Antoinette explained. “I had been making daily trips along the railroad tracks just south of town, collecting bits of wood and half-burned coal for use as fuel. We were too poor to get it in the regular way. Sonta began following me there every day, and annoying me with persistent advances. Finally, I denounced him angrily and threatened to tell my husband. Sonta only laughed at this, and when I stopped going to the tracks to avoid him, he began coming to my home and annoying me even in the presence of my husband. My husband became bitterly resentful of these visits, but he was afraid of the influential Sonta and his vengeance, and dared not oppose him too openly.
“On the afternoon of March 4, after my husband flounced out in anger leaving us alone, Sonta again attempted to force himself upon me, I quarreled violently with him, and it was then that he threatened my life. He had been drinking and was in a reckless mood. Taking a revolver from his pocket, he waved it before me and told me he would kill me, my husband Tolla, his wife, or all of us, but that he was determined to have his way, and that I could not escape him. I was badly frightened. I tried to reason with him but he would not listen. Then, still holding the pistol in his right hand, Sonta removed a large roll of bills from his pocket with the other, and offered me a choice. Either I could accept the money and submit to him, he said, or he would kill me, do as he wished, and then shoot himself, too.” Grace winced. The translator for the first trial had gotten much of this wrong.
“At that moment, Sonta’s six-year-old son Rocco, who had been playing in the street, appeared at the door. He became frightened when Sonta turned on him, reproving him in a loud voice, and the boy began to cry. I then fled into the kitchen, where I secured my pistol, and placed it in the pocket of my apron. At the first opportunity, I ran to the outside door, where I met my husband coming in. I continued to Sonta’s home, where I remained about a half-hour pleading with Sonta’s wife and his oldest daughter, Annie, to do something to help me.
“When I returned to my own home, Sonta was sitting in the rocker, smoking his pipe. My husband had fallen asleep in the bedroom, he reached out and drew me to him roughly. His face was flushed, there was a strange, fixed look in his eyes.
“I struggled to free myself. Terrified, and scarcely realizing what I was doing, I grasped the pistol in my apron pocket and fired twice. Both shots struck Sonta in the head, one penetrating the skull near the right temple.”
As Grace prepared to leave, Antoinette’s eyes filled with tears again, and she clung to Grace’s hands as if she would never let go. Then, turning to the interpreter, Antoinette laughingly asked him to tell Grace that she reminded her of a bunch of black grapes. In Italy, Antoinette explained, black grapes meant good fortune. Seeing Antoinette up close, Grace noticed that she had a scar on her forehead and one under her lower lip.
The next day, Grace spent some time investigating the records of the autopsy surgeon in the coroner’s office. When she finally found the actual report, it showed that Sonta had four superficial wounds, two where a bullet had entered the right temple, gone through the brain, and exited under the left jaw. Here was Grace’s proof that the first and fatal bullet had not been fired at Sonta from the back. She grabbed the report and stuffed it in her bag.
Grace was again not alone. The Susan B. Anthony Club of Cincinnati appealed to President Roosevelt himself to pardon Antoinette. His response was that “he has no authority to interfere in this case, and he will not do so.” At a time when Italians all across the United States began to mobilize their newfound political power, an Italian priest, Father Pozzi, wondered, “has America become the woman-killing country?” Governor Stokes remained immobile. “There is no evidence of any kind to show that Sonta ever attempted to assault the woman,” he stated. A bullet in the back was never self-defense. It was murder. Grace had to change the minds of Stokes and those who shared his opinion.
On February 9, when Antoinette’s reprieve was almost at an end, Grace was granted another hearing before the court of pardons in Trenton. Grace submitted all the new affidavits she had collected. Most important was the doctor’s report on the autopsy. After her presentation in the big courtroom in the State Building, Grace retired to the corridor outside the chamber. She paced nervously up and down for almost an hour, awaiting the court’s fateful decision.
When Grace was summoned back into the chamber, the court had decided to give her a choice. They would, right then and there, agree to commute Mrs. Tolla’s death sentence to life imprisonment—which was all they really had the authority to do—or they would grant an additional reprieve of thirty days to give Grace an opportunity to petition before the court of errors and appeals for a new trial altogether. The governor and his board had ruled that Grace had introduced sufficient new evidence to justify a retrial, but they did not have the authority to grant one. They were asking the new lawyer to make a very difficult choice.
And she had to make it immediately.
If Grace accepted Antoinette’s sentence of life imprisonment, she would be condemning her young client to a penalty tragically severe for a woman who had acted in defense of her own life and honor. But if Grace sought a new trial and failed to secure one, there would be no more reprieves, and Antoinette would die. It was a gamble with the highest of stakes. Dean Ashley had not covered this in law school.
