"Compulsion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levin Meyer)

Book Two: The Trial of the Century

We waited half through the night, with the news leaking out to us. The confessions were going well. The time was long because the State’s Attorney was going over each fact, nailing down the evidence so every point could be proven even if later some smart lawyers had the boys withdraw their statements.

Thus we hovered between the two rooms, catching bits of the story, certain it was turning out to be a sex murder, perversion, with the ransom plan tacked on to cover the act. We waited, the hours broken only by a call from Louisville informing the State’s Attorney that the almost forgotten drug clerk, Holmes, had died without talking.

Behind each door the story was pouring forth; each of the culprits seemed bent on getting ahead of the other. And as usual when it came right down to the end, Horn’s assistants let us know, these smarties were like everyone else – they were frantically blaming each other.

Then gradually a new and curious idea came out to us. This different idea was being insisted upon especially by Judd, with a kind of triumphant disdain for the authorities who, even with the murderers in their hands, failed to see the real nature of the crime. Judd vowed that lust really had nothing to do with it. And as for money – would two millionaire boys risk their lives for ten thousand dollars? He had a strange explanation to offer. This was a crime for its own sake. It was a crime in a vacuum, a crime in a perfectly frozen nothingness, where the atmosphere of motive was totally absent.

And as we learned how Artie and Judd thought of their crime, the whole event again became a mystery. For was even their own notion of it the truth?

We could, in that night, only grasp their claim of an experiment, an intellectual experiment, as Judd put it, in creating a perfect crime. Their act sought to isolate the pure essence of murder.

Before, we had thought the boys could only have committed the murder under some sudden dreadful impulse. But now we learned how the deed had been marked by a long design developed in full detail. What was new to us was this entry into the dark, vast area of death as an abstraction. Much later, we were to seek the deeper cause that compelled these two individuals to commit this particular murder under the guise, even the illusion, that it was an experiment.

Just as there is no absolute vacuum, there is no absolute abstraction. But one approaches a vacuum by removing atmosphere, and so, in the pretentious excuse offered by Judd, it seemed that by removing the common atmospheres of lust, hatred, greed, one could approach the perfect essence of crime.

Thus one might come down to an isolated killing impulse in humanity. To kill, as we put it in the headlines, for a thrill! I think the boys themselves believed this was what they had done.

At first their recital sounded much like an account of daydreams that all could recognize. They had been playing with the idea of the “perfect murder”. Is not the whole of detective-story literature built on this common fantasy? True, in such stories we always supply a conventional motive. We accept that a man may kill for a legacy or for jealousy or for revenge, though inwardly we may make the reservation – that’s foolish, the butler wouldn’t go so far. We accept that a dictator may unleash a war out of “economic needs” or “lust for power” but inwardly we keep saying, “Why? Why? Why?”

But Judd Steiner and Artie Straus were saying that they had killed the boy, a victim chosen at random, truly for the deed alone, for the fascinating experiment of committing a perfect crime.

Each related how the plan had begun, Artie vaguely saying “a few months ago”, but Judd, with his passion for precision, saying “the first time we thought of a thing like this was on the twenty-eighth of November” and telling us how on that night they had robbed the fraternity house in Ann Arbour, and how they had quarrelled on their weird drive homeward. Quarrelling lovers must break, or bind themselves into deeper intimacy, and so their pact was made to do some great and perfect crime together. That it should be a kidnapping came out in Artie’s thought – perhaps it had been waiting in him.

Then, the step of pure logic: for security, the victim must never be able to identify the kidnappers; therefore he must be killed at the earliest moment. Thus the killing was non-emotionally arrived at; it was incidental to the perfection of an idea.

How needlessly emotional people had always been about death! In the pursuit of an impersonal plan, it was nothing, as Judd was to insist; it was no more meaningful than impaling a beetle, than mounting a bird.

The truly intriguing element of the problem would follow: how to secure the ransom, without risk of contact? Though money was not the actual motivating force, still it was part of the set exercise. After the feat of a perfect murder came the feat of a perfect transfer of ransom. And so came the idea of a transfer in moving space – the train, the rented car, an abstract identity.

“And so you registered at the Morrison Hotel as James Singer?”

“Yes, Artie brought an old valise – we left it there.”

Instantly, McNamara was hurried over to the Morrison. The registration was found: James Singer. In the storeroom, the tagged, abandoned valise. For weight, a few books. So clever, so careless the perfect plan – books from the university library, one of them containing a library card made out to Artie Straus.

By such tangible items the whole nightmarish, incredible tale began to become real even while the recital continued, behind each door. The rented car – and putting up the side curtains so no one could see into the rear. And then the lunch with Willie Weiss, and then hunting the victim, and the boy coming into the car.

“And at that moment it was not too late to stop?”

Was it? You could think it was too late from the moment Judd first met Artie, from the moment when he was born so bright, born a boy though a girl was wanted. Or you could believe that even with an arm upraised, holding the taped chisel, it was not yet too late… How many murders are halted only as a thought in our minds? I could kill that sonofabitch! In how many tales do we have the moment of the pointed gun, the Go ahead and shoot, and instead, the dropping arm? When the first chosen victim, Dickie Weiss, had disappeared on 49th Street, it had seemed the end of their adventure. And yet the arm came to be raised.

“And in that moment you were still able to distinguish between right and wrong?”

“Right and wrong in the conventional sense, yes,” Judd answered.

And so the blow was struck and perhaps even directly afterwards it seemed not to have happened and that the deed could still be halted. And then came that strange burial, the vain attempt at effacement.

“Then it was our plan to pour acid on the face in order to oblitterate the identity, in case of the finding of the body.”

But in the actual deed, suddenly it had seemed necessary, essential to go on pouring. “And when we were doing it, we continued pouring it also on another part of the body-”

“Where?”

“The private parts.”

Then wasn’t it after all a sex crime? Something sickening, to be hastily covered up, and turned away from? But the questioners had to be relentless. In that closed room, Judd was asked, “What made you do that?”

“We believed – yes, we were under the impression that a person could also be identified by-” He stopped.

In that intensely charged confession room, with all the men staring at him – Horn, Czewicki, the stenographer, as though staring through his clothes, and with all the dirty meanings in their eyes – could there then have flashed through Judd’s mind some image from his childhood, seemingly disconnected, undressing somewhere, naked, and fellows, maybe even his brother, making crude jokes? For myself, I recall an incident as a boy, in a shower room – one of the kids closing his legs so that only the hair showed and jumping around yelling, “I’m a girl! A girl!” And the ribald laughter. Could some such image have pressed itself forward? Could it perhaps have given Judd a shadowy hint as to the meaning of that attempted obliteration?

Thus, there was the deed, poured out, relived in that night of confession. The body dissolvingly anointed over mouth and genitalia, then pulled into the mire, pulled blood-flecked through the swamp water and pressed into the dark tube.

Then hurriedly away, dragging the bloodied robe, up the night lane. Wait. To scoop the earth with the sharp chisel, and bury the belt buckle which never would burn. And farther on a piece, bury the shoes under a crust of earth. Then as far as the road, the city streets and lights. And stopping at a drugstore, Judd to phone home – the dutiful son, “I’ll be a little late” – and Artie calling a girl – “I got held up, babe, detained, puss, make it tomorrow.” Then to Judd’s house, and parking the Willys a few doors away while pulling out his Stutz to drive his aunt and uncle home, leaving Artie calmly playing a hand of casino with Judah Steiner, Sr. And then Judd back – “Good night, sir,” as Pater retires upstairs – then both into the Willys, the robe, the clothes still inside it. Then to Artie’s house, sneaking down to the basement, the clothes bundled into the furnace, but not the lap robe – “It’ll make a stench. We’ll stuff it behind a bush, get rid of it tomorrow. If anyone finds it, that’s virgin blood – boys will be boys, ha ha.” But wait – the blood in the car. Take the gardener’s watering pail, wash off the worst of it – “Can’t see, that’s good enough,” says Artie. “Park the damn Willys in front of some damn apartment house. Clear the stuff out of it.” Then drive Artie home. “Wait – get rid of the frigging tool!” And driving along Ellis Avenue, Artie flinging the taped chisel out upon the stupid world…

“Premeditated – why, they planned this thing for weeks, months,” Horn told us when he emerged into the hotel corridor. “I’ve got a hanging case, no question. I don’t care how many millions their families throw in to try to save their skins.” He was not vindictive, not bloodthirsty. He was a man who had carried out a most difficult task and could be satisfied that he had handled it well.

The confessions were being typed up, he said. There was only one basic difference between them, and he chuckled at the predictable. “Each says the other struck the fatal blow.”

Soon we had their own words. Artie had pictured himself as driving. “I pulled up alongside of Paulie and said, ‘Hey Paulie’, and Paulie came over and I asked, ‘Want a ride?’ and Paulie said no, he was only a block from his house, and then I said, ‘I want to talk to you about that tennis racket you had the other day’, so Paulie said okay and Paulie got in beside me. I introduced him to Judd, who was in the back seat, and I asked Paulie, ‘You don’t mind if I drive around the block?’ and Paulie said okay, and I pulled away from the curb and as I turned the corner the blow came from behind, three or four quick blows on the head, and the hands were over Paulie’s mouth before he could yell, and then he was dragged into the back seat and a cloth stuffed into his mouth.”

For several minutes, Artie said, Judd had lost his nerve, crying, “Oh this is terrible, terrible!” And Artie had had to talk fast, make wisecracks, until Judd got hold of himself.

“This is terrible, terrible,” echoed to me. It was no extenuation. But what did it mean, there at that moment? That the reality broke in, for one of them at least?

For himself, Artie said, he noticed his pulse racing, he felt exhilarated, his blood beating intensely, from the moment the boy got into the car.

The way Judd told it varied mainly on the question of who was driving. He had been at the wheel, Judd insisted, with Artie in the back seat; the blows had come from the tool in Artie’s hand.

At the time, in the immense excitement of having the story, the dual accusation was only an ironic sidelight to the crime, and the fact that each accused the other only made them more alike in our minds. It was only later that the simple realization came that one of them must have been telling the truth.

To this day, the crime has been thought of as a deed in which they were organically joined, like Siamese twins. This may be true as to legal guilt. But understanding will never come through such an assumption. And if we see them as two beings who became wedded in the deed, then it does become momentous that one, here, had been telling the truth while the other had been lying.

I knew I had to phone Ruth. She should learn it all from me and not from the papers. In some shameful way, whatever I said would sound like a personal triumph. I procrastinated, telling myself I didn’t want to wake her with this news. Then when I finally called, she had already learned it, from a Tribune extra in the streets. Then she asked, “Sid, will you see him?”

“Maybe.”

“Sid, Sid.” It was as though she were crying, “Judd, Judd.”

We rushed out to interview the families. They had been wakened with the news, and the Strauses let us all in, begging for us to tell them – hadn’t it been the third degree? As soon as the boys had rested, and had some sleep, they would repudiate the story. It was absurd, insane!

Artie’s father left the room. Mrs. Straus held herself upright. “I won’t believe it,” she declared, “unless I hear it from Artie’s own lips.”

And at Judd’s house, his father, in his measured voice, repeated to us only, “No, no, this is some mistake, it cannot be true.” His brother Max told us, “It must be the boys’ idea of a joke. They must be sore at the cops for keeping them so long.”

After his confession Judd felt, if anything rather proud, as after making an unusually comprehensive report in class. He wished only that Artie had been there in the room – forgetting, momentarily, his rage at Artie for breaking down and talking. The crime had a certain altitude, he told himself; the action had a wholeness – the word was consistency. Now, through a trial, through an execution, he would maintain the same consistency, the same dignity of living and dying by a set of ideas. Even with the blunder, even with being caught, he and Artie had somehow achieved their aim. They had demonstrated something that was beyond the ordinary mind.

The State’s Attorney, to his credit, had carried out the interrogation in exactly the proper tone, with respectful curiosity. Thus when it was all over Judd had been asked if he would like to rest. He stretched out on a couple of chairs, and, the tension gone, for a tumultuous second imagined himself and Artie mounting the scaffold together. Repeating to himself that he had no fear, that he was consistent, Judd presently slept.

When Judd awoke there was coffee, and Horn was back, looking newly shaven. Then Padua came into the room with Artie.

Artie was wearing a hiding, self-conscious grin. The nearness of Artie had brought in Judd the automatic throb of mind and heart together, but now there came an emptiness as he recalled what Artie was doing. In trying to twist the story, Artie was deserting their togetherness, killing it.

Mr. Horn was amiable. “Now, boys, we want to read you your statements. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to give us your corrections.”

Padua handed Judd a copy of Artie’s statement. At once Judd saw the little mistake about when they first planned the thing, and even that small error was incomprehensible to him. How could Artie have forgotten that night ride after raiding the frat? He read on, until there came the part about who was driving the Willys.

This was the second moment of shattering for Judd, after having been told, the night before, that Artie was confessing. Now, Artie was breaking their union.

Judd fixed his eyes on his friend, who had been reading Judd’s own confession. At that moment, Artie flushed and leaped up, talking angrily. “In the first place, he says the chisel was wrapped by me. It was wrapped by him, Judd Steiner, in Jackson Park. He wrapped that chisel while waiting there in Jackson Park on that little nine-hole golf course. All right.”

Artie’s objection was partly true. Sitting next to each other in the car, Artie had said, “I’ll show you,” and started the tape around the hard blade, then handing it to Judd to wrap.

“In the second place, he mentioned the idea of the thing, well, the main thing was to get the burial place, and the means of throwing that package. The place was his, and he struck on that idea of the train.”

That was it, then – Artie wanted step by step to put the full blame on him, his idea, his burial place, his chisel, his killing! Artie would make himself out as only an accessory. For one instant the scene of their planning, the chummy evenings in the house, came back to Judd, and he felt grief. But he listened on. “He doesn’t mention the method of killing,” Artie declared. “He had that very well conceived and planned out, as evidenced by the ether in the car, which was absolutely the notion to be followed through. The boy was to be etherized to death, and he was supposed to do that because he had a number of times chloroformed birds and things like that, and he knows ornithology. I don’t know a damn thing about that.”

“Yes, but the ether wasn’t used, was it?” Horn asked. “Who hit him with the chisel?”

Artie snapped, “He did.”

“Who is he?”

Judd tried again to catch Artie’s eye, to look him straight in the eye. Artie affirmed, “Judah Steiner, Jr. He was sitting up in the front seat-” and then he caught himself.

At Artie’s terrible slip, a double impulse of pity and of exultation, like some reversible electric current, went through Judd, and as Artie floundered Judd even felt an anxiety for his partner, now at last proven the weaker.

“I mean I was sitting up in the front seat,” Artie started again. “This is obviously a mistake. I am getting excited.” The prosecutors scarcely concealed their smiles. “This Kessler boy got up in the front seat. He didn’t see Judd till he was inside the car.” Artie was fully recovered now, and despite his own powerful desire to intervene and contradict, Judd felt a satisfaction that Artie was doing better. “I introduced Judd to this Kessler boy and then took him into the car.”

With these words Artie turned, pouring the rest out directly at Judd. “I have been made a fish of right along here. This story – all this alibi, all these women, and being drunk in the Coconut Grove and everything – we planned that definitely. It was definitely decided that that story was not to go after Wednesday noon, which was to be a week after the crime. After that we were just to say we didn’t know what we were doing. We felt that you were safe with your glasses after a week had passed and that your glasses being out there would not necessitate an airtight alibi. And then you came down here Thursday and told the story you had agreed not to tell!” Artie was shrieking now. “I came down to Mr. Horn, I denied being with you, Steiner, and being at the Coconut Grove; I stuck to our agreement! But when they started talking about the Grove and Lincoln Park, I put it together and knew you had told the alibi story you should not have told, so I stepped in to try to help you! And I think it is a damned sight more than you would have done for me. I tried to help you out because I thought that you at least, if the worst came to the worst, would admit what you had done and not try to drag me into it in that manner.”

Artie was staring into his face. It was for Judd like the moment that comes to any man in the discovery that the woman who had glowed for him, whom he loved, is a slut, and there is a bewildering dismay in him, and he thinks to himself, But I knew it all the time; I knew it when she was abandoned with me, when she did all those dirty things with me – they don’t count for dirty only because you yourself are doing them – but I knew she would do the same with other men. And sinkingly the man knows he may have to love her still and be alone for ever in his love.

So at this moment Judd felt eternal solitude coming upon him. The dignity, the consistency, of the deed had been broken; they were no longer wilful gods, but caught boys squirming to throw blame, and he wanted only to detach himself so he might at least retain his own idea of integrity.

Judd turned on Artie. “I am sorry that you were made a fish of and stepped into everything and broke down and all that. I am sorry, but it isn’t my fault.”

Horn broke in. “Now listen, boys. You have both been treated decently by me?”

Judd responded, “Absolutely.”

“No brutality or roughness?”

“No.”

Artie was still silent. “Not one of you has a complaint to make?”

“No,” Judd said.

“Have you?” Horn asked Artie.

“No,” Judd heard Artie mutter.

As they were led out, Artie didn’t look at him.

With unrelenting speed and energy, Horn sought to sew up his hanging case before lawyers could get to the boys and tell them to keep their mouths shut. Horn thought ahead to the defence. An insanity plea, undoubtedly. Some chance, with their brilliant school records! And Horn sent out men to secure depositions from fraternity brothers, from teachers, and from girl friends – had they ever known Judd or Artie to be anything but intelligent and self-possessed?

When we assembled again in Horn’s office, the boys were brought in to us, refreshed, alert, though hostile to each other.

A new phase of the bizarre story was opening.

At once came our questions about remorse. Artie said he was sorry, but only because the adventure had not succeeded. Judd said, “I have examined my reactions and can’t say that I have experienced any such sentiment as remorse.”

Would he do the thing again?

No, Judd said, with deliberation, but only because he now knew that there could be no perfect crime – some error would always be made.

While Artie scarcely spoke, Judd suddenly became torrential. After all, he said, it was not entirely wrong that they had been caught. Now they could fully explain their ideas; even if they paid with their lives, it was in a sense the only way to establish the new concept that had guided them. The failure, the slip-up, was a flaw in the experiment. The magnitude of the idea remained.

He began then to explain his superman philosophy – the freedom from all codes, sentiments, superstitions, even from fear of death itself. He was to go on talking all day, as our cavalcade retraced the path of the crime.

A half-dozen limousines were lined up in the street, but they were already insufficient for all the newsmen, the sob sisters, the photographers, the out-of-town press people who were arriving in droves.

With Sergeant McNamara behind him, Judd came over to where I stood with Tom. “I understand that we owe our predicament in good measure to you gentlemen,” Judd said, “but I want to state that I don’t regard it as anything personal. In fact, I must congratulate you on your accomplishment.”

I looked at him, trying to erase in myself the knowledge that he was a murderer. There had to be something human, something worthy, to draw a girl like Ruth – or was all love a delusion? Or was this worthier quality buried so deeply that only an occasional rare person like Ruth could sense it?

We were herded into the cars. I managed to crowd into Artie’s car with Padua, Mike Prager, and a sob sister from the Herald, a stringy blonde named Rea Knowles.

He was now being serious and penitent. “I don’t see how that cold-blooded fish can sit in that other car and laugh over this thing,” Artie told us. Rea asked if he felt the meaning of what he had done, and Artie said, “The first few days I didn’t feel it; it seemed to me that I could have carried this secret the rest of my life. But now I feel it.”

She immediately got after the girl story. “You went out on dates, during this last week, didn’t you, Artie? Didn’t it bother you when you were out with a girl?”

With his boyish candour, Artie said, “No, just a thought or two at times. But I’m appreciative of the thing now. Every once in a while the whole thing comes up and a realization of the thing we have done comes over my mind.”

He paused, as if it had come just then. “This thing will be the making of me,” Artie declared. “I’ll spend some years in jail, I suppose, and then I’ll be released. I’ll come out to a new life, I’ll go to work and have a career.” We all stared at him. Could it be that it hadn’t really hit him yet? Or did he feel so sure his people could get him off?

Artie turned the questioning on us. Did we think any lawyer could save his life? Inevitably, the name of Jonathan Wilk was mentioned. Artie had already been thinking of him. “But he only defends the poor,” he said. “Do you believe he would take our case?”

There was a silence. Padua, sitting up front, turned his head with a curious smile, and Rea resumed her attack. If he went to jail, did he have any girl in mind who might wait for him? And Artie said remorsefully that he didn’t know if any woman could ever marry him after the thing he had done. Though sometimes he felt as though it were another person who had done it -

Mike Prager leaped on this. Did Artie believe he had been dominated by Judd Steiner, in the crime?

Artie looked at us candidly, including Padua in his open gaze. “What do you think?” As one thought of the swarthy Judd, with his intense dark eyes, there could be only one answer to the boyish Artie: Judd, the master mind.

Was it true that Judd was unpopular, that he didn’t go out with girls? Rea asked Artie.

“Oh, we’ve been on double dates.” Artie eyed me confidentially.

“Well, you know what I mean. Has he ever been in love?”

“Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Artie said.

“Have you ever been in love?”

He smiled winningly for her. “Lots of times.”

“Yes, but I mean just once. The real thing.”

Artie winked. “Now, kid-” I revelled in my private knowledge, in having it all over Rea and Mike Prager.

The cavalcade had halted in front of the Driv-Ur-Self place. The manager, confronted with Judd, gasped, “Yes, I remember him – James Singer. Rented a Willys a couple of times. We made our usual full check-” he started to say, but Horn reassured him, “That’s all right.”

At the next stop an incident occurred. It was the lunch counter where Artie, as the reference for Mr. Singer, had waited for a telephone call.

When the crowd started into the place, a round-faced woman behind the cash register pointed at once to Artie. “That’s him!” Artie half pitched against the wall, fainting. A detective caught him, propping him up.

“The poor weakling.” We all turned our eyes to Judd. His voice had had neither contempt nor pity; there was merely the effect of a statement.

Artie was revived; he made an effort to joke it off, saying he usually required a pint before he passed out. The cavalcade was resumed.

We were following the death ride. From the turnoff lane to Hegewisch, briskly Judd led the group across the prairie, indicating where the body was carried and how he had pushed it into the concrete tube. “A few inches farther and it would never have shown,” he remarked, and his voice had that odd, clacky classroom tone.

Someone in the crowd asked, “Why, particularly, in this place?” And at this, Artie burst out, “This was all Mr. Steiner’s idea. I’m not even familiar with this place. I couldn’t even find it again!”

And vaguely, I think I felt then what Judd may have felt: the cistern, the close snug fit, as when little kids, finding a packing box or a barrel, feel impelled to crawl in and hide.

“Why here?” someone repeated, and Judd looked confused. He turned away. He was in conversation with McNamara about his chances. The big cop had become familiar. “I don’t think I’ve got a chance before a jury, do you?” Judd said. “They’d hang us.” McNamara agreed, professionally, that a jury would be a big risk. Sometimes a judge could be friendlier.

“I suppose our families will secure the best legal talent for us,” Judd said. “Maybe with a smart lawyer before a judge, our lives could be saved. What do you think?” That speculation was to provide a fantastic climax to the trial.

Down the lane, Judd showed where the belt buckle could be dug out, and it was found, and then the shoes. We drove to the beach, where the half-cindered remnants of the lap robe were located, and finally to the lagoon in Jackson Park, where divers sought the remains of the typewriter. Thus it was all proven, exactly, exactly.

When we came downtown again and struck Michigan Boulevard, we encountered a parade, and Judd cried, “Oh, yes, Memorial Day!” And he added, “The annual parade for legalized murder.”

Then it was dinnertime and Horn expansively ordered the entire cavalcade to proceed to Crown’s, near Lincoln Park. Several huge round tables were commandeered. Judd again became discursive, like an instructor following up his laboratory demonstration with a lecture.

And it was then that he made his second irreparable remark. When someone asked if Nietzsche’s superman philosophy justified murder, Judd perversely replied, “It is easy to justify such a death, as easy as to justify an entomologist impaling a butterfly on a pin.”

The room became quiet. Danny Mines of the News said, “We all had a little Nietzsche in college, Steiner, but that doesn’t mean you have to live by it.”

“Why not?” Judd demanded. “A philosophy, if you are convinced it is correct, is something you live by.”

We all studied our menus. “The herring is excellent here,” Judd announced to McNamara, “but I suppose you don’t like herring – you aren’t Jewish.”

Throughout the meal he continued to flash his erudition, and against my will, I was being pushed by the others, set up as the antipode – for I too was a university graduate at eighteen. Repeatedly, Judd seemed to challenge me, with a reference to Anatole France, a reference to Voltaire. On these I could keep up with him, but I had not read Sappho, even in translation. “The Medicis!” he cried. “We all have a time to be born in. I should have lived in the time of Cellini or Aretino, don’t you think? You’ve read Aretino, surely?”

How much Judd was a part of his own century we could not then know.

Only at the end of the meal, as we arose, Judd took an opportunity to talk quietly with me, as two who are publicly opponents but privately have much in common. “Have you seen our friend Ruth?”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t had a chance in the last few days, but I talked to her on the phone. She – she sent you her sympathy.”

He gave me a furtive look. “Make my apologies to her, will you?”

As Horn was hustling the boys away, a reporter called a last question. Did they have any word for their parents?

“Yes,” Judd snapped, “tell my father it’s time he got me a lawyer.”

As it was Saturday night I went to see Ruth.

This should have been my moment of triumph – a young reporter coming to his girl after trapping the most sensational murderers in all history!

As I entered, she came toward me with a forced smile. “No, really, Sid, it was fine what you did, it was brilliant, and I want you to know-” We stood near each other, we almost leaned to kiss, but then only grasped hands, and I knew it was gone.

I gave her Judd’s apology. She whispered, “Poor kid.”

My nerves were all gone. I burst out, “Why keep sympathizing with him? He’s a plain monster! Artie at least has some remorse, but not Judd! He’s even bragging! He throws us all this fancy Nietzsche superman philosophy as if it makes everything excusable!”

She stood listening, silent, and this provoked me to a stumbling, even patronizing, effort at reconciliation. Too bad, I went on, that she had been attracted by Judd for a few days, fooled, but now -

Her eyes had filled with tears. I reached for her, but she drew aside. “Oh, Sid!” was all she said. Then Ruth let her tears flow, and I felt they were not only for Judd, not only for us, but for the whole sick world.

Ruth said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

As we walked to the park, I found myself suddenly talking in a streak about the case, about us. “Ruth, it was when I told you about Judd’s glasses that I saw you believed he had done it. Something in you knew. That was when I went out to find more proof.”

She drew her hand from mine. “Then I did it too,” she said.

“What, what did you do? For God’s sake, how can you blame yourself, how can you blame us for catching them?”

“Oh, no. They had to be caught. Oh, I suppose I’m a coward.” We stood in the park and then, oddly, sat on a bench.

“Sid, I owe it to you – there’s something I have to tell you,” she said. And she told me about going out with Judd that time to the dunes.

I felt sick, sick for myself, then frightened as she talked. Alone, out there. He could have done anything.

“Nothing happened,” Ruth said.

But the sickest part I couldn’t ask in words. Had she felt – as with me?

She sensed that question too and took my hand this time. “It was something different, not like with you. Sid, something drew me to him. Perhaps because he needed someone so much and he keeps everything down deep inside himself.”

How could I feel jealousy for the poor bastard? And yet I blurted, “And after that, on the dunes, you went out with him again?”

“Yes.”

“Why, Ruth? Why?”

“I don’t know… he even spoke of marrying…” Her voice cried for understanding. “I – I think then I loved him. Oh, Sid, it would be wrong not to tell you. Perhaps it was only pity. I knew he was suffering from something terrible he couldn’t tell me. He hides everything in himself. Perhaps” – her voice became small, choked – “perhaps that’s even what made him do it.”

I didn’t quite understand that remark and felt that she would not be able to explain it either. Then she was calmer; Ruth even asked, it seemed to me quite impersonally, if I believed they should be executed.

I said I believed intellectually that capital punishment was pointless, merely vengeance, but when you saw a thing of this kind you simply felt that the perpetrators should be put out of this world.

She was silent, and I blundered again. I said, “Ruth, why should this make anything wrong between us? I didn’t murder anyone.”

Then it all burst out of her, in agony, in bitterness. “No? Haven’t you been working night and day, so excited, so eager too to be in on the kill, and don’t you want to see them hang even though you’re intellectually against it!” She doubled over, weeping. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

If I could have admitted, then, some feeling of shame, we might have got past that dreadful barrier. I see that now.

The two families could no longer deny the facts to themselves. Artie had been permitted to telephone his mother; thus she had indeed finally heard it from his own voice. “Yes, Mother, it’s true, I did it. I’m sorry for what it’ll do to the family. I’ll do anything you want me to.” It went on like that. His mother couldn’t speak except to repeat his name and ask over and over again, “Why? Why? How could you, Artie?”

Mrs. Straus was upstairs when Artie’s telephone call came. She and Artie’s father took the call together; though he would not speak into the phone, he sat beside her. Then he went into his study.

All were afraid for him. Randolph Straus was high-strung, sensitive; that was why he was sometimes so unapproachable. A nephew of Nathan Weiss, the founder of the great Corporation, he was now its executive head, and already, Straus knew he would resign. The name must not blot the company. He would resign, for he could not face the world.

What private guilts arose in each of the parents? Did Artie’s mother ask herself if it was a punishment for unfaithfulness to her church, for not raising her children as Catholics? Did his father partly revert, asking himself if the ancient archaic laws could be in force?

Then, at last, his brother Gerald walked in and said, “We have to make plans.”

Plans, plans – what plans were there to make? But he came out with Gerald, and sat with them; his sons, his brothers, his wife’s brothers, and the Feldschers had come. There was talk in twos, in threes, mostly hushed – the child’s clothes burned in their own furnace, right here in this house – and the dreaded word unuttered, then uttered at last. It could only be insanity.

And that word sounded at last the deeper fears. For as in every large family, there was one who was sick – a cousin in an asylum – and now the waves seemed to reach for them all. Would every girl of the family feel the dread fate in her womb? Was this what Artie had done to them?

But Randolph Straus would not accept it. And he stood up and spoke for all of them to hear. “It’s his own fault! That boy had everything! Since he was a child, he’s been taking advantage, getting himself into trouble because he knew we’d have to get him out of it. We’ve covered up every mess he got into – he lied, he was wild, he cheated at cards, he stole; yes, we all knew it. He drove like a wild man, not caring for anyone’s life. No one can say we didn’t try with him; he’s no good, and now he has done this and he will pay for it himself! Let him take the consequences of the law.”

His voice did not break but seemed barely to reach to the last word. And he would speak no other word. He had denounced Artie, he had reverted to those ancient archaic laws, he would not speak Artie’s name ever again, he did not want to hear of him.

After a moment his brother Gerald said, “But we’ve got to get him a defence. You can’t call that interfering with the law.”

Lewis remarked, “Whatever we do, they’ll say we’re trying to buy it.”

James said, “If we don’t help him, it’ll look worse.”

The sons confronted their father. But the father remained silent. No matter what was done, Artie’s life saved, or his body hanged, to him Artie was eliminated.

With this point reached, cousin Ferdinand Feldscher suggested talking to Judah Steiner; the families should perhaps best act in unison.

When the call came from the Strauses, Judah Steiner did not have the strength to go. “You go, Max. What needs to be done for him, do it.”

Max had seen many of them only a few days ago at his engagement party. They asked solicitously about his fiancée – had she gone back to New York?

“She’s fine, just saw her – she’s taking it like one of the family.”

Artie’s father was no longer in the room; his Uncle Gerald had taken charge. The gloom and shame had been brushed aside; there was work to be done, a campaign to organize.

The question had two parts: what was best for the families? And what could be best for the boys?

Who could say in so many words what stood darkly in every mind: best for all might be the quickest, the quietest end. If the boys had to hang, then let it be got over with; there was no need for a spectacular trial with the family names in the headlines for months to come.

It was Ferdinand Feldscher who finally suggested, “Plead guilty, then there’s no jury trial, only a quick hearing. Ordinarily on a guilty plea you would get a deal, a life sentence, but in this case-”

But Uncle Gerald Straus spoke up. Was it a foregone conclusion that there could be no other verdict? What about insanity?

Edgar Feldscher spread his palms. “Of course they’re sick, the crime itself shows it. But if you plead insanity you automatically go before a jury, that’s the law. And in a case like this, I can’t imagine any jury letting them live.”

Gerald said, “There is no such thing as being sure of what a jury will do.” He would get the best help there was, he said, even if it cost a million dollars! And if the case remained in the headlines, let it! The harm had already been done. At least, let the world see that their families stood by these two brainsick children!

The younger Feldscher the bald-domed Edgar, had been listening as though gathering up all that was valuable; his voice was soft, in contrast to Uncle Gerald’s. “We could do something more than merely defend them. We could spare nothing to try to find out, as far as modern science can, what made them do it.” They all looked at him with the respect owed a man who worried over the deeper elements in things. All of them knew how close Edgar had been to the cousin who had become mentally troubled. Now Edgar ended, rather tentatively, “Suppose we get the best men, even from Vienna. Make a full study. Perhaps it could prove of some use to humanity, too.”

Uncle Gerald said that was a real point. Especially if it was going to be an insanity defence. But right now strategy was the problem. First, as to legal counsel. Ferdinand Feldscher was certainly one of the biggest trial lawyers in the whole country -

“No, no, you don’t have to watch out for my feelings, Gerry,” Ferdinand interrupted. “We all know there is only one man to go to.”

“My father always believes in getting the best,” Max Steiner said.

James Straus said, “The question is, would Wilk take it? I understand he only defends the poor.”

