Strange Fits of Passion

by Anita Shreve

  Mrs. English's charges that her husband was drinking heavily during their marriage have also been called into question. Editor Kaplan dismisses the claim: "Harrold was no alcoholic," says Kaplan. "He drank like the rest of us drank. A martini at lunch, maybe two if the occasion called for it. But that was it."

  Whatever actually happened between Harrold English and his wife, there is evidence that friction began to develop not long after the wedding. According to Mrs. English, the traveling demanded by her job incited Harrold's jealousy. Like most national reporters, Mrs. English often had to travel around the country with male reporters and photographers. While she always had her own room, she acknowledged that there was usually an easy camaraderie among the crew and that her colleagues would often visit her in her hotel room. Her husband, she said, found this familiarity intolerable and once beat her badly upon her return from a business trip. She was then forced to lie to her editors, telling them that she suffered from motion sickness and could no longer travel in airplanes or automobiles. Her editors released her from reporting duties and relegated her instead to rewriting other people's stories, a move that effectively derailed a promising career.

  Mrs. English said that she was driven to seek the help of a psychiatrist, and that at one point she considered suicide. It's also possible that her pregnancy aggravated her despair. She quit her job at the magazine unusually early in the pregnancy and seldom left her apartment after that. On one occasion, she ran away to her mother's.

  Alcohol, too, may have exacerbated her downward spiral. Both she and her husband, she said, were drinking excessively during this period. "We drank like we were drowning," Mrs. English explained. They drank in bars and then drank at home. Curiously, Mrs. English continued to drink in Maine. By her own admission, there was always beer in her refrigerator at the cottage on Flat Point Bar, and she often offered Willis Beale a drink when he came to visit.

  Even after she reached St. Hilaire, Mrs. English's emotional health appears to have been unstable. At one point, she said, she began to have hallucinations, to hear her husband in the cottage long before he actually found her. She also apparently passed out from fright at a community event—a festive holiday bonfire on the town common on Christmas Eve.

  Undoubtedly Mrs. English was under great stress during her stay in St. Hilaire. She had taken her baby from the apartment in New York City and driven 500 miles to a strange town. When she arrived, the temperature was 20 degrees below zero. Both her own and her baby's health were fragile. She was living on funds she'd taken from Harrold's wallet on the night she left him. She'd been unemployed for nearly a year and had no clear prospects for employment in Maine. She was lying about her name, lying about her background, and telling varying stories to those she met. She was trying to begin a new life—that of "Mary Amesbury."

  Everett Shedd's general store has always been the hub of the small fishing village of St. Hilaire, but these days it is bustling. Each day, after "the doin's over to Machias," residents of the town gather in the small store filled with groceries, sundries, fishing gear, and cold beer to talk over the case. They speculate as to who came out on top that day in court, and comment about how "Mary Amesbury" looked on the stand.

  On the surface, St. Hilaire is a classic New England coastal village—charming, picturesque, and sleepy. There's the typical white steeple, the common, the old colonial houses, the tidal rhythms of the harbor. But underneath, life in St. Hilaire is not always as simple as it seems. According to Shedd. who has one glass eye, a thick Down East accent and doubles as the town's only officer of the law, St. Hilaire has seen better days.

  "The town was big in shipbuilding 150 years ago, but now it's economically depressed," he says. "Most of the houses are abandoned. The kids, when they get out of high school, they lose heart and leave town."

  The fishing for lobster, clams, and mussels makes up the heart of the economy of this and other towns like it along the coast. Further inland, a few residents have been able to eke out meager livelihoods on scrubby blueberry farms, but an aura of hard times permeates the area. The houses, while charming, do not look prosperous; small pink and aqua mobile homes, many of them rusty with age, mar the landscape. It is a town, says Shedd, where women frequently become depressed during the winter months, where insularity has led, on occasion, to inbreeding (according to Shedd, one local woman has three breasts; others have what appears to be a ubiquitous familial trait—gapped front teeth), where men sometimes drown off their lobster boats, where unemployment and alcoholism are pervasive. It is a town of lapsed ventures and failed hopes.

