THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 4, 1995 TAG: 9510040042
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 133 lines
IT HAD ALL the ingredients for a media circus. A double murder, shocking in its brutality. A family member accused of the crime. A trial dissecting the lives of the wealthy and influential.
Reporters packed the courtroom and passed on every tidbit of testimony, writing of the missing murder weapon, the prosecution's belief in an all-too-understandable motive. From coast to coast, Americans were riveted, hungrily devouring each new revelation from the courtroom.
And when the jury reached a verdict in the 1893 trial of Lizzie Andrew Borden, the nation was shocked.
O.J. Simpson's trial was not the first to capture the nation's attention - and his acquittal Tuesday was hardly the first time a court of law contradicted the court of public opinion.
In a handful of celebrated cases beginning with Borden's June 20, 1893, acquittal, the country - and sometimes the world - has been caught off-guard by the verdict of judge or jury.
Borden was a household name by the time her trial ended. Single, a 32-year-old Sunday school teacher, the product of a wealthy upbringing, she seemed an unimaginable suspect in the slayings of her father and stepmother. Their murders seemed beyond the reach of such a refined young woman: Both had been hacked to death with a hatchet, suffering 28 blows between them. Her father's head was axed 10 times.
Borden walked free from a Massachusetts courtroom, an event carried on the front page of the June 20, 1893, Norfolk Landmark. The headline, recognizing her first-name fame, read simply: ``Lizzie Not Guilty.''
In the years that followed, Borden inherited her father's fortune and built a large hilltop house in the town in which she'd been raised.
But she found that an acquittal did not bring forgiveness. Borden died a recluse, shunned by her neighbors, tormented by the still-familiar child's rhyme:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother 40 whacks
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father 41.
A generation later, Roscoe ``Fatty'' Arbuckle was a beloved Hollywood icon and one of the movie industry's biggest wage-earners. Vastly overweight but light on his feet, the weirdly acrobatic Arbuckle won raves as a regular in Keystone Kops and then produced his own string of critically acclaimed two-reelers. By 1921, his stardom was eclipsed only by Charlie Chaplin.
But on the Labor Day weekend that year, Arbuckle embarked on a binge of debauchery that forever changed Hollywood's image.
Despite his reputation as a bashful soul who loved children, Arbuckle's real penchants were the bottle and the company of showgirls. He started the holiday weekend by driving to San Francisco with two carloads of hard-partying friends, took a three-room suite in the upper-crust Hotel St. Francis, and launched into a recreation of ancient Rome's greatest excesses.
The party was still going on Labor Day - Sept. 5, 1921 - when Arbuckle allegedly pulled a dark-haired and drunken starlet named Virginia Rappe into one of the suite's bedrooms.
Other guests soon heard screams and moans behind the locked door. After Arbuckle walked out, giggling, they found Rappe nearly naked on the bed, writhing in pain, moaning: ``I'm dying, I'm dying. He hurt me.''
Rappe, 25, died five days later of a ruptured bladder. The medical examiner ruled that it had been caused by ``external pressure'' she suffered during sex, but other purported causes soon gained favor among the public - among them, that Arbuckle had raped the young woman with a champagne bottle or a jagged piece of ice.
Charged with first-degree murder, Arbuckle went on trial in mid-November. He took the stand in his own defense, protesting that his alleged actions and words had been fabricated or misinterpreted. The jury deliberated 43 hours before the judge declared a mistrial.
Twice more Arbuckle was hauled into court, weathering a hung jury in his second trial, until he was finally acquitted in April 1922.
But America did not share the jury's view. Arbuckle was banned by Hollywood, deserted by friends. He found work as a gag writer and director only after changing his name and died broke and a drunk at 46.
Though widely followed, neither case matched the worldwide fixation on the trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
This time, the defendants were thought to be innocent. Sacco, a shoemaker, and Vanzetti, a fishmonger, were Italians living in the Boston area. They were also avowed anarchists, which wasn't a particularly popular label to hang on someone at the time.
In May 1920, both men were arrested for the murder of a paymaster and his guard outside a factory in South Braintree, Mass., during a robbery. The evidence was flimsy, to say the least: Witnesses described the bandits as swarthy, and Sacco and Vanzetti were linked to a Buick that matched the description of the getaway car.
Both men had alibis - Sacco had been in Boston that day and could not have participated. The real getaway car turned up, too, and had no connection to the men. The judge, Webster Thayer, spewed anti-Italian epithets outside the courtroom.
Innocent though Sacco and Vanzetti may have been, their defense was hampered by the fact that they weren't angels - they were both packing revolvers when they were arrested. Their status as political and religious radicals further tarnished them, and both were convicted in July 1921.
Six years later - over the objections of politicians, newspapers and overseas heads of state, and amid rioting in cities here and abroad - Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in the electric chair.
A few other celebrated trials since then have wound up going the ``other way.'' In 1982, a Newport, R.I., court set free Claus von Bulow, who was accused of attempting to murder his wife, Sunny, a billionaire and hard drinker.
Sunny von Bulow had been plunged into a coma with an injection of insulin, using a needle supposedly found in one of her husband's bags. He wasn't helped by testimony that he delayed summoning a doctor for hours after finding his wife unconscious.
But von Bulow's defense team argued that Sunny was suicidal, and von Bulow walked.
More recently, a suburban Los Angeles jury cleared a phalanx of Los Angeles police officers of wrongdoing in the notorious Rodney King case, in which the cops were accused of beating an errant motorist to within an inch of his life. That verdict so angered Los Angelenos that some of them set their city afire.
These defendants, like those before them, left the courtroom free but stigmatized, hardly off the hook.
Arbuckle perhaps best summed up life after acquittal. ``The American public is ardent in its hero worship and quite as ruthless in destroying its idols in any walk of life,'' he said in 1922. ``It elevates a man more quickly than any nation in the world, and casts him down more quickly - quite often on surmise or a mere hunch.'' MEMO: Virginian-Pilot librarian Peggy Deans Earle contributed to this report.
ILLUSTRATION: Photos
The public was shocked when Lizzie Borden, above, was acquitted in
1893 of murdering her father and stepmother. She died a recluse.
Silent film star Fatty Arbuckle, left, was cleared in 1922 of
killing starlet Virginia Rappe, but was abandoned by Hollywood, his
fans and friends.
<
KEYWORDS: HISTORY ACQUITTALS MURDER by CNB