Compulsion

by Meyer Levin

  “I was then taken by the hand by the Feldscher brothers and taken to a psychopathic laboratory, and there I received quite a liberal education in mental diseases, and particularly what certain doctors did not know about them.”

  The defence lawyers were sitting back, smiling.

  “The three wise men from the East, who came on to tell Your Honour about these little babes, wanted to make the picture a little more perfect, and one of them was sacrilegious enough to say this pervert, this murderer, this kidnapper, thought that he was the Christ Child and that he thought that his mother was the Madonna.

  “Why, this young pervert has proclaimed since he was eleven years of age that there is no God!” He turned to Judd. “I wonder now whether you think there is a God or not!

  “I wonder whether you think it is pure accident, with your Nietzschean philosophy, that you dropped your glasses, or whether it was an act of Divine Providence to visit upon your miserable carcasses the wrath of God in the enforcement of the laws of the state of Illinois.”

  Then, turning back to the bench: “Well, if Your Honour please, after the Feldschers had completed my education in the psychopathic laboratories, then my good friend Jonathan Wilk took me on a Chautauqua trip with him, visiting social settlements such as the Hull House, to expound his peculiar philosophy of life, and we would meet with communists and anarchists, and Jonathan would regale them with his philosophy of the law, which means there ought not to be any law and there ought not to be any enforcement of the law.

  “I don’t know whether the fact that he had a couple of rich clients who were dangerously close to the gallows prompted that trip or not.

  “If Your Honour please, when I occupied the position Your Honour graces, I had an unfortunate man come before me. I don’t know whether his pineal gland was calcified or ossified. I don’t know whether he had clubfoot or not, and I did not inspect his mouth to find out whether he had a couple of baby teeth.”

  He screamed, “I don’t know whether Thomas Fitzgerald developed sexually at fourteen or sixteen!

  “I do know, and knew then, that under the law he had committed a dastardly crime; he had taken a little five-year-old girl, a daughter of the poor, and assaulted her and murdered her. And Mr. Wilk says that in carrying out my duty to sentence him to death I was bloodthirsty!

  “The law says in extreme cases death shall be the penalty. When Mr. Wilk served in the legislature he introduced a bill to abolish capital punishment. It was defeated. If I were in the legislature I might vote either way on such a bill. I don’t know. But as a judge, I have no right to set aside the law. I have no right to defeat the will of the people, as expressed by the legislature of Illinois. I have no right to be a judicial anarchist, even if Jonathan Wilk is an anarchist advocate.

  “He says that hanging does not stop murder. I think he is mistaken. From the time Thomas Fitzgerald expiated his crime upon the gallows, I have not heard of any little tot in Chicago who met a like fate to that which Janet Wilkinson met.

  “He says that hanging does not stop murder. I will direct your attention to the year 1920 when we stopped a wave of lawlessness. Four judges for two months tried nothing but murder cases. In that brief period fifteen men were sentenced to death in the criminal court of Cook County.

  “As a result of that, murder fell fifty-one per cent in Cook County during the year 1920.

  “You have heard a lot about England. Well, I never had any liking for her laws as they applied to my ancestors and people in an adjoining isle, but I have learned to have a wholesome respect for the manner in which they enforce the laws of England.

  “There, murder is murder; it is not a fantasy. Justice is handed out swiftly and surely, and as a result there are less murders in the entire kingdom of Great Britain yearly than there are in the city of Chicago!”

  He stared at the boys as a man who did his duty even if the sight of the subjects made him sick.

  “Call them babes? Call them children?” Horn shrieked. “Why, from the evidence in this case they are as much entitled to mercy at the hands of Your Honour as two mad dogs are entitled.

  “They are no good to themselves. The only purpose that they use themselves for is to debase themselves. They are a disgrace to their honoured families and they are a menace to this country.

  “The only useful thing that remains for them now in life is to go out of this life and go out of it as quickly as possible under the law!”

  There came a woman’s high, hysterical wail, smothered into a sob. I looked; it wasn’t Myra. She sat tense, utterly white, her lips in-drawn.

  “I think it is about time we get back into the criminal court, and realize we are here trying the murder case of the age, a case the very details of which not only astonish but fill you with horror.

  “Their wealth, in my judgment, has not anything to do with this, except it permits a defence here seldom given to a man in the criminal court. Take away the millions of the Steiners and Strauses, and Jonathan Wilk’s tongue is as silent as the tomb of Julius Caesar.

  “Take away their millions, and the wise men from the East would not be here, to tell you about fantasies and teddy bears and bold, bad boys who have their pictures taken in cowboy uniforms. Why, one by one, each of their doctors discarded the silly bosh that the preceding doctor had used, and finally that grand old man of the defence, Jonathan Wilk, seeing how absolutely absurd it all was, discarded all their testimony, and substituted as a defence in this case his peculiar philosophy of life.

  “All right, let’s see about that philosophy.

  “What are we trying here, if Your Honour please – a murder as the result of a drunken brawl, a murder committed in hot blood to avenge some injury, either real or fancied?” He went a tone higher. “A murder committed by some young gamin of the streets whose father was a drunkard and his mother loose? Who was denied every opportunity, brought up in the slums, never had a decent example set before him?