“He’ll take it, he’ll take it,” Ferdinand Feldscher said, “out of vanity if for nothing else.”

Even though it was past midnight, Gerald was for going directly to Wilk’s house.

“Go home, go home,” Judah Steiner kept telling his sister-in-law and her husband, until at last she said, “You’ll be all right?” and he promised her he would go right up to bed.

He went through the motions of undressing, and then he drew on a robe and returned downstairs.

Unaccountably there had come into his mind the thought, Maybe it was because for the last baby they had wanted a girl.

He was uncomfortable with it. He had never let his mind go into such things, these complicated psychological things that people brought into the conversation nowadays. He had not even wanted to know, exactly, that story about the boys a couple of years ago, in Charlevoix; Max had brought him the story – well, you know, a couple of young boys horsing around. Such things, the dirty things in life, had to be shut out.

Still, it came to his mind again, Judd’s going to school that first time when they had lived on Michigan Avenue, and the only decent school nearby was Miss Spencer’s where they had only girls.

The unending arguments! Mother Dear, can’t you see the boy is miserable, everybody teases him, a sissy with all those girls. Finally he had taken Judd out and sent him to the public school. But that had lasted only a few months. Until that day when the stupid nurse had been late to fetch him, and Judd had come running home himself with the bloody nose.

No, no, even so, a bloody nose, every boy has to go through it, he had argued, but his wife and her sister had talked him down. The boy was weak and frail even for his age. So Mother Dear insisted it was better to send him back to Miss Spencer’s – at least the girls didn’t beat him up and call him sheenie.

Judah Steiner had been sitting in the dark in the large leather chair where he usually smoked. Now he leaned over and switched on the lamp.

He went to the back of the library and uncovered a projector he had bought especially because of Judd’s little film last summer. Taking out the film, he managed to thread it, though this was something he had usually asked Judd to do. To set up the screen, he moved almost stealthily; he did not want servants to come. Then he sat on the high-backed chair by the carved-legged library table, watching the picture.

There was the boy, crouching, alert, his eyes so bright. It was on the dunes, the high weeds, the sand. Now the camera picked out the birds, hopping on the branches of a high bush – a special lens had been used to enlarge them from that distance.

Now Judd came out, standing near the bush. He held out his hand, with some bird seed, or crumbs, whatever he used for them. A bird hopped close. It was thought these warblers were gone altogether, migrated for ever, or maybe died out, until Judd discovered them there on the dunes. The State of Michigan had sent the cameraman to make a record of the discovery. An ornithology magazine had printed an article Judd wrote. Perhaps the boy was right, perhaps he should have been a scientist…

The tears came to his eyes.

Mistily, he saw the bird hopping up onto Judd’s forearm – and Judd was smiling now, his serious, dignified smile, people said like his father’s.

Judah Steiner’s eyes were so filled with tears that he couldn’t see any more. He felt the tears roll down his face.

By then already a legendary figure, Jonathan Wilk devoted more time to lecturing, writing, philosophizing than to the law. In a courtroom, he was purely and simply a great plea-maker. None like him has since arisen. Though from a technical point of view he was an amazing cross-examiner, dogged, devious, even cunning when necessary, his spectacular qualities emerged on the simplest level of pleading for human compassion. He spoke of himself as a materialist, but I suppose what came through was the heart of a mystic, a man of great soul who sought to open the souls of other men.

He had become famous as a labour lawyer in a great railway strike. For an entire generation he had defended labour leaders accused of violence. In a frame-up, Wilk had been completely broken and nearly disbarred; he had then regained his career in an endless series of trials, defending criminals, defending underdogs, defending Negroes, defending; defending. He was a reformer, sometimes an iconoclast, an awakener, and he had lived long enough to become a legend.

His body was beginning to show weariness – rheumatic spells sometimes kept him bedridden for weeks. Wilk resided in a third-floor walk-up overlooking the university and the park. The stairs were too much, but he would not abandon the apartment, with its magnificent view.

Gerald Straus led the way up the stairs. James Straus and Max Steiner had come with him.

Mrs. Wilk herself came to the door, a compact woman, with a humorous mouth, quick eyes. They told her who they were.

Wilk had heard the bell; he was sitting up in bed. Gerald Straus said, “We’ve come to you as the only man who can save our boys.”

As he had been secluded all day, reading, the last Wilk knew of the Kessler sensation was that two rich boys had been picked up for some silly coincidence about eyeglasses.

“But anyone can get your boys out,” he said. “It’s obviously only a coincidence.”

“No, no, they’ve confessed!” Hoarsely, Gerald Straus pleaded, “You’ve got to take the case. You’re the only one who can get them off.”

Wilk sat erect. “Get them off?”

Max quickly interjected, “Save their lives. Just so they don’t hang. Let them go to jail for life, we wouldn’t even ask for less.”

“It will be a great case,” Uncle Gerald said, recalling Feldscher’s suggestion. And he added, “You can name your own fee.”

Wilk seemed not to have heard the last part. By his lifelong philosophy he was doomed to defend them, even if it killed him, and it might, it just might.

“I don’t know,” he said cautiously, sighing. “Where are they now?”

“State’s Attorney Horn has them. He’s been running them all around town; they’ve been talking their heads off.”

Wilk’s jaw moved. “By now, you won’t be able to get a writ to get them out of his clutches before Monday morning. He’s got all Sunday to keep them babbling. God knows what he’ll get them to say.”

“You certainly can’t do anything now in the middle of the night,” his wife said. “Jonathan, at least get some sleep before you decide.”

Wilk sighed again. “I don’t know if I can do you much good. You’ve got a fine man in your own family, Ferdinand Feldscher.”

“He begged us to get you,” Uncle Gerald said earnestly.

“Well, come in the morning.” Wilk looked at his wife. “I suppose the Feldschers thought about alienists. There are only a few top men in town. Arthur Ball – you’d better try to get him.”

“I’ll call him right now,” Gerald offered.

“If Horn hasn’t got him already, it’ll keep till morning.”

When they were gone, his wife said, “Jonathan, it’ll kill you. And everybody will say you’re doing it for the money.”

Wilk found the answer, the inevitable slogan, at once. “The rich have got as much right to a defence as the poor.”

Horn had got to the alienists. Dr. Ball was already in Horn’s office, early Sunday, when the boys were brought from the hotel where they had been allowed a last night of ease.

Several of us were in the room.

Dr. Ball was keen-looking, kindly, quite aged; he was a professor emeritus of the Northwestern Medical School ’s department of neurology. Instantly Judd began talking about the mental processes of birds. When birds altered their migratory routes by selecting between various sensory stimuli, wasn’t that reasoning? Just as when humans made decisions by selecting between sensory stimuli – like a man between two women. “I am a behaviourist,” Judd announced, while the professor smiled and asked whether in his view a human being had no more control over his conduct than a bird.

“I take a materialist determinist position,” Judd said, and just then another psychiatrist arrived. The new arrival, Dr. Stauffer, turned to the boys with zest.

Judd recognized his name. “Ah, you’re an advocate of the Stanford-Binet test – you’re sold on it,” he challenged. He kept on, talking about reflex actions and reaction time. He had measured reactions of a ten-thousandth of a second, Judd said.

The term “ten-thousandth” caught Horn’s ear, for he now turned to the boys asking why they had fixed on ten thousand dollars as the ransom. Judd laughed at the association and said, “See, everything has a cause.”

But surely they hadn’t needed the money, Horn said.

“Why shouldn’t we want it?” Artie said. “Ten thousand dollars is ten thousand dollars.”

“Well, if I had ten thousand in my pocket right now would you try to lift it?” Horn said.

“It would be highly improbable that you had ten thousand dollars,” Judd remarked, and everyone laughed at the jibe.

Dr. Ball asked the boys to tell their story, and Artie began to relate it all over again in every detail. There were elaborate shiftings around, Judd using a filing cabinet as a table. There were thank-yous at the water cooler. All this, we learned at the trial, was being noted down by Dr. Stauffer – the responsiveness, the well-oriented behaviour, the ability to carry on the complex recital through incessant interruptions.

When Artie had completely finished his story, Dr. Ball looked from one to the other and inquired, in a tone of unaffected curiosity, “But can you tell me why you did it?”

“I don’t know why on earth I did it!” Judd blurted out.

Artie was silent.

At that moment, Judd’s father entered the room.

That morning was the first time Judah Steiner had called for the car since the thing had happened. He had not seen Emil since the papers had said it was the chaufeur’s unexpected story that had proved to be the last straw causing Artie to break down and confess.

Emil stood holding the car door open, as always. Judah Steiner stopped for a moment before getting into the car. “I don’t blame you, Emil,” he said. “You did what your conscience told you.”

Emil gulped some words, how sorry he was. They drove downtown.

Judah Steiner went up to the same door where, a few nights before, he had appeared as a proud man to make his presence felt. Today he walked uncertainly, dazed, bewildered. All his measurements of life had proven wrong. As he entered, he heard those words of Judd’s in the high clacky voice, “I don’t know why on earth I did it!” and at the same moment their eyes met.

Judd said, “Hello, Dad.”

The State’s Attorney was the first to break the silence. “Is there anything we can do for you, Mr. Steiner?”

“No, no, sir.” Perhaps Steiner felt he had already received the answer to whatever had brought him there.

“Did you wish to speak with your son alone for a few moments?”

“Did you get me a lawyer?” Judd demanded, without waiting.

“Yes,” his father said. “That is arranged. We have engaged the best. Mr. Jonathan Wilk will defend you.”

A look of triumph came onto Judd’s face. He turned involuntarily to Artie, forgetting for the moment their estrangement. Artie was grinning.

The father was still looking at his son, his head beginning to shake slightly from side to side. Judd said, “I’m sorry this happened.”

“Yes,” Steiner said. “We are all sorry.” He turned and withdrew.

From there, he had Emil drive him to the Wilk apartment. Max was there, with the rest, in the library with its overflow of books in piles on the floor.

Judd’s father inquired after Mr. and Mrs. Straus. How were they?

“Lewis took them to Charlevoix,” Gerald said. “Doctor’s orders.” Randolph Straus had a bad heart. Mrs. Straus had fallen into a state of depression. “It’s best for them to leave. What can they do here?” And the hounds, the stupid dirty hounds of the public had already started on them, Gerald said bitterly. Anonymous phone calls, even telegrams.

Judah Steiner listened. Yes, it was better they should go.

With all this hysteria, said Ferdinand Feldscher, there was only one course – to delay. To wait for things to die down.

“Horn will scream his head off if you try any delay,” Wilk said. “We all know him.” No, they had to get right to work on a defence. Unfortunately, Dr. Ball had already been nabbed by the state. So had Dr. Ralph Tierney. Of course there were others.

Edgar Feldscher had his intent, concentrated look. He offered his thought. “Why can’t we both use them, if they’re the best?”

Wilk’s eyes lighted up as he caught the idea, but the others were all staring at Edgar Feldscher, uncomprehendingly. He elaborated. Why not make a truly honest, serious attempt to get the best, the latest that modern science could offer, to have a joint comprehensive study made of the boys? Wouldn’t it inspire public confidence, reduce some of this hostility, if both sides agreed to use the same scientific study?

“And after all that,” Wilk said with melancholy humour, “some totally ignorant layman on the jury will decide on their sanity according to how he likes their faces.”

All looked to Wilk, the swayer of juries. He drew his hand slowly along his cheek. Just then Mrs. Wilk, with a slight groan, passed him a copy of the Sunday Examiner, pointing to an account of Judd’s conversation while retracing the trail of the crime. Wilk read it aloud: “Young Steiner also discussed the possibility of a guilty plea, saying the best thing for him and for Artie might be to avoid a jury and go before a friendly judge. With their family millions-”

“Well,” said Wilk dryly, “if we don’t get at those boys and make them stop talking, they’ll hang themselves for sure, judge or jury.”

“If they haven’t already,” Ferdinand Feldscher muttered.

Meanwhile an item in another column had caught his brother’s eye. It was about a meeting of psychiatrists, opening in Atlantic City. The top men in the country would all be there. Edgar pointed out excitedly.

Gerald spoke decisively. “Somebody better take the night train to Atlantic City.”

Judah Steiner seemed scarcely to have been following the details, but as the group broke up he drew Edgar Feldscher aside. In an almost ashamed voice, he asked, “Could it be that we are doing wrong to try to defend them?” Edgar Feldscher studied him, his large serious eyes seeming to know the full meaning. “I am trying to think,” Judah Steiner said, “if they were not our sons.”

Edgar Feldscher placed his hand on the older man’s shoulder. “Our conception of justice requires a defence. That’s why justice holds the scales blindfolded. So as not to see the monsters.”

Judah Steiner’s head was beginning to shake again. “You feel that anybody has to be defended, no matter what he did?”

“Yes,” Feldscher said with his small, rather worried smile. “Everyone. That is the basis of our law. Everyone is entitled to a defence.”

Steiner’s head steadied. “Then you believe we are not responsible for what we do?” he asked, heavily.

“Yes, we are responsible. But when our behaviour becomes abnormal, there are causes, pressures from outside and from inside, and the individual needs help to overcome such terrible pressures. Besides, there is the whole question of the kind of punishment. Take these boys-” and the way he said it, they could be strangers. “What would be served by their execution? Judd has already shown so much creative power.”

Again, the father’s eyes filmed. He did not try to hide the tears from Feldscher. “If he is allowed to live, even in prison he might repay with some good-”

“Yes. That is what I thought.”

“But what made them do it?” the father asked.

“Who knows?” the lawyer repeated. “I look at all this as human energy we’re dealing with, free energy, a natural force, which we try all our lives to control. Like electricity, which we use and control, even if we don’t understand its nature. What we have in us, this energy, is a flow of force, and sometimes a part of it flashes out, like lightning.” Judah Steiner was staring at him, unhappily. “I know it doesn’t exactly fit, but it seems to me, and the newer psychologists try to explain it this way, we all have this psychic energy, and we have to channelize it, but sometimes, like a baby – a baby doesn’t know good from bad – it lets through every impulse, what it wants it does, what it wants it seizes.”

“But how can they be still like babies? They are grown, brilliant, intelligent boys.”

“Some parts of us can stay ungrown; in some parts of us we are still like babies,” Feldscher said. “We use it in our daily conversation – we say someone is infantile. You can’t blame a baby for what it does.”

Steiner’s head was shaking again; he couldn’t understand. “You never blame anyone?”

“Yes. Yes, I do believe there is blame. But I try not to blame right away.” He held his pipe elegantly.

“I don’t understand.” Steiner turned away. “I don’t understand.”

The other men were in a circle, their voices subdued, for there had come up a remaining part of the subject so disagreeable to touch that each had held off from it. Judah Steiner did not know, at first, what they referred to, for he had found himself unable to look at the newspapers. But he caught their words now. Ferdinand Feldscher was saying, “It’s to be expected Horn will try to pin every unsolved crime of the last five years on them.” The newspapers were asking about that horrible crime of a few months ago, the taxi driver who had been found mutilated, the “gland robbery” on the South Side. Two assailants, he had said.

“But he admitted he never got a good look at them; he could never identify his assailants,” one of the others insisted.

“Well, maybe I shouldn’t mention this,” Max put in, his voice quite low and solemn. “But at my engagement party Artie kept talking all the time about the kidnapping, saying he bet the same criminals committed the two crimes. A lot of people heard him. Someone is liable to remember it now.”

James Straus said, with his hasty way of getting rid of something nasty, “In the Examiner they mention that student who left the house to mail a letter and was found drowned. Artie knew him. Perry Rosoff.”

“That poor Rosoff boy was a suicide,” Uncle Gerald stated.

Hesitantly, James suggested, “Wouldn’t it be better if we asked the boys about all this?”

There was a silence, a fear-laden silence. Then Gerald said, “Can’t we wait and deal with these matters when and if any evidence is offered?”

The group began to break up.

“If there is anything like that,” Ferdinand Feldscher said to his brother Edgar, “can there still be a question of sanity?”

We were all, by then, puzzling over the other crimes. Tom recalled that strange stormy letter stolen from Judd’s desk. About betraying Artie to a friend. Couldn’t that have been about the other crimes? And the friend, Willie Weiss, was the same fellow they had lunched with on the day of the murder! None of us had talked to Weiss. True, the police had checked and dismissed him. Still, shouldn’t we try to see Willie?

Tom had to go home; he explained he always had Sunday dinner with his folks. We agreed I should try to see Willie Weiss by myself. This time he proved not difficult to find. I phoned his home and was told he had gone over to do some work at the lab.

Working at the end of the long room was a round-shouldered figure in a smeared lab coat, perched on a high stool. “Weiss?” I said.

He had a long, narrow head, held a trifle cocked to one side; his eyes were keen, but his dark skin was completely pocked and his nose was a caricature. “The Horrible Hebe”, we learned Judd called him, and he was ugly in the grand manner. As he slipped off the stool, I saw that he was dwarfish, the head overlarge.

Willie didn’t seem hostile. Indeed, before I could ask him any questions, he was drawing out from me in extreme detail everything I had done on the story, getting me particularly to tell how Artie had injected himself among the reporters, even among the detectives, with his advice, theories, clues.

“True to form, true to form,” Willie kept saying about Artie’s behaviour, and then, “I would have guessed he’d be the first one to break down and confess.”

I observed to Willie that he probably knew them better than anybody.

“You think I was a third member of the team?” He grinned. “Sure, we had lunch regularly every Wednesday. I was studying them.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. I’m interested in their psychology. You seen them since they confessed?”

“I just came from there,” I said. “The State’s Attorney had a couple of alienists in the office, questioning them.”

“Yes?” He was full of curiosity. “Who?”

“Dr. Ball. And Stauffer.”

“Pretty good men,” he conceded. He wanted to know what they had asked. I said they had only had the boys repeat their story of the crime.”

Hadn’t they asked anything about their life? Their homes? Their families? Their childhood? Hadn’t they advanced any idea about what made the boys do it?

“No,” I said, “they just asked them if they knew right from wrong.”

“Goyishe kep!” Willie snapped. His use of the Yiddish expression, dumbheaded gentiles, came with a sidewise grin to me.

Since he was studying them, I asked, did he have any idea what made the boys do it?

Only the beginning of a theory, Willie said. Those alienists – had they questioned the boys about the weapon, the particular choice of weapon?

“No,” I replied. “Why?”

“Just curious,” Willie said. And he moved to turn back to his work. I stopped him with a direct attack. Had he ever known about other stuff they had done? What about that famous letter of Judd’s?

“What about it?” Willie grew a trifle sharp.

It just sounded, I said, as if Judd had revealed to him some crime that Artie had committed.

“That’s an interesting assumption,” Willie said. “So you connect it with all that junk in today’s paper about additional crimes?” He kept looking at me. “Nah, all Judd did was to hint around to me that he knew things about Artie that I didn’t know.” He mimicked, “‘Artie tells me secrets he doesn’t tell you!’ You know the way girls are with their little whisperings.” Willie shook his head in admiration of his own perceptiveness. “Pure feminine psychology.”

But even if they were perverts, I said, the way the crime now seemed to have been done, that had nothing to do with it.

Did I know anything about the new psychology? Willie asked. About Sigmund Freud?

I knew the catchwords: complexes, suppressed desires.

“It’s my field,” Willie announced.

Did the Freud stuff help him to understand Judd and Artie? I asked.

No, no, he was far from understanding. Weiss was entirely serious with me now. “Only I’ve had a kind of hunch,” he said. It kept sitting on his mind that there was a significance in a couple of things – two things that might turn out to contain the key.

What two things? What were they?

“The implement,” he said, “the implement, and then, the burial place.”

“The implement?”

Yes. The weapon. The chisel wrapped around with tape.

So unused were we, in those days, to thinking in symbols that are today common to every imagination, that even under Willie’s shrewd prodding the meaning of it did not occur to me.

As for the burial place, I thought he meant the swamp, in its entirety. Was he perhaps hinting that other bodies might be found there? I asked him this, point-blank.

Willie must have decided then, that I was after all not too bright. Then, like an exasperated teacher, he gave me one more chance. “Who do you suppose they were really trying to kill?”

This time, as by telepathy, I caught his meaning. “Themselves?”

He gave me the smile of reward to a dense pupil who has at last come through with one correct answer. On the first plane, yes, he agreed, self-destructiveness was clear in both of them. Look at the way Artie drove a car – he had been in any number of accidents – and look at Judd’s dropping his glasses.

“Yes, of course,” I said.

But self-destructiveness wasn’t enough of an answer, Willie declared. Had I read the confessions? The different people they had picked to kill, at one time or another during their planning stage?

“Yes, you were on the list,” I said. “But everybody has a little list.”

He brushed aside my remark. “But whom did those people represent? Whom did they really want to kill?” He stared at me. “It would make a fascinating study. Fascinating. What an opportunity! Now that they’re isolated. What an opportunity for a great study!”

I could get no more out of him that day.

As I walked the half-empty sunny Sunday streets, the conversation lay on my mind. Whom had they really wanted to kill? And the chisel…

I called Tom. Presently he met me, driving up with his brother Will, who was on the police force. They were in Will’s Ford.

“That chisel-” Will ruminated, after I told them of my interview with Willie Weiss. We drove over to the Hyde Park station and Will talked to a friend of his, Sergeant Lacey.

Come to think of it, Lacey believed he had heard of at least one other chisel wrapped in tape picked up in the neighbourhood. Some months before. One of those private watchmen around the rich homes had found it on a lawn. Looked like something a footpad might have used, but it didn’t check with any crime; so as far as he knew it had been chucked away.

But of course! This was what Willie Weiss had meant. The weapon.

We got into the Ford and went to work again, questioning watchmen and gardeners in the neighbourhood. Yes, one or another had seen a chisel something like that, with tape on the blade. Yet we couldn’t track anything down precisely.

When we returned to the Hyde Park station, Will’s friend Lacey told him on the quiet about a search that had just been made in Artie’s room. In an old trunk in the closet, under some toys, they had found a whole lot of men’s wallets and ladies’ purses. No money in any of them.

When I got to my room there was a note under the door to call Miss Seligman. Though it was after ten, I called. Myra implored me to come directly to her room, which could be entered from the hotel corridor.

The room had a studio effect, and Myra was wearing a Chinesey kind of dressing gown; as she took my hand, her palm was hot and moist.

“Sid,” she said, “Sid, they were here! I don’t know if I did the right thing – I talked to them, I told them things about Artie-”

“Who?” I asked.

Two men from Horn’s office had appeared. Of course she wanted to help Artie, they said to her, and she had said, of course. They had been nice men, very considerate, and they had wanted to know all about Artie, since she had known him from childhood. He had always been of exceptional mentality, hadn’t he? And she had said, of course, he was brilliant! And certainly not abnormal.

Now she sucked in her lower lip, in that naughty-child way she had. “Do you think I said the wrong things, Sid?”

I said they were probably taking depositions from everybody.

She looked guiltily at me. They had asked about the last times she had been out with Artie and she had mentioned our date at the Four Deuces with him and Judd. They had wanted to know if Judd had a girl. She had mentioned his taking out my little friend Ruth.

Ruth would surely have been questioned in any case, I reassured her.

Her voice hoarse, Myra told how once she and Artie had made a suicide pact – she supposed all kids did that, but people only thought of Artie as always happy-go-lucky. And now, today… I didn’t move. After a moment she came and slipped to her knees, going limp against me. “Oh, tell me what to do,” she begged. “I would do anything to help him.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” I said. “You’re not mixed up in it.”

“I am, I am. Everybody who knew him is. Everybody who let him come to a thing like that.”

I tried to say that it was surely a sickness, that there was nothing she could have done. “Oh, I’m worse than a whore,” she cried. “Do you think if I had given myself to him… oh, we’re all such frauds – we pretend we’re so emancipated. Sid, if I had, if I had, then maybe he wouldn’t have got all tangled up with that awful Judd. That’s what got him into it. I feel such a complete failure.”

I believe that even at the time I saw that her obsession, her constantly putting everything in terms of sex, was only because it was the only name then given to love.

Sunday evening, the boys were finally brought to the real jail, the heavy, square building with walls of grey stone, almost black with dirt.

Horn had got all he wanted from them; so he turned them over to the sheriff, to be booked at last, charged with their murder.

There was a narrow connecting bridge, between the administration building and the cells, and Artie went first over it, getting ahead of the turnkey, who snapped, “What’s your hurry? You’ll have plenty of time here.”

He didn’t feel out of place. The closing door, the turning lock had familiarity. Artie looked to his cellmate with an almost mischievous glance, as though they were two kids. But the cellmate was a dull-witted farm lad, who didn’t even seem impressed by who Artie was. After brief exchanges of what they were in for – the cellmate had done a robbery with a gun – Artie stretched on his bunk.

He had seen himself often, lying behind solid dungeon walls. After Miss Nuisance had tucked him in tight and placed his teddy bear beside him and gone out, shutting the door as the lights went off, he would turn to the bear, and it came to his lips now, the magic beginning, “and now, Teddy…” But here the light never really went out.

And now, Teddy, they got us. But the master criminal, the greatest of them all, cannot be held by locks and bars. No, Teddy, this place is easy – you saw that guard, that screw, give me the eye, the one at the main gate. He’s in our pay; he’s part of the master criminal’s gang. And in a few days, as soon as we’re ready, we’ll tip him the wink, and the gate will accidentally be left open and we’ll walk right out of here.

Meanwhile we’ll play the game just like we did with Miss Nuisance. We will be model little boys. They will trust us, and we’ll wander around and get the layout…

But Mumsie hasn’t come to say good night to poor Artie. Only Miss Nuisance. Mumsie is busy with her baby. A new baby must be taken care of by Mumsie. All right for you!

Is Nuisance gone? Safe in her room? Sneak the flashlight from under the mattress. The detective book. The master criminal kidnappers. Snatch the baby right in his own house, and bring him up to the hiding place in the garret; everything works perfectly. That Italian organ grinder outside plays the signal-tune that says the ransom is ready. That means ten grand is ready.

No, we’ll do it differently. We’ll pretend to play cops and robbers with little brother. Yes, Mumsie, I’d love to play a game with Baby.

Shh, Teddy, here’s the plot. That little stupe believes everything you tell him. You pretend you’re on his side, helping him catch the master criminal, and I will be lying in wait at the top of the stairs. You bring the little bastard up, and pow! I’ve got him! It was an accident! Nobody knew the pistol was loaded. Poor baby, oh, my sweet little kid brother!

Then, punishment. They lock you in your room.

Revenge! Do the same to them!… “Now, Artie, this is your new governess, Miss Newsome, and you must be very nice to her.” There she goes into her room! Turn the key on her! Listen to the prisoner pound on the door! “Oh, Artie! Arthur! You naughty -!”

Then Miss Nuisance made him sit on a chair. Mumsie didn’t save him from her. Mumsie said obey Miss Newsome. All right for you, Mumsie, I’ll get even with you. In some dark hallway, pow!

They were leading him to the scaffold and Miss Nuisance was walking behind, reading A Tale of Two Cities out loud to him…

Turning over on his pallet, feeling something crawling under his clothing, Artie sat up. Bugs, lice.

Judd folded his trousers and his coat, placing them on the floor. He said a terse but civil good night to his cellmate, a car thief. The immense loneliness came over him.

He lay down with his hands under his head. And then all at once, in the quiet of the cell, Judd understood how stupid he had been in the last two days. A superman was not bound by the conventions of telling the truth! It was not against him, personally, that Artie had lied, but for his own self, as a god made his own truth.

A wave of relief passed through Judd. He had Artie back.

Would he see Artie tomorrow? In the yard?

The next morning when they were marched into the jail yard, Judd went up to Artie at once, his hand extended. “We got into this together, let’s go through with it together,” he said. “I’m sorry if I did anything that might strain our friendship.”

Artie blinked, then put out his hand, too, while over his face came that roguish, college-boy grin.

As Wilk and Ferdinand Feldscher came into the consultation cell, the boys rose, Artie with a sheepish look toward Feldscher, and Judd to address Wilk with undisguised adulation. “I am a great admirer of yours. May I say I consider you one of the greatest minds of our time?”

Well, he would try to be of help, Wilk said. But he did not see much hope. What had made them talk so much!

Raising his head, Judd said he guessed he had wanted to show off.

“All right. Now that’s finished with. Remarks like this thing about finding a friendly judge-” Wilk shook his head, eyeing Judd sadly. “You didn’t really say that?”

Judd declared that he couldn’t recall, exactly.

“Henceforth,” Feldscher admonished, “no matter what is asked, by reporters or anybody, you reply, ‘I must respectfully decline to answer upon advice of counsel’. Got that?”

“I must respectfully decline…” they parroted.

Feldscher glanced from one to the other. “Have they questioned you about other crimes?”

Artie’s face twitched.

“The papers are full of stuff. They claim you did everything from that gland atrocity to the killing of Cock Robin.”

“Have you got the papers?” Artie asked eagerly.

Feldscher shook his head. “Everybody is finding taped chisels all over Chicago.” His eyes had not left Artie’s face.

Artie returned his gaze unblinkingly. “I must respectfully decline to answer upon advice of counsel.”

For the time being they let it stand that way.

It was Wilk’s telephone now that rang incessantly with anonymous and obscene threats. A hundred and ten killers saved from the gallows? He himself would hang from a street lamp before he could add these two to his list!

And at midnight, flaming up beneath his windows, was the burning cross.

When news of it came, I rushed to the Midway, to see only the charred remnants, as of a huge box kite. Fire engines were pulling away. It was the Ku Klux Klan. The first burning cross in Chicago. No, no one had seen hooded white figures. Some said a truck had stopped, a dozen men had set up the ready cross, touched matches to it, and driven off.

For Wilk? I was dazed. What had this crime to do with the K.K.K.? All I knew were the general things. K.K.K. was something to be joked about, yet vaguely menacing. All those men in their white sheets, their regalia, were subjects for Mencken’s jokes in The Smart Set. They were symbols of stupidity. And they had seemed rather distant from Chicago. Wasn’t it a Southern thing that had started after the Civil war, against Negroes? The nearest that it had ever come to Chicago was some town in Indiana. A burning cross had been reported there. And they would come at night and grab somebody – some minister involved in a scandal, perhaps – they would grab him and take him to a wood and whip him. They were not only against Negroes. Catholics and Jews, too.

And Wilk. An atheist. A defender of Jews.

Then a remark of my father’s came to my mind. When I had called home, on Sunday, his only remark about the case had been, “One thing is lucky in this terrible affair, Sid. It’s lucky it was a Jewish boy they picked.” My father, with his one yardstick. What will it do to the Jews?

It was to take me a long while to perceive the inverted, subterranean way in which there was a meaning to their all being Jewish. The immediate result of the cross-burning was a police guard set around Jonathan Wilk. Despite his protests.

Then the defence called a press conference. Wilk was sitting with his back to the windows as we filed in, but he got up at once and assumed his celebrated Lincolnesque stoop; his coat hung loosely open, and his left thumb was automatically hooked under his braces. He waved us in, the ageing speckled skin of his hand transparent in a sunny.

We were handed copies of a prepared statement. The families pledged themselves in no way to make use of their wealth to influence justice. Lawyers’ fees would be determined by the Bar Association. The families felt that the boys should be permanently removed from society; however, they hoped that their lives would be saved.

Did that mean an insane asylum? we asked. What would the defence be?

First, said Edgar Feldscher, the defence would try to assemble the facts.

Mike Prager snapped, “Hasn’t everything already been found out?”

The outward facts, yes. But a team of the very best alienists would make a study to determine the inward facts.

“Then you are going to plead insanity?”

The plea, he repeated smilingly, would depend on the study. It was to be purely scientific. Indeed, the defence still held open to Mr. Horn the offer for a joint mental study.

We took the defence offer to Horn. He laughed. “I’ve got my own alienists, the best in the business. Old Wilk is trying to pull a deal. First, a joint examination. Then he’ll offer a guilty plea. Oh, no, you can tell old Jonathan the Great that I’m not playing. I’ve got an airtight hanging case and those boys are going to swing.”

Had there been feelers from the defence? Was there a chance of a deal on a guilty plea before the Chief Justice?

“You know what the chances would be if I was still sitting up there!” Horn said ominously. He was reminding us that before running for State’s Attorney, he had himself occupied the post of Chief Justice of the Criminal Court. He was putting Judge Matthewson on notice.

The formal arraignment was to take place on the following morning, and late into the night we hovered near the Wilk apartment, still held by Horn’s angry hint that there might be a plea of guilty instead of a great show trial.

Edgar Feldscher had returned from Atlantic City, bringing two of his alienists. Willie Weiss was there too, hurrying in and out of various rooms, and from the doorway I managed to get his attention. He came out and walked around the block with me, talking incessantly. He was going to work with the defence! There was Dr. Hugh Allwin, a very advanced man who had just come from Vienna with the very latest techniques! And with him was Dr. Eli Storrs, a brilliant psychologist. “They’re really going to do a job!” he said. “Nothing like this has ever been done before. Complete psychological and physiological studies, the latest gland stuff. Wilk’s also got Dr. Vincenti, the best endocrine man alive!” The boys would virtually be taken apart, to see what made them tick.

But upstairs, I gathered, the insanity strategy was in question. Precedent alone, straight legal precedent, presented to a judge, might be the soundest approach, for no minor in Chicago had ever been hanged on a guilty plea.

On the morning of the arraignment we still did not know how they would plead. Then, as we were leaving for court, Reese beckoned to Tom. Somebody named Al Capone, the owner of a speak-easy called the Four Deuces, had just been picked up for shooting a top gangster named Joe Howard. A new kind of cold-blooded killing. The car had simply swept past Joe Howard on Clark Street, and he had been shot full of holes.

Tom hurried to police headquarters and I went on alone to cover the arraignment of the boys.

