Room 1219: Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood

by Greg Merritt

  —“MICROSCOPE’S EVIDENCE MAY DETERMINE ARBUCKLE’S FATE,”

  EVENING INDEPENDENT (MASSILLON, OHIO),

  OCTOBER 31, 1921, FRONT PAGE

  Fingerprints were first admitted in an English criminal case in 1902. The first comprehensive forensic hair study was published in France in 1910. An antibody test for typing dried blood was developed in 1915. By the autumn of 1921, Edward O. Heinrich was a pioneer in such matters. Though most of his reputation as “the Wizard of Berkeley” or “America’s Sherlock Holmes” was earned afterward, he was, at the time of Rappe’s death, America’s foremost forensic scientist. Heinrich spent his teen years working in a pharmacy, remarking later that “a drugstore is a veritable laboratory in behavioristic psychology. I learned what people do in secret.” After obtaining a chemistry degree, he consulted on criminal investigations, and in 1916 he was appointed chief of police of Alameda, California. In 1919 he accepted a post as a criminal expert to the city of San Francisco (and another as a chemistry professor at Berkeley). In his lab in Oakland, he studied and practiced to gain expertise in all fields of criminal science. Just before the Arbuckle case, he investigated the August 2 kidnapping and murder of a priest and helped to prove the guilt of the man who found the body (and wanted the reward money) by connecting him, via microscopic details, to beach sand and a tent cord on or near the corpse. It remains a landmark forensics case.

  Heinrich strove to find forensic evidence in the Arbuckle case. However, he did not enter room 1219 until September 16, eleven days after the Labor Day party and after a maid had cleaned it. Visiting the room on three occasions, he compared hairs found there with those from Rappe’s head; he searched for fiber filaments that matched her clothing; he had 1219’s doors taken to his laboratory. America’s Sherlock Holmes peered through his microscope lens, searching for a clue invisible to the naked eye, a key to unlock the mystery of what happened on Labor Day at the Hotel St. Francis.

  On November 12, two days before jury selection began, Arbuckle moved into what would be his home for the duration of the trial: the Palace Hotel, where Virginia Rappe had stayed nearly ten weeks earlier. “I’m certainly glad my trial starts Monday morning,” he said. “You may think it’s funny that I’m so eager to go before a judge and jury and take a chance of lounging in the penitentiary for ten years. But if you’d gone through what I have—the loss of friends, the shame, the stories, the rumors about me, the attitude of the American public, the sermons of the ministers, to say nothing of the loss of money—you’d be glad to get it over with, too.”

  Though the Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women’s right to vote nationwide, was ratified in 1920, women had served on juries in California since October 1911. The practice was repeatedly challenged until codified in California law in April 1917.* In November 1921 women on juries remained controversial. Traditionalists balked at members of “the fairer sex” being taken from their household duties to hear salacious testimony, being sequestered with male strangers, and passing judgment on men. Women were deemed by many men to be too emotional and irrational to decide matters of life, death, and imprisonment.

  And so the possible inclusion of women on the Arbuckle jury made nationwide news. When the pool of sixty-six potential jurors included thirteen females, headlines appeared such as WOMEN MAY TRY ARBUCKLE. Still, a (male) journalist with the San Francisco Examiner predicted, “When the jury finally is completed, there will be no women let upon it.” He was wrong. Over four days, a jury of seven men and five women was selected, along with one male alternate. While the male occupations varied from confectioner to explosives expert, four of the women were listed as “wives” and the fifth was a “spinster” (unmarried). Before opening statements, one of the male jurors admitted to having formed an opinion that Arbuckle was innocent. After he was excused, the alternate was seated in the jury box. (A new alternate was selected.) That twelfth juror and one of the five women were destined to have a profound impact on the life of Roscoe Arbuckle.

  On November 18 the trial opened with an overly erudite statement by Assistant DA Leo Friedman (who replaced Isadore Golden). The defense chose to delay its opening statement until after the prosecution presented its case. First up for the state were Drs. Shelby Strange and William Ophüls, who discussed the two autopsies. The defense scored points by getting Strange to admit Rappe’s bruises may have been caused after death and by getting Ophüls to say a bladder could rupture spontaneously. Another witness introduced architectural drawings of the hotel rooms.