Grace asked for a short recess. When it was granted, she returned to the corridor. Antoinette’s husband, Giovanni Tolla, was waiting there anxiously and misinterpreted Grace’s grave attitude to mean the worst of outcomes. He pleaded with Grace to ask the court that he be allowed to die in his wife’s place.
After reassuring him that such a sacrifice would not be required, Grace walked down the hall to the office of the attorney general, Robert McCarter. She did not know the older attorney, but she was hoping that he might be able to give her the kind of advice that Dean Ashley used to. McArthur beckoned her into his office, small but filled with large books. He was cordial but said that her problem was an individual responsibility. He did not feel free to interfere. Grace felt the sting of his words as he shut his door. But she recognized their truth.
Grace returned to the pardon board and accepted the thirty-day reprieve to try for a new trial. She prayed she had made the right decision. Grace was only licensed to practice law in New York, so she hired a local Newark attorney named Samuel Kalisch to aid in the presentation of the case before the court of errors and appeals. Th
at night, Grace again went back to the jail to tell Antoinette Tolla that her agony was not yet over.
The day before, an immigrant named Jerry Rosa was hanged in the jail yard. A few hours before his scheduled execution, the terrified man had somehow eluded his guard and barricaded himself in a closet. No threat or inducement could get him out, and it had finally been necessary to break through the wall and spray a powerful hose on him until he was exhausted. They pulled him out of the closet, half-conscious and soaked to the bone. When his time finally arrived, Rosa absentmindedly marched to his death, less than a hundred feet from Antoinette’s cell window.
* * *
With three days left to Antoinette’s reprieve, there was still no decision from the Supreme Court. Grace had presented her case weeks before and grew so uneasy that she called on each of the judges separately to remind them. This was not something she had learned at NYU, but she had run out of options. She was thinking of unreported guns and poorly translated testimony. Grace begged them to render a prompt decision.
Grace was also having difficulty even seeing Antoinette Tolla. Since her initial lawyer was court-appointed, the sheriff of the jail didn’t officially recognize Grace as Antoinette’s attorney. This was the stupidest thing Grace had ever heard.
On the penultimate day of the reprieve, the court ruled that sufficient new evidence had been presented to warrant a new trial for Antoinette Tolla. But in the same breath, it declared that it had no jurisdiction to reopen the case at this late date. Grace was angry, but would not give up. The March term of the court of pardons was to begin its session the following day. Grace was determined to be heard in that session, for that would be the final day of Antoinette’s reprieve. Grace also proceeded to get out a writ of error for the United States Supreme Court, as a final, wild gesture to stay the hanging. The writ required Antoinette’s signature, so Grace made the trip once more to the jail. Antoinette signed her name numbly, and Grace left again.
An East Coast snowstorm was falling as Grace boarded a late train to return to Trenton. Grace sat down, exhausted. As she looked around the train, she was surprised to see Governor Stokes sitting across the aisle, reading an evening newspaper. Grace stared at him to make sure she wasn’t seeing things as the train shook. When the train stopped, he came toward Grace with a smile.
“Are you still working to save Mrs. Tolla?” he asked.
“I would not give up as long as there was hope,” Grace responded.
The following afternoon, Grace was granted a ten-minute hearing before the governor and his board. She knew it was her—and her client’s—very last chance. Grace told them that this time she had come not for mercy, but for justice. The Supreme Court had ruled that the evidence justified a new trial, but the Court was powerless to grant it. Grace quoted the opinion of one of the justices:
Her (Mrs. Tolla’s) state of mind on that occasion was one evincing deliberation and premeditation: but had the excluded testimony (as to antecedent sexual assaults and indignities) been admitted, the verdict upon this vital point might have been different, A prolonged and persistent course of efforts to debauch a woman have a different effect on her mind than a single solicitation. A strong element of premeditation was shown in the purchase of the pistol. I cannot agree, however, that if the pistol was not used in self-defense it may not have been purchased with that object, and if it was, the strong element of premeditation drops out of the case or, at least, is rendered doubtful.
Grace concluded her plea with the contention that, since the courts of law declared themselves powerless to right the wrong done to this woman, it was the duty of the court of pardons to pass on the evidence as a trial court and jury and consider a full pardon based on its contents.
This was a bold interpretation of the law. It was also Grace’s last-ditch effort. She hoped that her legal reasoning was more persuasive than the lateness of the moment. Her ten minutes were up.
When Grace was recalled to the room, it was to hear that the governor, after a vote of six to two by the board, had commuted Antoinette Tolla’s death sentence to seven-and-a-half years’ imprisonment. It was the only time in the history of the state of New Jersey that the court of pardons had commuted a death sentence. Allowing for the time Antoinette had already spent in jail, and with good behavior, her actual term might be about five years.