As word spread that the thrill killers would appear, there were scuttlings from all the corridors; from nowhere, the courtroom filled.

The boys were brought in. It was Artie’s nineteenth birthday, and the sob sisters were ready. Had he received presents from his best girls? From Myra Seligman? From Dorothea Lengel?

Artie smiled teasingly. Other questions came, for both. What was jail life like? Would they prefer hanging to life sentences? And they replied courteously, but like a vaudeville team, “We must respectfully decline to answer upon the advice of counsel,” smirking at their lawyers.

We laughed, and then for an instant they bent their heads together, and Artie came out of the huddle, grinning. “We have a statement, fellows.” We all bit, readying our notepaper. “The sun is shining,” said Artie. “It is a pleasant day.” So we laughed again and noted that they had recovered their friendship and their bravado.

The judge entered. It was the Chief Justice himself. In certain events, chance seems to exert itself to choose the proper persons, as if there were an ordainment to show mankind from time to time a complete symbol. So in this case Judge Matthewson had precisely the bearing for his rôle He had the fullness of years, but with no suggestion of frailty of age.

The clerk called the case.

Horn and his staff had prepared a formidable indictment, for felonious assault, murder by strangulation, kidnapping with intent to kill – everything – as if afraid of some wizardly loophole evasion. But Wilk sat relaxed, loose, with no papers before him. When the time came, he and Ferdinand Feldscher stood, one on each side of the two boys, as they were asked, how did they plead?

“Not guilty,” said Judd, as though answering a classroom question, and Artie said, swallowing his words, “Not guilty.”

Horn was smiling. He would have his chance to take on the great Jonathan Wilk before a jury. The judge set the day, a few weeks ahead.

Wilk pleaded for a delay to prepare a defence. “The defence needs no more time than the prosecution!” Horn cried.

Edgar Feldscher pointed out that complex medical and mental examinations had to be made. The Chief Justice kept gazing at the boys. “The best I can give you is an extra week,” he said.

I phoned the news and hurried in to write my feature. But instead of writing about Artie’s birthday I found myself impelled to write of Judd’s father, sitting there in the courtroom. I’ve come across that story, in the files:

Judah Steiner, Sr., a man with grey hair, sat in Judge Matthewson’s courtroom today for an hour. He did not move. The other men spoke, even smiled, gestured, disputed. Judah Steiner sat quite still…

Occasionally he put his hand to his ear. He was not angry, he was not weeping. He was merely trying to understand this thing. His son had killed someone. For no reason at all, and for the reason of some philosophy that he couldn’t understand. He had always thought his son was brilliant…

People were staring first at him and then at his son, noticing the same cut in the yellowing lips of the father and the firm, red lips of the boy. People were noticing the same contour of forehead, the same balance of cheek.

Then they came to him with questions. What did he think? What did he have to say?

He had only one sentence. “Why do you come to me? I – I have done nothing.”

I have done nothing. Today, the words echo ironically. But even then they set me to wondering.

I would speak to Myra, who knew the families well.

When we met that evening, she greeted me with bravado; her hand, as we went down in the lift, was hot, pulsing. Automatically we started to walk toward the campus, almost deserted at night in the summer.

Myra could tell me only of the Strauses. Her mother was a close friend. Mrs. Straus was indeed ill in Charlevoix, shattered, accusing herself, broken. “You see, she’s such an intelligent woman.” And most of all, Mrs. Straus had prided herself on her advanced knowledge of child care. She headed all sorts of committees for settlement work with children. And she was interested in the latest educational methods.

Why hadn’t she known what was happening with Artie?

The closest to him – Myra swayed, and I sat her on the stone bench in Sleepy Hollow. All those little fibs and lies as children – how was anyone to know that with him these things came to more?

And what of Artie’s father? I asked.

He was a man entirely occupied with his affairs. On festive occasions he would put in an appearance, at Artie’s birthday parties.

I asked, was Mr. Straus a cold person? No, Myra said, not really, and indeed the Straus household hadn’t been cold at all. Mrs. Straus had given it such a warm, open atmosphere. Everyone felt free at the Strauses; it was that kind of a house, with culture, good music. Of course, Mrs. Straus was quite busy – she was the leader of so many activities.

“I always thought,” Myra confessed, “I would have liked her for my own mother; she’s so much more up on things-” And Myra crumpled against me. “I was with Artie on every birthday,” she sobbed. “I wrote a poem for him every year.” She had written one today. She tried to recite it to me, in her gaspy hoarse whisper.

Oh, angry boy

Life’s a broken toy

Which you’d destroy,

No! angry boy -

Her voice choked. “It’s doggerel,” she cried desperately. “Oh, Sid, why can’t I-” I held her until she stopped trembling, and then I walked her home.

In my primitive way I was following the path of the psychiatrists, who began their work with family interviews. Dr. Allwin made a hasty trip to Charlevoix. Artie’s father was still in a state of shock, silent, withdrawn. The mother had begun somehow to encompass the blow. She could sit with Dr. Allwin and attempt to recall…

Of course Artie had been from infancy exceptionally wilful, mischievous, and for that very reason she had felt that a strong personality like Miss Newsome was a good choice as governess. Miss Newsome had her faults, and toward the end there had been quite a struggle with the poor woman who had no other avenue of affection and had become over-attached to Artie, seeking to replace his mother – but such situations frequently arose with governesses, didn’t they?

Then there had been the escapades. Yes, the times he had taken things from stores, they had been quite disturbed… and the dreadful accident here in Charlevoix, when he had taken the car to a dance. An old woman had been in the wagon Artie had run into, and she had lingered in the hospital for several months. Artie himself had suffered a concussion.

Had he changed markedly at that time?

She strengthened herself, to be unflinchingly honest. It had to be admitted that Artie had always been wild. And deceitful. Yes – but how could anyone have imagined…?

No, no, the doctor reassured her, it would have been virtually impossible to suspect homicidal tendencies. And he never confided in anyone?

She had always thought that possibly with James he… Her eyes wavered.

Perhaps, in other ways, Artie might have shown his true feelings? Sudden angers? Hatred? Jealousy within the family?

She recalled one time when his father had been going on a trip East, taking his brother James along, and Artie had wanted so badly to go to New York. He had been fifteen then, and he had screamed, even producing a tantrum quite like he used to have when he was a very little boy.

Tantrums?

Oh, very frequently. Childish tantrums, to get what he wanted. But all children did that, and she usually tried the method of letting the child scream itself out, shutting him in his room, as neither she nor his father of course believed in capital – she caught herself – in corporal punishment.

She had tried to make things always stimulating and agreeable for him around the house. She had always encouraged young people to congregate, though it did seem that Artie wore out his friends rather rapidly. For this reason, perhaps, she had tolerated too long his unhealthy relationship with Judd Steiner.

Mementoes, snapshots were brought out, and Dr. Allwin studied them absorbedly: the white-clad tennis youth, the smiling boy in the class photograph, the collegiate Artie in a roadster. And then, further back, among the childhood pictures, one snapshot halted the alienist: Artie in a cowboy suit, holding a toy pistol, stalking his teddy bear.

Did she remember when it was taken?

Of course she remembered it! Artie was four, yes. A Sunday afternoon – Artie was so cute, so darling that day, and Mr. Straus himself had been unusually relaxed and had taken the pictures. Why? Was there something about the picture?

No, nothing unusual, the doctor said. But yet – in the expression…

And he so loved his teddy bear, the mother said.

But still, the doctor mused, a kid would be grinning, or making faces, or looking toward his parents. But here, the boy was so intent, lost in his masquerade, really living the hunt. He asked, This was shortly after the governess, Miss Newsome, came into the household? Why, yes, the mother said, her brows contracted. But why?

He himself didn’t know, he was only feeling his way. Was this a moment that became fixed, frozen, a boy for ever masquerading, for ever a hunter with a pistol? “It’s just that he seems so concentrated,” the doctor said. Could he take this picture with him? he asked. But of course! And he pocketed the snapshot.

In the Steiner house, too, there were mementoes. The elaborate Baby’s Book that the mother had filled with such exalted pride – the photographs of the tiny, alert infant with his curiously brilliant black eyes. And Aunt Bertha talking all the while of the marvels of the precocious child, and how his father and mother would do anything, anything for him.

The alienist nodded, and meanwhile thumbed through the Mark Twain School Annual, bound in elaborately embossed leather. “He was the highest in his class,” the aunt said, “and the youngest.” And Dr. Allwin halted at a page of verse, one stanza devoted to each member of the junior class. The very end of it had caught his eye:

Now there’s our Junior list

And surely there’s no finer.

But wait! we nearly missed

The mighty Judah Steiner!

Turning the page, Dr. Allwin came upon a photograph of Artie Straus – “Most Popular Twainite, and Youngest Student Ever to Enter the University of Chicago.”

From the brothers, there was little to be learned. Max said he had honestly tried to help the kid, but they just never had been interested in the same things. With the Straus men, brother James said maybe he had covered up too much for Artie, and Uncle Gerald said there was that incident four years ago – maybe the family should have paid more attention. James told of the incident. Going through his desk he had found a hundred-dollar Liberty Bond missing. “Artie got all excited and told some cock-and-bull story about seeing the chauffeur hanging around my room. But when Artie was out, I took a look in his desk and found the bond.” James had called him a lousy little thieving liar. And now James remembered how Artie had turned on him in bitter screaming anger, crying, “All right! So I swiped it! So what the hell is it to you!”

What the hell is it to you! It echoed now. Was that the kind of thing the doctor meant? “Maybe we should have done something about things like that, taken him to a doctor; maybe it was a sign.”

But Uncle Gerald said, “You should have beat the stuffings out of him.”

“Your father must have known something of his delinquencies?” the doctor asked of James.

“I guess he had an idea, but you see Dad was – well, off by himself. I’m afraid no one in the family was as close as we should have been to Artie.”

The doctor took a deep breath. Artie had apparently never learned to give anyone his confidence, he observed. Perhaps it would be best to prepare him for the study that was to be made. Since time was short, he should be made to understand that the doctors wished only to help him, but that they could do so only if he were entirely frank, and held nothing back. And as James and Uncle Gerald seemed after all to have most influence with him, perhaps they could suggest… They nodded, solemnly.

It was on their way to the jail that the disturbing thought came up. Should Artie really be advised to tell the doctors everything? The papers were still full of all those other crimes the police were trying to put on the boys. That awful taxi-driver thing. And the drowning and the shooting. All young men, all in the last year on the South Side. Who knew, with Artie? What couldn’t he have done, if he had done this thing! And if he now revealed, to his own doctors – James eyed Uncle Gerald, with the dreaded question.

“Well, how’s it look?” Artie said to them, coming jauntily into the visitor’s room.

Uncle Gerald suddenly noticed the torn sleeve on the prison coat Artie was wearing. “What happened to your clothes?”

“They got lousy,” Artie said cheerily. “So the screws gave me this.”

How did things look? Artie repeated. Any chances? And before they could answer, “Say, James-” Would James tell Dorothea Lengel to stand opposite his window at 10 A.M., he’d wave to her.

Now seriously, Uncle Gerald said, Artie was going to have to snap out of this silly attitude. He had to work with the alienists. Everything depended on the report of the alienists.

“Oh, a battle of experts!” Artie exclaimed. “I guess you can’t claim that I was temporarily insane, that’s out, but how about heredity, maybe we ought to say it’s in the family – how about Cousin Richard?”

“Don’t try to put on an act, Artie,” his brother advised. “Just co-operate with these doctors. Just tell them everything they want to know.”

“Everything?”

His brother met his eyes. “Even the things people never tell anybody, kid. Things you’d never tell – well, me.”

“Things I did? Everything?”

That peculiar look came into Artie’s eyes, conspiratorial, cunning, and yet cute.

“Artie,” his uncle said, “are there important things we don’t know?”

“Well, do you want to know?” Was he teasing? Kidding? Now he laughed. “You believe all that crap in the papers?”

“Well, let’s say this,” his uncle stipulated reflectively. “If there is anything you run into that you’re in doubt about, Artie, maybe you’d better ask James first whether you should tell it.”

A snort escaped from Artie. “Maybe it would be easier to tell the docs.”

James said, “This may be your life, kid.”

“The hell you care!” Artie snapped.

James gasped. Artie’s voice had suddenly sounded quavering, the cry of some six-year-old kid wanting something from his big brother. “We all care, kid. We want to help you.”

Artie had changed back. “How’s Mumsie bearing up?” he asked contritely.

“She’s a little better. The doctors said for her to stay in Charlevoix,” James said. Was there anything else Artie wanted?

Sure. They could send in a couple of broads, he said with his old grin.

With Judd, it was Max who explained about co-operation with the psychiatrists. As usual, Judd’s response was to show he knew more than the experts. “According to the legal definition, I’m sane.”

“You wouldn’t think it,” Max let slip, and the old hostility was there between them. “For Christ’s sake, if you’re not crazy, what made you do it?” Max cried. “You must have been all ginned up!”

“I’m afraid drunkenness would not be a defence,” Judd remarked with cool superiority, “and although we did have a bottle in the car, I don’t think we took more than a swallow. Perhaps when we were waiting.”

“Waiting?”

“For school to let out.”

Max groaned. “Judd, kid, for crissake, why didn’t you stop? All right, Artie is wild, but why didn’t you call it off?”

“Back out? You want me to be a coward?” And there it stood naked between them, an accusation, a sneer with some kind of bitter laugh behind it, pointed at Max himself: You taught me, you taught your own little brother – be a man, never be a coward, never back out – that’s your own goddam code!

Then for a time things became relatively quiet. Dr. Storrs and Dr. Allwin proceeded with their work. It was to prove the most extensive psychiatric study made for a court case, certainly up to that time, and I believe perhaps even to this day. While Dr. Allwin gathered family material, Storrs began the psychological tests.

The prisoners were conducted each day to a large unused cell on the ninth floor. The room seemed almost an office, with its desk and chairs, its sunlit warmth. Along one wall was a bench, and between tests Artie would stretch out, dozing, while Judd engaged Storrs in a kind of reverse quiz, usually trying to prove the worthlessness of the test he was taking.

Psychological testing had not yet been developed in the specialized ways in which it is used today. Knowledge tests, tests of mental agility, were already in wide use. But testing of emotional responses had only begun. The Rorschach, now indispensable, was not used on Judd and Artie. The thematic apperception test had only just been invented by a young psychologist at Harvard; Dr. Storrs experimented with it and found curious results.

Of the other tests, the standard intelligence forms, the results were predictable. Judd completed the Stanford-Binet so rapidly that the scale was not high enough to rate him. Artie’s results were almost as phenomenal. The vocabulary tests and the problem-solution tests were child’s play for them. In a word test for which five minutes was considered a minimum, Judd completed his paper in three minutes and fifteen seconds. Artie, too, was rapid.

For emotional reactions, Storrs began with word association. Through an entire list, each boy reacted quickly and with a virtual absence of emotional tone. Only the word chisel, inserted between neutral words, suddenly brought Artie to a halt. He waited a full minute before saying, “trouble.”

It was then that Storrs tried the set of pictures used in the thematic apperception experiment. For example, there was a picture of a boy with one shoe on. Near him lay the matching shoe, an overshoe, a slipper. What did the picture suggest?

A simple response might have been that the boy would next put on his other shoe, and then the overshoes, and go to school. Or he might have been undressing – he would take off his shoe, put on the slippers.

With this and other pictures in the set, Artie and Judd produced stories hardly to be expected from young men of their age and seeming mental development. Artie at once decided that the boy might be putting on someone else’s shoes, so as to leave false footprints. And on he went, in a childlike fantasy of crime. Judd ignored the little situation in the picture – the incompleted act of dressing or undressing. The boy was waiting for someone, he ventured. Something important was happening. A big decision was being made, and the boy was waiting, perhaps for his mother. It could be that there was an argument about him going on in the house. About where he should go to school… Then Judd looked at Storrs, cunningly, with the caught-on look of the test sophisticate.

In another week, it is Dr. Allwin who conducts the examination, aided by medical specialists for the new-fangled metabolism tests and cardiograms.

On one of these mornings, there is Judd coming in alone, finding Dr. Allwin in a white jacket, laying out a few instruments on a clean towel.

Allwin greets Judd as one might greet a colleague, collaborating in pure scientific inquiry. But this morning Judd notices several hypodermic needles laid out, and turns pale.

“Anything wrong?” asks the doctor.

“What’s all this for?”

“We’re only going to take a few blood samples.” Picking up a syringe, the doctor turns to him, but now Judd is absolutely white.

“I’m sorry, doctor,” he says, “but the mere idea of blood always affects me this way. I know it is a stupid reaction, but I can’t help it.”

“Well this will only take a second.” Judd has an involuntary reaction of shrinking and pulling away, as the sample is taken from his ear lobe. When it is over, beads of sweat are on his forehead.

“You really have a very strong reaction, don’t you?”

“I’ve always had it.” And Judd tells of an incident when he was quite young and saw a doctor examining his mother; the doctor said he would take her blood pressure. “I pictured it as blood gushing out, I suppose, and I became so sick the doctor had to take care of me instead of my mother.”

“How did you think of your mother?”

In his matter-of-fact, clacky voice, Judd says, “I used to picture her as the Madonna. I still do.”

He feels quite easy, talking to this elderly, gentlemanly doctor, and he tells of the stained-glass window in a church, to which he was taken by the young Irish nursemaid who preceded Trudy.

“But your family being Jewish – they had no objection to the girl’s taking you to church?” the doctor asks with civilized curiosity.

On the religious score they were not old-fashioned, Judd says. In fact, his father declared he did not mind Judd’s learning all about churches, since he was going to live in a Christian world. “I used to have the chauffeur drive me to different churches on every Sunday. I soon knew the differences between Catholic and Protestant, Methodist and Episcopal and Congregational services.”

“That was quite an unusual preoccupation for a child.”

“I kept it up as I grew,” Judd says. “I classified all the religions and their different ideas of God.”

“And this had an effect on you?”

“How could a kid help seeing it was all a lot of bushwa? God was three and He was one and He was a body and He was incorporeal and He was a Jewish old Moses with a beard.”

“I see. And in this time, when you were visiting the churches, did you visit synagogues too?”

“They had a certain type of training – my father wanted me to receive the usual training for boys. You study elementary Hebrew and you are supposed to participate in a ceremony at thirteen, to take part in the services. He used to send me to Rabbi Hirsch’s classes, but I got through with it all a few years ahead, and by the time I was thirteen I didn’t care to take part in the ritual – it’s a kind of confirmation – because I couldn’t believe in any of that any more.”

“And yet you say you still cling to this image of your mother as the Madonna.”

“That’s an exception. Oh, even as a child I realized she didn’t belong to us. And of course I later realized it was all a superstition, but I made this exception to keep this idea about my mother. And since Mother died, I prefer to see her that way.”

“You mean as the beautiful lady in the church window?” The pink-faced doctor seems to be smiling with him at childish notions. “A heavenly being?”

“Yes.” Then he continues, in that even, unemotional voice, “If not for me, she might not have died. I was responsible for her death.”

“How is that?”

“It was due to my birth,” Judd says. “She was never well after I was born. She became an invalid. She suffered from nephritis.”

“I’ve noticed a history of nephritis in the women of her family.”

“I contributed to her death,” Judd insists. “She was a perfect person.” He frequently visits her grave, he says, and adds, “I often wish I had never been born.”

“You have often wished it?”

“I used to wish it for years. When I was a kid.”

Another time, Dr. Allwin gets him to speak of those childhood years when he so often wished he had never been born. Judd explains that it was when the family lived on Michigan Avenue and he had to go to that school where there were only girls.

“You might have been proud of being the only boy among so many girls.”

He hated girls, hated females. They were all so stupid, gossipy.

Has he never had a steady girl, a real girl?

A few times he has been attracted, but not in love. And now, just lately, he had met a girl, a girl who made him feel different – he had even thought of running away with her, marrying her. His voice drops.

How did she make him feel different? Sexually?

No, he had not had sexual intercourse with her, though she stimulated him. But she was a nice girl and she made him feel he could understand things like marrying and having a family… Judd falls silent.

“Do you want to tell me more about this girl?”

“I don’t see any point to it.”

He tells, all at once, of an incident with Max, when he was a little kid: When they were playfully wrestling on the lawn, he hit his forehead on a stone and bled and cried, and Max called him a sissy. That was when he determined in his heart never to show Max, never to show anyone, if he felt hurt – in fact, never to let any feelings hurt him. “I discovered that emotions could hurt too much, and so I decided not to let myself be hurt that way.”

Another day, he finds himself talking of the few months he spent at the public school. The kids kept teasing him because he was such a shrimp, and a Jewboy.

“How did you feel about it?”

“That is hard to analyse at this point. Angry, I should think.”

“And perhaps ashamed?”

“No – no, I would not be ashamed of being a Jew. My people were always proud of it,” he adds automatically.

Then Judd tells of the strange day when Trudy wasn’t there and he started home alone, and two rough kids kept after him: “Hey, sheenie! Where’s your nursemaid?” Then they had hold of him, pulling him into an alley. Hey, that fat nursemaid, did he ever look under her skirt? “Yah, yah, you’re her slave, she makes you do it to her.” And then, “Hey, he got a pecker? Hey! the sheenies they cut off a piece of the petzel, maybe they cut off too much! Hey, maybe he’s a girl!” And tearing at his knickerbockers, holding him while he yelled, struck blindly. He feels their blows on his body, his face… kicks, blood… and he is running.

“This nursemaid, Trudy, she was with you for some years?”

“Until I was fourteen.”

What was she like?

She didn’t have a very highly developed intelligence, Judd explains. In fact, he would say she was a moron – she had gone only to a few grades in school in the old country. He spoke German with her. But she was cunning, and she was devoted to him. Once he wanted some stamps from a cousin’s collection and she just laughed as he went and swiped them. But after that she blackmailed him, by threatening to tell on him, making him do things she wanted.

What things?

Oh, just obey her. And not tell… about other things. Even, he sort of remembers, sex things – maybe when she gave him his bath, how she loved her little boy, kisses all over him. Trudy’s mouth, laughing and threatening, “If you’re not a good little boy…” and laughing, as if to devour, and then he would be her little girl.

How is Judd’s sleep? Dr. Allwin asks him. Does he fall asleep easily, or does he have some favourite fantasies, perhaps, before going to sleep? Judd becomes interested – this is a whole world of inquiry that he would not have thought of – and he talks quite freely, objectively. Yes, almost as far back as he can remember – “I used to make up these stories, before falling asleep. I was a king, sometimes, or else a slave-”

“Which were you more often, the king or the slave?”

“As it went on, I was almost always the slave.”

“It went on for a long time? Till the present?”

“Well, fairly recently.” Sometimes, he tells, it would last for an hour. He would lie on his stomach or on his side, usually hugging the pillow. After a while it would become very pleasant, with a pleasant warm bed odour, and he would imagine this was like the body odour of a naked slave who had been exerting himself, perhaps in battle, wielding a big sword and saving the life of the king. “Then the king would be grateful and offer to give the slave his liberty, but I would refuse, because I was devoted to the king.

“Another time I would be on a ship, and the vessel would be captured by pirates, and we would all be sold as slaves, and in the market place the Grand Vizier would notice me on the slave stand, and he would observe that I was more intelligent than all the rest, so he would buy me to become tutor for the young king, and then I would be branded.”

He breathes more deeply. “I would be branded on the inside calf of the right leg, a beautiful round mark of a crown-”

Another time he describes the king as his camp counsellor, when he was twelve. “His name was Chesty. He was about eighteen, and I admired him very much.

“Then I would picture myself as his slave. Sometimes it would be that the king got the slave as a stray baby found in the woods in a basket, or else the king was riding past the slave market and there was a boy of ten or twelve being sold, and the king took pity and bought him and took him for his personal slave. The king would have the boy slave come and sit with him, and he would pet him.”

“This was always your counsellor, Chesty?”

“After that summer it was other fellows, sometimes a teacher, and then a few years later we went up that summer to Artie’s in Charlevoix, and I began to idealize him, and from then on it was almost always Artie who was the king.”

“You idealized him?”

“I would see him as an athlete, a champion, even though I knew he is not a champion. And also. I would idealize him as a brilliant student, getting all A’s-”

“You knew his actual grades?”

“I knew Artie never got all A’s, but I told myself he could, if he wasn’t lazy. He has an almost perfect mind, and in other ways – sociability, and the ability to make people do what he wants – I would rate him very high. In fact, I once made a chart, and I rated everyone I knew, and Artie came out highest, ninety I think.”

“I see. You were aware, through all this, that you idealized Artie?”

Judd looks directly into his eyes. “It was blind hero worship. I almost completely identified myself with him. I would watch the food he ate, the drink going down his throat, and I would be envious.”

“And now?”

“Yes, even now. For a few days, I was angry with him. But now, when they take us through the corridors together sometimes, and to feel him near me, to brush against him, makes me feel I am alive.” He continues to look into Dr. Allwin’s eyes, not defiantly, not apologetically; Judd is entirely self-possessed, but there is between them, as a few days ago, a sense of shared pleasure in a task that is going well, even though its purpose remains obscure.

Another time, Judd recalls a reversed version of the fantasy, in which he was the king, and Artie was the slave. “We were on a sea voyage and we were shipwrecked, and came to an uncharted island. A piano was all we saved from the wreck, and I was the only one who knew how to play. There were natives on the island, and I was the only one who could speak their language.

“The natives of the island were divided into two groups, nobles and slaves. All of my companions were made slaves, but because of my ability to play the piano I was made a noble, for the natives knew nothing of music and were enchanted. Then, as a noble, I bought Artie to be my slave. He was very ill, and I nursed him back to health. Then when he was well, I gave him the choice of three alternatives:

“First, liberty. I would free him, and the brand mark on his right calf would be eliminated.”

“The slaves had been branded?”

“Yes. I would imagine this branding to be taking place, but it would not be on the island; it would be in the locker room of the Twain School, the locker room of the gym. Then we would be on the island and I would say, ‘If you choose liberty, you may go, but beware, because the first noble who sees you may capture you and make you his slave.’

“Secondly, he could remain my personal slave, in every sense of the word. Thirdly, I might sell him to some other noble. But if I did, he would receive bad treatment and would beg to come back to me. He would write me secret messages, using the pet secret word of the island. He would sign himself by that word.”

“And what was that?”

“Your kitty, or your pussy,” Judd says quietly.

I have tried to feel my way into the mind of Artie, but there are areas of impenetrable density that I suppose will for ever remain dark. It is curious that we all thought we knew Artie better than we knew Judd, since he was among us more, and perhaps that is why we puzzled less over him than over Judd. And another confusion resulted from our pairing them, from our feeling that they were in the crime to the same degree precisely, utterly commingled. This tendency to confuse them was to continue all the way through the trial, with lawyers and psychiatrists again and again naming the one when they meant the other. The record is filled with these snap-ups. “Steiner-” “You mean Straus?” “Yes, yes, I mean Straus-”

Thus they were a joint personality in our minds. Yet from their revelations to the psychiatrists, different patterns could be traced.

And despite the streaks of darkness in Artie’s revelations, a good deal can be made out of how these two distorted personalities conjoined. Artie was cunning and apt to withhold incidents in telling of his life. But when Dr. Allwin led him into his fantasy life, Artie, too, became easy and garrulous. Yes, he had indulged almost every night in picturizations, as he called them. There was something uncanny in the way they dovetailed with Judd’s.

Judd’s dominant fantasy rôle was that of a slave; Artie saw himself as a master. He was the chief of all criminals, commanding absolute obedience.

Even on the reverse side of their fantasies, there was an interlocking symmetry. Judd as a slave was, however, a superior being, a champion, a godlike, handsome person. Thus, while an inferior in the nominal side of his rôle he was superior on the active side. He lived in comfortable quarters, and he was the mentor of kings. Conversely, Artie was superior in the nominal side of his rôle he was a master mind, a chief, yet in carrying out his picturizations he saw himself as captured and jailed, chained and in rags. He derived greatest satisfaction from imagining himself incarcerated and whipped.

And in real life their fantasy relationships were carried out with beautiful inevitability. Both now related their strange compact, made after the frat-house robbery – the compact in which Artie was the master who must be implicitly obeyed; and yet, the other side of the agreement was the sexual act in which Artie had to submit and which was carried out in the spirit of a rape, a violence, almost a punishment – but, as in his fantasy, a punishment which he passively enjoyed.

Then, when he was nine, Artie’s little brother Billy was born. Three developments came with this event in Artie’s life. It was at nine, he told Dr. Allwin, that he first started pinching small articles from the counters of the Five and Ten. And it was then too that he began voraciously to read dime novels, hiding them from Miss Nuisance. The story of a kidnapped baby, hidden in the attic, made a lasting impression on him.

And it was then that he secured his first real information about sex.

There is the overcurious little boy, peeking, prying, trying to discover the secret of how the baby comes. Maybe Mumsie and Popsie are having the baby really because they want someone else, not you. Nobody wants you. Except maybe Hank, the chauffeur, who lets you hang around the garage. Miss Nuisance hates him – Hank is dirty, filthy, says Miss Nuisance. Because Hank does all kinds of things with girls. Everybody knows.

Hank is working around the car, the hood is open, and the garage is filled with the smell of gas and grease and rubber.

“Hand me the big hammer, Artie, will you?” The hammer has a sledge head. There is black tape wrapped around the handle for a grip. Hank is halfway under the hood, chiselling at something, with a chisel that cuts through iron. “The bloody nut is stuck,” he says. “That screw is tight as a witch’s twat.” That’s a bad word, and then Hank laughs at a big joke he just thought of – a joke about a couple that got caught being lovey-dovey and the police and the fire department had to be called to pull them apart. “Pull what apart?” Artie asks. “Their faces?” And Hank roars. And that is the day Hank tells Artie about the difference between men and women. It’s just like this nut and bolt, he says, just like a key and a keyhole!

When a fellow grows up, Hank says, the pecker gets big, and sometimes it swells up, it gets as hard as a goddam hunk of steel, and Hank shakes the chisel in his hand, to show how hard it gets.

Artie has picked up the chisel Hank put down. “What’s the tape on there for?” the boy asks. And Hank says, “For a grip, so the shaft won’t get too slippery from the sweat of the hand.” And then he breaks out into a real roar of dirty laughter. “That’s a good one, but don’t ever tell that to a girl!”

“What?” asks Artie, puzzled.

“That!” says Hank, taking the chisel in his fist, holding it the wrong way, the iron in his hand. “Boy, you could really knock them dead with something like this! Boy, there must be many a little man with a no-good pecker wishes he had one like this!”

And just then Miss Nuisance marches in on them. “Artie! What are you doing here?”

A tool, a rod – “stiff as a rod”, the frat brothers said, hard as steel, knock them over with it – Sure he would go along. He’d show them he was a man. They claimed they’d done it the first time at fifteen, at fourteen, at thirteen. He’d done it lots of times already, he said – hell, he’d done it to his governess; that’s why she had to leave.

And in Mamie’s place the fellows stood around in a circle, close. The raucous laughter… there was his broad all spread out and waiting, and he couldn’t, he couldn’t – hell, many times, when he was alone, it did – but now, “little mousey”, she said, and they all roared, the bastards, the stinking sonsabitches.

Sonofabitch thing. Hard now in jail when you couldn’t – when you wanted it, limp as a rag. With Judd that time with the two broads, that little punk Judd doing it on the other side of the car. And his own broad trying to let him off easy, wagging her finger at it – “You bad little boy, you had too much to drink, didn’t you?” and, giggling, “He just wants to curl up and go to sleep.”

With his agreeable candour, Artie told Dr. Allwin of all the early little things – about swiping money from a lemonade stand he operated with another boy, about taking his big brother’s Liberty Bond, for surely the doc had already been told. Artie told of things with Judd – the Edison electric car, the bricks in windows, the time a cop shot at them, the frat house in Ann Arbour.

“Wasn’t there something else, in between?”

“No -?” How much did the doc know from Judd, from the family?

“And wasn’t there a trip to Oak Park?”

Why, yes, it had slipped his mind. Artie smiled and told of the time he and Judd planned to hijack the cellar of Joe Stahlmeyer’s house, full of Canadian stuff worth twenty dollars a bottle. Artie had a revolver along and also -

He caught himself up.

“Also?” probed Dr. Allwin.

Oh, he had taken along a taped chisel for a billy.

“Was that the first time you fixed one up?”

Yes, but the expedition had been a flop.

“Why the tape around it?”

“Well, that way it made a good handle to grip, for a billy, and solid steel inside,” he ended, with a little gasp, a hiss.

How many questions stood awakened in the mind of Dr. Allwin? The discarded chisels that had been rumoured found in the neighbourhood, the tale of a young man living nearby, drowned, a supposed suicide…

In that little hiss, there was a release of more, much more than some story of playing robbers. It belonged with the suddenly unfocused, evasive look in Artie’s eyes. It belonged to the small raging boy inside, the imprisoned child – to an Artie in this moment almost contacted, almost released to scream out his murderous tantrum: I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you if you say I can’t!

Dr. Allwin said quietly, while closing his notebook, “And there were still other times, with a chisel?”

Artie’s smiling cunning look had returned. “Am I supposed to tell you?”

The doctor screwed on the top of his pen. “We’re only here to help you, Artie.”

“What if you found out something that wouldn’t help me?”

Perhaps they had better stop for the day, the doctor said.

The alienists had come to a deep cleft, and there they halted. Should they let themselves down into every crevice, or would it be best to leap over, perhaps to improvise a bridge of ropes? Storrs and Allwin must have debated long and earnestly over this dilemma, and in Wilk’s apartment the discussions must have gone far into the night.