  On the second day, after nurse Grace Halston testified, defense counsel McNab asked Dr. Arthur Beardslee, “Did Mrs. Delmont give you what was purported to be the history of the case? What was the history she gave you?”

  District Attorney Brady objected, and Judge Harold Louderback sustained the motion.

  McNab pressed on: “Did Mrs. Delmont or Miss Rappe intimate to you that Mr. Arbuckle was responsible for her condition?”

  “Objection!”

  “Sustained.”

  Assistant DA Milton U’Ren labeled the questions “poison.” There followed a verbal battle between the prosecution and defense. The defense was trying to insert comments by Rappe into evidence; Delmont had supposedly heard her make a statement to the hotel detective that they said absolved Arbuckle. Further, Delmont supposedly told Dr. Beardslee that Arbuckle attacked Rappe, only to have Rappe contradict her. The state called all of this hearsay.

  Judge Harold Louderback was forty, a native of San Francisco, a graduate of Harvard Law, an army captain during the war. He was still in his initial year as a Superior Court judge when he was assigned the biggest celebrity criminal trial in American history. He repeatedly sustained the prosecution’s objections regarding Rappe’s alleged statements.

  On the third day, the state called Dr. H. Edward Castle, who had briefly attended Rappe at Wakefield sanitarium, and the facility’s head, Dr. W. Francis Wakefield. Both testified that Rappe was bruised before her death. Then came Zey Prevost and Alice Blake, the state’s star witnesses and reluctant celebrities. After the preliminary hearing, they had been placed in protective custody in the house of a DA clerk’s mother. While Blake’s wealthy family eventually won her release, Prevost had spent the last seven weeks under a sort of house arrest in someone else’s house. The defense made much of this, as in this retort from McNab to the prosecution: “I do not know what she was doing when she was in your private prison.”

  Prevost recounted how Rappe entered 1219 and “Mr. Arbuckle followed her and closed the door.” According to the witness, a half hour later Maude Delmont kicked at that door several times and demanded, “Open the door. I want to speak to Virginia.” Prevost stated that a red-faced Arbuckle opened the door, fumbling with his robe. He said nothing as he strolled into 1220. When Delmont and Prevost entered 1219, they found Rappe on the bed, fully clothed, moaning and writhing.

  “Did she say anything at this time?” Assistant DA Friedman asked.

  “Yes,” Prevost replied, “she said ‘I’m dying. I am going to die.’ She then began tearing at her waist.”

  Prevost recounted that she and Delmont removed Rappe’s clothing for a cold bath, after which Fred Fishback, who had just returned to the hotel suite after scouting his film location, carried Rappe back to the bed.

  “After the bath, did she say anything?” Friedman asked.

  “Yes, she said, ‘He hurt me.’”

  Thus the crucial statement that the prosecution had labored over during preliminaries had collapsed into two parts. “I’m dying” was no longer paired with “He hurt me,” and the latter could be applied to Fish-back carrying Rappe.

  “Did the defendant say anything?” asked Friedman.

  “Yes, he said, ‘Aw, shut up. I’ll throw her out the window if she doesn’t stop yelling.’” Prevost also recounted Arbuckle applying ice to Rappe’s “abdominal region” and saying, “That will make her come to.”

  In cross-examination, McNab highlighted the inconsi
stencies of Pre-vost’s varying recollections, and he suggested that Brady had pressured Prevost to sign a statement with the words “He killed me.”

  Blake was a supporting player after Prevost’s starring role, testifying only briefly before she was excused until the state could produce a suppressed statement she’d made to a detective.

  After Kate Hardebeck testified to Rappe’s good health, the state called Jesse Norgaard, a sixty-two-year-old security guard who’d worked at Henry Lehrman’s studio when Arbuckle shot The Hayseed and The Garage there. He claimed that in August 1919, when he returned to the studio office to get his hat, Arbuckle asked him for the key to Rappe’s dressing room, and when he refused, Arbuckle said it was for a joke and offered “a big roll of money and said he would trade it for the key.” Upon hearing Norgaard state this, Arbuckle laughed so loudly the bailiff called for order.