  “No!

  “But a murder committed by two super-intellects coming from the homes of the most respected families in Chicago. They had the power of choice, and they deliberately chose to adopt the wrong philosophy, Wilk’s philosophy! They chose to make their conduct correspond with it!

  “These two defendants were perverts, Straus the victim and Steiner the aggressor, and they quarrelled.

  “They had entered into a compact so that these unnatural crimes might continue. And Dr. Allwin calls that a childish compact. If Dr. Allwin is not ashamed of himself, he ought to be. My God, I was a grown man before I knew of such depravity!”

  Aghast, he shrieked, “They talk about what lawyers will do for money, but my God, for a doctor to go on the witness stand and under oath characterize an unnatural agreement between these two perverts as a childish compact!

  “Mitigation! Mitigation!” He backed away from it. “I have heard so many big words and foreign words in this case that I sometimes thought that perhaps we were letting error creep into the record, so many strange, foreign words were being used here, and the Constitution provides that these trials must be conducted in the English language; I do not know, maybe I have got aggravation and mitigation mixed up.”

  Striding to his table, Horn seized his notes. “I have wondered, when I heard these doctors say that you could not make an adequate examination in less than twenty or thirty days, whether the fact that they were working for two hundred and fifty dollars a day did not enter into the matter.”

  And it was not because he suspected the boys might be insane that he had called in State alienists. “I knew how much money they had for some kind of fancy insanity defence. And that is why I sent for the best alienist in the city of Chicago that very first day.”

  What better opportunity, in God’s world, could there have been for an examination! “These two smart alecks were boasting of their depravity before they had been advised to invent fantasies.

  “I am not the physician that the younger Feldscher is, nor the philosopher t
hat the senior counsel is, but I think that if I talk to a man for four hours consecutively, and he is insane, I am going to have a pretty good suspicion of it.

  “I have sometimes thought we were dreaming here, when the learned doctors got on the stand, who had been employed to say just how crazy these two fellows were. ‘Just make them crazy enough so they won’t hang, and don’t make them crazy enough to make it necessary to put this up to twelve men, because twelve men are not going to be fooled by your twaddle. Just make them insane enough so that it will make a mitigating circumstance that we can submit to the court!’” Knowing he had touched them there, Horn grinned at the defence table.

  “Why, one of the defence alienists had talked of Judd’s ornithological writings. I asked him, ‘Did you read them?’ ‘No.’ ‘You were employed to examine his mind, were you not?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘What did you do?’ ‘I examined his urine.’”

  The laughter came.

  Horn picked up, now, his copy of the thick Storrs-Allwin report. “In the discharge of my duty, and in an effort to protect the people of Cook County, I have to do a lot of disagreeable things, so I decided I would read this report.

  “It has grown to be quite a famous report.” He held it gingerly. “If they were to be discharged today, through some technicality in the law, their present so-called mental disturbances would all disappear very rapidly. If the glasses had never been found, if the state’s attorney had not fastened the crime upon these defendants, Judah Steiner, Junior, would be over in Paris or some other of the gay capitals of Europe, indulging his unnatural lust with the five thousand dollars he had wrung from Charles Kessler.”

  He opened the report. “The doctor did not think this report would ever get into the hands of the State’s Attorney.” He stopped at a page as if at random and referred to the nursemaid – the nurse, he said, who knew more about Artie Straus up until the time he was fourteen than any living person. “They tried to create the impression that she was insane and that Artie caught his insanity from her, the same as catching measles. Let us see what Dr. Allwin says about her. ’she is very reserved, quiet and strict, her memory is good. She is a woman of attractive appearance, modestly and carefully dressed.’ Why didn’t they produce her as a witness? Here’s why: ’she denied that he ever had any fears or any disorders in his sleep’! And if anybody would know about the daydreams or the night dreams of Artie Straus, I submit this woman would know about it!”

  As for Artie’s addiction to detective stories. “Well, there are a whole lot of us in the same fix. I remember crawling under the bed to read Nick Carter. And when I was a student at Yale I paid more attention to Raffles than I did to real property. I think that is the experience of most normal, healthy-minded young people.

  “Now, they claim that the only reason that Artie committed this slight delinquency of murdering little Paulie Kessler was because all his life he craved for thrills.” Snorting, Horn read, “‘He never appeared to crave a thrill or excitement, but was rather quiet in his conduct. After Miss Newsome left, he seemed to be much the same as before, quiet, rather affectionate, extremely polite and respectful.’”

  On and on he went, using the report: “‘The patient says that he will tell a lie with no compunction whatever, and that he is completely dishonest.’ Then, on page sixty-six, ‘He said he had failed to mention certain things because he had been advised not to mention them.’”

  Horn slammed shut the report. “Here are doctors,” he blazed, “who want to make Your Honour believe that their only interest is in finding out what the truth is. And yet they admit there were major episodes they did not inquire into!”

  A, B, C, D! What were they? Even though the defence advised its doctors to inquire no further, the State had inquired further.