When Grace, the woman in black, finally told Antoinette, she screamed with happiness, promising that she would devote her time in jail to getting home to her little family.
As Grace left the jail, she felt enormous satisfaction. Somehow, it had all worked out—not exactly as she wished, but better than she had feared. This whole experience had been one surprise after another. At times, the law had almost totally failed her; it was only by applying creative hard work to a small window of luck that Grace had managed to save Antoinette’s life. This was astonishing to Grace. Facts were important—the discovery of the gun had saved Antoinette’s life—but it was quick thinking and imagination that had brought about the happy resolution. Grace took note of that. As she passed the courtyard on her way out, she saw the wooden gallows, high and empty, towering in the night sky.
4
The Heatherbloom Girl
February 1917
The New York City detectives sat Maria Cocchi down right away. The little boy, released from the clutches of his woolen coat, sat quietly next to her, his eyes staring at the men. Mrs. Cocchi spoke quickly, in Italian. Her hair was all different places at once. Once she calmed down, she told the detectives about her husband’s actions in the hours before his disappearance.
“He came in about 12:20,” Maria said. “He wanted his lunch as soon as possible. He seemed nervous and irritable, but I thought little of it.” The Cocchis lived not in the motorcycle shop but in a small apartment nearby, at 75 Manhattan.
“He has been working hard of late and is very nervous, anyway,” Maria said. The little boy stared as the detectives took notes. The other bundle in Maria’s arms moved; it was a newborn girl. Maria slipped her baby back under the folds of her coat and continued.
“He ate without saying anything,” she continued rapidly, “and then got up and played with the baby awhile. Then he asked me for $10, saying he wanted to pay the electric light bill. I gave it to him, and he said ‘goodbye’ and left. He did not pay the light bill sometimes,” his wife admitted. But he was “an expert mechanic who always made money.” And “business was good.”
“I thought he would go right to the shop, but about half an hour later a man called up and said the shop was locked and he wanted his motorcycle. I called up all the hospitals in the neighborhood and all of our friends trying to find Alfred, but no one had seen him.” The detectives were writing everything down.
“I can take care of my babies,” Maria kept saying, “I will take care of my babies. I can take care for myself.”
The detectives told Maria Cocchi how they had questioned her husband and searched his shop just before noon on Thursday.
“That’s funny,” Mrs. Cocchi said. “My husband had made no mention of this.”
After she finished speaking, the detectives went down to the motorcycle shop again. It was padlocked, so they took a pair of pincers and twisted the steel until it bent into ribbons. People gathered outside and watched as Lagarenne and McGee walked in slowly. They went over everything for a second time. There was very little that anyone from the street could see, other than the big black machines through the glass. It was all the same grimy New York building, for the most part. The detectives left after a short time. They took a few papers they found, but that was all.
The detectives started knocking on doors in the neighborhood again. The newspapermen who had started to show up began to do the same. From neighbors, customers, and friends, the papers began to cobble together a profile of Alfredo Cocchi, the man already cleared by the police but now queerly missing. They started filling him out with numbers: he was thirty-five years old, about five foot seven in h
eight, and weighed 135 pounds. Cocchi did not wear a beard, and he had pale skin, which was unusual for an Italian. When he disappeared, he was wearing a green cap, a dark brown sweater, and a gray silk shirt. He wore black shoes and socks. He was now classified, like Ruth, as a missing person.
On the sly, neighborhood friends of Cocchi also told the detectives what everyone was thinking. Cocchi was terrified when the police came to his door on Wednesday. Not because he was guilty of anything having to do with some Harlem girl, but because of his Italian heritage. It seemed like everyone blamed the hot-blooded Italians for everything these days, especially the police. Especially after Petrosino. Cocchi’s disappearance was nothing sinister, his friends and neighbors said. He was just scared. He had probably gone home to his family in Italy. They had been urging him to join the army anyway. The detectives had found a letter to this effect among Cocchi’s things. Everything else they saw in the store confirmed Mrs. Cocchi’s claim that her husband had left quickly. His shop overalls were in the middle of the floor. A small bench was overturned. A back door was unlocked.
When a reporter asked Lagarenne about Mrs. Cocchi, he swiftly dismissed the thought of her involvement. “She knows very little of his business,” he said. He explained that she was probably just jealous and mad that her husband had left home. They had been hearing rumors that she kept him on a short leash.
The detectives checked out two other motorcycle shops that Cocchi had once owned, just in case, one in the Bronx and one in New Jersey. Meanwhile, Fourth Branch detectives visited Harlem pawnshops looking for Ruth’s gold wristwatch and her high school graduation ring. According to Henry Cruger, the ring had her initials inlaid in blue enamel on a smooth silver band.