  When Blake returned to the stand the next day, her statement to a detective was introduced: Rappe said only “I’m dying” and not, as Blake remembered on the stand the day before, “I’m dying. He hurt me.”

  In cross-examination, McNab pounced. “Was not your memory of the incidents of the party clearer at that time than it is now?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Blake

  McNab replied, “That’s all.”

  Al Semnacher told of seeing Rappe pained, tearing at her clothes and claiming she was dying. He said the morning after Labor Day everyone merely thought Rappe had been drunk, and Arbuckle told the ice story. Again, in regards to the icing, Semnacher wrote but did not speak “snatch.” Under cross-examination, he admitted to having seen Rappe tearing off her clothes “two or three times” when drinking on previous occasions.

  After Rappe’s personal trainer demonstrated the medicine ball exercises she did, illustrating her good health, the state brought back its most effective witness from the preliminary hearing: hotel maid Josephine Keza. She was much less effective this time, perhaps because the defense was better prepared. She theatrically retold her tale of a woman screaming behind the closed door to 1219 and saying “No, no, oh my God!” followed by a man commanding, “Shut up!” But Keza had supposedly been in and out of the suite throughout Labor Day, sometimes hiding in closets, other times listening at keyholes, and under cross-examination specifics melted into one debauched party. “Oh, what an afternoon!” she exclaimed to laughter, playing to the audience. The remark was stricken from the record. By her account, Rappe was, improbably, screaming off and on for two hours, and multiple men had told Rappe to shut up.*

  The state saved its only direct evidence for its dramatic conclusion. For Edward O. Heinrich’s presentation, the door leading from 1219 to the hallway was brought into the courtroom. Heinrich explained that fingerprints on it belonged to Arbuckle and Rappe, aligned in a manner that indicated the former had pressed the latter’s hand against the door, as if she was trying to leave and he prevented her exit. The state rested its case.

  As at the preliminary hearing, one witness was conspicuously absent from the state’s roster: Bambina Maude Delmont, or, as the press repeatedly called her, somewhat sinisterly, “the avenger.” In fact, Delmont was subpoenaed for the trial, and she attended as a spectator and dined with a state witness. Later, when the state called rebuttal witnesses, a front-page headline would scream, “AVENGER” MAY TESTIFY AGAINST ARBUCKLE, and the accompanying story would say that she “hovered behind the closing scenes of the Arbuckle trial today, the one remaining mysterious figure of the case.”

  The avenger was destined to remain mysterious, but the reason is no mystery. The defense had spent much of its resources investigating her past, and in addition to the Earl Lynn extortion charge, they supposedly uncovered numerous instances of fraud, unpaid debts, and petty crimes. The defense was prepared to present Delmont as a con artist whose latest and greatest victim was Roscoe Arbuckle. Brady was surely wary of putting her on the stand before a hungry defense team eager to dredge up her past, especially after her poor performance at the coroner’s inquest, but his decision was made easy when her past intruded on her present.

  An investigation had begun in late September in Madera, California, and on the first day of testimony in the Arbuckle trial, a formal complaint was filed. Brady delayed the matter in case he needed Delmont to take the stand, though the chances of that had shrunk from slim to infinitesimal. On December 2, just after the Arbuckle trial went to the jury, Delmont would be arrested in San Francisco, charged with bigamy. After separating from John Hopper in 1914, she had never finalized their divorce before marrying Cassius Woods seven years later.* When she pleaded guilty to bigamy on December 10 and was sentenced to one year’s probation, it was front-page news throughout the country. Upon her arrest, she gave her name as “Mrs. Bambina Maude Delmont Hopper.” Occupation: “actress.”

  Much of the press coverage of the trial focused on Arbuckle’s reaction to testimony. The Los Angeles Times repeatedly broke up the most dramatic parts of Friedman’s opening statement to cut to the defendant’s nervous tics:

  “Arbuckle dug into his pocket, extracted a gold pencil and began to play with it, his eyes gazing downward.”

  “Arbuckle took an open letter from his pocket and began to scribble on it.”

  “Arbuckle turned the envelope over and scribbled some more.”

  “Arbuckle’s eyes dropped and he ceased scribbling.”

