Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis

by Alexis Coe

  Of course, the efforts of George Mitchell could never be underestimated. He had, by that time, already proven to be highly effective at getting women in his family institutionalized. Alice had made the Mitchell family front page news, and it was easier to move on with her out of sight. Should the doctors ever consider releasing Alice, the Attorney General would have the option of reopening the case, but it seems unlikely George would have allowed that to happen.129

  ALICE, WHETHER BY HER OWN VOLITION OR NOT, gave few interviews in the years that followed. When she did, the questions posed were curiously devoid of any reference to Freda, the murder, the inquisition, or her mental state. In a dubious article from March, 1893, Alice was described as a “bright, happy, laughing girl” who nonchalantly referred to the “tragedy that ruined her life.”

  These articles sought to reverse the public’s conception of Alice as a perverted, masculine murderess. She now lived “in a pretty little room,” which she kept neat before dashing off to spend her days doing the kinds of feminine activities she had allegedly shunned her entire life. At Bolivar, she was said to love needlework, embroidery, and even reading—despite the fact that the Hypothetical Case had asserted she had shown “no taste for books or newspapers, and reads neither the one nor the other.” She suddenly played the guitar, even though “efforts to teach her music and drawing were a failure” for the first nineteen years of her life.

  The least believable claim of all: “The dances and concerts in the amusement hall were dull and spiritless without Alice Mitchell’s presence. She dances well and never misses a set.”130

  Of course, if any of that were true, it would suggest that Alice was indeed on her way to “recovery,” if not already capable of standing trial for murder—but that was not the goal of these articles. They assured the public that Alice was now tame and docile, and everyone was safe: she from herself, and from harming others. It comforted readers to see that Alice, at the end of the day, posed no serious threat to their values, or their class. She was now happy and feminine, vindicating their way of life. And if Alice was really the good, well-bred lady she was raised to be all along, the storm had passed.

  Even the record itself hints that this public narrative of Alice was, as usual, not quite accurate. The Bolivar Bulletin, for example, concurred that Alice attended every dance, but did not specify whether or not they were mandatory. And their description of her refusal to dance with anyone other than male asylum attendants strongly suggests that the dances were indeed mandatory, and belies the image of her bringing jollity and high spirits to the amusement hall.

  “No, I don’t care to dance or have anything to do with Bolivar boys,” she is reported to have said, “for I know they want to meet me merely for curiosity.”131

  ON THE LAST DAY OF MARCH, 1898, Alice Mitchell died. She was twenty-five years old.132 There was no cause of death listed on the patient rolls, but the local papers declared her the victim of consumption. Alice appeared to be faring well, at least physically, until about 1897, when her health suddenly waned. She was described as “wasting away.” Her body “gradually failed until the end came as it usually does to the insane— a collapse of the whole system.”133

  In Alice’s case, consumption may have meant that she starved herself, which she had previously considered, or it could have meant tuberculosis, which was certainly on the rise at the asylum. Of the sixty-nine deaths from 1896 to 1898, twenty-three resulted from the respiratory disease referred to at the time as “phthisis pulmonalist.”134

  Alice’s unexpected demise from tuberculosis could be easily reconciled with the account of her “happiness” at the asylum—but there is another possible explanation.

  Thirty-two years after Alice died, Malcolm Rice Patterson made a startling admission. He told the Commercial Appeal, “Those closest to the case knew . . . she had taken her own life by jumping into a water tank on top of the building. But that story was never printed.”135 By his own description, Patterson would have been privy to this kind of information; he had represented Lillie Johnson in the trial, and had been employed by the same law firm that represented Alice, often supporting the defense’s case and appearing alongside them in court.

  Like much about her life, the story of Alice’s death may have been a projection of the people around her, driven by fear and shaped by what they wanted to be true. We do not know exactly how Alice Mitchell died. We might never know. But we do know that it reunited her—almost—with her beloved: Alice and Freda were both buried at Elmwood Cemetery, about a quarter of a mile from each other. Because the Mitchells were of comfortable means, Alice was buried in a family plot, and her ornate headstone still stands; Freda’s was unmarked until recently, when a tree was planted on the site.