  "You read the tourist brochures," says Shedd. "The shortest paragraphs are about St. Hilaire. There's nothing here."

  Into this bleak and frigid coastal town came Mrs. English on the night of December 3. She spent one night at the Gateway Motel just to the north of town and then rented a cottage on Flat Point Bar from Julia Strout, a prominent local widow. Mrs. English then, according to her own testimony, settled down to a tranquil, Hester Prynne-like existence. Like Hawthorne's heroine, she even took up needlework. "I loved the cottage and my life there," she said. "I read. I knit. I took care of the baby, I took walks. It was a simple life, a good life."

  Indeed, this tranquil domesticity might have helped her more at her trials were it not for one critical detail that some observers have found at odds with her assertions of a simple life.

  Barely a month after she arrived at St. Hilaire, Mrs. English took a lover—a local fisherman with a wife and two children of his own. He was Jack Strout, 43 (a cousin of Julia Strout's husband), and he was there on the morning Mrs. English shot Harrold English.

  "By Christmas Eve, I could see there was already something between Jack Strout and Mary," says Beale. "And I can tell you this: It wasn't Jack who started it. He was always, before he met Mary, very loyal to his wife. I always liked Mary, but I have to say, in retrospect, she was a pretty fast worker."

  Strout is a tall, lanky lobsterman with light-brown, curly hair. His daughter, Emily, 15, is still at home, and his son, John, 19, is a sophomore at Northeastern University. Strout attended the University of Maine and hoped to become a college professor. But after his sophomore year, his father broke both of his arms in a fishing accident, and young Jack returned home to take over his father's lobster boat. Strout refused to be interviewed for this article, but he appears to have been well-respected in St. Hilaire. For years he has kept his green-and-white lobster boat moored off Flat Point Bar.

  According to Mrs. English, she met Strout on the point one night while taking a walk. The two became lovers shortly afterward. She has described the affair in some detail in her interviews. Strout came to her bed at daybreak and made love to her each morning before he went out on his boat. She said that their relationship was very "natural"—that they needed each other.

  The two appear to have been discreet at first, but Beale, who was often on the point, mending his pots, recalls seeing them together.

  "I saw them come back on Jack's boat on a Sunday," he says, "and I would see them at her door, acting in a very 'friendly' way."

  The need for discretion was important because Strout's wife, Rebecca, was almost incapacitated by depression, which appears to have begun shortly after the birth of her first child. Strout was afraid of what his wife might do if the affair became public.

  Even so, on the Monday before the shooting, Strout accompanied Mrs. English to a clinic in Machias when her infant daughter developed a 105-degree fever. After this visit the local doctor called the child's pediatrician, who subsequently alerted Harrold English to the whereabouts of his wife. It was on that Monday, too, that Beale saw Strout in broad daylight at Mrs. English's door, acting in a "friendly" way.

  According to Mrs. English, she and Strout were anticipating an end to their daily predawn trysts because he would soon have to haul his boat, and then he would no longer have a reason for leaving his home before daybreak. The prospect was causing them both anxiety about the futur
e. In her interviews, Mrs. English stated that she knew the last time Strout would be able to come to her cottage would be on Friday morning, January 15—the morning she shot her husband.

  More than just calling Mrs. English's character into question, the love affair has crucial significance because prosecuting attorney Pickering contends that it was this, and not self-defense, that was the true motive for the murder of Harrold English.

  In court, D. W. Pickering, a 32-year-old graduate of Columbia Law School who moved north from Portland to practice law in Washington County two years ago, has presented a formidable contrast to his older opponent, Sam Cotton. Pickering, whose height (6'5"), booming voice, and penchant for theatrics have given him at least a performer's edge in court, has seemed at home and unruffled, first before the jury and now before Judge Geary. Unlike Cotton, who sometimes sweats in the courtroom and who has a slight but noticeable stutter, Pickering seems positively to be enjoying himself. And perhaps never more so than with the business of the fork.