  “Arbuckle wrinkled his brow and squinted at Friedman.”

  “Arbuckle was busily engaged tearing paper into tiny bits.”

  Often he was said to look disinterested, but when Prevost spoke of his applying ice to Rappe, he seemed to be purposefully distracting himself and perhaps other observers: “Arbuckle balanced his chair on two legs, leaned over and took a thumb tack from The Times’ [Los Angeles Times’] section of the press table…. Arbuckle stuck his thumb with the tack, winced, and then the noon recess was declared.”

  If every mannerism of Arbuckle was news, so was every item of clothing worn by Minta Durfee. She and her mother sat behind the defendant, sometimes joined by his brother Arthur, and the daily outfit of the estranged-yet-loyal wife demanded an exorbitant amount of news ink. On the second day of state testimony, the San Francisco Examiner noted, “There was but one feature of importance to yesterday’s proceedings. Mrs. Minta Durfee Arbuckle wore her black velvet hat.” Prevost and Blake were also covered as if models at a fashion show.

  Female fashion was featured so prominently in newspapers because women were so enthralled by the case. In San Francisco, the trial was the hottest ticket (actually, a blue card) in town, and it was free. One report noted:

  Society women continue to make up the majority of spectators as the trial progresses. Seats are at a premium, and the little blue cards bearing the magic words of admission to the “scandal theater,” are highly prized and sought after. The social register is not alone in seeking entrance, for there is a good sprinkling of everyday women. “I saw Fatty today,” seems to be as much the topic of the drawing room as in the backyard gossip.

  The trial was a chance for a Pacific Heights patrician as well as an Alameda housewife to learn all she wanted to know (and more than the newspapers could print) about Jazz Age coed booze parties and Hollywood’s culture of excess.

  One trial spectator specialized in the seamy side. Gouverneur Morris, the author of numerous crime stories and novels,* sat behind Arbuckle, near the two Durfees. The pulp writer was on assignment for the movie fan magazine Screenland, for which he would write an article sympathetic to Arbuckle that appeared in the November 1921 issue. Demonstrating how sensational even fan magazines got in the wake of the Arbuckle arrest, the next issue of Screenland asked on its cover, IS VIRGINIA RAPPE STILL ALIVE? Their answer was: sort of, as Rappe reportedly appeared “in a materialized form” at a seance and proclaimed Arbuckle’s innocence.

  “The state has miserably failed to prove its case,” Gavin McNab pronounced in his opening statement. Judge Louderback struck the assertion from the record a
nd asked him to merely state what he intended to prove. Roscoe Arbuckle’s innocence, McNab told the jury in many more words.

  The defense’s first witness was George Glennon, formerly the house detective at the St. Francis, to whom Rappe had supposedly made a statement absolving Arbuckle of guilt. The state’s objection called the statement hearsay. The judge agreed, and Glennon was excused. (The defense tried and failed again another day to get Glennon on the record.) An elderly St. Francis maid, Kate Brennan, testified that she had dusted and thoroughly polished the door of room 1219 before Heinrich checked it for fingerprints.* A guest in 1218 stated that she was in her room all Labor Day and heard no screaming or moaning.

  A local film producer, R. C. Harper, claimed to have been lurking in the hallway outside the twelfth-floor suite for thirty-five minutes starting at two thirty or two forty-five, during which time he heard no screaming and never saw Josephine Keza. According to his implausible story, he’d come with a business proposal for Arbuckle, a man he didn’t know, only to grow bashful at the threshold and decide to linger in the hall in the hopes of ambushing the movie star instead—a plan he discarded after half an hour, all conveniently during the period most crucial to the defense’s case. His testimony smacks of someone on the outskirts of the film industry attempting to ingratiate himself with those on the inside. In his closing argument, Friedman would ask of Harper, “Is it not an insult to one’s intelligence to ask us to swallow a story like this?”

  The next morning, by court order, the jury, judge, attorneys, and defendant briefly toured the three rooms in question on the top floor of the Hotel St. Francis. As closely as possible, the furniture and furnishings had been arranged to appear as they were on Labor Day. Arbuckle made no comment and was said to appear “thoughtful” as he strode through the interconnected rooms.