  ON HER WAY TO THE INSANE ASYLUM IN 1892, Alice made one last request.

  During the inquisition, the Mitchell family had insisted that Alice, in her insanity, believed Freda was still alive, but if her own testimony on the stand had not convinced the public otherwise, her final stop should have: Before being committed, Alice wanted to visit Freda’s grave at Elmwood Cemetery.

  Freda had no headstone, nor marker of any kind. Whether it had been a gesture of sympathy or much needed aid, Freda had been buried in a plot owned by the very same church she and Alice had hoped to be wed in. When Alice arrived at Elmwood on that August day, a year after they were forbidden to speak, she was trailed by reporters.

  But even without a marker, Alice found Freda’s plot, a mound of dirt that had settled while she was in jail. The spring had brought grass, and the summer wildflowers. At night, fireflies flew low, illuminating the ground.

  What did Alice say to Freda? What was she thinking about? Was it the first time she saw Freda at Miss Higbee’s? Did she imagine what their life would have been like, had they made it to St. Louis? Maybe she felt a jolt, like when a letter arrived from Freda, or when she picked the perfect rose for her beloved. Or maybe she thought about that photograph of her beautiful Freda, the one Alice had said she would not part with, even after they were forbidden to ever speak again.

  But in the end, that photograph had been taken from her, along with the engagement ring she had engraved “From A. to F.,” and all of the other treasures she kept hidden in her family’s kitchen. It was all gone now.

  We will never know what Alice was thinking at Elmwood that day, and neither did the journalists who watched from afar. But they did report what they saw, and, for once, what they wrote seems believable: Alice dropped to her knees and, for the woman she loved without shame, wept openly.

  SEXUAL MONSTERS

  THE MITCHELL-WARD CASE sparked a controversy in the medical community that would last for decades to come, as evidenced by a proliferation of articles in U.S. and European medical publications.

  Dr. Frank Sim, an expert witness in Alice’s lunacy inquisition, published the first lengthy account of the case on the Memphis Medical Monthly. His article was informed by sensational news stories and courtroom proceedings as much as medical research, and it circulated widely. It reached leading psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebbing in Austria, who then cited it in the English translation of Psychopathia Sexualis, a forensic reference book for the law and medical communities.

  By the time the 1894 edition was published, Krafft-Ebing had come to believe that “‘forbidden friendships’ flourish especially in penal institutions for females,” but was on the rise more widely “partly owing to novels on the subject, and partly as a result of excessive work on sewing-machines, the sleeping of female servants in the same bed, seduction in schools by depraved pupils, or seduction of daughters by perverse servants.”136

  Alice, who met Freda at the Higbee School, fit into the third circumstance, “seduction in schools.” Newspapers had initially speculated that Alice had been influenced by the first factor listed by Krafft-Ebing, specifically pointing to French novels about taboo relationships—but there is no evidence that Alice read these supposedly nefarious books, much le
ss that the novels somehow led her to murder Freda.

  The case provoked questions about treatment, sometimes leading to drastic conclusions. In light of Alice’s murder trial, Dr. F.E. Daniel wondered if the medical community should “asexualize [i.e. castrate] all criminals of whatever class.”137 By 1893, Daniel had already deemed castration the solution to most cases of sexual deviancy, from bestiality to masturbation. He was a Southern eugenicist, a doctor who believed that the human population would be improved by discouraging reproduction among people with genetic defects, along with those who had inherited other undesirable traits. Daniel’s call for castration of all classes was uncommon, but the school he subscribed to was not. Alice’s same-sex love and insanity, supposedly inherited from her mother, could easily fall into these eugenicist categories. It was indeed the fact of her class—that she had been raised by a respectable family—that made Daniel consider expanding his categories to include such cases, rather than rethinking the categories themselves.