  According to Mrs. English, her husband attacked her in the cottage in the early hours of Friday morning, January 15, with a sharp instrument. Upon cross-examina tion during the first trial, it was revealed that this object was a fork with which Harrold was about to eat a casserole he had found in the fridge.

  "You mean to say you were worried that your husband would kill you with a fork?" Pickering asked her under oath. There was, in his tone, an unmistakable note of disbelief.

  "Yes," Mrs. English replied, in her quiet, straightforward manner.

  "The same fork he'd just eaten the macaroni and cheese with?" the prosecutor asked. The disbelief in his voice had risen a notch.

  "He hadn't started it yet," she replied.

  A wave of laughter washed over the courtroom.

  Each side then called "expert" witnesses to the stand to attest to the fact that a fork could or could not kill a woman, but Pickering's amused incredulity tainted the testimony, giving it a frivolous backbeat and mitigating Harrold English's intent.

  Pickering was no less incredulous when it came to the shooting itself. As he pointed out at both trials, if Mrs. English was truly concerned for her life, she certainly had time, after her husband fell asleep, to go up to a neighbor's house at the top of the lane, barely 200 yards away, and telephone either Everett Shedd or the police in Machias.

  Instead she made an extremely difficult journey in the dark out to the end of the point, where she got into a dinghy and rowed out to Strout's lobster boat, on which she had once seen a gun. She had some difficulty en route with the wet sand of low tide, once falling into a treacherous quicksand-like pocket the locals refer to as a "honeypot."

  When she returned to the cottage, she says her husband was still asleep. He woke up just before the bullet hit his shoulder. Then she fired again. Strout, she has said in court, entered the cottage after the two shots were fired.

  According to Pickering, at his summation at the first trial: "Maureen English had obviously hurt Harrold English, if not disabled him entirely, with the first bullet. If all she were concerned about had been self-defense, she'd have achieved that then. But she fired again. She meant to kill her husband."

  Instead of self-defense. Pickering maintains, the murder was premeditated. Because Mrs. English was now in love with Strout—and her husband, who had driven 500 miles to reclaim her. was unlikely to agree readily to a separation or divorce—she believed she had no alternative but to rid herself of her husband altogether. Hence the difficult trek to the lobster boat instead of to the neighbor's house. Hence the shooting in what Pickering has called "cold blood."

  Both Mrs. English and Strout have testified under oath in court that they were "friends," and Strout admitted that he went to the cottage on the morning of January 15 with the intention of "visiting" Mrs. English. When Pickering asked the defendant if the "friendship" included a sexual relationship, she would say only that she and Strout had "a relationship."

  Both have testified that Strout entered the cottage seconds after she shot her husband.

  In her written interviews, Mrs. English has been somewhat more revealing. She states that Strout entered the cottage just seconds before she fired two bullets at her husband. Even allowing for the confusion of the moment, it seems apparent, if we are to believe Mrs. English's statements in her interviews, that Strout was physically present in the cottage when she shot her husband. "I raised my arm and aimed," she said. "I heard a noise. It was Jack. He started to cross the room. I aimed the gun at Harrold's heart. I fired."

  Shedd, who arrived moments later, believes that the two have publicly denied Strout's being in the cottage at the moment of the shooting to protect each other: "If Jack were to say he was in the cottage when Mary shot her husband, there would be no case whatsoever for self-defense. And Mary has changed the moment of Jack's appearance because she doesn't want to involve him."

  However, if Strout entered the cottage before Mrs. English fired, why did she shoot her husband? Wasn't Strout's presence in the room security enough? Or did she, as Pickering has argued, have an additional motive, above and beyond that of self-defense, for wanting her husband dead?

  Mrs. English insists her motive was self-defense, and she will say only this: "If Harrold lived, I had no life of my own."