Can we judge their decision? We may say, from a purely medical viewpoint they were obliged to make every effort to explore the furthest crevice. And yet, taking into account the attitudes of that day, the prejudices and the limited understanding, their hesitation can be comprehended. They had been engaged – and the word was to be their own – in forensic medicine. In legal medicine. As experts. Did not the legal problem therefore remain a foremost factor in their work?

Their task was to study the minds of these two boys in relation to a, specific crime. Would it help to know the details of other crimes? Lawyers and doctors agreed: that this was for the family to determine.

Uncle Gerald came to Artie’s cell.

“All right,” Artie said, inhaling avidly – he had run out of cigarettes and the damn screw had been holding him up a buck for a pack – “all right, there were other things.”

“Judd know about them?”

“He always acted as if he had it on me. Anyway, for one of them.”

Their eyes met. “Big?” his uncle said.

“Big.”

“How many, Artie?”

“You could say – four.”

The deeds hung between them.

“I don’t want to know,” Uncle Gerald said. “Don’t tell me, Artie. They might get me on the stand.”

“What about the docs?”

According to law, Uncle Gerald said, only this case was to be tried, no others.

“Wouldn’t it make a difference if they call me nuts or not?”

His uncle reflected on that point. It could make all the difference. “Maybe you could tell the doctors you did – a certain number of things, without saying what they were.”

What would the family want? Artie asked, with the sudden genuine-sounding throb that could come into his voice. He didn’t wish to hurt Mumsie, the family, any more.

In such moments, you had to believe him.

When next he talked with Dr. Allwin, Artie kept to the line suggested by his uncle. Yes, there had been other things.

“These other – incidents – major outbreaks, shall we say? How many were there?”

“Four.”

“Let’s refer to them as A, B, C, and D.” Carefully the doctor went on to remind Artie that the press attributed certain specific crimes to him, or to him and Judd.

“That’s a lot of hooey!” Artie exclaimed, but then there came over his face his peculiar sidewise smile. “I never had anything to do with that monkey-gland robbery,” he stated. Nor had he had anything to do with the handless stranger. But, significantly, the two unsolved student deaths were not mentioned.

Now, in the night-long meetings in Wilk’s study, the entire defence position had to be re-examined. If Artie were a multiple murderer, wouldn’t he be seen by any jury as demon-ridden, demented? And if Judd were not a participant in the other crimes, was it fair to link him completely to Artie in a joint trial? Judd had, rather, participated as one enslaved, enthralled by a madman.

Surely this possibility must have been examined, discussed, a thousand times discarded, only to be examined again by the lawyers, during the days when Storrs and Allwin were intensively at work in the Wilk dining room, writing their report.

But was separation really advantageous? As both Wilk and Ferdinand Feldscher pointed out, Horn was no fool. He could ridicule and riddle any plea that Judd was a mere accessory. The public reaction to such a move would be only of heightened anger – a legal “trick”. Nor could it be certain that the revelation of added horrors would cause Artie to be judged insane; rather, a jury might become even more determined to destroy so dreadful a fiend.

Fortunately, Dr. McNarry arrived during those days. His solid presence, Willie Weiss told me in a tone close to adulation, helped to clarify everyone’s thinking. Everything about him seemed full-packed – his clothing seemed packed with his large bulk, and his huge head, with veins standing out on the bald dome, seemed packed with knowledge.

He had studied Charcot’s work at the Salpêtriére in Paris, he had been to Nancy, he had known Jung in Switzerland and Bleuler in Vienna and lastly, the great Freud himself; his pioneering book on psychoanalysis was therefore not the work of a quick enthusiast who had picked up the latest jargon, but of a lifelong practitioner who had travelled the same paths, the head of one of the world’s great mental hospitals.

McNarry had his first few interviews with the boys, so as to obtain his own, unaffected impressions; then the three doctors conferred. McNarry’s material was much the same, the king-slave fantasies from Judd, the master-criminal fantasies from Artie, the childhood patterns. Eli Storrs laid out the results of his tests, eagerly watching for McNarry’s reactions to the new type of study, the apperception chart.

At once the doctors got into an intense discussion involving McNarry’s central concept of the psyche. He did not believe in separating emotion and intellect, as in two compartments. All belonged to a single biological entity that reacted as a unit.

“Well, but that unit has different aspects. Our tests obviously show us that different people react differently…”

“Yes,” McNarry at last agreed, there was a feeling-aspect, which might be called emotional in tone, and there was an intellectual aspect -

Gerald Straus, with an apologetic laugh, pressed them. Would all this help to show a jury that the boys were insane?

Equally smilingly, Dr. McNarry read him a short lecture on insanity, as though for an average juryman. “People think that at one moment a man is sane, and at the next he goes insane. To a doctor, insanity means nothing but mental derangement, sickness, and just as there are all degrees of physical sickness, from a common cold to paralysis, there are all degrees of mental sickness, from a mild neurosis to a psychoneurosis to a psychosis.”

Uncle Gerald nodded. “How sick can you say they are?”

“We have concluded” – the elderly Dr. Allwin took over – “that each of the patients is suffering from a functional disorder. Artie’s could develop into dementia praecox, a splitting of the personality, and Judd’s is in the direction of paranoia.”

“How far gone are they?”

“That’s what we’re trying to determine,” Dr. McNarry said, somewhat brusquely, and Uncle Gerald subsided. McNarry had just come from talking to Judd about his philosophy. The philosophy itself he dismissed as a mere camouflage, just a smattering of things Judd had read. (As Willie Weiss reported it to me, “a mishmash”.)

But all these philosophies of Judd’s, Eli Storrs observed, tended in one direction – paranoia. “Look how the mind seizes what it needs!” Like his tests, they proved that Judd was emotionally a child.

“That’s interesting,” McNarry said. “You could interpret Nietzschean omnipotence the same way. It belongs to the magic phase.” This was the phase in which the infant, by crying, discovered that everyone around him would do what he wanted. And had this phase ever ended, for Judd?

Suddenly beginning to understand, Uncle Gerald remarked, “Why, Max told me that kid didn’t even lace his own shoes until he was fourteen years old. He’d have the nursemaid do it.”

He had felt there was “something wrong” with the boys, but now, suddenly through his own story about lacing the shoes, he saw the doctors’ meaning. Something in him was saying, Why, it’s really true! What we’ve been claiming is really true. All the better.

The psychiatrists had moved on to a discussion of Artie and his game of “detective”. Artie had offered Allwin the explanation that he still played it only because he had to have a game he could play with his little brother Billy. But to Dr. McNarry, Artie had no longer rationalized the childish game. He had told of playing it with Judd, and even when he was alone, walking through the streets, imagining he had accomplices with him, giving them hand signals. Dr. McNarry added, “I believe he even built it up for me; he’s cunning.”

“No, he really does it!” Uncle Gerald broke in. “Why, a year ago last fall he shadowed me all the way home one night. He came up behind me when I got to my house – he had a black handkerchief tied around his face like a real hold-up man – and he said, ’stick ‘em up!’ Of course I knew it was Artie and I just told him to run along home.”

“That’s very interesting,” the alienists were saying to him; but to Uncle Gerald the whole case was now coming into focus. Just now, the alienists had made him see that it was a wild child inside of Artie, an ungrown child that could not yet fully understand the difference between right and wrong, that had dictated Artie’s behaviour. But could the alienists make an ordinary jury understand this complicated mechanism?

The Feldschers, with Max and James, had come in, and now the discussion expanded, yet always kept returning to the main point: How could you make a jury see that the boys were “functionally disturbed”?

“We’ll have to make it stronger,” Uncle Gerald insisted.

“Well, you can’t claim that he has completely lost contact with reality,” Dr. McNarry pointed out. “Don’t forget there will be psychiatrists on the other side.”

The very thought of this started McNarry off on his pet tirade. For McNarry couldn’t understand how any psychiatrist could bring himself to testify for the prosecution: The entire aim of psychiatry was to unravel the causes of behaviour. And if all behaviour had a cause, where was guilt? How, then, could any doctor become a prosecutor?

“At least you and Jonathan Wilk believe the same thing,” Ferdinand Feldscher said. “But what jury does?”

McNarry shook his head. He had only the gloomiest view of making a jury see it, in this case. For every jury had to act as a sample of the society from which it was drawn. This was inevitable, it was the very heart of the jury system. “What you will get is the herd critique through the medium of the jury.”

He reminded them of several cases in his own experience, cases in which insanity was self-evident. There was the Father Schmidt case – a priest who had cut a woman into seven parts, on the altar. Yet the jury had declared him sane, in order that he might be hanged. “Juries invariably regard the insanity plea as a dodge. They discredit the experts.”

What, then, was to be done?

What about Wilk? Uncle Gerald reminded them that, after all, Wilk was the greatest jury lawyer in the world. Surely he could make a jury see it. Even one juror would be enough.

Wilk had gone to bed with a cold; the entire group moved into his bedroom.

It was then that Edgar Feldscher revived the thought of going to a judge with a plea of guilty.

His brother said, “I’ve never ruled it out, in my mind. But all you’ve got is a plea for mercy on the grounds of their youth.”

“No,” said Edgar, tentatively. “Why couldn’t we present the entire psychiatric evidence, as we would before a jury?”

The others looked at him as though he had forgotten his ABC’s. If a judge could be convinced of insanity, he was bound to call a jury.

“Yes, yes, but short of insanity-”

Wilk’s head had lifted. “Mitigating circumstances,” he croaked hoarsely, pulling himself up to a sitting position. “A judge is duty bound to listen to mitigating facts.”

“Yes, but how can you raise the question of their mental condition, in mitigation, without coming to the question of insanity? And the minute you touch on that…”

It was indeed the paradox, and McNarry did not hesitate to express his lifelong disgust with this curious situation in which a jury of laymen, the persons least equipped for it, were always the ones who had to decide whether a person was insane.

Uncle Gerald had a thought. “All right, suppose a judge does at some point call a jury. We’re no worse off. In fact, we’re better off, because this already shows the judge doubts their sanity.”

It was an impressive point. “And then, we’ve still got Jonathan, here, before a jury,” said Ferdinand Feldscher.

“We’re not doing this as a show for me,” Wilk said.

Edgar Feldscher drew them back to the original idea. “We don’t have to raise the insanity issue, temporary or anything. We claim they are suffering from a functional disorder, short of a psychosis. These boys are not responsible for their behaviour-”

“Who is?” Wilk interjected.

“And if we are careful to keep the argument short of insanity, isn’t it a mitigating condition?”

It would be a thin line to tread – to convince the judge that they were sick, but not sick enough to be called insane. The doctors would have to avoid the very word.

“Don’t worry,” said McNarry. “It’s not really a medical word. I never use it if I can help it.”

“There’s one thing I like about this plan,” said Max Steiner. “It’s honest to plead guilty. It’s the plain truth.”

Wilk drawled, “It’s no easier to make people believe the plain truth than a lie. But I suppose it is always more comfortable.”

Uncle Gerald was still uncertain. It was so risky to rest everything on one man instead of twelve.

“He’s a good man,” Wilk commented.

“He’s never hanged anybody,” Ferdinand Feldscher said.

And so they agreed, but with one condition. “We’d better make sure how the boys feel about it.”

Wilk wanted to see for himself how they reacted. Artie nervously agreed. They knew best. Judd had a touch of resistance. Pleading guilty, didn’t that mean merely going up to be sentenced? Then the case would never really be heard?

No, Wilk assured him; in the mitigating evidence, everything would be heard. All his ideas would be heard.

Thus it was that the defence made the astonishing announcement of a change of plea. In a quick, unspectacular hearing, the boys were brought into court, to declare themselves guilty.

The Hearst papers were the most blistering. So even Wilk was afraid to go before a jury! And then Mike Prager carried an “inside” story. The defence case had collapsed, he declared on “good authority”, because the thousand-dollar-a-day alienists for the defence refused to declare the boys insane.

We all found ourselves crowding into Wilk’s office. Wilk looked harrowed, his voice was hoarse. He gestured to the newspapers on his desk. On top was the American, with its scarehead: THEY’LL HANG, HORN VOWS.

“Now, fellows,” Wilk said, “if you want to know why we had to change the plea, there’s the answer. You’re all part of it. How can we hope to find even one unprejudiced citizen for this jury?” He would plead evidence in mitigation, merely that their lives might be spared.

What mitigating evidence? we all demanded.

If they had been boys from impoverished homes, Wilk pointed out, we would all agree there were mitigating conditions. But wasn’t there something beyond the social condition, a lower common denominator, something that forced the boys to kill? That was what the psychiatrists were trying to find.

A dozen voices demanded, Was it true that the psychiatrists had reported there was nothing wrong with the boys? The report of Dr. Allwin and Dr. Storrs was a private one, Edgar Feldscher put in sharply.

“Why?” demanded Mike. “What are you trying to hide?”

There might be some private family matters that had nothing to do with the crime, Feldscher said calmly.

Mike retorted, “There’s nothing private about murder.”

Wilk addressed Mike directly. “Now why do you want to go printing stuff you don’t know is true?” He slapped his hand down on the newspaper. “What do you want to make up stuff like this for?”

If anything was made up, Mike taunted, then let Wilk release the facts to disprove it.

“The facts will come out in court,” Wilk said, “and all of you will get them at the same time.”

“I’ll get them before that, if I can!” Mike snapped. “And I’ll get my own facts, not the facts you want us to have.”

There was a murmur, something like “Aw, play ball.” But Mike marched out.

On the secretary’s desk was a pile of documents, just delivered from a typing service. The secretary was in the main office with the rest of us. Mike’s eye took in the doctors’ names, on the top sheet. He picked up a copy of the Storrs-Allwin report and simply walked out of the office with it.

Mike’s paper was on the street in two hours, with a full page of sensational quotes from the confidential report. Instantly, we were called to come back to Wilk’s office. Even as I dodged across the Loop streets, I was skimming Mike’s scoop. Under “Sex Pact” there appeared for the first time the story of their curious agreement, after the Ann Arbour robbery. In a special box, I found Artie’s admission of additional crimes, A, B, C, D. What were they? the paper demanded. And on the inside page were columns and columns of quotations from their fantasies.

In Wilk’s office there was an atmosphere of outrage. Edgar Feldscher handed out all the available copies of the report, with one last attempt to caution us. “This should never have got out,” he said. “Not that we want to hide anything from the public, but because these studies are still incomplete. We’re pleading mitigation, mercy, because these studies show that the boys were not entirely responsible – indeed they were far from responsible – for what they were doing, in the sense that they were not in mental and moral health.”

It may be that he said it as well, then, to our circle of reporters, as it was ever said in court. As we hurried out with our copies, we talked angrily of Mike and his scoop. Only Danny Mines of the News said, “Hell, any one of us wishes he had done it.” And there was again the question never entirely resolved in the mind of the newspaperman, the fundamental question of the means and the end.

And it must be asked, had Mike never stolen that report, would all that we know have become known? Would even that slight mention, “He admits to four other episodes” – characterized as A, B, C, D, and not further examined – ever have come to public knowledge?

The report had one stunning effect on our conception of the crime. Until then, Tom and I, like almost everyone else, had felt Judd to be the dominant power, the Svengali, the dark, sinister one; but in the office, as we digested the material, we saw that we had been wrong, everyone had been wrong. Except, I thought, Ruth.

For the alienists showed in detail how Artie had been the instigator, the leader, and Judd his “gang”. Judd had been tied to him in passion. While Tom rushed out the excerpts, I phoned Horn. He was in high spirits, alternating between ridicule of all that flimflam and indignant demands that the obscure parts be illuminated. “A, B, C, D – that’s all crime means to Mr. Wilk and his friends!” Horn shouted. “Just a couple of little boys that can say A, B, C, D, with a murder for each!” And that gland stuff – the boys were known in jail to be in perfect health. As for all those daydreams, kings and slaves, was Wilk actually going to come into court with that nonsense? No wonder he wouldn’t dare face a jury!

The terrible pressure of catching up with the American was over. Going home, I took the report along. I had really only skimmed it. After supper, I passed by Wilk’s apartment, and ran into Willie Weiss. He started at once on the report. What did I think? The material on Judd – his tremendous conflicts: Was he a boy or a girl? Was he a Jew or a Christian? Willie had never himself realized how completely Judd was torn.

From what he said, I had completely missed the important meanings of the material. We went to an ice-cream parlour on 61st Street, and Willie, with that feverish argumentative way he had, started to show me what I had missed.

Why had I paid so little attention to the family history? “Look at this-” There had been three unsuccessful pregnancies before Judd was born, and his mother had been sick throughout her pregnancy with him. Judd had always blamed himself for her illness, even for her death.

“He must have blamed his father, too,” Willie added. “Don’t forget he’s precocious. Kids get a strange idea, when they first begin to catch on – they imagine that fathers do something terrible to mothers. And this child feels his birth killed his mother, but his father killed her first. It’s the classic complex, the Oedipus-”

The term was not so popular then, but passionately Willie explained to me how well the Oedipal situation fitted the case, the boy in love with his mother, hating his father.

“His Baby Book records his first step at three months, his first word at four months.”

From the very earliest impressions, Judd was made to feel he was someone utterly extraordinary. And with this he had to keep up.

A small and sickly child, “until he was nine he had gastrointestinal disorders, complicated by fever, headaches, vomiting.” Anxiety, said Willie. He had been rather effeminate up to that age – that was the period of the girls’ school. “How could this child know what he really was?” Willie demanded. “He’s small, delicate like a girl; he hates girls because he knows he should be more of a boy, yet he is always thrust among girls. His father tries to send him to public school, but his mother still insists her darling is too frail, too special, too different. The father overrides the mother. Judd tries the public school.” Of this, the report said, “He realized his superiority over the other boys in wealthy parents, in the fact that his nurse accompanied him to and from school, and that he couldn’t attend the toilet in the school.”

“Poor bastard, holding himself in!” was Willie’s comment on this point. “Imagine this kid, feeling he is so special he can’t even use the can! No wonder he got a god complex!”

We turned back to the report. It went on to tell of his cataloguing all the churches, of his Madonna fixation on his mother.

This Willie seized upon. It fitted perfectly. “You see, by the Madonna fixation, he gets rid of his real father, whom he resents bitterly. And that leaves him free to consider himself as a magical, superior being, even magically born, the son of God. And look at this-” The report spoke of Judd’s innumerable sketches, all over his classroom notebooks. Of the thousands of things he drew the first item was “Crucifixions”. “The most interesting part of the Crucifixion for him appears to be somebody nailed to something.”

His mother was a Madonna, he was a Christ. And here, Willie supplied another conception that was new to me: “Remember, the church is a mother-idea, everything about the church is seductive, feminine; and the synagogue is a father-religion, harder and more austere, stemming from the patriarchs.”

And so Willie explained Judd’s conflict over being a Jew. At the time it seemed far-fetched to me, seemed perhaps a reflection of Willie’s own excessive concern with his “Jewish appearance”.

“But look,” Willie said, “Christ is born a Jew but in reality He becomes the symbol of Christianity. Isn’t this an inevitable identification for someone who is struggling with his Jewishness? Judd runs around to all the churches but hasn’t quite got the nerve to renounce his father-religion, to become a meshumed, a convert, so he nominally rejects all religion and says he’s an atheist. Wait. Look at his fixation on Artie-”

“But what’s that got to do with religion?”

Willie’s eyes gleamed. “Look at Artie, a tall blond fellow who is everything Judd wanted to be in appearance, who doesn’t look Jewish at all, a real collegiate shagetz type, and look what Judd says: ‘I identified myself with him completely.’” Now Willie lowered his voice, producing his culminating point. “I’m sure Judd never thought of this overtly. But remember, Artie’s mother is a Catholic. If Judd were Artie, he could more literally sense himself as the son of the Madonna.”

I thought it was too pat.

Actually, Willie argued, the entire subject of Jewish self-hatred was a rather new concept. He had read the basic book, available only in German. It showed how every Jew had a wish not to be burdened with the problem of being a Jew. Then came the guilt feeling for harbouring such a wish. “Haven’t you ever felt it?” he challenged me.

I could not deny that his words called up something of the sort in me. “All right. Then why should such a feeling make Judd kill Paulie Kessler?”

“Why? Self-destruction! They picked a boy, a Jewish boy, just at the age when Jews become Jews – thirteen, the bar-mitzua age.”

That was going too far. “They picked him at random, on the street-”

“Yes. That’s what they claim,” he said fanatically. “That there is no meaning, that everything is at random. Do you think that maybe, somewhere far back in their minds, it didn’t ring home that Paulie Kessler was the son of a pawnbroker, the symbol of everything that is shameful in being a Jew?” He leaned back, and grinned at me.

I wanted at first to laugh. Yet his ideas echoed and echoed. Wasn’t I, myself, ashamed? Didn’t I sometimes feel a secret rage at my father’s being a cheap Jewish cigar-maker?

Willie had fallen silent, brooding over his only partial explanation of Judd, an explanation which he was to complete for me, in an extraordinary way, years later. I turned the pages. “What about Artie?”

“It’s either obvious or a complete mystery,” he said. “Maybe he’s just a born maniac.”

“You think it could be heredity, then, after all?”

Willie didn’t believe it was entirely the fault of heredity. If these weaknesses had been detected early, perhaps the new psychiatry could have helped. But why hadn’t the faults been detected? “Ah, we don’t know a damn thing.” He had become morose.

“One thing you did guess,” I said, to restore the spark in him. “About the weapon.” I told him it was his insistence about the chisel that had led us to the tales of other taped chisels, other crimes.

Willie looked at me foggily for a moment. “For crissake, that wasn’t what I meant at all.” Though he wouldn’t be surprised if other such murders had been done. “Don’t you see what it is? The chisel? The tool itself? What it represents?”

Nowadays we would say I must have been blocked in some way, not to have understood instantly. As he made an obscene gesture with his hand, it dawned on me. It seemed at once weird, far-fetched, and obviously true. I felt stupid, too stupid to ask the next question.

He did it for me, rhetorically. But why should Artie have had to kill people with that thing? And why only men? For Artie had been against Judd’s idea to make it a girl, the report told us.

In Artie’s case, too, Willie said, it was the relationship with the father that had to be studied. The very first lines about Artie said material had been obtained from his mother, brothers, uncle. “His father still keeps absolutely shut off,” Willie observed. “Upstairs, they’ve been trying to get a show of support, you know, for the public. They finally got his mother to say something, but not the old man.”

We read, “The grandfather, a quick, alert man, was abusive to his children and beat them severely. The patient’s father has been exactly the opposite in his treatment of his children, probably as a reaction to the excessive severity of the grandfather.” Willie pointed out a passage, under Artie’s sex life. When Artie had caught gonorrhoea, “he sought advice from his older brother and his uncle, being particularly desirous of keeping a knowledge of all this from his father, whose respect he wanted to maintain”.

“Almost any kid would have done something like that,” I said.

“The patient had no sex knowledge from his parents, from his brothers, from his governess. At one time, he did secure some information from the family chauffeur…”

Then Willie found a clue. In the year Artie’s little brother was born, and Artie had begun his crime fantasies, he “had some eye trouble, and his lids would tend to stick together for a period of several weeks”. The next detail Willie pounced upon – the eye trouble had returned over a month ago, the time of the murder.

“I don’t see-”

“You don’t see! That’s just it. He didn’t want to see. To see that baby brother, or, years later, to see the crime he had done.”

Now I recalled Willie’s question in the lab: Whom did each boy mean to kill? Was it his little brother, then, for Artie? Hadn’t Artie and Judd actually discussed taking Billy as their victim?

But why? Merely jealousy of a kid brother?

It all went somehow into a sense of inadequacy, Willie argued, a sense as a child of not being wanted enough – or else why would the parents have another baby? Wasn’t Artie still undeveloped, despite his great hurry to grow up? “At eighteen, his voice is still changing”, the report read. “He is retarded in his masculine development.” He hardly needed to shave. His sexual growth was delayed. “To cover up his relative impotence, he boasted of his marks at school; although he received only moderate grades. He convinced his friends that he was quite superior to them mentally…”

Impotence? Artie, the sex braggart? But of course, that would fit. For what did we really know of his conquests? Hadn’t he always let on that Myra was his mistress? And I was certain she was a virgin.

The answer to Artie was all in there, somewhere, Willie said. The violent jealousy over his baby brother, and then the shame at being somewhat impotent – all his angers and frustrations bringing a kind of rage of impotence that was expressed the way a kid would. “I’ll show you!” With a hard tool he would knock over, kill, all those who made him feel insignificant – kill that rival kid brother who was so cute and beloved. And kill his own inadequate self.

The tool – wasn’t it the absolute symbol, the murderous weapon feared and dreamed of by every little boy, who in his fantasies about adults sees it somehow as a dreadful, powerful, killing thing?

Evasively, feeling uncomfortable, I asked about the other fantasies of Judd and Artie, the daydreams or whatever they were -

“You mean the masturbation dreams?” Willie said.

I pretended that I had myself understood them as such.

“They’re wishes. Judd wished most of all to be Artie’s slave, so he became it, and Artie wished to become a master criminal and get caught and jailed.”

But even with all this inner compulsion, weren’t they both persons of intelligence, exceptional intelligence? Could they not have seen where they were being driven?

“Look,” he said, “in both cases, the reports show us, the emotional age and the intelligence age are out of kilter. Even the psychological tests showed they were emotionally still children. What’s the emotional reaction of a kid of nine when he’s mixed up, baffled? He’ll strike out, blindly-”

“But it wasn’t blind killing. It was a long cunning plan,” I objected.

“Won’t a kid brood like that and plan? And then do something violently impulsive? They planned – and then picked up a kid impulsively.”

He read again of Artie’s moods, his depressions, his declaration that he had at times contemplated suicide. “The patient has some insights into his peculiarities and says that the question has often come to him as to whether he was ‘all there’. He states that during the past year he has felt different; he feels he cannot concentrate so well, that his memory is not so good, and that he cannot carry on conversations and small talk with others as formerly…

“In our opinion this tendency will continue and increase so that he will become more and more wrapped up in his world of fantasy and less and less in contact with his world of reality.”

For the family, the report was reassuring: “There is no reason to feel that the patient’s condition is of a hereditary nature or that it will be transmitted to future generations of his siblings or relatives. Neither is there any reason to feel that the family is responsible in any way for this boy’s condition.”

Willie was restless. Responsible. He tasted the word.

“According to you,” I said, “no one is responsible.”

“I didn’t say that.” He threw change on the table. “I suppose you think ignorance is no excuse?” We got up.

I was too excited to go to bed. I walked alongside the lake, ignoring all the entwined couples on the grass, in cars. And as I walked, there grew in me that peculiar elation that comes to us when we are young men, eighteen, twenty – that mystical sense of infinite creative connection to the universe, that winy sense of godlike power. And this, I then knew, was what that poor, tragic Judd must have felt at times, this elation, this intoxication with his own mental powers, and this was what he had confusedly expressed in his ideas that man was even more than God, that man conceived God and hence was greater than God. Each being in his own being was God. I felt the same thing in myself, and that night I felt even larger, larger with pity.

And then, when the exaltation was gone, and I was walking tiredly home, I found myself thinking of all Willie had said. There was much in it that could have meaning, and the tool had been explained – how else could you explain it? – and I had forgotten, in the rush of all the new ideas he had conveyed, that other hint he had given me a few weeks ago. The place of burial.

On the following Monday, the trial was to begin. Scrawled letters threatened to blow up the court building if anything but a hanging verdict was the result. Editorials screamed at the waste of public funds to provide a trial for such monsters, yet gloated over our noble sense of justice that insisted on a defence opportunity, even for them. But there were also higher expectations of the trial. Some of us, perhaps imbued by Judd, expected lofty and timeless discussions, as at the trial of Socrates.

By eight o’clock the pavement of the County Building was lined for a solid block with citizens who hoped to glimpse the killers as they were brought from jail. A special cordon of police had been stationed in the building entrance, and a constant series of arguments was in progress, with irate citizens, with blandishing women, with people using every means of subterfuge to get through.

Upstairs, I found the hallway to the courtroom packed solid. The victors in the battle for coveted admission cards were mostly friends, wives, and daughters of politicians. And there were the special visitors – visiting jurists, celebrities, big lawyers passing through Chicago on their way to a vacation – all of whom wanted a glimpse of the trial of the century.

And finally, the press. Nearly half the courtroom was filled with correspondents from abroad, from national magazines, from out-of-town papers. But there existed a higher category still. The select of the press were in the jury box. Thus we saw ourselves as the true arbiters; what we wrote was judgment.

Several in the press box were old familiars, on the case from its beginning. Mike Prager was there, sporting his belligerent sneer; Richard Lyman, of the Tribune, had naturally appropriated the foreman’s seat; the Tribune had added a “fancy writer” named Arthur Kramer, who sat alongside the box, where extra chairs had been placed. A dozen sob sisters were in court to cover the women’s angle. Certainly Artie evoked a hysterical tenderness in women. We heard it now in the corridor, a curious feminine shrieking and gasping, as the boys were pulled through the crowd; we glimpsed bare arms, hands reaching toward him, heard a few piercing girls’ voices above the others – “Artie!” “Artie, honey!”

Inside, the two sides had assembled. For the prosecution, there was Horn, looking ruddy, massaged, made fit for battle, low-set, a line-driver. Padua was on his left, handsome, a smiling ball-carrier. They were accompanied by Czewicki – a padded interference man, with his mountains of files and reference books – and a half-dozen others.

The other team was older-looking: Wilk, in his studied shabbiness, his clothes having the same rough, worn, softened look as his face; Ferdinand Feldscher, perfectly groomed, reasonable, shrewd, smooth; his brother Edgar, with his high forehead, his unlit pipe, his slightly poetic look that made one wonder what he was doing in a law court, in a murder case.

Then there were the representatives of the families: Artie’s brother James, who aroused sympathy, and his Uncle Gerald, leaning forward to whisper to the lawyers. On Judd’s side, father and brother sat together; sometimes Max was to be absent, and Judah Steiner would sit alone, a monumental Job, a figure that seemed, even within the crowded courtroom, removed by some invisible wall.

Directly behind sat two small men, Charles Kessler and his brother Jonas, their faces impassive. Judge Wagner was with them.

And so the prisoners were led in. Artie exchanged a puckish smile with his brother and uncle, while Judd cast a furtive glance toward his kin.

Then came the judge, in his black robe. Throughout the sweltering August Chicago heat, he was to retain in his black robe that look of being unaffected by weather as by any mere extraneous factor.

The case was called, and a representative of each side rose to state what it would attempt to show. Horn in person declared for the State that never in all the world had so cold, vile, and excuseless a murder been committed, and that the extreme penalty was inescapable in such a case. When Ferdinand Feldscher rose for the defence, it was simply to state that their efforts would be to present evidence in mitigation.

Horn called his first witness, the Polish worker who had found the body.

And then, for more than two weeks, there ensued a dull parade of circumstantial witnesses, the undertaker, various policemen, handwriting experts, the diver who had found the typewriter – all in endless detail proving the crime which the defence fully conceded. But there was method to it, for by having witnesses describe the blood, the body, by having teachers describe the innocent schoolboy, and by piling up evidence of the luxury in which the murderers had been raised, Horn was indeed proving aggravation, to counterbalance any mitigating evidence the defence might offer.

During those weeks, the defence could only make effort after effort to shorten the proceedings; witnesses were rarely cross-examined, except for an occasional flash question to show the defence was in form.

Then came the coroner’s physician, Dr. Kruger. Despite an air of disgust and impatience on the part of Judge Matthewson, Horn kept the doctor on the stand, describing “signs of sexual abuse”.

The defence objected incessantly. The coroner’s verdict itself stated that no conclusion could be drawn. Surely the prosecutor was attempting deliberately to arouse prejudice!

Horn flared back. “Prejudice! Monsters are monsters!”

Finally, Wilk had the witness. This time there was no perfunctory dismissal. Had Dr. Kruger not stated that no tangible evidence existed? How then could he come to a conclusion? Oh, it was an opinion. Would there not be just as much basis for the opposite opinion? Then it was a guess? Were medical men given to swearing on guesswork?

Dr. Kruger, with each reply, seemed ready to jump out of his seat. But Wilk kept him pinned there with a barrage of medical questions. Wasn’t it true that muscle tension relaxed after death? Particularly during all-night immersion? “Then the condition was really normal, wasn’t it?”

“That’s my opinion and I stick to it!” the coroner’s physician snapped. Wilk shrugged, and waved him from the stand.

The retinue of humdrum witnesses continued.

For Judd, the trial was the last bitter irony. Was this the great trial that was in a sense to have justified his crime by bringing momentous questions before mankind? The question of free will, the question of law and the superman, reduced to routine evidence about a fake signature on a hotel registry. And for Artie, there was no particular disappointment, only boredom; to him the outcome was interesting only as a kind of bet, a long shot on life.

Then came my day to testify.

I had assured myself that testifying on the stand would only be like sitting in front of the typewriter. When I wrote, I gave testimony, making it as true as I knew how. Then what was it that troubled me? Was it some feeling that I would nevertheless that day be deserting my function as an objective bystander, to take the chair and participate?

From Artie and Judd, I was sure I received a special, measuring look, weighing how damaging I might be.

I had gone over the material with Tom. Certain words of Artie’s would be ugly to repeat. But we had long ago put them into print; how could we change them? If you had to pick a kid to kill, he was just the kind of cocky little sonofabitch you’d choose. That sentence, we both knew, was counted on by Horn as a hanging sentence.

The heat was growing in the room, and the people were wiping their brows. The two accused sank low in their chairs, showing their indifference. A Socrates trial, a dance of minds! Then, seemingly in the midst of a sentence, Horn sat down; Wilk shook his head, no questions, and I heard my name called.

