Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis (20 page)

“You say, Miss Mitchell, that you undertook to kill yourself?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you feel regret that you failed?”

“I have always wanted to do it.”

“Do you feel that you are determined to carry out that purpose?”

“No, sir. I don’t know that I will,” she answered, before concluding, “but I want to die.”

“It was said you kept a thumbstall saturated with Freda’s blood and yours,” Fleece stated, addressing an oft invoked rumor. “Do you want to have that now? Would it give you pleasure to look upon it?”

“Yes, sir,” she answered. “I think I would.”

T
HERE WAS LITTLE TO ASK
A
LICE AFTER THAT
.
But as the papers noted, this was “the last act in the drama, and Judge DuBose wanted to savor it.” He postponed deliberations until Saturday, July 30, so that he might prepare a written charge to read to the jury.
¹²⁵

When the day finally came, Judge DuBose delivered his statement, and then the jury filed out of the courtroom to deliberate—and returned within about twenty minutes.
¹²⁶
The courtroom was so quiet, so full of anticipation that spectators in the very back of the courtroom, claiming the worst seats in the house, probably heard the wooden chairs creak as the jurors settled back into their seats.

The foreman, state senator Colonel McGalloway, was called upon to read the verdict.

“Presently Insane,” he declared.

D
ECLARED INCURABLE BY LEADING
medical experts and judged to be insane by a jury of the finest men in Memphis, Alice was remanded to the Western Hospital for the Insane in Bolivar, Tennessee.

She was to be committed on August 1, 1892. After six months of being a public figure—the subject of endless lurid speculation across the country— Alice was gone, out of sight in nearby Bolivar. The Wards silently accepted that justice would not be served, and returned home to Golddust. The big urban dailies called their reporters home, and the emptied city moved on.

W
HEN
A
LICE ARRIVED IN
B
OLIVAR
,
the insane asylum was only in its third year of operation and already overcrowded. The third of its kind in Tennessee, the asylum was built to accommodate some 300 patients, divided by race and gender. But Alice’s arrival pushed the asylum’s population to 319, a number that would continue to rise. The luckiest among the
151 males and 168 females retained at least some semblance of privacy, but when patients began to number in the thousands, they were crowded into large dormitories.

Alice joined Bolivar’s largest patient population, the 37 percent who had a “hereditary predisposition.” This was followed closely by alcoholism and epilepsy in men, and for women, uterine trouble, those who suffered by the vaguely defined “ill health,” and even the flu.

The only recorded therapy Alice received was “moral treatment.” It should have entailed regular exercise, a healthy diet, some kind of work or hobbies to occupy the fragile mind, and occasional amusements, like dances, concerts, and magic lantern shows. Men farmed and went to workshops, while women did laundry and spent their days in the sewing room.
¹²⁷

But patients during this time period often received harsh treatment, and there was little oversight. The asylum staff was overworked, and they were easily frustrated when patients receiving ineffectual treatment failed to progress.

Not that there was ever any expectation that Alice would “recover.” The asylum was run and staffed by doctors who had declined the prosecution’s requests to testify at the lunacy inquisition. There was no need to interview Alice, they had said, as the sensational news stories had already convinced them of her insanity. The year she was admitted, the asylum’s own publication, the
Bolivar Bulletin,
reported that experts believed “her insanity is progressive, and it is only a question of time when this victim of erratic [sic] mania will be a driveling idiot through the decay of brain tissue.”
¹²⁸

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

A
LICE, 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

O
N THE LAST DAY OF
M
ARCH
, 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.