  Voices of medical dissent, absent during the inquisitio itself, began to emerge afterward. Charles H. Hughes, M.D., president of the Barnes Medical College in St. Louis and editor of the Alienist and Neurologist, appeared to be the clearest voice of skepticism. He found Alice’s plea of present insanity to be highly dubious, and in July of 1892, he began examining her case on the pages of his medical publication.138 In an editorial, he criticized the sensational news coverage of the case, as well as the “novices in psychiatry” who would give credence to the insanity argument.139 Nothing Hughes had read convinced him that Alice was insane at the time of the inquisition, or before it. Based on those articles, he understood the slaying of Freda Ward to be an act of revenge, and if Alice was indeed insane, “it will be because of other facts than that of contrary sexual feelings.”140

  Hughes soon moved on to the information newspapers purposefully avoided in their coverage. The same month that Alice committed to an insane asylum in Bolivar, he reprinted an editorial written by “H.” in the Medical Fortnightly. It speculated that Alice likely discovered masturbation on her own, which she then introduced to Freda, and “mutual masturbation followed, then the well-developed perverted sexual love with all its disgusting details, was the almost inevitable result.” The subsequent forced separation of Alice and Freda had made “sexual monsters of the two maidens—then the climax—murder.”141 Medical literature was still parsing the differences between hereditary and environmental influence—that is, whether the “insanity” was passed down from a parent, or whether the sexual relationship turned violent because of new circumstances.

  Alice’s case continued to complicate conceptions of class and female sexual deviancy. Prostitutes and promiscuous women—who were often poor—were considered sexual deviants, but their motivations were typically ascribed to economics, and the supposed lust and immorality prevalent among the vulgar masses. As Hughes and others who published on the case acknowledged, Alice made no economic gains from her relationship with Freda and, on the contrary, assumed a significant financial burden in her intention to pass as a man and support Alvin J. Ward’s wife. Her desire to maintain middle class respectability seemed at odds with a sexually deviant woman, which is exactly why Alice’s defense team had gone to such lengths to exaggerate her masculinity and attribute the murder to this supposed pathological crossing of gender norms. As Hughes was careful to point out, Alice, in her relationship with Freda, was in fact motivated by love, and wanted to enact conventional romantic feelings within the structure of a traditional marriage.

  Nevertheless, others continued to champion the argument that Alice was insane, and that her insanity stemmed from her sexual preferences. James G. Kiernan, a leading sexologist in America, was a proponent of this theory. He had worked in asylums, taught in medical schools on the East Coast, contributed to leading journals, and was regularly called upon to offer expert testimony in the courtroom. In a lengthy article, Kiernan predicted “that sexual pervert crimes of all types are likely to increase, because of newspaper agitation on the subject, among hysterical females, from a desire to secure the notoriety dear to the hysteric heart.”142 Whether or not that came to pass, Kiernan was still asserting this view in 1916, when he identified Alice Mitchell as the reason American mothers had been keeping a watchful eye on female friendships, lest their daughters meet a similar fate as Freda.143

  Kiernan argued that such maternal vigilance had proven successful, and there were fewer incidences of “sexual inversion” in America. Sexologists believed that sexual inverts experience an inborn reversal of gender traits, hence the emphasis on Alice’s supposedly masculine inclinations.144 Even so, interpretations of his research varied. Influential English sexologist Havelock Ellis studied Kiernan’s conclusion and reached an opposing one, declaring that sexual inversion, or deviant “homosexuality,” was actually on the rise in America. He referred to the Mitchell-Ward case to substantiate his claim in 1915.145

  The first conspicuous example of this tendency in recent times is the Memphis case (1892) in the United States....There is no reason to suppose that she was insane at the time of the murder. She was a typical invert of a very pronounced kind. Her mother had been insane and had homicidal impulses. She herself was considered unbalanced, and was masculine in her habits from her earliest years. Her face was obviously unsymmetrical and she had an appearance of youthfulness below her age. She was not vicious, and had little knowledge of sexual matters, but when she kissed Freda she was ashamed of being seen, while Freda could see no reason for being ashamed . . . She was adjudicated insane.146