As I raised my hand in the oath, I experienced a queer intensification, an archaic fear of the absoluteness of what I would be saying; I am told that all witnesses feel this to some extent and that lawyers play upon it.

Horn advanced, smiling reassuringly, and established my identity, my employment, and that I was a recent graduate of the University of Chicago, as well as a fraternity brother of one of the accused. Then he asked my age.

To graduate at eighteen was pretty unusual, wasn’t it? he asked, and I found myself saying there were others who had graduated at my age.

“Yes.” He stared at the prisoners.

Then he asked if I had been tutored by a governess to speed me through school. Wilk had risen, objecting, “No, no!” Horn withdrew the question, and turned then to my work as a reporter, and the identification of the body of Paulie Kessler. “That was considered quite a scoop, wasn’t it?”

Artie had picked up his head. I muttered, “Well, it was only luck.”

On the day we found the drugstore, wasn’t it Artie who had insisted on making a search? And the inevitable question arrived.

“Did you discuss Artie’s personal acquaintance with the victim?”

“We did.”

“Did you ask him anything about Paulie?”

“My partner, Tom Daly, asked what kind of kid Paulie was.”

“And what was his reply?”

Artie and Judd were staring fixedly at me. I felt sweat break and slide under my arm. “He said, ‘He was just the kind of cocky little -’ and then he used a swear word ‘you would pick if you were going to kidnap someone.’” They had me repeat the word to the stenographer.

Horn glanced challengingly at the defence.

Had the remark aroused any suspicion in me? Not at the time. Then Horn led me through the account of the typewriter, without failing to remark that there seemed to be different kinds of prodigies at the university.

But he was not through. “Tell me, Mr. Silver, would you mind telling the court, have you ever pictured yourself as a king, or a slave, or an ideal college hero?”

The quiet Edgar Feldscher leaped up, shouting objections.

What was the purpose of the line of questioning? the judge asked. Even while they argued, there crowded through my mind my own fantasies: a football hero, a sophisticated star reporter, a great writer receiving the Pulitzer Prize. I felt myself flushing, for quickly, overwhelming these, were sexual images, harem images…

Horn was insisting that the alienists’ reports, pages and pages filled with the boys’ fantasies, had opened up this entire question. But this evidence had not yet been presented in court, Judge Matthewson remarked.

I was turned over to the defence.

I watched Jonathan Wilk, unfolding like a carpenter’s rule; would he now make a fool of me? But from the first stroke of his voice I felt drawn to his side. Wilk did not have many questions to ask of me. I was used to Artie’s way of talking, wasn’t I? I knew him around the fraternity house and on campus, didn’t I? And was Artie in the habit of employing swear words or dirty words in his usual speech?

He was.

In fact – and with a shadow of his sad smile, Wilk turned his head toward Artie – in fact, the boy couldn’t open his mouth without some filthy expression, the way some kids did to show they were grown-up?”

Yes, I agreed. These were habitual expressions with him.

So the swear word Artie had put in there didn’t have any real significance, did it? It didn’t mean anything?

No, I agreed, and found myself relieved to have this pointed out.

Mentally I deleted “sonofabitch”. The rest was still terrible.

Wilk seemed to have done the same thing in his mind. And now he lowered his voice to a more intimate level.

Now, I had seen a great deal of Artie, and of his friend Judd, but particularly of Artie in those days before they were caught, and as I thought back on Artie’s conduct, what had he seemed like to me?

For a moment, I could not answer. There came to me, insistently, the Four Deuces, the dead derelict, Ruth, Artie, Judd dancing with Ruth… If I opened my mouth, I would talk of her -

Wilk prompted me. On the day Artie had insisted on hunting out the drugstore, what had he seemed like to me?

“I would say he was obsessed,” I testified. “I even remarked to my partner that Artie was obsessed with the case because he was so crazy about detective stories.”

“It didn’t bring suspicion upon him?”

“No; he himself had the explanation that his own kid brother might have been the victim.” Willie Weiss was staring at me. Did I really believe Willie’s far-fetched theory? Within myself, I felt an intensification, an acceleration of all processes, as if being a witness indeed helped me to see. It was a peculiar instant of oversensitivity; there was an exquisite shudder in it; and I even thought, Suppose someone were driven to hunt for such augmented perceptions? Suppose someone had to reach out beyond everyday actions, by hurting, by murder…

“Obsessed, did you say?”

“Yes, he seemed obsessed.” I left the stand, feeling somehow grateful to Jonathan Wilk for having got me to say those last things.

At long last, Horn was done, and the defence was to begin. Again, the pavement was jammed; the halls, the lifts were crowded; and extra bailiffs had to be called to guard the courtroom doors. It was Wilk’s turn.

He rose in his piecemeal manner, and asked Dr. McNarry to take the stand. Even while the doctor made his way to the chair, the opposition was clamouring at the bench. He gave his name; he was sworn. Only then Judge Matthewson turned his attention to Padua, Horn, Czewicki – all three in full cry, Czewicki with an arm-load of books, Padua repeating as a litany, “If Your Honour please-”

“All right, what is it?”

Padua led off, with a torrent of argument about the plea of insanity, beginning with sonorous quotations from Blackstone about compos and non compos: the ability to tell right from wrong.

Judd had become alert; something like pleasure showed on his face – the argument was being joined at last on a question of ideas. He whispered to Edgar Feldscher, no doubt some jibe about the high school lawyer with his primitive Blackstone.

Padua read from the Illinois statutes: “A person shall be considered of sound mind who is neither an idiot, nor a lunatic, nor affected with insanity, and who has arrived at the age of fourteen years, or before that age if the person knows the distinction between good and evil… An individual under the age of ten years shall not be found guilty of any crime or misdemeanour.”

It flashed through my mind that the psychiatric reports had placed the “emotional age” of the boys at nine. Wouldn’t it be a clever argument for the defence to contend that the emotional, rather than the physical, age should apply?

Then came the provision for temporary insanity. If at the time of committing a crime, “the person so charged was a lunatic or insane, the jury shall so find by their verdict…”.

“… In all these cases it shall be the duty of the court”, Padua read emphatically, “to empanel a jury to try the question whether the accused be… sane or insane.”

If the defence even touched on the question of insanity, the case automatically had to go to a jury.

It was a curious moment. Wilk, the great jury lawyer, was seeking at all costs to avoid a jury. And the prosecution was trying by every trick in the law books to force the case before a jury, or else to keep out the entire mass of psychiatric evidence, the only evidence the defence had to offer.

Now Horn took up this argument. “Insanity is a defence,” he insisted, “the same as an alibi. Have we got to a point of the law here where we can enter a plea of guilty before the court in order to avoid a jury, and then treat that plea as a plea of not guilty, and put in a defence?”

The judge made a movement, as though brushing away a fly. Horn kept on. “I insist, if Your Honour please, that we proceed without hearing any evidence tending to show that these men are insane. If not, everything you do from now on is of no effect under the law.”

There was a gasp from the courtroom at his audacity. Dr. McNarry, who had been staring at Horn with a professional half-smile, now turned his gaze upon Judge Matthewson.

“From the moment you hear evidence on insanity, this becomes a mock trial!” Horn shrieked. At last, the judge cut in. Did the State’s Attorney have any authorities?

Several lawyers responded simultaneously. Meanwhile, as Judd and Artie listened intently, the judge leaned forward, explaining his own view. It was actually his duty to find out if the boys might be insane, in order to protect their rights – to a jury trial! “I have a right to know whether these boys are competent to plead guilty or not guilty.”

The judge seemed determined to give each side a point, for he went on to remark, “There are different forms of insanity. Medically-”

“Not under the law!” Horn cried.

Patiently, as one going back to fundamentals, Judge Matthewson asked Horn, “Then is there no mitigation in a murder case at all?”

“Insanity is not a mitigating thing. It exists or does not exist.”

Wilk ambled to the bench, as a man puzzled. “And has the degree of responsibility nothing to do with it?”

“Degree!” Horn snapped. “Insanity is a total defence, the same as self-defence, the same as an alibi.”

“But if a medical condition-” Edgar Feldscher began.

Padua interrupted. “The law on the issue of an insanity defence-”

“We claim-” began Wilk.

“One moment, Mr. Wilk!” And he put his question to the judge. “If it is conceded that insanity is not a defence, have they any right to introduce any evidence of insanity?”

“No, we’re not-” Feldscher shouted.

“No evidence of insanity!” Wilk echoed, while Dr. McNarry studied them all with interest.

“Then have you any right to introduce evidence as to the mental condition of these men?” Padua demanded.

“Certainly!” they cried in unison.

“Evidence intended to show that they are not responsible, or should not be held to the degree of responsibility that other people should be?”

“Certainly,” Wilk demonstratively resumed his seat.

“But that is insanity called by another name!”

“You can call it green cheese if you like!” Ferdinand Feldscher sneered.

“Wait, wait! Don’t get excited!” The judge leaned in.

Dr. McNarry permitted himself a chortle. Judd grinned. Artie looked worried, as if to remind us all that his life was at stake in this dispute.

The case seemed to hang in balance. Turning blandly toward Dr. McNarry, the judge said, “I don’t know what Dr. McNarry or whatever his name is, is going to testify.” He beamed upon Horn. “Nobody has said he is going to testify as to their sanity, except the State.”

It was sophistry. We all had the report of the alienists in our hands. Did not the report on each boy conclude with the statement that he was mentally affected? From a legal point of view, Horn seemed right. But the real trouble was that the law itself in its definition of insanity was antiquated.

There in that broiling courtroom in Chicago the inadequacy of the definition was being made clear; there in those days of wrangling the law itself was being tested. If it did nothing else, if the life or death of Judd and Artie was of little significance, their case at least served to focus the world’s attention on the inadequacy of our laws in the face of our new knowledge of the human personality and mind.

The argument climbed. The lawyers brought in rulings from Nebraska, precedents from Alabama, statutes from Colorado. Word of the battle had seeped down to the street, and the pressure at the door increased. As in most arguments, the issue was only a definition of a word. Insanity. The word was like a push button for a jury. The defence tried to shade it to “an affected mind”.

“There is no need in citing the law,” Judge Matthewson said. “If there is any mental disease, it is insanity.”

There was a sudden silence. The prosecution seemed to have won. Judd, in panic, turned to Jonathan Wilk.

Wilk arose again and stepped to the bench. “Do you mean to say that the court will not consider the mental condition on the question of mitigation? When the mental condition does not rise to a defence?”

His question hung in the air. Mitigation, he repeated. What entered into mitigation? Didn’t one consider the conditions that led to a crime? The background of the criminal, the forces that moulded his character? The pressures upon him, the extent of his responsibility?

And as he spoke, the courtroom was being gradually drawn back from the definition of a word to deeper questions. What was free choice of action? What was free will? And, unsaid, one could hear Wilk’s lifelong rumination, his gentle pessimism, his insistence on some form of mechanistic determinism, his claim that there was no free will. Yet even if some freedom of will did exist, “Suppose the mental condition seriously interferes with their free will and understanding, don’t you think the court has a right to listen to that, in mitigation?”

It was the deeper kind of plea, for which we had waited from Wilk, the plea for compassion, yet delicately balanced, because if you carried it too far you would be saying what you really meant, that no one was responsible for any crime.

And Padua, lowering his voice so that it was as solemn as Wilk’s, devilishly suggested, “If you had a mental condition of that kind, it would be your duty to take full advantage of it before a jury.”

A grudging gasp went through the courtroom, at the young attorney’s cleverness in puncturing the grand champion’s spell.

Wilk was momentarily taken aback. Ferdinand Feldscher stepped in, to quote authorities again, and at times four or all six of the attorneys argued earnestly, with the judge intently taking part.

But gradually voices rose. “We’re wasting hours!”

“Wasting a few hours doesn’t make any difference,” said the judge. “The lives of two men are at stake here, and the issue itself is important.”

The morning session was over. As the boys were led out, Judd remarked to Dr. McNarry, “Well, you nearly got a word in,” and Artie said, “They’ve got you stuck to that seat, Doc.” We all recorded their wit, the hostile papers adding that at two hundred and fifty dollars a day, the doctor had no reason to complain.

When the argument was resumed, it was Edgar Feldscher who attempted to clarify the issue. “Even the most expert alienist finds it difficult to put his finger on the border line between sanity and insanity.” Though experts found it hard to define insanity, Feldscher pointed out, “Yet the law is that a jury of twelve ordinary laymen, maybe half of whom got through high school, should, on listening to testimony, be able to judge whether a man is sane or insane!”

“But that’s the law!” Horn was right back at it. “An insanity issue goes before a jury.”

The mild Edgar Feldscher suddenly snapped, “Let me ask, when you were a judge on this bench, didn’t you, in a similar proceeding – in the Fitzgerald case – hear evidence of sanity on a plea of guilty, for attacking that poor five-year-old little girl?”

“No, I didn’t-” Horn began.

Wilk cut in, a figure of wrath. “Why, every lawyer in Chicago knows you had an alienist testify that Fitzgerald was a legal moron!”

“Yes, but I didn’t permit testimony of insanity!” Horn screeched. “Moral depravity is not insanity.”

“An alienist testified to the mental condition of Fitzgerald,” Wilk insisted.

“Testified he was a degenerate!”

“And irresponsible!” Wilk shouted in his face.

“And Fitzgerald was sentenced to be hanged!” Horn retorted triumphantly.

“You hanged him,” Wilk stated, in disgust. “You hanged a diseased moron.”

Judge Matthewson angrily rapped for order. For another day they debated, until Padua summed it up for the State: “Seventy per cent of all admissions to state institutions are mental diseases functional in their nature – the very language of the defence – and that is insanity, legal insanity, and that is a defence before a jury.”

Now Wilk ranged himself in his famous pose, his thumbs under his braces, his long body relaxed.

He began dryly. “I understand from everything that has been said in this case, from the beginning to the end, that the State’s Attorney’s office feels the universe will crumble unless these two boys are hanged. I must say I have never before seen the same passion and enthusiasm for a death penalty as I have seen in this case.”

It was Wilk in one of his characteristic humanitarian outbursts. “If I thought that hanging men would prevent any future murders, I would probably be in favour of doing it,” Wilk said. “In fact, I would consent to having anybody hanged, excepting myself…”

Now he became the clever lawyer, turning Horn’s own argument against him. “If the ability to judge between right and wrong is the only criterion of sanity, why, then we already know the boys are legally sane, so the judge can listen to anything he wants, here. Why, Mr. Horn even said my clients are as sane as he is!” What, then, was the prosecution holding things up for? “They came in here with their beloved Blackstone, hoary with time…”

Horn shook his head as if to say, Let the clown have his act.

“We have in this state a statute which says the court, before he passes sentence on a human being, may inquire whether there are mitigating circumstances. Now what does this mean? Is there any catalogue? No, the court must tell, it is for him to decide and no one else.

“What is a mitigating circumstance? Youth itself. Simply because a child hasn’t judgment. Why, we’ve all been young and we know the vagaries of the mind of a child. We know the dream world it is in; we know that nothing is real. These two boys are minors. The law forbids them making contracts, from marrying without their parents’ consent. Why? Because they haven’t judgment, which comes only with years. I can’t understand lawyers who would talk of hanging boys as they would talk of a holiday – as they would talk of the races.

“About seven years ago, a poor boy named Petnick was charged with murder and I was asked by a charitable organization to defend him. He went to a house one day to deliver groceries and picked up a knife and killed a mother and her baby.

“I entered a plea of guilty, as in this case. I called his school teacher to show his mental condition, and I called alienists to prove the state of that poor boy’s mind. Judge Willard, a former partner of Mr. Horn here, said he would not hang that boy. And yet in this courtroom today we are told that the court may not consider such a circumstance!” He gazed reproachfully at the prosecution. “They say that’s the law – you are told you can’t even hear this testimony in mitigation. If that’s the law, I trust this court will ignore it, as the courts do ignore it constantly!”

Horn exploded. “In the name of the women and the children of this state,” he screamed, “I ask Your Honour whether this has ceased to be a court of law! Mr. Wilk tells Your Honour to ignore the law, to bum the criminal code!” He glared at the forgotten Dr. McNarry, the cause of the two-day argument. “You would indeed have to disregard the law, to hear this witness!”

With a brusque movement, the judge made his decision. “Under the wording of the statute I must hear evidence in mitigation and evidence in aggravation. The objection of the State is overruled, and the defence may proceed.”

Judd and Artie were alight, as though all had been won.

What could Dr. McNarry tell? Why had the State’s Attorney fought for two whole days to keep out his testimony?

McNarry began with Artie, detailing how the habit of lying evolved until “he himself says that he found it difficult to distinguish between what was true and what was not true.”

Horn broke in: “I submit that we are getting now clearly into an insanity hearing and I move that a jury be empanelled.”

“Motion denied,” said the judge.

McNarry came to the fantasy life, and Horn tried the other tack. “This condition you have described is sometimes called building castles in the air, is it not? Is that not quite common among boys?”

“Surely,” the alienist agreed. “But air castles are generally considered to be something beautiful and desirable, while these-”

“Don’t most boys have daydreams about dungeons and escapes?”

Judge Matthewson said stiffly, “Let the doctor proceed without interruption; cross-examine when he gets through.”

The doctor described the shadowing in the street, the jail fantasy, and how when Artie finally got into jail he “felt as if he belonged there and was living out in reality what he used to picture to himself as a child”. He told of the curious “continuance into his present life of a practice he had as an infant, confiding in his teddy bear, ‘And now, Teddy…’” He summarized: “Whereas fantasy life is compensatory, it also foreshadows our real conduct. He thinks of himself in prison, as a master criminal. The significance is on the emotional side because it is in the emotions that the fantasy life has its roots.” Artie was remaining, then, emotionally a child, a bad child seeking punishment.

To show how fantasy imposed itself and could even obliterate reality, the psychiatrist reminded us that despite Artie’s genera! popularity everywhere, Artie had an idea of himself as unwanted and inferior. This was another sign of Artie’s disintegration, as was his complaint that in the last few years he had felt that he “wasn’t all there”.

“In other words, he has grown to eighteen years of age, but he has carried his infancy with him in the shape of an undeveloped emotional attitude toward life… We see a complete derangement, a complete personality split where there is no longer the possibility of bringing the two aspects of the personality into sufficient harmonious union. Artie is in a stage which is capable, if it goes further, of developing that malignant splitting.”

Would Dr. McNarry discuss the other crimes, A, B, C, D, as further evidence of Artie’s disintegration?

“Artie’s tendency was criminalistic.” But he listed only the minor crimes, already well known. “To fulfill his mastermind fantasy, Artie needed a gang, and Judd was his gang. Now Judd had no fundamental criminalistic tendency.”

This statement in itself startled the courtroom.

Judd’s tendencies, the doctor said, could be expressed as a constant swing between feelings of superiority and feelings of inferiority. He needed a complement, a balance, and had attached Artie as his other ego, sometimes superior, sometimes inferior, as when the king was rescued by the slave.

“Thus, in this fantasy, in either position he occupies, as king or as slave, he gets the expression of both components of his make-up, his desire for subjection on the one part and the desire for supremacy on the other, so that with their effective and emotional relationship to each other, each entire life plays into the other with almost devilish ingenuity, if I may be permitted to use the term.”

While Artie was a disintegrating, a decomposing, personality, saying he had had all he wanted out of life, the alienist showed us Judd as incessantly active, cataloguing churches as a child, then investigating ornithology, analysing languages, and even now in jail projecting a book he would write to explain himself, a speech he would make from the scaffold if he were to hang. Indeed he was even planning a set of questions that he would answer from afterlife, should there prove to be any, though he did not believe any existed.

“So these two boys,” Dr. McNarry continued, in his even tone, “with their peculiar inter-digitating and complementing personalities” – he laced together the fingers of his two hands – “came into this emotional compact, with the Kessler homicide as the result.” It could be described, he said, as a folie à deux, rare enough, since it could not result unless the precise two personalities, by perhaps one chance in millions, came together.

The doctor emphasized this, probably as reassurance to the public, to the world; but even at the time I had a doubting thought: Wouldn’t the needed personalities somehow attract each other, to come together? And since then, of course, we have seen many other crimes out of such conjoinings.

The testimony of Dr. McNarry ended with Edgar Feldscher’s formal questions: “As a result of your examination and observation of the defendant Arthur Straus, have you an opinion as to his mental condition on the twenty-first day of May, 1924?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What is that opinion?”

“Well, I have practically expressed it. He was the host of antisocial tendencies along the lines that I have described. He was going in the direction of a split personality, because of this inner unresolved conflict… He is still a child emotionally, still talking to a teddy bear – somewhere around four or five years old. Intellectually, he passes his tests very well.”

As to Judd, he, too, was “the host of a relatively infantile aspect of his personality, but he has reacted to a defence mechanism, which has produced the final picture of a markedly disordered personality make-up in the direction of developing feelings of superiority which place him very largely out of contact with an adequate appreciation of his relation to others or to society.”

We had almost forgotten that it was a trial, a contest, until Horn came forward for the cross-examination. He turned to Artie’s “criminalistic tendencies”, and Judd’s lack of them. Did the doctor, for example, know who struck the fatal blows on Paulie Kessler’s skull?

There was a moment of hesitation as Dr. McNarry glanced toward the defence table. Wilk arose.

It would make no difference in the conduct of the defence if this point could be clarified, he said. The boys, by their own desire and that of their families, were being tried jointly, as they were inextricably bound in their act.

Horn repeated his question.

“Yes,” said Dr. McNarry. He spoke as though the detail were of little significance. “It was Artie.”

A woman’s shriek sounded over the courtroom hubbub. I noticed Myra, sudden tears on her face. Up to that moment she must still have been clinging to the idea of Judd as the devil.

Horn was asking how the doctor knew it was Artie.

“During one of our talks, there came a point where it was quite clear to me. I asked, ‘It was you who struck the blows, wasn’t it?’ and Artie nodded; he said, ‘You knew it’.”

I had a glimpse over my shoulder of Judd, staring at Artie with almost a reproving look.

The sensation had come late in the afternoon; court adjourned before I finished my call. The corridors were flooded with excited women; there seemed, indeed, to be a particularly sharp scent rising in the warm corridors from their inordinate agitation. In that moment, I saw Myra, slipping between the clots of women. I called her name. She clutched my arm, in that way she had. “Oh, Sid.”

“Sid,” she gasped, “they’re putting me on the stand tomorrow.”

How could that be? What of all the other psychiatrists?

“I don’t know, I don’t know. The lawyers just told me. Sid, I’m scared of that awful man.”

I reassured her. Horn was nobody to be afraid of; it was nothing to be on the stand. She had Wilk to protect her.

I waited in the park. Myra wanted me to walk her to Wilk’s apartment. The heat had not lifted, and the park was teeming. All at once she was there with me, wispy in the twilight. We stood a moment, listening to a middle-aged woman talking to her husband. “I thought all the time it was the dark one did it, that Judd Steiner, but if it was that boy Artie, I don’t understand how he could hit a kid – he looks such a nice boy. He must be insane.”

“It’s the way they were brought up,” the husband said. “Kids nowadays, they have everything too easy.”

We started walking. “Perhaps we’re all like that,” Myra said in her low breathy voice, “the generation that refused to grow up. We’re all babies emotionally.”

And as we walked: “Oh, Sid, should I say he was crazy, that he always acted crazy?” When Dr. McNarry had been describing Artie on the stand, Myra said, she had suddenly seen it so clearly, she had remembered so many scenes all tumbling together. The time he put on dark glasses and sat on the curb at Cottage Grove and 63rd, pretending to be a blind beggar, that was infantile – she had always said he was infantile, even to her mother… “Oh, the poor kid, if they do save his life, if he’s sent to an asylum, and some day becomes cured, will they ever let him out?”

And, leaning against me, she expressed her terror again. What was it like on the stand? That Sunday, when Horn’s men had come to see her, she hardly remembered what she had said. Could they hold her to what she had said?

As we entered Wilk’s apartment, Myra was taken over at once by Ferdinand Feldscher, who disappeared with her into a side room. There were conferences everywhere. In a corner of Wilk’s library, several of our fraternity brothers were being prepared to go on the stand. In the dining-room, there were members of Judd’s birding class, and a few campus intellectuals with whom he had argued philosophy.

I began to understand this sudden break in strategy. Dr. McNarry’s testimony had proved too strong; to follow him directly with other psychiatrists was to risk playing into Horn’s hands, to cause the case to go to a jury. Instead, there would be an interlude, with character witnesses, friends, girls, who would restore the image of Judd and Artie as college boys, active, bright, even attractive to perfectly normal young girls.

A hall door opened, and I could hear an entire segment of argument about whether to call the girls at all and expose them to cross-examination. Horn would stop at nothing; he would surely confront even the girls with the homosexual thing.

Suddenly a question stood clear in my mind. If Artie was the actual murderer, and Judd was involved only because of his homosexual love, what would Judd be if released from that love? Hadn’t some such release been taking place, through Ruth? Hadn’t he shown himself on the way to normal emotions?

As if my thoughts had summoned him, Willie Weiss stopped at my side. And with his uncanny penetration, he asked, “Worried about your girl going on the stand?”

It didn’t strike me then that he could have meant Myra, since I had brought her. I needed help, and in some stumbling way I made it clear to him, telling him all I knew about Judd and Ruth. He perched on the edge of a telephone table, immensely intrigued.

“You mean you think Judd was about to come out of it?” he asked.

“That’s what I want to know,” I said. And just then, as Dr. McNarry passed through the hall, Willie caught his arm. “This is quite interesting,” he told the alienist. And looking around: “Let’s go where we can talk.”

We tried the dining room, but it was in use. Mrs. Wilk, sighing, offered us the maid’s room behind the kitchen.

So we sat on the cot in the tiny room. There was an unshaded overhead bulb, and I felt Dr. McNarry studying me.

Wasn’t I the reporter, he inquired, who was so much involved in the case? Unfortunately he hadn’t been present during my testimony.

“I’m perhaps even more involved,” I said, and told about my friend, Ruth Goldenberg.

“Your girl?”

“Well, not exactly. Not any more, I’m afraid.”

“Judd’s?” He identified her then as the girl Judd had not wanted to name during all the examinations. Yes, Judd had even talked about leaving home and marrying this girl. But – McNarry touched his fingers together – it had all seemed rather a fantasy.

Willie stated the problem that was troubling me. “Sid has been wondering if this sudden attachment to a girl could be a sign that Judd was overcoming his pathology? I think it’s an interesting question.”

Dr. McNarry studied his fingertips. “Of course it happens. Homosexuals can behave simultaneously as heterosexuals – that seems to have been true in both these boys – but they can also go over, as we sometimes see, to normal relationships. In fact, in late adolescence that’s a common pattern, isn’t it?” He gazed at me. “Judd’s nineteen.”

“Doctor,” Willie broke in, “couldn’t the murder have acted as a kind of catharsis, freeing Judd from his homosexual bond?”

An appreciative smile came over the alienist’s face. “But then the bond has apparently reasserted itself,” Dr. McNarry said.

“Because now, in jail, he has no alternative,” Willie argued. “But in the week after the crime, in fact virtually the day after, for the first time in his life he had what seems to be a true emotional reaction to a girl.”

Dr. McNarry asked, “The young lady was affected by him?”

“Yes,” I said, hurt by Willie’s having to hear it. “I believe she intends to testify.”

He looked at his hands again.

One more question pressed itself forward in me. That time with Ruth on the beach – wasn’t it somehow a proof that Judd, by himself, could master his impulses? The doctor stared at me. I finally had to ask: Would it help if something like that were brought out in court?

Instantly, under his gaze, I had an intense feeling of shame at my own thought of Ruth on the stand questioned about physical intimacy.

“This is the girl Judd brought to his brother’s engagement party,” Willie remarked. Dr. McNarry nodded, as though he had known.

Then he sighed, not as a doctor but as one of us. “The poor wretch.” He shook his head. “All in the wrong time. The poor wretch.”

It was just as Myra was taking the stand that I saw Ruth enter the courtroom. Willie pulled Ruth into the room and led her to the front bench, filled with witnesses. The fellows moved together to make room for her. Ruth saw me watching her then and gave me her serious smile.

I felt her somehow changed, and an anguish came over me; I wiped sweat from my face, so I could furtively dry my eyes. Would Ruth say Judd had asked her to marry him? Would that somehow for ever close me away, as though my girl had really given herself to another man?

The questioning of Myra had begun.

She was dressed in white, like a nurse, in a straight white linen frock, with only a few huge buttons to show it wasn’t a uniform. Ferdinand Feldscher was questioning her in a soft fatherly manner.

Yes, she had known Artie since childhood.

And would she characterize him as a stable character?

Highly unstable, she said. He was nervous, smoked nervously, throwing away his cigarettes after a few puffs. He was given to lying for no reason at all, making up stories the way kids did, like his bootlegger stories, and then, often, he behaved in an infantile way, so much so that it was embarrassing, and everyone had remarked on it.

“Can you think of an example?”

“Quite recently, I had a date and Artie dropped in just before my date arrived. When the bell rang, he put on my sash, and ran to the door…”

There was giggling at the story. Horn was grinning. Of course, Myra said, such antics could be due to high spirits, but with Artie they often became disturbing.

“Would you say that he was fully developed, mature?”

“Oh, no, decidedly not. He was very childish.”

“Childish? In his emotions?”

“Yes. Very much so.”

The lawyer made the point over and over, then backed slowly away, and Horn approached Myra; he was still grinning, but his voice was bland.

She was a cousin of Artie’s?

A distant cousin.

She had been his playmate as a child?

One of them.

“Would you call yourself his sweetheart?”

She flushed and couldn’t answer.

“You kissed, I presume, at times?” he demanded, hard. Despite objections, the judge directed her to answer.

“Yes,” she said, her resentment helping her to regain her composure.

“And would you call these kisses from a grown sweetheart childish emotional behaviour?” Over the full laughter, Horn rubbed it in. “Were they childish or mature kisses?”

The judge rebuked him.

“As his childhood playmate and young lady friend, you would help Artie out if you could?”

“Certainly,” she said, “but not-”

“Being a lady, you wouldn’t be lying now, to help Artie out?”

“I don’t lie!”

There was a knowing murmur from the courtroom. “Oh, wouldn’t she!”

“Haven’t you been lying, right here on the stand?” Horn demanded. He glanced at some papers in his hand. “You made a statement, did you not, to a representative of the State’s Attorney’s office, the day after Artie Straus and Judd Steiner confessed to this crime?”

“I was asked some questions. I was very upset at the time.”

“Let me read to you from the statement. Question: ‘Would you say that Artie is intelligent?’ Answer: ‘Exceptionally.’ Question: ‘Mature in his ideas?’ Answer: ‘Oh, very mature in his ideas.’ Now, do you remember giving that answer?”

“I might have said it, I don’t know. I didn’t know what they meant by mature – I said a lot of other things they didn’t put down-”

“Miss Seligman, in this signed and sworn statement, you declare this man to be mature. Here on the stand you testify-” He had the court stenographer read back her testimony. “Question: ‘Would you say he was fully developed, mature?’ Answer: ‘Oh, no, decidedly not. He was very childish -’”

Horn cut in, his arm outflung, finger pointing at her. “When were you lying, ten minutes ago in this courtroom, or now?”

Myra’s face squeezed, contorted. “But – but-” She struggled to speak.

“Excused,” Horn snapped. Ferdinand Feldscher rushed to help her as she stumbled from the stand. Wilk glared at Horn with utter loathing, red spots of fury on his cheeks.

With a frantic movement, Willie Weiss was across the enclosure, on the other side of Myra. We all rushed from our press seats as Myra was carried into the judge’s chambers. Presently, Feldscher came out to us. Dr. Allwin had given Myra a sedative, he announced, and she was being taken home.

When I resumed my place in the press box, I saw that Ruth was no longer in the courtroom. “No more girl witnesses,” Tom told me, as he left for the office to write the story. “Wilk cancelled them all.”

I caught Judd’s eye. I told myself that he, too, felt relieved.

And could it have helped him? Even if Ruth had been able to make everything known – everything, even the inner, uncompleted feelings…

Then, to our surprise, the defence used Milt Lewis, despite his having produced the fatal typing notes. Milt told about the day in law class when Judd had insisted that a superman was above the law.

“Can you fix the date?” Ferdinand Feldscher asked.

“Well, I know it was in between the crime and the apprehension.”

“At the time of the discussion, did you think it was strange?”

“It was just one of his nutty ideas.”

“Nutty, did you say? Meaning irresponsible?”

“Well, exaggerated. Things you couldn’t take seriously.”

“Can you recall some other such – nutty ideas?”

“He said he was a nihilist-”

“A nihilist, what is that?”

“A kind of anarchist who wants to destroy things.”

“Even worse than an anarchist, then? Destructive?”

“Yes. He felt no restraint as far as authority was concerned, and he said he believed in destruction merely for the sake of destruction. I remember one argument when he said there was no value to life in itself.”

“Was this a part of his Nietzschean philosophy?”

Judd was whispering excitedly now; Wilk was trying to calm him.

“No, I wouldn’t say it was exactly in line with Nietzsche.”

“Would you accept the Nietzschean philosophy?”

“No,” Milt said, “because the founder of that philosophy was insane a good part of his life. Nietzsche himself died in an insane asylum.”

“But Judd accepted it?”

“Hook, line, and sinker,” Milt said.

Horn’s cross-examination was simple. Hadn’t all the students been exposed to Nietzsche?

“The Nietzschean theory is just one small phase of the entire field of philosophy,” Milt said ponderously.

“All of you didn’t take it as a licence to go out and murder?” The question was withdrawn after defence objection.