  Although Pickering claimed in his opening remarks that the love affair was the motive for the shooting, he was noticeably gentler with Strout on the stand than observers had anticipated. At neither trial, for example, did he ask Strout if he had had a sexual relationship with Mrs. English. At Shedd's store, Pickering's treatment of Strout has been the subject of much speculation. Some have suggested that the prosecutor has been unwilling to harass Strout about the affair because Mrs. English's statement about "a relationship" said enough. Others have maintained that there may have been some local reluctance to trouble a man already racked by guilt and grief—and that badgering Strout might have sat poorly with both a jury and a judge.

  For perhaps the saddest aspect of the story is the death of Strout's wife, Rebecca, less than twelve hours after the shooting.

  Upon returning home on the morning of January 15, Strout appears to have told his wife of the shooting at Flat Point Bar. Whether he also told her of his affair with Mrs. English, he has never said. But later that day, while Everett Shedd was taking him to the police station in Machias to give a statement, Rebecca drove her husband's black Chevy pickup truck over to the point.

  Mrs. Strout was a tall, thin woman of 43 who had once been a beauty queen in high school. In recent years, however, as a result of her chronic depression, she was seldom seen in public.

  On the day she drove to Flat Point Bar, she wore a long navy-blue coat, a blue kerchief, and a pair of black rubber boots. She appears to have taken her husband's rowboat out to his lobster boat—a boat named after Rebecca herself—and climbed aboard. Then she stepped off the boat into the Atlantic Ocean.

  Her pockets and boots were filled with stones from the beach. The autopsy indicates that she drowned at once.

  Townspeople searched for her all night long and found her body the next morning. Mrs. Strout had washed up on the low-tide flats of Flat Point Bar—ironically, just below the little white cottage where her husband's lover had committed murder the day before.

  "When I think about Rebecca, I just get so upset," says Julia Strout. Mrs. Strout has asked for and received temporary custody of the Englishes' baby daughter, Caroline.

  "It's the children I feel for now," she adds. "Rebecca's children, John and Emily, and now this baby.... It's such a tragedy."

  Throughout both trials, Cotton has retained his mild demeanor. Cotton's father was a fisherman off Beals Island—an island connected by a causeway to Jonesport, just south of St. Hilaire—where the lawyer still lives, with his wife and three children. A familiar presence in these parts, he has defended local fishermen who have taken well-aimed potshots at poachers. Rumor has it that he might be tapped for a seat on the bench this year—ma
king this case particularly important for him.

  Cotton has two advantages. The first is that while Mrs. English's initial trial ended in a hung jury, the final split was tipped in her favor. One juror, a Native American woman from Petit Manan, seemed to speak for those who had voted for acquittal when she said on June 23, "You couldn't not believe that woman." Although Mrs. English's presence on the stand has occasionally been a problem for her, she has, at times, struck a distinctly sympathetic chord.

  Cotton's second advantage is the previously mentioned tendency of Judge Joseph Geary to be particu larly lenient toward women. Although Geary has not shown Mrs. English any favoritism in court so far, the word over at Shedd's general store is that with Geary on the bench, "Mary Amesbury is in good hands."

  Still, Cotton has been dogged by several key aspects of the case. The most serious is the core of the defense itself. Because Harrold English was asleep when Mrs. English shot him, she cannot claim that her life was immediately in danger. Instead she has stated that she believed that her husband would eventually, that day or that night, kill her. Trickier still is the fact that Mrs. English herself says that while her husband was physically abusive toward her, he did not actually verbally threaten to kill her that morning. She simply believed that he would seriously harm her, if not kill her outright, sometime that day.

  The allegations of abuse themselves have also been a problem for Cotton. As previously mentioned, he has not been able to provide a single witness to testify that Harrold English beat his wife. He did, however, put several residents of St. Hilaire on the stand—Shedd, Julia Strout, and Muriel Noyes, the owner of the motel where the defendant spent her first night in Maine—to testify that when Mrs. English arrived in St. Hilaire on December 3, her face was covered with bruises and her lip was cut and swollen. This testimony was later somewhat weakened when both Beale and Mrs. Strout testified that Mrs. English herself had told them that the bruises were the result of a car accident.