  In the early twentieth century, middle to upper classes remained the focus of American research, but their proclivities were viewed in a variety of ways, rather than just the binary of “normal” and “deviant.” In 1925, social reformer Katherine Bement Davis published Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women, a groundbreaking study in the sexual activities of women, including auto-erotic practices and same-sex love. By the 1950s, Alfred Kinsey was conducting trailblazing research on homosexuality. The Kinsey scale indicated degrees of sexual orientation, from 0 (representing exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (for exclusively homosexual) because it “comes nearer to showing the many gradations that actually exist.”147

  But the rhetoric of deviance was far from extinct. In homes, the workplace, and academic and religious institutions throughout the United States, and most certainly in Memphis, the emphasis on marginalizing same-sex relationships persisted, echoed by politicians on issues of morality on a local and national level, and it became a powerful machine of degradation and political exclusion—much of which still exists today.148

  LETTERS BETWEEN

  ALICE MITCHELL AND FREDA WARD

  FROM ALICE MITCHELL TO FREDA WARD

  Memphis, Tenn., Sunday, May 11, 1891

  “LOVE”—As I have nothing to do and nobody to talk to I will write to my Pitty Sing.149 Mattie has gone to church with Mr. Farl and Addie is talking to Frank and Ida. Will did not come today. I thought you might come this evening. I watched for you.

  Hun, please tell me why you thought that ivy would not grow; will you? I tell you almost anything you ask me.

  FROM FREDA WARD TO ALICE MITCHELL

  Golddust, Tenn., July 26, 18[91]

  YBIR—Your letter was received and I enjoyed it, oh, so much, even if you did fuss at me all the way through it. Yes, loved one; I love Freda [Alice’s alter ego] dearly, and I would give anything in this world (but A. J. W.) [Alvin J. Ward] if she had only lived. I wanted to see her so bad. We all [g]ot to talking about her this afternoon at Mrs. Matthews’, and I couldn’t help but cry. Mrs. M made them stop talking about [her]. She said she don’t want to make me feel bad. I tried . . . not to cry, but I couldn’t help it. I know you love me best. Love, I knew it long before Freda (YBIR) died. I know you are so sweet, but I love you better than any one in the world. Monday afternoon, Alvin, forgive me. I have done what you heard me tell Lil I was going to do. No, love, I am no
t keeping my promise, but I will be true to you this time and tell you all about it. Sweetheart, I didn’t think what I was doing when I did it. I did not think I was deceiving you when I did it. But I more than worship you, sweetheart, and I only love A. R. [Ashley Roselle]. I swear I don’t even love him now as much as I did when you were here. Believe me, Alvin, I am trying not to love him.

  I didn’t even think of doing such a thing until Lil told me to do it, and a week after you left this is what I wrote to him. Sweetheart, BELIEVE me, I will tell you the honest truth.

  LETTERS FROM ALICE MITCHELL AND LILLIE JOHNSON TO MEN

  LETTER FROM ALICE (UNDER THE NAME “FREDA MITCHELL”) AND LILLIE JOHNSON TO AN ACTOR THEY HAD MET ON THE ELECTRIC CAR LINE

  Memphis, Tenn., Aug. 22, 1890

  Mr. R. F. Chartrand:

  KIND FRIEND—As you have been so kind to us, and you are going away, we thought we would return it by sending you a few flowers. Hoping this will not be the last time we see you, we remain yours truly,

  FREDA MITCHELL and LILLIE JOHNSON

  FROM ALICE MITCHELL (WRITING AS ANOTHER ONE OF HER ALTER EGOS, FREDA MYRNA WARD, AN ACTRESS)

  Memphis, Tenn., Sept. 15, 1890

  Unknown Friend—I am an actress. I have pearl-white teeth, blue eyes and light hair. I am 17 years of age, I have been in Memphis this summer with the Fishcer Opera Co. After I left Memphis I went to Greenville for three nights and then to St. Louis. I will not go on the stage this winter, and thought I would write you for a pastime, or what may follow. Next summer I will join the Fisher Opera Co. again, and next winter will travel with the “Said Pasha” Opera Company. I will not write to many, as I will be studying. I was going to join the Baker Opera Co. this winter, but I will rest and write to you. If I like you I will write to you while I am travelling, and tell you all that goes on. My home is in Memphis, but as I belong to a St. Louis troupe I am in St. Lois more than any other place.