Milt left the stand with a virtuous air.

A grave problem confronted the defence. It concerned the stolen Storrs-Allwin report. If neither Storrs nor Allwin were called, could the damaging items from the report be kept out of the courtroom? Crimes A, B, C, D? Wouldn’t Horn himself produce the report?

In the morning the defence called Dr. Allwin. Even when the defence produced the snapshot of four-year-old Artie in his cowboy suit, aiming his pistol at his teddy bear, Horn let it go into the record, only chortling aloud as Dr. Allwin explained the significance of Artie’s “intent expression”, an indication that, even at that early age, fantasy and reality were confused in the boy. Horn waited for his chance to cross-examine.

Then, holding the Storrs-Allwin report in his hand like a Bible, the prosecutor attacked.

“Couldn’t the boys have cheated on some of these tests, since they are so smart, such good liars, as your report observes?”

“No,” said Dr. Allwin.

“And why not?”

“Because I am smarter than they are,” he said softly.

Because of the very abundance of the material he had received from them, consistent lying would have been most difficult, he explained. Judd, he felt, had been on the whole fairly truthful, decidedly more so than Artie. But Artie had lost the normal person’s ability to distinguish between truth and fantasy.

“Well, what constitutes normality?”

“A proper balance between the intellect and emotion.”

“And these boys are abnormal?”

“Yes, but in different ways.”

Horn snorted. In what he understood by abnormality, they were the same, he said. In fact, to the State they were plain perverts. Didn’t their compact provide that Artie should consent to certain acts, in exchange for Judd’s help in his criminal adventures? What were those acts?

“They were sexual acts,” Dr. Allwin said.

“How often?” Horn demanded.

Several women pressed their way down the aisles, to get closer. Angrily, the judge ordered, “I want every woman to leave this room!”

Finally, the courtroom was partly cleared. The judge had the testimony continued. In a voice refined and regretful, Dr. Allwin described the acts, calling Judd the aggressor. But this was the only such relationship, apparently, that Judd had ever developed. On Artie’s part, the incidents had been passive. They had occurred a few times a month.

Judd’s eyes were cast down. His father’s head was bent low, the eyes closed.

There lay the sickness, finally frankly exposed before us. Was it so dreadful a thing? In all the history of human behaviour, of the sick and ugly and distorted and careless and sportive and mistaken things that humans did, was this so much more?

But there was something more connected with the sexual act, Horn insisted, when the open trial resumed. Wasn’t it a part of the compact, that each act was linked to a crime? What, then, were the other crimes?

No, no! Ferdinand Feldscher protested.

Forcefully, Horn read from the Storrs-Allwin report the section about crimes withheld. Of Artie, it said, “Without any indication, facial or otherwise, he would lie or repress certain instances.” He turned on the alienist. “So there were gaps in Artie’s story of his crimes?”

“Yes. I said that.”

“And he might have been advised not to tell you these things?”

“He might have been.”

Horn read on: “‘His older brother does not know of these untold stories, but the patient says he will not tell him unless the family advises him to.’ You wrote this?”

“Yes, that is just what I wrote.”

“So just how important these matters are that he has been advised not to tell you, you don’t know?”

“I don’t know,” Allwin replied, unruffled.

With heavy emphasis, Horn read, “‘On the other hand there is a certain legal advantage in minimizing the broadcasting of these episodes.’ In other words, it is to the advantage of the defendants to have withheld certain information from you so that the conclusions you have arrived at won’t be disturbed, is that true?”

“I was interested in the one crime, the Kessler crime,” the doctor said.

Horn read on, arriving at the crucial mystery. “‘Though Artie denied the so-called “gland robbery” and the “ragged stranger” murder, he referred to four other episodes where the letters A, B, C, D were suggested. It was found forensically inadvisable to question him about these.’ By ‘forensically’ you mean legally, don’t you?”

Allwin hedged. “Just a pressure of time. We were concentrating on this case and to get our report in before the doctors came from the East.”

Horn shook his head. “What does ‘forensic’ mean?”

“Form the forum.”

“It means legal?”

“Yes, legal, or pulpit.”

“So this might have said, ‘It was found legally inadvisable to question him about these’?”

“Yes.”

“Get this, ‘It was found forensically -’”

“Yes, that was the reason,” the doctor persisted. “That is the forensic reason.”

There was laughter.

Horn kept after him. “Yes, but legally it was found inadvisable – now what do you mean by that? That it would not help his case if you went into these other episodes?”

“No – to get the report through by the twenty-first if we could possibly do it.”

“Why didn’t you say that? That you didn’t have time?”

“That is the way I felt about it,” the doctor snapped.

“And you thought the court and the rest of us would understand by that sentence that you did not have time to go into these other matters?”

The sarcasm was the final jolt to the doctor. “Absolutely not,” he said, testily, “and for this reason. This report was not prepared for you, it was prepared for other physicians who were coming on from the East. I had no idea this report would be submitted to the public or to you.”

Horn breathed a loud “Aha! So we weren’t supposed to know even this much.” Then he said, “But there is someone who knows. In your report, Artie Straus is speaking here of his associate, Judd Steiner. He says, ‘I have always been afraid of him, he knew too much about me’. And you, Dr. Allwin, wrote here, ‘He was somewhat afraid his associate might betray him. He had thought of pointing a revolver at his associate and shooting him.’ You say Artie Straus said, ‘The idea of murdering a fellow – especially alone – I don’t think I could have done it. But if I could have snapped my fingers and made him pass away of a heart attack, I would have done it.’”

The boys were looking at each other with pale, self-conscious grins. Horn went on. “‘He wanted to kill his associate, because he knew too much!’ What did he know?” He stared at Judd, then at Artie. If only he could have dragged them on to the stand! It was utterly clear now that the defence would never risk putting the boys in the witness chair.

Judd stared back at Horn. It was a bold look, a look that contained inner pride. He had not betrayed, he had kept the code.

That strange, brooding, perversely obstinate look of Judd’s remained with me as one of the fixed moments of the trial. Could it not have occurred to Judd that if a succession of crimes proved Artie demented, their fates might have been separated? Artie’s to an asylum, and his own, perhaps, for less than life in jail.

Had Judd actually taken part in the other crimes? Or had he only known of them? Artie’s words in the report suggested that he had always used an accomplice. But Artie was the less believable of the two.

Horn blunted himself against the stone wall of the unknown, but the episodes were to remain for ever a mystery, and in them, it has always seemed to me, lay the mystery of Artie, of his true mental state.

When Dr. Allwin stepped down from the stand, it was as though, for Judd, the most dangerous moment of the trial had passed. His eyes turned again to Artie, and there was a subtle smile between them, an instant of their old, intimate sharing.

Those were Horn’s days, and the defence seemed to recover only slight ground with a Sing Sing alienist who had specialized in juvenile delinquency. Dr. Holliday pointed out that Judd’s mania for collecting things, his mania for perfection, fitted in with the “compulsive behaviour” of manic patients, and that his thinking was “autistic”, a new word to us then. As I understood the explanation he made, it is the belief that things really are the way we imagine they are – a kind of self-contained magical thinking, without reference to the outside realities. Both boys had this characteristic to some extent, Holliday said, for it was a splitting off from reality. He showed how Judd’s planning even manifested itself in anticipation of his execution. He would make a great speech from the platform. He would convey his philosophy to the world; he would be “consistent” to the end.

And Artie, in contrast, was indifferent, passive. Hanging seemed hardly a real possibility to him, but something that might happen to someone else. He had said, “Well, it’s too bad a fellow won’t be able to read about it in the newspapers.” And if he got a prison sentence, and at some time came out, Artie wanted to know if at that time he could get a complete file of the newspapers of this period. “I have examined a lot of hardened criminals in my lifetime, but-”

Horn interrupted, objecting, and Feldscher helped the doctor, by reformulation: “Did your experience in your work at Sing Sing in examining over two thousand prisoners aid you in forming any conclusions in reference to Artie Straus in his emotional responses or lack of them?”

“Yes. The hardened criminal shows in every response a kind of crudity. Straus seems to be incapable of responding to this situation with an adequate emotional response. His actions can only become comprehensible when one keeps in mind that one is dealing here with a disintegrated or not completely integrated personality, a split personality, if we will.”

“Or to use another term,” Horn interjected rather feebly, “he is insane?”

The studious Holliday was followed by a gland specialist, Dr. Vincenti, an extreme enthusiast of the new science. Younger than the others, he had a quick, wide-eyed air about him, as though the whole thing were altogether too self-evident. He produced his X-ray pictures of Judd’s cella turcica, the cradle of bone, holding the pineal gland. There! Anyone could see it was already calcified! Calcified at nineteen! All of Judd’s disorders might have resulted from this early calcification. His illnesses, his sexual maladjustment, everything!

As for Artie, his low basal metabolism was an indication of poor functioning of the endocrine glands and accounted for his periods of morbid depression, his suicidal tendencies, and his lack of sexual development.

On this note, the defence testimony ended. It was a weak ending. Disingenuously, Horn asked: The doctor was positive, was he, of his interpretation of all of this new-fangled science?

Vincenti beamed. Positive.

The prosecution’s first rebuttal witness was a gland specialist who promptly declared that nobody knew a thing about the ductless glands. Redheaded, truculent, forthright, Horn’s expert set the courtroom howling with laughter. Never had an expert proved he knew so much as Dr. Leahy did by explaining how little he knew.

Had he specialized in the endocrine glands? Yes, for fifteen years and more. Come to any conclusions? Exactly none. “Except for certain isolated facts, the status of our knowledge of the endocrine glands might be compared to our knowledge of Central Africa before Stanley’s day.”

Could glandular activity have an effect on emotional growth?

“Your guess is as good as mine or any other expert’s.”

So much, said Horn, for Judd’s famous cella turcica. And he proceeded to produce his other counter-alienists.

Against Hugh Allwin, there was the elderly Arthur Ball, a hometown authority who could stand up against the biggest man from the East.

Yes, he had been called in, that Sunday, to examine the young gentlemen. Mr. Horn had then asked the young gentlemen to tell their story, and they had done so in detail. “The other young gentleman had done most of the talking, with occasional corrections from Mr. Straus-”

“Mr. Steiner, you mean?”

“Yes. Mr. Steiner.” He smiled, to accent that the confusion was natural.

“Now, doctor, from any interview which you had with Straus or Steiner, do you know anything that might throw some light on the motive for this crime?”

“I remember Mr. Straus said, ‘God, I don’t know why’.” Once more he was straightened out. Wasn’t it Mr. Steiner who had said that? The professor looked from one to the other, fixing them in his mind. Yes, that was Steiner’s remark, the short one. The tall one, Mr. Straus, had said it was for the thrill, the experience, and the money.

“Did they speak of the ransom?”

“They were going to keep the money hidden in a safe-deposit box and none of it was to be spent within a year inside of Chicago, but one of them expected to go to Mexico.” He looked at them carefully. “Mr. Straus, that was.” He smiled at having got it correct. “And the other, Mr. Steiner, was going to Europe.”

Horn opened the Storrs-Allwin report. Now, if the professor was familiar with this report -?

But the professor was not. He had not even seen it.

Would he care to examine it?

Indeed he would, as he was always curious about new psychology.

Smilingly, the members of the defence counsel agreed to an adjournment, since noon was close. When court resumed, the professor said that he had thoroughly studied the report. Horn opened his copy. From the evidence in the report, would he conclude that either of the defendants indulged in fantasies to an extreme degree?

No, they seemed the fantasies that a normal boy indulges in.

Judge Matthewson was leaning forward on both elbows. Professor Ball expatiated. “Everybody has fantasies. A lawyer has fantasies about winning a big case. A golfer has fantasies about playing a good golf game, and a young man of criminalistic tendencies, like the young gentleman here, Artie, quite naturally had criminalistic fantasies. Unless one wishes to take the crime itself as proving an abnormal mind, there is nothing abnormal in the fantasies as reported.”

We all noted that the judge nodded, as though he had at last heard common sense spoken.

Horn went on. Had the professor observed any lack of emotion in the subjects?

Artie had shown intense emotional reaction. And as Judd had stated that he had systematically suppressed any show of emotion since childhood, his lesser show of emotion was self-explanatory. Yet no one could deny intense emotion in his relationship to his companion, Mr. Straus.

Smiling, Horn asked whether the professor would agree with the statement that Judd was “pathologically suggestible”?

“I saw no evidence that he was at all suggestible.”

And Judd’s sense of inferiority in reference to his puny stature – was it so marked that it could be called pathological?

Indeed, no! The young gentleman was not, after all, a dwarf.

Finally, taking into account not only his own examination but the Storrs-Allwin report, both young men had to be pronounced unquestionably sane.

Wilk approached, conversing casually, reminding Dr. Ball of the many pleasant discussions they had had. Wilk knew he was a scientist of integrity who would state his facts accurately.

Now that examination lasting a few hours, in a crowded office – had that been a good opportunity for an examination?

In some aspects, yes. A man had to be in excellent possession of his faculties to give a detailed and accurate recital in the midst of such distraction.

Granted. But was the situation well adapted to bringing out everything connected with the mental state of an individual?

Professor Ball smiled. “Let me frankly avow, Mr. Wilk, that I would not consider it a complete mental examination, if that is what you are driving at.” But as far as the requirements of the case were concerned, Dr. Ball was satisfied that his conclusions were accurate.

Undoubtedly, Wilk agreed, if one limited oneself to the legal definition of insanity. But would the doctor not admit that the legal definition was inadequate by medical standards?

Yes, the doctor agreed. And here in the Storrs-Allwin report was the evidence of a prolonged examination. Yet he could not agree with the conclusions.

Wilk quoted from an article by Dr. Ball in a medical journal, “‘The whole past life of the patient, his diseases and accidents, his schooling, environment, and character, and the entire history of his antecedents should be examined’.”

“Yes!” Dr. Ball readily agreed. “In a case for treatment. But this is not necessary, if one seeks only to determine their legal sanity.”

Wilk smiled. “We too consider them legally sane. We are here to ask for mitigation on the grounds of a medical condition of mental abnormality which probably could not be observed in a rapid examination. Did you make any notes on that occasion, Dr. Ball?”

A few. Dr. Ball brought out a folded sheet of paper; he deciphered and read aloud a scrawled word, “Zuganglich”.

“What does that mean?”

“It is a term used in psychiatry, for ‘accessible’. We first determine whether the patient can be reached in normal communication, or whether, as it is popularly put, he is too far gone.”

“And they were not too far gone?”

“Not at all. Completely Zuganglich.” Edgar Feldscher smiled.

Wilk asked, “You have other notes?” Yes, but the rest of his notes he had to confess he couldn’t make out. Dr. Ball chuckled, joining the general laughter.

Then, coming to the fantasies, hadn’t the doctor written somewhere that dreams and fantasies were the clues to the condition of the mind?

Why, yes, the professor agreed, with a new air of interest. But persistent fantasies wouldn’t indicate a disorder unless of course they reached the delusional stage.

“That is the stage where fantasy becomes confused with fact?”

Yes, when a fantasy was accepted as reality, as actually happening, there was delusion.

A young man, a college graduate, playing cops-and-robbers in the street, following his uncle to his door, wasn’t he acting out a fantasy and making it real?

The professor smiled. “It could appear so,” he said. “But you would have to know just how far he was lost in his little game.”

Wilk swung now to another form of derangement. An obsession, an obsessive belief – didn’t that reach up to the state of a delusion? For example, there were people who believed absolutely in religious visions and predictions, believed themselves to be saints and messiahs.

“Oh, yes,” Dr. Ball agreed, “there are people who are confined to insane asylums because of such delusions.”

“Now, couldn’t the same thing be the result of a philosophical belief?”

“If one believed strongly enough.” But Wilk didn’t ask the expected, linking question. Instead he asked whether there were states of mind, short of mental disorder or insanity, that would alert one for watching and that would even call for treatment.

Yes, yes, indeed, Dr. Ball said.

Their pleasant discussion was over. Dr. Ball’s real conclusions, if one thought about them seriously, were precisely those of the defence.

It was the second of the State’s alienists who brought out, in Wilk, a kind of savage brutality that we had until then associated only with Horn.

The witness was Dr. Stauffer, pudgy, self-assured. A familiar figure in the courts, Tom told me. “Makes his living testifying for the State.” Yet his record was impressive enough; he had been head of the department of psychology at the University of Illinois; he had been in charge of the psychiatric laboratory at the State Hospital for the Insane.

There seemed scarcely any point to his lengthy recital, until Dr. Stauffer came to Artie’s description of the ride with the body. “He told how they got to a blind road near a Russian Orthodox cemetery. He related that there they stripped the body from the waist down, took off the pants, shoes, and stockings. Now, there is a little matter here I would like to speak of just before you and the attorneys, if I may, Judge.”

The group of lawyers huddled around the judge’s bench. The doctor sanctimoniously lowered his voice. “It was because of this circumstance of undressing the boy just from the waist down.” He had made that the occasion to ask a great many questions along the line of sexual perversion and homosexual practices.

It was clear that he had got nothing out of the boys. He had raised the question of abuse, undoubtedly with Horn’s approval, purely for the effect of suggestion. Wilk’s face had become dark, clotted.

Stauffer continued with his description of the burial, piling on the details. “Straus stated that the body was stiff and the eyes were glazed. They let the body down easily into the culvert so that it would make no splash…”

He had asked Artie Straus if at any time he could have withdrawn, “and he stated that he always hated a quitter, that he had no use for a coward. Mr. Steiner made practically the same answer.”

Categorically, the doctor testified that each defendant was sane, in excellent possession of his faculties, including the faculty of judgment.

Horn asked him then whether he was familiar with the “new psychology”. Certainly, said Dr. Stauffer, he was entirely familiar with it, but he did not believe in it at all. Why, if the defence was successful here, every criminal would start studying dream books!

Through the laughter, Wilk advanced upon Dr. Stauffer, head down. He halted at some distance, as if to avoid contamination.

How long was it since Dr. Stauffer had been in the actual practice of medicine, where he might be trying to help someone?

Horn objected.

The question amended, Dr. Stauffer replied that he had not for ten years been in practice, being occupied with teaching and research.

“In fact, you have been almost fully occupied testifying for the courts?”

Stauffer admitted that he was in considerable demand by the State.

“And what is your usual fee?” Wilk wrung out of him that it was fifty dollars per day. “And what are you receiving in this case?” It was “the same as all the others, two hundred and fifty.”

Wasn’t it a fact that he had refused to testify unless he received this raise?

Horn was livid. Angrily, Stauffer replied, “Why shouldn’t I get the same as the others?”

Just as angrily, and just as hopelessly put in the wrong, he declared that he didn’t need more than two hours to make an examination. And as for the examination taking place in a crowded room, no matter!

“You heard Dr. Ball state that the conditions and the time limit permitted only the beginning of an examination. Do you disagree?”

Dr. Stauffer shrugged. He had every respect for Dr. Ball, but his own experience with criminals was far more extensive, so he could see through them more readily. “Nobody from the defence had got to them as yet, to tell them what not to say!”

“Exactly!” Wilk roared. “They were without defence, without help, and for two hours you could do as you pleased with them.”

“Two minutes would be enough to see through those smart alecks!”

Wilk picked up a text book. Had Dr. Stauffer studied in Germany?

Yes.

Did he recognize Dr. Bleuler as an authority on nervous disorders?

Dr. Stauffer granted that Dr. Bleuler was a man of high reputation.

Wilk read, “‘A negative finding without prolonged observation never proves a patient to be normal.’” Did Dr. Stauffer agree with that statement?

Stauffer snorted. As a matter of fact, he had observed the criminals right here in court, day after day. They were perfectly oriented.

Wilk read another passage from Bleuler. “‘To suppose that people are well mentally because they are oriented in time, space, and presence is just as naïve as to suppose a person is well mentally because he is not a raving maniac.’”

If they were mentally sick, Dr. Stauffer retorted, then they certainly had a good time with their supposed illness, sitting there laughing.

And didn’t that demonstrate their emotional deficiency?

“No,” said Stauffer. “It shows they’re heartless killers, that’s all.”

“Heartless killers,” Wilk repeated. “But not professional killers who dishonour science by dragging smut into court, and who get paid for perjury, are they?”

Horn roared for an apology. Wilk muttered something to the judge and stalked away from the witness with a trivial wave of the hand.

He had obtained his effect, annihilating Stauffer with contempt, just as he had beguiled Dr. Ball with chummy flattery.

And on the following day, Wilk produced still a third style of cross-examination, to the discomfiture of Horn’s final expert witness.

For Dr. Tierney, Wilk exhibited a clear, persistent, dry method of questioning and an utter mastery of his material, so that the entire courtroom could not but relish his playing of a highly aware and resistant witness, until the lawyer got the doctor to say everything he wanted him to say.

Tierney was a local man of national stature, whom Horn had used to tally against Dr. McNarry. He had been director of the State Hospital for the Insane, and he was, like Dr. McNarry, the author of an important work on insanity and the law. A most impressive figure, dark-haired, wearing heavy horn-rimmed glasses.

For Horn, he confirmed that he had studied the Storrs-Allwin report and that he had studied the behaviour of the defendants during all these weeks in court. Both were in full possession of their faculties, and sane.

Wilk began, “Could you tell by looking at these boys whether or not they were mentally diseased?”

“No,” the doctor responded. “But I could tell whether or not their appearance showed evidence of mental disease.”

There was a suppressed snort from Judd at the fatuous remark.

Wilk then sought to show that Dr. Tierney had never even talked to the defendants. The doctor had seen them a day after the famous Sunday examination. They had been brought to Horn’s office, to pick up suitcases sent by their families.

“And did you examine these boys then? Did you question them?”

“They had already been instructed not to reply to any questions.”

“In your experience with criminal cases, is it customary for the lawyers to instruct their clients not to talk?”

“I have examined quite a number of cases for the State in which the lawyers have not advised their clients to refuse to talk.”

“What ones?”

“Well, one would be Carl Wanderer, for instance,” Tierney said, recalling a notorious murderer.

“He talked, did he?”

“He did talk, yes.”

“And he got hanged?”

“Yes, sir.” The laughter seemed not to reach him.

“You know that nobody had a right to compel them to talk?”

“I believe that is a constitutional right, yes.”

And yet, Wilk pointed out, Horn had been trying to get the boys to answer questions for Dr. Tierney.

Horn leaped into the fray. “I object. You cannot compel a man to talk, but there is no constitutional provision that you can’t ask him to talk!”

Wilk turned on him. “You had no more right to bring them back into your office than to take them to the state penitentiary!”

“The sheriff brought them in, with your permission, to get their suitcases!”

“And you tried to make use of it, tried to get them to talk some more, in violation of their constitutional rights, after you had had a picnic with them all the weekend, keeping them away from counsel!”

“I will confess that I violated a number of constitutional rights!” Horn shouted, the witness forgotten. “And I intend to continue that as long as I am State’s Attorney!”

Wilk turned to the whole world. “I don’t think in a well-organized community a man could be elected State’s Attorney under the statement that when a citizen is charged with a crime, the state’s attorney would violate his constitutional rights.”

“Well now, gentlemen, you will have plenty of time for argument after the evidence is all in,” Judge Matthewson said.

“Excuse me, Your Honour,” said Wilk. He eyed Tierney. His evidence, then, was to be founded entirely on his observations in this court?

That, and the reports of the other psychiatrists, Dr. Tierney said.

“Was there any testimony of fact by any of the psychiatrists that would put a psychiatrist on inquiry, as to further examination?”

“Outside of the crime itself, no.” Moreover, Dr. Tierney pointed out, the boys had never aroused suspicion of mental disease prior to the crime.

“Is a split personality evidence of a mental disorder?” Wilk asked.

“To become a disorder, there would have to be a further development in a delusional state – a schizophrenia leading to a psychosis.”

That was just the word he was looking for, Wilk said. Sizzy – skizzy – what was it? And as he struggled with it, everyone laughed. Ah yes, he had seen that word in the doctor’s own book.

“What other names do you use for split personality?” Wilk asked.

“Oh, they talk of delusions and they talk of hallucinations and they talk of fantasies. And schizophrenia.”

“Yes. We just had it. Now, to digress a little, what is the mind?”

“The mind represents that which we commonly call I. It is really the I-ego, the sum of all one’s experiences in the subjective stage, and not the objective experience.”

“The sum of one’s experience?” The great Jonathan was letting us feel that this expert might be too much for him.

“Yes, one’s thinking, feeling, and actions, in relation to the situations in which one is being placed and that one can recall.”

“And what is emotion?”

“Emotion comes from the need of living matter to maintain itself.”

“Then a person, an ‘I’, a mind, is badly served by an emotional nature that does not seek to maintain itself?”

“In what way?”

“Someone who committed rash acts that could lead to death – would he be emotionally defective?”

If he was referring to suicides, Dr. Tierney said, it would again be a case where the definition of mental illness came with the act itself.

“But there are indirect forms of suicide?”

Not every rash action was evidence of a self-destructive impulse, the doctor said. Some rash actions were merely foolish.

Wilk nodded. Wasn’t a self-destructive or suicidal tendency often found in a split personality? That is, one part for, one part against, oneself?

Yes, Dr. Tierney agreed.

“Now what was the word again? Sizzo – never mind. If you did find a split personality, you would examine further, wouldn’t you?”

Dr. Tierney smiled. “It is all a question of degree. If you forget a word, Mr. Wilk, I shouldn’t think it necessary to examine you for mental disease.”

Wilk awarded him a mock bow. “Now – this schizo – what sort of persons are most liable to it?”

“Why, schizophrenic persons, naturally.”

“Are you trying to evade me or make fun of me?”

“No, I’m trying to understand you,” the doctor said urbanely.

“At what age is it most likely to develop into a psychosis?”

“What do you mean by it?”

“I mean your sizzyphasis or whatever it is.”

The doctor’s face became stonily remote. So he had been put off guard by clowning. “I can’t generalize,” he said.

Ah? Wilk glanced into the doctor’s own book, at the page where his finger had been all the while. “During the period of adolescence?”

“A certain frequency has been noted,” the doctor admitted.

Wilk read from the book, “‘In such cases – schizophrenia in adolescence’” – and this time he had no difficulty whatsoever with the word – “‘one often finds expression in crimes of violence.’”

Horn shouted, “This has no bearing on this case, has it, doctor?”

“Wait till it’s your turn to ask questions!” Wilk snapped before the judge could intervene. And he returned to his attack.

“When is this condition most often seen?” Wilk persisted.

Tierney sat silent. Wilk read, “‘This condition may most often be seen in adolescents at the time when they are emancipated from home control, and when they are leaving school…’”

The doctor shrugged.

Wilk read on. “‘It may occur in persons of a high degree of intelligence… At this difficult stage toward the end of puberty, the subject may develop fantasies, bordering upon autism. However, not all such cases develop a psychosis.’” He raised his eyes from the book and asked, “Would a young man of exceptional intelligence who had had a governess until the age of fifteen, who left home at that time, leaving one school for another, a young man decidedly given to fantasies – would such a person come under this description?”

It was some years, Tierney said, since he had written this book.

“Do you intend to take this out in the next edition?” Dr. Tierney responded to the laughter with a stiffly sporting gesture of the hand. Wilk read on. “‘The subject may go so far as to commit murder, seemingly for no motive, and he may appear devoid of remorse.’”

“Doctor, did you find any evidence in either of these subjects of a paranoid personality?”

He had noted in Judd Steiner a few superficial similarities, Dr. Tierney said. “But the main features of a paranoid personality are lacking.”

“What would such features be?”

“Selfishness and a domineering character are often noted.”

“Such as one might attribute to a superman?”

Dr. Tierney smiled. “That is entirely a concept. However, even this concept concerns a more developed paranoid stage.”

And could Dr. Tierney recall any other features of a paranoid personality?

There was a guarded silence. “I will help you,” Wilk said, looking again in the book. “‘One who is anxious to be in the forefront’?”

“Yes, but that might be considered part of an egocentric character.”

“Well, let us see about egocentrics.” Wilk thumbed the volume. “Doesn’t it say somewhere here that an egocentric is practically the same thing as a paranoid character?”

The doctor’s lips parted in a thin smile. “I don’t think I will quarrel with you very much on that.”

“Then why not say yes, and agree with me once, without so much work?”

Someone applauded. The gavel rapped. He returned to his point. Were people with this egocentric or paranoid character usually fond of learning?

This was often a characteristic, the doctor admitted.

“‘While they learn readily, there is really no broad grasp of the relationship of the material learned to the situations in life.’ Is that right?”

Dr. Tierney hedged. Only of certain types of paranoid or egocentric personalities.

“All right, doctor. You still recognize this book as an authority, do you?”

Tierney nodded stonily.

“I am reading from page 157. The heading of this section is ‘The Egocentric Personality’. It says: ‘Individuals of this type are often endowed with a facility for learning in a parrot-like way, which enables them to acquire their lessons easily and to do well scholastically, but the quality of the learning is poor, and there is really no broad grasp of the relation of the material learned to the situation in life.’”

“That’s right, as I already agreed.”

But was not this the defence description of Judd, an egocentric or paranoid type of a psychopathic personality? “And I understand you to say that a psychopathic personality is not yet in a diseased condition?”

No, not necessarily.

“But it would put a doctor on his guard to investigate?”

“If one knows one is dealing with a paranoid personality, I don’t see anything further to investigate. I know a lot of paranoid personalities in ordinary society.”

“If that paranoid personality has committed a crime, a murder?”

“Oh, in that case the personality should be investigated.”

Time and again in the trial, it seemed to us, this point had been reached. Yet we hung on the words, as if, this once, the answer might appear.

As Wilk put the question, the scientists of the mind could read the meanings afterward – why couldn’t they read them before a crime?

Because a psychopathic personality was not mentally diseased, the doctor insisted. There was as yet no proof that he would be harmful to others or to himself. He might be on the way to disease or he might be adjusted as he was.

“It just happens, does it?”

The number of psychopathic personalities, fortunately, was not very great, Dr. Tierney said.

“Not so great but that – since you show us they are recognizable – we could watch them with more care,” Wilk said, turning and looking steadily at Judd. He had put the pieces perfectly into place; he had made the State’s alienist confirm, to the precise point, the defence contention that the boy was not insane, but that he showed marked characteristics of a potential disturbance.

Wilk went back to his table. Astonished, we realized that the case was nearly over. For a month, we had come to this room as to a class. In the last weeks, we had learned a great deal about psychiatry. Only, what were the true opinions of the doctors? And even between Wilk and Horn, how much was conviction? If Horn himself were an attorney outside the services of the State, would he not be willing to defend the same boys?

And now indeed there came news of professional “dickering”. For the sake of shortening the trial, Wilk would eliminate the remainder of his sympathy witnesses, if Horn would eliminate rebuttal witnesses.

During a recess hour, the opposing attorneys were locked together. “No deal,” Horn announced as he emerged. He wouldn’t do it. He was going to put on Sergeant McNamara. The defence could do as they damn pleased.

McNamara’s material was not new. We had all printed versions of his story of Judd’s remark about “pleading guilty before a friendly judge”.

What could Horn hope to gain by putting this into the record? Did he feel that he would be putting Judge Matthewson on the spot, so that he could not dare pronounce the predicted “friendly” sentence? Did Horn feel that his alienists had been so discredited by Wilk that only a bold manœuvre could save his hanging case?

Carefully Horn led the policeman through his testimony. Had Judd become talkative with him? Had he made notes? Yes, because the case was so important. And on Sunday, May thirtieth, had Judd made any remark that struck him?

Yes, Judd had said, in discussing how he would plead, “that depends on my family – if they wish me to hang. Or else I will plead guilty before a friendly judge to get life imprisonment. There is also the insanity plea.”

Judge Matthewson sat rigid.

McNamara told how he had been so struck by the words that he had repeated them to his wife and to some neighbours on the way to church.

If Wilk had been bitter, contemptuous, in his cross-examination of Dr. Stauffer, he was now simply murderous. When had McNamara written down the remarks? Right after they were made? No, later on. When, exactly? That same day, the detective thought. Where was the notebook? He didn’t have it with him.

He didn’t? Did he think he could come into court and tell any cock-and-bull story without evidence?

The judge leaned forward. Court would be recessed. Let the notebook be produced.

An hour later, the session was resumed. McNamara produced a pocket-worn notebook, the schoolboy kind. There were entries in pencil, some half rubbed out, most of them having to do with petty expenses.

Wilk found the notations of the day of the cavalcade. Where was there anything about the “friendly judge” remark? Nothing on that day or the next.

“Then you lied,” Wilk cried. “You lied under oath before this court! You didn’t write it down that day or the next – if ever.”

McNamara sputtered. It wasn’t a lie. He hadn’t said exactly when he wrote it down.

In a tangle of questions, Wilk had him stumbling over his own tongue, on the point of violence or tears. McNamara pointed out notations on a later page. “Insanity plea, or get a life sentence from a friendly judge.”

Jonathan Wilk was relentless. How could anyone know these were Judd’s words? Couldn’t they be McNamara’s own conclusions? Couldn’t he have put them in recently, even today? Hadn’t a newspaperman invented the whole story?

McNamara shouted, “That’s a lie!” Reprimanded by the judge, he sputtered the names of the neighbours to whom he had told the story, then, in repeating the wording, got the quotation wrong. Finally he admitted, No, he wasn’t sure of the exact quotation.

“Or if there was a quotation at all!” Wilk snapped. But he wasn’t done with his prey. And what did the phrase “friendly judge” mean? Even if Judd had said it, couldn’t he have meant that a jury would be unfriendly, after being stirred up by wild campaigns to creatre prejudice? Was McNamara not only a note-taker but a mind-reader?