  The entire defence table had risen. Before he could be silenced, Horn shouted, What of the monkey-gland robbery? What of the handless stranger? What of the two dead South Side students, one pushed into the icy lake, one found in a street, shot!

  And in pandemonium, the session ended.

  In the afternoon, Horn turned to the motive. “Your Honour, I have shown that this psychological-thrill motive was the bunk. The motive was money.

  “The kidnapping was planned for ransom. Page 104, ‘They decided to get a young boy they knew to be of a wealthy family.’ Thrills? Excitement? Money! Page 116, ‘He had no hatred for the boy. Neither he nor his associate would have done it without the money’! Money! And of his share, Artie says, ‘After all, five thousand dollars is five thousand dollars’! Page 118, Your Honour, in the language of Artie Straus, ‘We anticipated especially the money’, and then the doctor adds in parenthesis, ‘Facial expression of interest.’

  “On page 122, ‘The plan of kidnapping Willie Weiss was given up because his father was so tight we might not get any money from him.’

  “They thought of kidnapping their fathers. But on page 121, they decided it was not practical, that there would be no one to furnish the money.

  “They wrote in the ransom letter, ‘As a final word of warning, this is strictly a commercial proposition’! From beginning to end, Your Honour, they tell us their motive – you don’t have to send East for doctors to dig for it. The motive is Money!

  “On page 124, this is Artie talking about money and his opinion of the power of money. He believed that you cannot hang a million dollars in Cook County, no matter how dastardly the crime! Well, I disagree with him. I think the law is superior to money! ‘He thinks an escape could be managed by spending a few thousand dollars, by bribing the guards at the jail and by someone giving him a gun. He says this without any swagger, as though it were only a matter of careful, detailed planning, which his mind can do.’

  “What a feeling of comfort and security the mothers and fathers of this town would have, with their children going back and forth upon the streets of Chicago to school, and these two mad dogs at large!”

  And tellingly, Horn shouted, “Why, one of the books Artie Straus left in the Morrison Hotel when they registered to establish a fake identity for their murder was The Influence of Wealth on Imperial Rome!”

  Then he read: “Page 118, ‘I asked him if he would go through with his plan again if he felt certain he would not be discovered. He replied, “I believe I would if I could get the money”!’

  “And Wilk says money had nothing to do with it! Not the thrill, not the excitement.”

  Artie had three thousand dollars in the bank. Was it gain from other crimes, robberies, holdups?

  After Judd was to leave for Europe, Artie had “thought of other ways of continuing his career of crime”. One idea was to rent a room in a bad neighbourhood and hang around pool-rooms and meet criminals. Another was of becoming a clever financial criminal, putting through gigantic stock swindles, like Koretz. “Money, money, money!” Horn shouted.

  “Mentally sick? On page 131. ‘The patient’s intellectual functions are intact; he is correctly oriented, in excellent contact with his surroundings. He denies any hallucinatory experiences, and there is no evidence of their presence.’

  “Finally, Mr. Wilk tells us, the cause is heredity. But on page 139 their own doctors say there is nothing to show any evidence of a hereditary nature. All his evil is of his own making. ‘The condition’,” Horn read, “‘is acquired within the life history of the individual and will die out when he dies.’”

  As he dropped his arms, that death seemed to stand before us.

  Horn took a glass of water. He turned, then, to Judd.

  “No emotions, they say. He drove them all out when he was seven or eight years of age, at the same time that God passed out of his heart. Well, let’s see what his companion Artie says about it. ‘I had quite a time quieting down my associate.’ This is during the murder, if Your Honour please. It follows right after ‘he was hit over the head with the chisel’.

  “On page 108: ‘My associate said, “This is terrible, this is terrible”. It took five minutes to cool him down.’ Emotion o
r no emotion? ‘I told him it was all right and talked and laughed to calm him.’”

  And what of Artie’s lack of emotion? In reciting the crime to the doctors, “‘When he told of returning the car to the agency at four-thirty, he choked up and wiped his nose with his fingers.’ Yes, he cried, over the failure of it all.

  “No emotion in superman Straus? No emotion in superman Steiner? No, when they came into court they killed all emotion on advice of counsel! The desire to save their own worthless hides is the only thing that enters their thoughts. No emotion, and yet, on page 108, Judd tells the doctor that he is rather fond of small children, he could not have struck the blow because he always wants to take a crying child in his arms and comfort it!

  “The report says, ‘While in jail the patient has clearly been under considerable emotional tension and is rather irritable at times. The newspaper report that he is a cold-blooded scientist with no emotions and entirely unconcerned is completely wrong’! They admit it themselves! All intellect and no emotion, says Jonathan Wilk, and therefore not responsible. The report says, ‘The patient ordinarily is able to make a calm, self-possessed appearance and before reporters and visitors seems perfectly self-possessed and unconcerned. On the other hand, when he does not feel the need for doing this, and when he is talking frankly with people and no longer posing, he shows a good deal of irritability and nervous tension.’”

  Horn grinned at them, as though he had snatched away the mask.

  If there could be any doubt that they deserved death, Horn reminded the court of Artie’s own mother’s opinion, before the murderers were known. Whoever did it, she had said, should be tarred and feathered and strung up!