Sweating, the policeman growled, “No, I’m not that smart, not as smart as any million-dollar lawyers.”

Wilk looked up at Judge Matthewson. There it all was. They were bracketed together, in prejudiced minds. A million-dollar lawyer before a judge who would be friendly to millionaires.

McNamara lurched from the stand.

Thus on this note of hatred, the testimony ended; the case that was to explore our deepest philosophies, free will, guilt, and compulsion, closed with charges and countercharges of lying, shouts of money influence, with prejudice-stirring, with words bitter and base that were yet to reach into the last moment of the trial.

I WONDER WHETHER in all courtroom history the speaking effort of one man was ever awaited as was the speech of Jonathan Wilk for the defence of Steiner and Straus. Perhaps there was in this anticipation the sense that all the probings, all the expert testimony, had still fallen short of an explanation, and that only the ultimate effort of a great man could lift the meaning before us.

I kept wondering about Wilk in another way. For weeks he had been striving with all his might for these two boys in the crowded, dense, boiling courtroom. Yet, though Judd in particular seemed always to be trying to reach him with his gaze, Wilk did not appear to respond. It was as though Wilk defended them on principle, even, perhaps, against an inner sense of revulsion. His summation would have to be virtually an abstract plea for pure mercy, then.

And surely it would be the last great murder trial in which the tired, ageing Wilk would take part; never again could such extreme circumstances arise. Pure mercy – for murder, pure, without even a concomitant sense of guilt.

So Padua pictured the killing, as he took the first turn at summation, speaking smoothly, convincingly, reciting the law from Blackstone to our own day, precedent after precedent proving that hanging and only hanging, only the extreme penalty, was called for. Mitigation? For what? For their superior intelligence? For their superior advantages in wealth and luxury? For their waste of life, for destroying other lives as well as their own? No, as long as the death penalty existed in human law, it was mandatory in a case of this kind.

Then Ferdinand Feldscher spoke for the defence, proving by precedent after precedent that consideration of the youth and mental condition of the defendants should bring a jail sentence. A hanging would be atavistic. And he awakened a sympathy for himself; we could not forget that he was a relative. And through sympathy for him, there was sympathy for the boys.

The next day came Czewicki’s turn. It was a memorized speech filled with gruesome images piled one on the other; the effect was like turning the pages of an illustrated Inferno. His task was to deal with the psychiatric testimony, and his burden was that it was a virtual hoax, since the defendants were admittedly legally sane. Mad dogs were suffering from illness, but not these pervert prodigies, these vicious lust-killers.

To him, Edgar Feldscher replied, reviewing the entire relationship of psychiatry and criminal law and urging, earnestly, that the tragic case yield, for humanity, a further step in the use of the new science as an aid to justice. Of all who had spoken until then, he touched us most, for there was a deep perplexity in him, and even more than had been felt from his brother, an unashamed personal concern for the defendants. When Edgar Feldscher turned toward them in his plea that their lives were young, that one or the other, sick as they were, might yet have much to give, his voice lost its pitch. He ended by recalling that it had been the wish and hope of the defence that both sides should participate in the psychiatric study; it was still his wish and hope that the use of such knowledge should prevail, in place of oratory, in man’s search for justice.

There remained only Wilk and Horn.

Although only one individual, Judge Matthewson, would render the verdict, the trial was not a play rehearsed behind a dropped curtain. The entire world had become a jury. Thousands of letters, telegrams, petitions, even death threats, inundated the court. Could Wilk move enough feeling, literally sway it, to the side of pity?

If the doors had been crowded before, the day of the great attraction brought an unimagined assault. Their shirts blotched with sweat, the linked bailiffs tried to hold back the charge, when suddenly there was a roar of pain. A bailiff’s arm had been broken.

For half an hour Wilk waited, until there was complete order. The judge nodded, and Wilk arose.

We think of a great speech in terms of an oration that has a rising structure and a shattering climax. And we were indeed to be moved, but not in a continuous line.

He spoke for two days, during four sessions.

In such a lengthy address there were of necessity times when his delivery was relaxed and when he seemed only to be shambling about the courtroom. But the total effect was of a piece. It was of a man talking from his heart, in an intimate and serious conversation.

He began in a low, almost tired key, touching at once upon the question that was on everyone’s mind – the avoidance of a jury.

“Your Honour, it has been almost three months since the great responsibility of this case was assumed by my associates and myself. I am willing to confess that it has been three months of great anxiety. Our anxiety has not been due to the facts that are connected with this most unfortunate affair, but to the almost unheard-of publicity it has received. Newspapers all over the country have been giving it space such as they have almost never before given to any case. Day after day the people of Chicago have been regaled with stories of all sorts, until almost every person has formed an opinion. “And when the public is interested and demands a punishment, it thinks of only one punishment, and that is death.

“In this stress and strain, we did all we could to gain the confidence of the public, who in the end really control, whether wisely or unwisely.

“It was freely published that there were millions of dollars to be spent on this case. Here was to be an effort to save the lives of two boys by the use of money in fabulous amounts, amounts such as even these families never had.

“We announced to the public that no excessive use of money would be made in this case, either for lawyers or for psychiatrists, or in any other way. We have faithfully kept that promise.

“There are times when poverty is fortunate. I insist, Your Honour, that had this been the case of two boys of these defendants’ age, unconnected with families supposed to have great wealth, there is not a State’s Attorney in Illinois who would not have consented at once to a plea of guilty and a punishment in the penitentiary for life. Not one.

“We are here with the lives of two boys imperilled, with the public aroused. For what?

“Because, unfortunately, the parents have money.

“I told Your Honour in the beginning that never before had there been a case in Chicago where on a plea of guilty a boy under twenty-one had been sentenced to death. I will raise that age and say, never has there been such a case where a human being under the age of twenty-three has been sentenced to death.

“And yet this court is urged, aye, threatened, that he must hang two boys contrary to precedents.

“Why need a judge be urged by every argument, moderate and immoderate, to hang two boys in the face of every precedent in Illinois and in the face of the progress of the last fifty years?

“Lawyers stand here day by day and read cases from the Dark Ages, where judges have said that if a man had a grain of sense left, and a child barely out of his cradle, he could be hanged because he knew the difference between right and wrong. Death sentences for eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, and fourteen years have been cited.

“As if this had something to do with the year 1924, as if it had something to do with Chicago, with its boys’ court and its fairly tender protection of the young.

“In as cruel a speech as he knew how to make, Mr. Padua said to this court that we plead guilty because we were afraid to do anything else.

“Your Honour, that is true.

“We have said to the public and to this court that neither the parents, nor the friends, nor the attorneys would want these boys released. They are as they are. They should be permanently isolated from society. We are asking this court to save their lives, which is the least and the most that a judge can do.

“We did plead guilty before Your Honour because we were afraid to submit our case to a jury. I can tell Your Honour why.

“I know perfectly well that where responsibility is divided by twelve it is easy to say, ‘Away with him’.

“But, Your Honour, if these boys hang, you must do it. You can never explain that the rest overpowered you. It must be by your deliberate, cool, premeditated act, without a chance to shift responsibility.

“Your Honour, I know that of four hundred and fifty persons who had been indicted for murder in Chicago in the past ten years and who had pleaded guilty, only one has been hanged. And my friend who is prosecuting this case earned the honour of that hanging while he was on the bench. But his victim was forty years old.” Wilk turned then to the prosecutor’s table. “I can sum up their arguments in a minute: cruel, dastardly, premeditated, fiendish, cowardly, cold-blooded.

“Cold-blooded!” And the long arm pointed. “Let the State, who is so anxious to take these boys’ lives, set an example in consideration, kindheartedness, and tenderness before they call my clients cold-blooded.

“Cold-blooded! Because they planned and schemed?

“Yes. But here are officers with all the power of the State, who for months have been planning and scheming and contriving to take these two boys’ lives.

“They say this is the most cold-blooded murder the civilized world has ever known. I don’t know what they include in the civilized world. I suppose Illinois. Now, Your Honour, I have been practising law a good deal longer than I should have, anyhow for forty-five or forty-six years, and during a part of that time I have tried a good many criminal cases, always defending. It does not mean that I am better. It probably means that I am more squeamish than the other fellows.

“I have never yet tried a case where the State’s Attorney did not say that it was the most cold-blooded, inexcusable, premeditated case that ever occurred. If it was murder, there never was such a murder.

“Why? Well, it adds to the credit of the State’s Attorney to be connected with a big case. That is one thing. They can say, ‘Well, I tried the most cold-blooded murder case that ever was tried, and I convicted them, and they are dead.’

“And then there is another thing, Your Honour: of course, I generally try cases to juries, and these adjectives always go well with juries – bloody, cold-blooded, despicable, cowardly, dastardly, cruel, heartless – the whole litany of the State’s Attorney’s office goes well with a jury.

“They say this was a cruel murder, the worst that ever happened. I say that very few murders ever occurred that were as free from cruelty as this.”

He waited for the chill of these words to pass through us. “Poor little Paulie Kessler suffered very little. There is no excuse for his killing. If to hang these two boys would bring him back to life, I would say let them go, and I believe their parents would say so, too. But

The moving finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

In the pause, Mike Prager remarked, “Ever hear of Wilk making a plea without Omar Khayyám?”

Wilk resumed, turning now to the State’s argument. Horn had taken pains to build up the ransom as the motive. This was almost too easy to ridicule, with their huge allowances, with Artie’s $3,000 bank account, with Judd’s $3,000 for a trip to Europe.

“And yet they murdered a little boy against whom they had nothing in the world, to get five thousand dollars each. That is what their case rests on. It could not stand up a minute without a motive. Without it, it was the senseless act of immature and diseased children, as it was.”

He turned and gazed at the boys, interminably, it seemed, and a gloom, a heart-heaviness at existence itself could be seen coming over him, and it came over the courtroom, too.

“How insane they are I care not, whether medically or legally. They committed the most unprovoked, most purposeless, most causeless act that any two boys ever committed, and put themselves where the rope is dangling above their heads.

“Was their act one of deliberation, of intellect, or were they driven by some force such as Dr. McNarry and Dr. Allwin have told this court?

“Why did they kill little Paulie Kessler?

“Not for money, not for spite, not for hate. They killed him because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood.

“Are they to blame for it? It is one of those things that happened; and it calls not for hate, but for kindness, for charity, for consideration.

“Mr. Padua with the immaturity of youth and inexperience says that if we hang them there will be no more killing. This world has been one long slaughterhouse from the beginning until today, and killing goes on and on and on, and will for ever. Why not read something, why not study something, why not think instead of blindly shouting for death?

“Kill them. Will that prevent other senseless boys or other vicious men or vicious women from killing? No!

“I heard the state’s attorney talk of mothers. I know that any mother might be the mother of a little Paulie Kessler who left his home and went to his school and never came back. I know that any mother might be the mother of Artie Straus, of Judd Steiner. The trouble is that if she is the mother of a Judd Steiner or of an Artie Straus, she has to ask herself the question, ‘How came my children to be what they are? From what ancestry did they get this strain? How far removed was the poison that destroyed their lives? Was I the bearer of the seed that brings them to death?’

“I remember a little poem that gives the soliloquy of a boy about to be hanged, a soliloquy such as these boys might make.” And he quoted Housman:

The night my father got me

His mind was not on me;

He did not plague his fancy

To muse if I should be

The son you see.

The boys were looking down. Judd seemed to brush at his eyes, and two rows behind him his father sat with a strange, tranced pain, his eyes fixed on the back of his son’s head.

The day my mother bore me

She was a fool and glad,

For all the pain I cost her,

That she had borne the lad

That borne she had.

My father and my mother

Out of the light they lie;

The warrant would not find them,

And here, ‘tis only I

Shall hang so high.

O let not man remember

The soul that God forgot,

But fetch the county sheriff

And noose me in a knot,

And I will rot.

And so the game is ended,

That should not have begun.

My father and my mother

They had a likely son,

And I have none.

“No one knows what will be the fate of the child he gets or the child she bears; the fate of the child is the last thing they consider. This weary old world goes on begetting, with birth and with living and with death; and all of it is blind from the beginning to the end. I do not know what it was that made these boys do this mad act, but I do know they did not beget themselves. I know that any one of an infinite number of causes reaching back to the beginning might be working out in these boys’ minds, whom you are asked to hang in malice and in hatred and injustice, because someone in the past has sinned against them.

“I am sorry for the fathers as well as the mothers, for the fathers who give their strength and their lives for educating and protecting and creating a fortune for the boys that they love; for the mothers who go down in the shadow of death for their children, who watch them with tenderness and fondness and longing, and who go down into dishonour and disgrace for the children that they love.

“All of these are helpless. We are all helpless. When you are pitying the father and the mother of poor Paulie Kessler, what about the fathers and mothers of these two unfortunate boys, and the boys themselves, and all the fathers and all the mothers and all the boys and girls who tread a dangerous maze of darkness from birth to death?”

He lifted his head up from his soliloquy. “Do you think you can cure it by hanging these two? Do you think you can cure the hatreds and the maladjustments of the world by hanging them?

“What is my friend’s idea of justice? He says to this court, ‘Give them the same mercy that they gave Paulie Kessler.’

“If the state in which I live is not kinder, more humane, more considerate, more intelligent than the mad act of these two boys, I am sorry that I have lived so long.”

So ended the first session.

In the afternoon, Wilk resumed, speaking of the clumsiness, the ineptitude of the “carefully planned” crime. “Without the slightest motive, moved by nothing except the vague wanderings of children, they rented a machine, and about four o’clock in the afternoon started to find somebody to kill. For nothing.”

Wilk described how they picked up their victim. “… They hit him over the head with a chisel and kill him, and go on, driving past the neighbours that they knew, in the open highway in broad daylight. And still men say that they have a bright intellect, and as Dr. Stauffer puts it, can orient themselves and reason as well as he can.

“If ever any death car went over the same kind of route, driven by sane people, I have never heard of it. The car is driven for twenty miles. The slightest accident – anything would bring destruction. They go through the park, meeting hundreds of machines, in the sight of thousands of eyes, with this dead boy.

“And yet doctors will swear that it is a sane act. They know better.

“You need no experts, you need no X-rays, you need no study of the endocrines. Their conduct shows exactly what it was, and shows that this court has before him two young men who should be examined in a psychopathic hospital and treated kindly and with care…

“We are told that they planned. Well, what does that mean? A maniac plans, an idiot plans, an animal plans; any brain that functions may plan; but their plans were the diseased plans of diseased minds.” He walked close to the prosecution table, looking quizzically at his opponents. “My friend pictured to you the putting of this dead boy into this culvert – but, Your Honour, I can think of a scene that makes this pale into insignificance.” And gazing then at Judd and Artie, he described, in gruesome detail, the prospective hanging. “I can picture them, wakened in the grey of morning, furnished a suit of clothes by the State, led to the scaffold, their feet tied, black caps drawn over their heads, stood on a trap door, the hangman pressing the spring; I can see them fall through space – and – I can see them stopped by the rope around their necks.

“Wouldn’t it be a glorious day for Chicago? Wouldn’t it be a glorious triumph for the State’s Attorney? Wouldn’t it be a glorious illustration of Christianity and kindness and charity?

“This would surely expiate placing Paulie Kessler in the culvert after he was dead. This would doubtless bring immense satisfaction to some people. It would bring a greater satisfaction because it would be done in the name of justice.

“We hear glib talk of justice. Well, it would make me smile if it did not make me sad. Who knows what it is? Does Mr. Padua know? Does Mr. Horn know? Do I know? Does Your Honour know? Is there a human machinery for finding out? Is there any man who can weigh me and say what I deserve? Can Your Honour? Let us be honest.

“If there is such a thing as justice, it could only be administered by one who knew the inmost thoughts of the men to whom he was meting it out. It means that you must appraise every influence that moves them, the civilization in which they live, and all the society which enters into the making of the child or the man! If Your Honour can do it, you are wise, and with wisdom goes mercy.”

Judd smiled at the gracefulness of it.

“It is not so much mercy either, Your Honour. I can hardly understand myself pleading to a court to visit mercy on two boys by shutting them up in prison for life. Any cry for more roots back to the beasts of the jungle. It is not a part of man. It is not a part of that feeling of mercy and pity and understanding of each other which we believe has been slowly raising man from his low estate.”

He resumed the tale of the crime. “They parked the bloody automobile in front of Judd’s house. They cleaned it to some extent that night and left it standing in the street. ‘Oriented’, of course, ‘oriented’. They left it there for the night so that anybody might see and know. And then in a day or so we find Artie with his pockets stuffed with newspapers telling of the Kessler tragedy. We find him consulting with his friends, with the newspaper reporters; and my experience has been that the last person that a conscious criminal associates with is a reporter.” Wilk looked at us with an appeasing smile. “But he picks up a reporter, and he tells him he has read a great many detective stories, and he knows just how this would happen.

“Talk about scheming! But they must be hanged, because everybody is talking about the case and because their people have money.”

He turned then to a professional tone. He spoke of the traditional arrangements between prosecution and defence, the usual consideration accorded a plea of guilty. “How many times has Your Honour listened to the State’s Attorney come into this court with a man charged with robbery with a gun – which means from ten years to life – and on condition of a plea of guilty ask to have the gun charge stricken out and get him a chance to see daylight inside of three years? How many times?

“What about this matter of crime and punishment, anyhow? You can trace it all down through the history of man. You can trace the burnings, the boilings, the drawings and quarterings, the hanging of people in England at the crossroads, carving them up and hanging them as examples for all to see.

“We can come down to the last century where nearly two hundred crimes were punishable by death. You can read the stories of hanging on a high hill, and the populace for miles around coming out to the scene, that everybody might be awed into goodness. Hanging for picking pockets – and more pockets were picked in the crowd that went to the hanging than had been known before.

“What happened? Gradually the laws have been changed and modified, and men look back with horror at the hangings and killings of the past. What did they find in England? That, as they got rid of these barbarous statutes, crimes decreased instead of increased. I will undertake to say, Your Honour, that you can scarcely find a single scholarly book – and I will include all the works on criminology of the past – that has not made the statement over and over again that as the penal code was made less terrible, crimes grew less frequent.

“This weird tragedy occurred on the twenty-first of May. It has been heralded, broadcast through the world. How many attempted kidnappings have come since then? How many threatening letters have been sent out by weak-minded boys and weak-minded men since then? How many times have they sought to repeat again and again this same crime because of the effect of publicity upon the mind? I can point to examples of killing and hanging in the city of Chicago which have been repeated in detail over and over again, simply from the publicity of the newspapers and the public generally.

“Let us take this case. If these two boys die on the scaffold, which I can never bring myself to imagine, every newspaper in the United States will be filled with the gruesome details. It will enter every home and every family. How many men would enjoy the details? And you cannot enjoy human suffering without being affected for better or for worse; those who enjoyed it would be affected for the worse.

“Do I need to argue to Your Honour that cruelty only breeds cruelty? If there is any way to kill evil and hatred and all that goes with it, it is not through evil and hatred and cruelty; it is through charity and love and understanding.

“There is not a man who is pointed to as an example to the world who has not taught it. There is not a philosopher, there is not a religious leader, there is not a creed that has not taught it.”

We looked to Judd. Would he let himself be defended by this assault on his Nietzschean creed? But he was attentive, only flushing slightly.

“This is a Christian community,” Wilk went on, “so-called; at least it boasts of it. Let me ask this court, is there any doubt about whether these boys would be safe in the hands of the Founder of the Christian religion? It would be blasphemy to say they would not. And yet there are men who want to hang them for a childish, purposeless act, conceived without the slightest malice in the world.

“Your Honour, I have become obsessed with this deep feeling of hate and anger that has swept across the land. I have been fighting it, battling with it until it has fairly driven me mad, until I wonder whether every righteous human emotion has not gone down in a raging storm.

“I am not pleading so much for these boys as I am for the infinite number of others to follow, those who perhaps cannot be as well defended as these have been. It is of them that I am thinking, and for them I am begging of this court not to turn backward toward the barbarous and cruel past.”

In the morning Wilk turned to speak of the boys themselves. “Now, Your Honour, who are these two boys? Straus, a boy robbed of his boyhood, turned into a prodigy; Steiner, with a wonderfully brilliant mind-”

Judd leaned forward, as if at last the moment of fruition had come, when a great soul would interpret him to the world. But it was to the general psychiatric argument that Wilk gave attention. The brilliant youths, from earliest childhood “crowded like hothouse plants to learn more and more and more. But it takes something besides brains to make a human being who can adjust himself to life.

“In fact, as Dr. Ball and Dr. Tierney regretfully admitted, brains are not the chief essential in human conduct. The emotions are the urge that makes us live – the urge that makes us work and play, or move along the pathways of life. They are the instinctive things.”

Wilk pictured the examination by the State’s alienists after the boys had made their confession. “Dr. Tierney and Dr. Ball are undoubtedly able men. Dr. Tierney said this: The only unnatural thing he noted was that they showed no emotional reactions. Dr. Ball said the same. These are the State’s alienists, not ours. These boys could tell this gruesome story without a change of countenance, without the slightest feelings. What was the reason? I do not know. I know what causes the emotional life. I know it comes from the nerves, the endocrine glands, the vegetative system. I know it is practically left out of some. They cannot feel the moral shocks which safeguard others. Is Artie Straus to blame that his machine is imperfect? I have never in my life been interested so much in fixing blame as I have in relieving people from blame. I am not wise enough to fix it.

“A man can get along without his intellect, and most people do, but he cannot get along without his emotions. These boys – I do not care what their mentality: that simply makes it worse – are emotionally defective.

“Mr. Horn worked with intelligence and rapidity. On that Sunday afternoon, before the defence had a chance to talk to the boys, Mr. Horn got in two alienists, Ball and Stauffer, and they sat around hearing these boys tell their stories, and that is all.

“Your Honour, they were not holding an examination. They were holding an inquest and nothing else. A little premature, but an inquest.

“If Mr. Horn was trampling on the edges of the Constitution, I am not going to talk about it here. A great many people in this world believe that the end justifies the means. I don’t know but what I do myself. And that is the reason I never want to take the side of the prosecution, because I might harm an individual. I am sure the State will live anyhow.

“But what did Dr. Ball say? He said that it was not a good opportunity for an examination. Of course there was Stauffer. ‘Fine – a fine opportunity for an examination, their souls were stripped naked.’ Stauffer is not an alienist. He is an orator. Well, if Stauffer’s soul was naked, there wouldn’t be much to show.” So much for the prosecution’s alienists.

But the defence alienists had indeed examined the emotional conditioning of the boys. First there was Artie’s Miss Newsome. “This nurse was with him all the time, except when he stole out at night, from four to fourteen years of age. She, putting before him the best books, which children generally do not want; and he, when she was not looking, reading detective stories, which he devoured. We have a statute in this state, passed by the legislature last year, if I recall correctly, which forbids minors reading stories of crime. Why? Because the legislature in its wisdom felt that it would produce criminal tendencies in the boys who read them. This boy read them day after day. He never stopped. When he was a senior he read them, and almost nothing else. Artie was emotionally a child.

“Counsel have laughed at us for talking about childhood fantasies and hallucinations. Your Honour has been a child. And while youth has its advantages, it has its grievous troubles.

“What do we know about childhood? The brain of the child is the home of dreams, of castles, of visions, of illusions and delusions. I remember, when I was a child, the men seemed as tall as the trees, and the trees as tall as the mountains. I can remember very well when, as a little boy, I swam the deepest spot in the river for the first time. I have been back since, and I can almost step across the same place, but it seemed an ocean then. And these tall men who I thought were so wonderful, they were dead and they had left nothing behind. I had lived in a dream. I had not known the real world, which I met, to my discomfort and despair, as I grew older, and which dispelled the illusions of my youth.

“We might as well be honest with ourselves, Your Honour. Before I would tie a noose around the neck of a boy, I would try to remember the surging, instinctive, persistent feelings of the child. One who honestly remembers and tries to unlock the door that he thinks is closed, and calls back the boy, can understand the boy.

“Both these boys were in the most trying period of the life of a child; both these boys were at the moment when the call of sex is new and strange; both these boys were moved by the strongest feelings and passions that have ever moved men; both these boys were at the time boys grow insane, at the time crimes are committed. Shall we charge them with full responsibility that we may have a hanging? That the dead walls of Chicago will tell the story of the shedding of their blood?

“From the age of fifteen to the age of twenty or twenty-one, the child has the burden of adolescence, of puberty and sex, thrust upon him. Girls are kept at home and carefully watched. Boys without instruction are left to work the period out for themselves.

“They had parents who were good and kind and wise in their way. But I say to you seriously that the parents are more responsible than these boys. They might have done better if they had not had so much money. I do not know. Great wealth often curses those who touch it. I know there are no better citizens in Chicago than the fathers of these poor boys. I know that there are no better women than their mothers. But I am going to be honest with this court, if it is at the expense of both.”

He spoke more slowly. “To believe that any boy is responsible for himself or his early training is an absurdity that no lawyer or judge should be guilty of today. Somewhere this came to this boy. If his failing came from his heredity, I don’t know where or how.”

The audience was staring at Judd’s father. The old man raised his massive head, as if almost eager to take his share of castigation. On Artie’s side, it was as though one knew at last why his father and mother had been too ill to come to court.

“I do not know what remote ancestors may have sent down the seed that corrupted Artie Straus. If there is responsibility anywhere, it is back of him, somewhere in the infinite number of his ancestors, or in his surroundings, or in both.”

It was curious that when he spoke of heredity, he emphasized Artie, rather than the two. Did Wilk feel the weight of Artie’s other, unnamed crimes? Did he know more of Artie’s madness?

“‘Now I have put off childish things’, said the Psalmist thirty centuries ago. Suppose we cannot put them off? It is when these dreams of boyhood, these fantasies of youth still linger, and the growing boy is still a child – a child in emotion, a child in feeling, a child in hallucinations – that it indicates a diseased mind. There is not an act in all this horrible tragedy that is not the act of a child, the act of a child wandering in the morning of life, moved by the new feelings of a body, moved by the uncontrolled impulses which his teaching was not strong enough to take care of, moved by the dreams and hallucinations which haunt the brain of a child.

“Your Honour, all parents can be criticized; likewise teachers. Some time education will be more scientific. Some time we will try to know what will fit the individual boy, instead of putting all boys through the same course, regardless of what they are.”

He looked at Artie, who stirred uncomfortably. “This boy needed more love, more directing. He needed to have his emotions awakened. He needed guiding hands along the serious road youth must travel. Had these been given him, he would not be here today.”

His gaze moved to Judd. “Now, Your Honour, I want to speak about Judd.” Their eyes held for an instant, until Wilk turned away. “Judd is a boy of remarkable mind – away beyond his years. He is a sort of freak in this direction, as in others – a boy without emotions.”

I wondered if that could be as properly said of Judd as of Artie. There was, first, his attachment to Artie. And Dr. Vincenti had pointed out that in Judd’s case there were strong remnants of emotional life. Perhaps it was rather a case of powerful suppression, diversion of feeling.

Wilk went on with his analysis: “He was an intellectual machine going without balance and without a governor, seeking to solve every philosophy, but using his intellect only.

“Of course his family did not understand him; few men would. His mother died when he was young. He grew up in this way. He became enamoured of the philosophy of Nietzsche.

“Your Honour, I have read almost everything that Nietzsche ever wrote. He was the most original philosopher of the last century – a man who probably has made a deeper imprint on philosophy than any other man within a hundred years, whether right or wrong. Nietzsche believed that some time the superman would be born, that evolution was working toward that superman.” He glanced at Judd, like teacher correcting pupil.

“He wrote one book, Beyond Good and Evil, which was a criticism of all moral codes as the world understands them – a treatise holding that the intelligent man is beyond good and evil, that the laws for good and the laws for evil do not apply to those who approach the superman. Judd Steiner is not the only boy who has read Nietzsche. He may be the only one who was influenced in the way he was influenced.”

Today we know that more, far more were influenced, or thought they recognized in Nietzsche something of their own selves. There in 1924, in the Chicago courtroom, far from the Munich where another Nietzschean began his march in 1924, the tocsin for the era was scarcely heard.

Jonathan Wilk walked back to the defence table and picked up some notes. “I have made a few short extracts from Nietzsche. These would not affect you. They would not affect me. The question is how these works did affect the impressionable, visionary, dreamy mind of this boy. Here are some of the things which Nietzsche taught:

“‘Why so soft, oh my brethren? Why so soft, so unresisting and yielding? This new table, oh my brethren, I put over you: Become hard. To be obsessed by moral consideration presupposes a very low grade of intellect. We should substitute for morality the will to our own end, and consequently to the means to accomplish that.’”

His own voice hardened by the words, Wilk went on. “‘A great man, a man that nature has built up and invented in a grand style, is colder, harder, less cautious and more free from the fear of public opinion.’”

He spoke directly to Judd, as to a misunderstanding pupil. “This was a philosophical dream, containing more or less truth, that was not meant by anyone to be applied to life.” Wilk went on to quote a scholarly appraisal: “‘Although no perfect superman has yet appeared in history, Nietzsche’s types are to be found in all the world’s great figures – Alexander, Napoleon – in the wicked heroes such as the Borgias, Wagner’s Siegfried and Ibsen’s Brand, and in the great cosmopolitan intellects such as Goethe and Stendhal. These were the gods of Nietzsche’s idolatry. The superman-like qualities supposedly lie not in their genius, but in their freedom from scruple. They felt themselves to be above the law. So the superman will be a law unto himself. What he does will come from the will and superabundant power within him.’”

An excited gleam had come to Judd’s eyes. Was Wilk defending him now? And the great accusatory question stood forth in those eyes: How was anyone to know whether the will to power led to good or to evil?

But the moment passed. Wilk seemed to shake himself out of his abstraction and slowly to load upon himself again the burden of defence. “Your Honour, this philosophy became part of his being. He lived it and practised it. Now, he could not have believed it, excepting that it either caused a diseased mind or was the result of a diseased mind.

“Here is a boy who by day and by night, in season and out, was talking of the superman, owing no obligations to anyone, believing whatever gave him pleasure he should do – believing it just as another man might believe a religion.

“You remember that I asked Dr. Ball about these religious cases and he said, ‘Yes, many people go to the insane asylum on account of them.’ I asked Dr. Ball whether the same thing might come from a philosophical belief, and he said, ‘If one believed in it strongly enough.’ And we know this about Nietzsche: He was insane for fifteen years before the time of his death. His very doctrine is a species of insanity.”

Judd’s mouth opened. Then he sank back.

“Here is a man,” Wilk continued, “who made his impress upon the world. Every student of philosophy knows him. His doctrines made him a maniac. And here is a young boy in the adolescent age, harassed by everything that harasses children, who takes this philosophy and believes it literally. It is his life. Do you suppose this mad act could have been done by him in any other way?

“He did it, obsessed of an idea, perhaps to some extent influenced by what has not been developed publicly in this case – perversions that were present in the boy.” Intimately, to the judge, he said,” Both are signs of insanity, both, together with this act, proving a diseased mind.

“Why should this boy’s life be bound up with Friedrich Nietzsche, who died twenty-four years ago, insane, in Germany? I don’t know. I only know it is.

“I know, Your Honour, that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up together. I know that a pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without disturbing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame. I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it; neither has any other human brain. But I do know that if back of it is a power that made it, that power alone can tell, and if there is no power, then it is an infinite chance, which man cannot solve. Tell me that you can visit the wrath of fate and chance and life and eternity upon a nineteen-year-old boy! If you could, justice would be a travesty and mercy a fraud!”

Then if it was the encounter with Nietzsche’s philosophy that had drawn out a capacity for evil in Judd, who was to blame for that encounter? Could the publishers of Nietzsche’s works be blamed? Could the university be blamed? “I do not believe that the universities are to blame. I do not think they should be held responsible. I do think, however, that they are too large, and that they should keep a closer watch, if possible, upon the individual.

“But you cannot destroy thought because, forsooth, some brain may be deranged by thought. It is the duty of the university, as I conceive it, to be the great storehouse of the wisdom of the ages, and to let students go there, and learn, and choose. Every changed idea in the world has had its consequences. Every new religious doctrine has created its victims. Every new philosophy has caused suffering and death. Every new machine has carved up men while it served the world. No great ideal but does good and harm, and we cannot stop because it may do harm.”

He paused there; he seemed to have done with Judd’s philosophy, and on Judd’s face there came a blank look – was he thus meagrely explained to the world? Was this all his life was worth?

“Your Honour, there is something else in this case that is stronger still than the elements I have spoken of before. There is the element of chance. These boys, neither one of them, could possibly have committed this act except by coming together. It was not the act of one; it was the act of two.

“Your Honour, I am sorry for poor Paulie Kessler, and I think anybody who knows me knows that I am not saying it simply to talk. I do not know what Paulie Kessler would have been had he grown to a man. But would it mean anything if on account of that death, these two boys were taken out and a rope tied around their necks and they died felons? No, Your Honour, the unfortunate and tragic death of Paulie Kessler should mean an appeal to the fathers and the mothers, to the teachers, to the religious guides, to society at large. It should mean an appeal to all of them to appraise children, to understand the emotions that control them, to understand the ideas that possess them, to teach them to avoid the pitfalls of life.”

As he began again in the afternoon, he was once more the skilled lawyer making his points. He came to the sorest point, the testimony of McNamara about a “friendly judge”.

“I want Your Honour to know that if in your judgment you think these boys should hang, we will know it is your judgment. It is hard enough for a court to sit where you sit, with the eyes of the world upon you, in the fierce heat of public opinion, for and against. It is hard enough, without any lawyer making it harder. I will say no more about it, excepting that this statement was a deliberate lie, made out of whole cloth, and McNamara’s entire testimony shows it.”

Horn’s face was solid anger. If Wilk had planned this as a taunt, he could not have devised a more effective provocation, as we were to find in the very last moments of the trial.

Wilk walked again toward the bench, resuming his plea. “Your Honour, I must hasten along, for I will close tonight. I know I should have closed before. Still there seems so much that I would like to say.

“Crime has a cause as certainly as disease, and the way to rationally treat any abnormal condition is to remove the cause.

“If a doctor were called on to treat typhoid fever he would probably try to find out what kind of water the patient drank, and clean out the well so that no one else could get typhoid from the same source. But if a lawyer were called on to treat a typhoid patient he would give him thirty days in jail, and then he would think that nobody else would ever dare to drink the impure water. If the patient got well in fifteen days, he would be kept until his time was up; if the disease was worse at the end of thirty days, the patient would be released because his time was out.

“As a rule, lawyers are not scientists. They think that there is only one way to make men good, and that is to put them in such terror that they do not dare to do bad.”

And then he spoke of an aspect of the crime that few had considered. Going back over the record of hangings, he showed that a recent change had taken place. For years, no minor had been hanged in Chicago, not even on a jury conviction. Not from 1912 until 1920. “In 1920, a boy named Viani was convicted by a jury and hanged, a boy of eighteen. Why did we go back to hanging the young? It was 1920; we were used to young men, mere boys, going to their death. It was 1920, just after the war. And that time is still with us, Your Honour.

“We are anew accustomed to blood, Your Honour. It used to make us feel squeamish. But we have not only seen it shed in bucketsful, we have seen it shed in rivers, lakes, and oceans, and we have delighted in it; we have preached it, we have worked for it, we have advised it, we have taught it to the young, until the world has been drenched in blood and it has left stains upon every human heart and upon every human mind, and has almost stifled the feelings of pity and charity that have their natural home in the human breast.

“I believed in it. I don’t know whether I was crazy or not. Sometimes I think perhaps I was. I urged men to fight. I was safe because I was too old to go. For four long years the civilized world was engaged in killing men. Christian against Christian, barbarians uniting with Christians to kill Christians; anything to kill. It was taught in every school, aye, in the Sunday schools. The little children played at war. Do you suppose that this world has even been the same since then?

“We read of killing one hundred thousand men in a day. We read about it and rejoiced in it – if it was the other fellows who were killed. We were fed on flesh and drank blood. I need not tell Your Honour how many bright, honourable young men have come into this court charged with murder, some saved and some sent to their death, boys who fought in this war and learned to place a cheap value on human life.”

Wilk turned toward Judd and Artie. “These boys were brought up in it. The tales of death were in their homes, their playgrounds, their schools; they were in the newspapers that they read; it was part of the common frenzy. What was a life? It was nothing. One of them tells us how he was haunted by a war poster, how he dreamed of rape and of killing.

“It will take fifty years to wipe it out of the human heart, if ever. No one needs to inform me that crime has a cause. It has as definite a cause as any other disease. I know that growing out of the Napoleonic Wars there was an era of crime such as Europe had never seen before. I know that Europe is going through the same experience today; I know it has followed every war and I know it has influenced these boys so that life was not the same to them as it would have been if the world had not been made red with blood. I protest against the crimes and mistakes of society being visited upon them. All of us have our share in it. I have mine. I cannot tell and I shall never know how many words of mine during the war might have given birth to cruelty in the place of love and kindness and charity.”

Again, he had mounted far beyond the case; the spell was upon him and upon us all as Jonathan Wilk spoke. “Your Honour knows that in this very court crimes of violence have increased, growing out of the war. Not only by those who fought, but by those who learned that blood was cheap, and human life was cheap, and if the State could take it lightly, why not the individual?

“I do not know how much salvage there is in these two boys. I hate to say it in their presence, but what is there to look forward to? I do not know but what Your Honour would be merciful if you tied a rope around their necks and let them die; merciful to them, but not merciful to civilization, and not merciful to those who would be left behind. To spend the balance of their days in prison is mighty little to look forward to, if anything. Is it anything?

“They may have the hope that as the years roll around they may be released. I do not know. I do not know.” He gazed at the defendants. “I will be honest with this court as I have tried to be from the beginning. I know that these boys are not fit to be at large. I believe they will not be until they pass through the next stage of life, at forty-five or fifty.”

The words fell heavily, as if he had prophetically sentenced them.

“I would not tell this court that I do not hope that sometime, when life and age has changed their bodies, as it does, and has changed their emotions, as it does, they may once again return to life. I would be the last person on earth to close the door of hope to any human being that lives, and least of all to my clients. But what have they to look forward to? Nothing.” He quoted again from Housman:

Now hollow fires burn out to black,

And lights are fluttering low:

Square your shoulders, lift your pack

And leave your friend and go.

O never fear, lads, naught’s to dread,

Look not left nor right:

In all that endless road you tread

There’s nothing but the night.

Something had come over Wilk’s face, a complete and otherworldly beauty, as if he indeed were relieved of the shortcomings of mankind.

He repeated: “‘In all that endless road you tread, There’s nothing but the night.’

“I care not, Your Honour, whether the march begins at the gallows or when the gates of Joliet close upon them, there is nothing but the night, and that is little for any human being to expect.”

He drew himself out of his spell and came to his peroration. “But there are others to be considered.

“Here is Steiner’s father – and this boy was the pride of his life. He watched him, cared for him, he worked for him; he educated him, and he thought that fame and position awaited him, as it should have awaited. It is a hard thing for a father to see his life’s hope crumble into dust.

“And Straus’s son, the same. Here are the faithful uncle and brother, who have watched here day by day while Artie’s father and mother are too ill to stand this terrific strain, and shall be waiting for a message which means more to them than it can mean to you or me.

“Is there any reason, Your Honour, why their proud names and all the future generations that bear them shall have this bar sinister written across them? It is bad enough as it is, God knows. But it’s not yet death on the scaffold. It’s not that. And I ask Your Honour, in addition to all that I have said, to save two honourable families from a disgrace that never ends, and which could be of no avail to help any human being that lives. I have been sorry and I am sorry for the bereavement of Mr. and Mrs. Kessler, for those broken ties cannot be healed. But as compared with the families of Steiner and Straus, the Kesslers are to be envied, and everyone knows it.

“Now I must say one word more and then I will leave this with you where I should have left it long ago. The easy thing and the popular thing to do is to hang my clients. I know it. Men and women who do not think will applaud. The cruel will approve. It will be easy today; but in Chicago, and reaching out over the length and breadth of the land, more and more fathers and mothers, the humane, the kind and the hopeful, who are gaining an understanding and asking questions not only about these poor boys, but about their own – these will join in no acclaim at the death of my clients. These would ask that the shedding of blood be stopped.

“I know the future is with me and what I stand for here; not merely for the lives of these two unfortunate lads, but for all boys and all girls; for all of the young, and as far as possible, for all of the old. I am pleading for life, understanding, charity, kindness, and the infinite mercy that considers all.”

Tears flowed freely on old Steiner’s face; some said that Judd and Artie wept. We were all utterly held by some tragic sympathy in Wilk’s voice, in his whole being, that transcended any effect of words.

“I am pleading that we overcome cruelty with kindness and hatred with love. Your Honour stands between the past and the future. You may hang these boys, but in doing it you will turn your face toward the past. I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when we can learn by reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.”

He walked back a little, partly releasing us.

“If I should succeed in saving these boys’ lives and do nothing for the progress of the law, I should feel sad indeed. If I can succeed, my greatest reward and my greatest hope will be that I have done something to help human understanding, to temper justice with mercy, to overcome hate with love.

“I was reading last night of the aspiration of the old Persian poet, Omar Khayyám. It appealed to me as the highest that I can vision. I wish it was in my heart, and I wish it was in the hearts of all.

So it be written in the Book of Love,

I do not care about that Book above.

Erase my name or write it as you will,

So I be written in the Book of Love.

We did not dare speak to each other, for our words might deride sentiment. We rather made the comments professional. A great plea. His greatest. His valedictory. It was a plea for every human life.

The praise accorded Wilk, even in the papers that cried the loudest for blood, must have been the final goad to Horn, for he rushed into his hanging plea like a blinded fighter, flailing, hitting in every direction at once. It was Wilk that he attacked, as much as the murderers, for Wilk’s philosophy, he argued, would condone all crime, abandon all punishment, dissolve the basic rule that protected society. There were screaming, flailing periods when his voice went ridiculously high, and even Judd and Artie smiled sardonically, and this drove him to utmost fury.

Horn began with sarcasm: “Before going into a discussion of the merits of the case, there is a matter I would like to refer to. The distinguished gentleman whose profession it is to protect murder in Cook County, and concerning whose health thieves inquire before they go to commit crime, has seen fit to abuse the State’s Attorney’s office. We all have hearts of stone.

“We have dared to tell Your Honour that this is a cold-blooded murder. We ought not to refer to these two young men, the poor sons of multimillionaires, with any coarse language. We should have come up here and tried these kiddies with kindness and consideration!

“Your Honour ought not to shock their ears with cruel references to the laws of the State, to the penalty of death. Why, don’t you know that one of them has to shave every day of the week, and that is a bad sign. The other one has to shave only twice a week, and that is a bad sign. One is short and one is tall, and it is equally a bad sign in both of them. One is over-developed sexually and the other not quite so good.

“My God, if one of them had a harelip, I suppose Jonathan Wilk would want me to apologize for even having them indicted!

“We are cold-blooded! We have planned, according to Mr. Wilk, for three months and we have conspired to take the lives of two little boys who were wandering in dreamland.”

Padua was a decent, clean-living man, he told us, and so was Czewicki; as for himself, “I believe that not even Mr. Wilk, who has known me for years, would say that Arthur Horn is a vicious, cruel, heartless monster.” Were he not State’s Attorney he would have no feeling of animosity against these two individuals. When they were in his custody he had treated them with “kindness and consideration”. When he had first received Judd’s name as a possible owner of the glasses he had interviewed him at a hotel, so as to keep the matter out of the newspapers. “I think the State’s Attorney of this county is as kindly a man as the paid humanitarian, the man who believes in doing his fellow citizens good – after he has done them good and plenty.”

There was hesitant laughter.

“But as a public official selected by the people, charged with the duty of enforcing the law of my country,” he shouted, “I have no right to forgive those who violate their country’s laws. It is my duty to prosecute them.

“You have a right to forgive, and I know you do forgive those who trespass against Gilbert Matthewson personally, but sitting here as Chief Justice of this great court, you have no right to forgive anybody who violates the law! You have got to deal with him as the law prescribes!

“Your Honour, in this case, with the mass of evidence presented by the State, if a jury were sitting in that box and they returned a verdict and they did not fix the punishment at death, every person in this community, including Your Honour and myself, would feel that the verdict was founded on corruption!”

The judge’s face darkened, but he kept his composure.

“And I will tell you why. I have taken quite a trip during the last four or five weeks. I thought I was going to be kept in Chicago all summer trying this case, and that most of my time would be spent in the Criminal Court Building. I did come up to Your Honour’s courtroom five weeks ago, but then Old Doc Yak – what is his name? The man from Washington – Oh, Dr. McNarry – Dr. McNarry took me by the hand and led me into the nursery of two poor, rich young boys, and he introduced me to a teddy bear. Then he told me some bedtime stories, and after I got through listening to them he took me into the kindergarten and he presented to me a little Artie and Judd.

“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 that 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 or 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!

“What did she mean?” Horn demanded. “She meant that a mob ought to take charge of such a beast! Yes! We have heard Mr. Wilk talk repeatedly of the hoarse cry of the angry mob. Well, there is no danger or no fear of us actually hearing the hoarse cry of the angry mob, if the extreme penalty is visited here. I am not so sure, otherwise!”

He paused, head down, like a fighter aiming for the kill. Swinging his chunky body, Horn demanded, what of the tender friendship between these two perverts? Hadn’t Artie again and again contemplated killing Judd? This fact was all over the report.

“In other words, all this king-and-slave fantasy is a pure figment of the imagination of the defence. The real tie that binds in this case is that one was a criminal, the other had something on him. Straus was afraid of exposure: he contemplated murdering Steiner. And the other blackmailed him, for perversion. Straus wanted to shut the mouth of Steiner and then break with him. For that he needed something on Steiner. That is why he wanted Steiner to help him choke the life out of little Paulie Kessler.”

Horn threw down the Storrs-Allwin report, as something demolished. “That is the medical defence in this case. Mr. Wilk has read you poetry. May I be permitted, if Your Honour please, to read you some prose?”

And he read, “‘The White House, Washington, D.C.’”

It was a letter denying an appeal from a death sentence. “‘I have scant sympathy with a plea of insanity advanced to save a man from the consequence of his crime, when, unless that crime had been committed, it would have been impossible to persuade any reasonable authority to place him in an asylum as insane.’” The signature was that of Theodore Roosevelt.

“Is not that the case here?” Horn demanded. “If this crime had not been committed, could any reasonable authority be persuaded to send either one of these men to an asylum as insane?”

Thus he ended his first day.

There remained Wilk’s plea of youthfulness. Was eighteen too young to die? Fresh in the morning, Horn began: “I submit, if Your Honour please, if we can take the flower of American manhood, take boys at eighteen years of age and send them to their death in the front-line trenches of France in defence of our laws, we have an equal right to take men nineteen years of age and take their lives for violating these laws that these boys gave up their lives to defend.

“The law that Your Honour is bound to enforce in this case declares that from fourteen years of age up a boy has the capacity to commit a crime and is entirely and thoroughly responsible for it.”

Then, like a litany, he began reading the names and ages of men who had been hanged. It seemed to go on for ever. Buff Higgins was hanged at the age of twenty-three. Henry Foster, twenty-four, Viana, seventeen…

And if but few of them had been hanged on a plea of guilty the reason was simple. Obviously, if a lawyer could not get assurance of a deal through the State’s Attorney, he would say, “Well then, I am going to take a chance on twelve men. They can’t do any worse to me, and I’m going to give my client a run for his money.”

Why hadn’t it been done this time? Because the crime was so subhuman, as the defence itself had admitted, that they simply could not go before a jury.

And Horn began his ultimate portrayal of the crime, the blows on the head, the suffocation, and working himself up to hoarse, staccato shrieks; “And then what did the fiends, the perverts, do to that dead boy in the car? Did not the coroner’s physician testify-”

To the banging gavel, Horn stopped. Quite calmly he dropped that point and said, “I think, if Your Honour please, I have now covered the three defences set forth by Mr. Wilk: the defence of mental disease, the question of motive, the defence of youthfulness. But the real defence in this case is Jonathan Wilk and his peculiar philosophy of life. When I was listening to Mr. Wilk plead for mercy for these two men who showed no mercy, it reminded me of the story of Abraham Lincoln, about a young boy of approximately their age, whose parents were wealthy, and he murdered both of them so as to inherit their money. His crime was discovered the same as this crime has been discovered, and the court asked him for any reason why the sentence of death should not be passed on him, and he promptly replied that he hoped the court would be lenient to a poor orphan.

“Mr. Wilk quoted considerable poetry to you, and I would like again to be indulged while I read a little bit of prose.”

He picked up a printed sheet. It was an address, he explained, delivered to the prisoners in the county jail by a distinguished criminologist. Horn read, “‘The reason I talk to you on the question of crime, its cause and cure, is because I really do not believe the least in crime. There is no such thing as a crime, as the word is generally understood. I do not believe that there is any sort of distinction between the moral condition in and out of jail. One is just as good as the other. The people here can no more help being here than the people outside can avoid being outside. I do not believe that people are in jail because they deserve to be.’”

The courtroom was abuzz as people told each other what Horn was quoting. He read more slowly, in an unmistakable imitation of Jonathan Wilk’s reflective, pleading manner: “‘I believe that progress is purely a question of pleasurable units that we get out of life. The pleasure-and-pain theory is the only correct theory of morality and the only way of judging life.’” Horn looked up. “Isn’t that exactly the doctrine of Judd Steiner? And that is the doctrine expounded last Sunday in the press of Chicago by Jonathan Wilk!”

This was scarcely an exact statement. The piece had been dug up by Mike Prager, from a report of a sensational talk given at the county jail by Jonathan Wilk, twenty years before.

Judd was glowing at Wilk. Yet it seemed to me that Wilk withdrew into himself, that he perhaps wanted to separate himself from these long-ago words that suddenly linked him to Judd. For even in this closing moment of the trial I had the impression that Wilk could not bring himself to any warmth toward Judd or Artie; he pitied them, he was their defender in all sincerity, but they had not entered his heart.

The judge was leaning forward, staring at Horn in a quizzical manner. He seemed on the point of asking, Was it Wilk, or the defendants, that Horn wanted to hang?

There was indeed a feeling that the judge was a man who tended to Wilk’s way of thought; all through the trial, Horn had made no effort to conceal that he saw the judge as a man like Wilk. And he seemed to be attacking the judge himself as he again shouted, “The real defence in this case is Jonathan Wilk’s dangerous philosophy of life!

“Society can endure, the law can endure, and criminals may escape, but if a court such as this court should say that he believes in the doctrine of Jonathan Wilk, that you ought not to hang when the law says you should, a greater blow has been struck to our institutions than by a hundred, aye, a thousand murders!”

The judge still eyed him with that curious, measuring look. And Horn, with a guttural growl of frustration and despair, flung in a last taunt, one that he had perhaps meant to hold back: “Mr. Wilk has preached in this case that one of the handicaps the defendants are under is that they are the sons of multimillionaires. I would not bring it up if Mr. Wilk had not brought it up. But he tried to make Your Honour believe that Sergeant McNamara lied about Judd Steiner’s statement that his father’s millions could find a friendly judge.”

There was that peculiar atmosphere in the room, foretelling that something ineradicable was on the way, something that Horn could no longer stop himself from doing.

Horn faced the judge, eye to eye. “Did Sergeant McNamara lie?” he demanded. “I don’t know whether Your Honour believes this officer of the law or not, but I want to tell you, if you have observed these two defendants sitting before you during this trial, if you have observed the conduct of their attorneys and their families with one honourable exception – and that is the old man who sits in sackcloth and ashes and who is entitled to the sympathy of everybody, old Mr. Steiner – with that one honourable exception, everybody connected with this case” – he drew breath and shrieked, his arms chopping the air – “they all have laughed and sneered and jeered! And if the defendant, Steiner, did not say that he would plead guilty before a friendly judge, why, his actions demonstrated that he thinks he has got one!”

The words hung in the hot, static air.

Judge Matthewson arose, stared at him, then sat down. “I will disregard what you have said.”

The shock of Horn’s running beyond the point of recall had been so great that those at the defence table did not even seem to enjoy their gain.

Horn finished hurriedly. “I believe that the facts and circumstances proven in this case demonstrate that a crime has been committed by these two defendants and that no other punishment except the extreme penalty of the law will fit, and I leave the case with you on behalf of the state of Illinois, and I ask Your Honour in the language of Holy Writ to ‘execute justice and righteousness in the land’.”

Judge Matthewson seemed not to have heard Horn’s final words, engaged as he had been in an effort of self-control.

“Before the State rests,” he said, “the court will order stricken from the record the closing remark of the State’s Attorney as being a cowardly and dastardly assault upon the integrity of this court.”

Horn’s voice was half-choked with chagrin, rage, defeat. “It was not so intended, Your Honour.”

The judge disregarded him. “It could not be used for any other purpose except to incite a mob and to try and intimidate this court.”

“If Your Honour please, the state’s attorney had no such intention.”

The entire courtroom was electric, the boys sitting up with a frightened hope, a realization that something entirely extraneous was happening, perhaps a break that would save their lives.

“I merely wanted to put my personal feelings plainly before the court,” Horn insisted. “It was my intention as the State’s Attorney-”

“The State’s Attorney knew that his words would be heralded all through this country and all over this world.”

“It was not my intention.”

“This court will not be intimidated by anybody at any time or place as long as he occupies this position.” The judge sat back.

After a moment he announced, “I am going to take this case under advisement, gentlemen. I have practically two thousand pages of exhibits. It will take some time to prepare to decide this matter and to render judgment in this case. I think I ought to have ten days or so, and I will fix the day as September ten.” He arose. “We will adjourn this case now until September the tenth at nine-thirty o’clock.”

During those ten days the intense and fantastic absorption with the case increased rather than abated. We were beset with rumours; there were threats to bomb the judge’s home, to kill him should he fail to hang the criminals.

Nor was Judd silent. If the sentence were death, the execution, according to the Illinois law, could take place in a few months’ time. His mind seemed to be churning at greater speed, to produce some proof of the importance of his life.

He released, now, the list of questions he would attempt to solve from the other side of death, should there prove to be an after-life. These were his questions:

Is human experience carried on in any form of consciousness after death?

Is there complete omniscience?

Are the cultural experiences of the earth necessary? What of the savage mind?

Is the absence of a physical being an advantage?

Does one retain reactions registered on the mind previous to death?

Is life on earth correct in judgment, or is there a higher judgment?

What is happiness?

ON THE MORNING of the sentencing, mounted police circled the building. The crowd was immense. Precisely at nine-thirty all were in their places in the courtroom, and Judge Matthewson appeared. Among us of the press, Prager and his friends were loud with dire predictions. That was a real mob out there. If the verdict proved short of death the boys would never get out of the building alive.

I could not feel it as a lynch mob, though I was not without uneasiness. Since then, I see it more like a crowd waiting for the outcome of a desperately fought election. In it there was a feverish having-to-know. I’ve talked about it with wiser and more learned men than myself, and I realize that it was not so much the act of decision that was awaited, not so much the who-wins, but the disposition, in terms of our own selves. In each there must have been identification; in each, the hidden sense that the disposition would symbolically apply to his own darkest impulse. If I let myself do something even as awful as this, how much would I be punished? Would I die for it?

We all rose for the entry of the judge. After the swift formalities, the boys stood before him, between Wilk and Ferdinand Feldscher, and as the judge met their eyes it was still impossible to know whether he brought them death or life. Artie was utterly pale, his cheeks twitched. Judd was impassive.

Judge Matthewson read:

“In view of the profound and unusual interest that this case has aroused not only in this community but in the entire country and even beyond its boundaries, the court feels it is his duty to state the reasons which have led him to the determination he has reached.

“It is not an uncommon thing that pleas of guilty are entered in criminal cases, but almost without exception in the past such pleas have been the result of a virtual agreement between the defendants and the State’s Attorney; and in the absence of special reasons to the contrary, it is the practice of the court to follow the recommendations of the State’s Attorney.

“In the present case the situation is a different one. A plea of guilty has been entered by the defence without a previous understanding with the prosecution, and without any advance knowledge whatever on his part.” Moreover, the judge pointed out, the plea of guilty in this case did not make the task of the prosecution easier “by substituting the admission of guilt for a possibly difficult or uncertain chain of proof”. For in this case the State already had ample proof of guilt, besides full confessions.

Death, then?

There were two crimes – murder and kidnapping for ransom. In both, he pointed out, it was the court’s duty under the statute to examine witnesses as to aggravation and mitigation. “This duty has been fully met. The testimony introduced, both by the prosecution and the defence, has been as detailed and elaborate as though the case had been tried before a jury.”

Then came the disposition of another point – was it for Horn? “The testimony has satisfied the court that the case is not one in which it would have been possible to set up successfully the defence of insanity as insanity is defined and understood by the established law of this state for the purpose of the administration of criminal justice.

“The court, however, feels impelled to dwell briefly on the mass of data produced as to the physical, mental, and moral condition of the two defendants. They have been shown in essential respects to be abnormal; had they been normal they would not have committed the crime.”

The very words of Wilk!

“It is beyond the province of this court, as it is beyond the capacity of humankind in its present state of development, to predicate ultimate responsibility for human acts.

“At the same time, the court is willing to recognize that the careful analysis made of the life history of the defendants and of their present mental, emotional, and ethical condition has been of extreme interest and is a valuable contribution to criminology.”

Surely, it was a decision for the defence.

“And yet the court feels strongly that similar analyses made of other persons accused of crime will probably reveal similar or different abnormalities. The value of such tests seems to lie in their applicability to crime and criminals in general.

“Since they concern the broad question of human responsibility and legal punishment and are in no wise peculiar to the individual defendants, they may be deserving of legislative but not of judicial consideration. For this reason the court is satisfied that his judgment in the present case cannot be affected thereby.”

Then it was for Horn; it was over.

“The testimony in this case reveals a crime of singular atrocity. It is, in a sense, inexplicable, but is not thereby rendered less inhuman or repulsive. It was deliberately planned and prepared for during a considerable period of time. It was executed with every feature of callousness and cruelty.” He raised his eyes, and spoke with another kind of pain, of the man who must touch some of the filthiest things of life. He spoke “not for the purpose of extenuating guilt, but merely with the object of dispelling a misapprehension that appears to have found lodgment in the public mind”. It was on the most gruesome point of all. He was convinced “by conclusive evidence that there was no abuse offered to the body of the victim”.

He returned to his paper. “But it did not need that element to make the crime abhorrent to every instinct of humanity, and the court is satisfied that neither in the act itself, nor in its motives or lack of motives, can he find any mitigating circumstances.”

Death, for certain?

The judge reviewed the possible punishments under the statutes. For murder, death, or fourteen years to life in jail. For kidnapping, death, or from five years to life imprisonment.

“Under the plea of guilty, the duty of determining the punishment devolved upon the court, and the law indicates no rule or policy for the guidance of his discretion. In reaching his decision the court would have welcomed the counsel and support of others. Nevertheless the court is willing to meet his responsibilities.

“It would have been the task of least resistance to impose the extreme penalty of the law.”

Then it was life!

Already, smiles were breaking, but Judd and Artie did not dare to breathe. “In choosing imprisonment instead of death, the court is moved chiefly by the consideration of the age of the defendants, boys of eighteen and nineteen years.”

Wilk’s tired face glowed. For in the end, this had been his choice of emphasis, youth and the precedent of consideration for youth.

“The court believes it is within his province to decline to impose the sentence of death on persons who are not of full age.

“This determination appears to be in accordance with the progress of criminal law all over the world and with the dictates of enlightened humanity. More than that, it seems to be in accordance with the precedents hitherto observed in this state.

“Life imprisonment, at the moment, strikes the public imagination less forcibly than would death by hanging; but to the offenders, particularly of the type they are, the prolonged suffering of years of confinement may well be the severest form of retribution and expiation.”

The entire courtroom was stirring, breathing. Perhaps Judd was already computing the years before they might be admissible for parole. But Judge Matthewson’s voice took on a note of doom. “The court feels it proper to add a final word concerning the effect of the parole law upon the punishment of these defendants. In the case of such atrocious crimes, it is entirely within the discretion of the Department of Public Welfare never to admit these defendants to parole.

“To such a policy the court urges them strictly to adhere. If this course is persevered in the punishment of these defendants, it will both satisfy the ends of justice and safeguard the interests of society.”

Then he read the formal sentences. Upon each, for murder, “to be confined in the penitentiary at Joliet for the term of your natural life.”

In addition, for kidnapping for ransom, “to be confined in the penitentiary at Joliet for the term of ninety-nine years”.

As the sentences fell like successive iron bolts, sentences of life and for ever, the first surge of joy abated. But then the life-urge poured and inundated over all other feeling. Judd and Artie pounded each other, and turned to wave to those they knew in the court, and laughed with happiness, Judd quieting only for an instant as he caught his father’s eye, as the old man arose, scarcely less sorrowful than before, to follow Max from the courtroom. It was over. Disposition had been made.

Judd was pushing toward Wilk, with his hand extended. Wilk took his hand. There seemed, momentarily, a danger of tears in Judd’s eyes, but the clasp was ended by the brusque interruption of the bailiffs, who laid hands on the boys to take them out of the room as a protection for the lives that had just been given back to them.

During the rest of the day, the tumult over the verdict was augmented by rumours of assassination plots. Mike Prager offered bets that they would never reach the state penitentiary in Joliet alive. There was a tip that three hundred members of the Ku Klux Klan were massing in Berwyn, just west of Chicago, that they would block the road with their cars and lynch the prisoners.

At dusk, Judd and Artie, surrounded by guards, were slipped into a large black Marmon that waited, with motor running, at the rear entrance of the jail. They were linked together by a short chain, from wrist to wrist. In their car sat four guards with pistols drawn and pump guns on their knees. A vehicle filled with police preceded their car, and two others followed. The cavalcade departed at high speed.

So nervous were the custodians that they twice came close to wreckage on the road. Once, on the outskirts of the city, a collision was avoided only by a rapid swerve that threw guards and prisoners into one heap and brought laughter from Judd and Artie. The second time, a sudden stop at a railroad crossing forced the prisoners’ car into a ditch.

But in a few hours Artie and Judd were delivered to the state prison authorities, and suddenly the entire drama was over. The walls shut in on them. For each, prison life began with solitary confinement.

And it was indeed so that the world seemed to envisage the remainder of their existence. As the press wires compiled reactions to the sentence, we read the New York Times editorial declaring that prison for them should truly mean “the oubliette”, that it should be “a life extinguishment virtually as complete as death”.

An Indianapolis paper declared that the judge had spoken truly when he pictured a lifetime in jail as worse punishment than execution. But could they not sometime get out? This seemed a pervasive fear. Legal experts gave interviews showing that they might be paroled in fifty years, even in twenty years. The Chicago Tribune editorialized that despite the judge’s advice against parole no one could tell what would happen. And while grudgingly accepting the sentence, the Tribune declared that it was more than anything a sentence against capital punishment, for if these two did not deserve to hang, then anyone hanged thereafter in the state of Illinois would be hanged unjustly.

Yet for all the rumblings, the act of disposition seemed indeed to have ended the case. Crank letters and threatening calls rapidly fell off. The court had spoken, and the case was decided. And in a few days, we had not a line about Steiner and Straus in the paper. We ran only a Sunday article by an eminent law professor pointing out that the elaborate psychiatric evidence introduced into the case would prove a landmark in medical jurisprudence.

A FEW DAYS after the verdict I made up my mind at last to call Ruth. Only then I learned that she had gone East, that she had transferred to Smith College.

For the next few months I stayed on the paper in Chicago. I began an affair with a girl reporter on the News, an “emancipated woman”. Those were the beginning days of the gang wars, and I became an expert on them – always the speeding car, the fusillade, the riddled body or bodies; then the gangster funeral, and the box-score tally, and rarely an arrest, almost never a conviction; it was just people shooting it out on the streets, it was the same as when kids did it. Bang, you’re dead.

There came the question of accepting the prize for helping to capture Steiner and Straus. Ten thousand dollars was to be divided between the Pole who had found the glasses and the detective who had traced them, and several others. And Tom and I were to have a thousand dollars each.

If I refused, I would be implying that Tom was wrong in accepting. There was not a reason in the world for refusing. Afterward, Tom and I got ritually drunk at Louie’s. I said I would go to Europe and write.

I even had it in mind, when I went East, to stop at Smith College. And so I wrote to Ruth. Her reply was cordial but cool. She congratulated me on my reward “since it would help me further my writing ambitions”.

I tried in a letter to explain myself, and she wrote back that the whole experience was perhaps too strong as yet for both of us, that perhaps when I came back from Europe, we could renew our friendship.

The first person I looked up in Paris was Myra; she had gone abroad immediately after the trial. Myra was thinner, but more attractive than ever; her eyes were huge, her hair was sleek, and she was already the ultra-habitué of the Dôme, nodding and waving to everybody and telling me who everybody was – Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and the editor of transition, in which she hoped to get her poems published.

We kept on drinking Pernod, then she was showing me the real Paris. We kissed along the quays, and it must have been nearly dawn when as a matter of course we went up to my hotel room – and she was pouring out talk by then: she wanted me to take her, it was “the only way to find out”. But when we tried, she became rigid, clenched, her body vibrating with her effort to break through her rigidity, and finally she said in a small voice that it was always like that – she hoped I would forgive her for trying to use me but…

For some time after that, we met at cafés and talked and talked. Myra was always seen with the newest young male arrivals, holding hands on the street, going off intimately with them somewhere.

After a few months in Paris, trying to write, I became restless. I would drop in at the Chicago Globe’s offices to look at the paper, and soon I was working full time. I seemed always involved in a serious affair or in an important story.

I went to Italy, I went to Germany. Something of the great malaise, the gathering sickness of Europe, began to be felt, and it was as though I had already known it; the taste of it was quite familiar to me from Chicago. Everything was as though expected. So the years passed.

Then came the troubles in Vienna, the brief abortive revolution when the socialists barricaded themselves in their model apartment houses. They were shot out in a few days. With other “experts”, I predicted great upheavals. With the socialists out of the way, what could stop the paranoiac Hitler from gobbling up Austria?

I was done with the story, and lingering in the depressing aftermath of the shootings, when I got a call, one morning, in my hotel. “Herr Doctor Weiss,” the clerk announced. It was Willie.

I found him waiting in the lobby, gnomish as ever, his head cocked to one side as he looked at me through narrowed eyes. There was the same knowing, ironic smile on his closed lips.

What was he doing in Vienna?

He seemed surprised that I asked. Where else would he be for his post-graduate work but in the home city of the Old Man?

“Let’s walk,” he said, explaining that he allowed himself an hour’s walk every morning.

Willie set off at a brisk gait, setting the pace for his rapid questioning. First, he pumped me dry on my opinions about the uprising. Then, quite brusquely, Willie demanded what news I had of the boys in jail. Had they succumbed to prison routine? Or was Judd, at least, finding it possible to keep up some creative, mental life?

Here I disappointed him. I was completely out of touch. I recalled only a story Tom Daly had brought to me after the trial: it seemed that Artie’s denial of the “gland robbery”, at least, was somewhat substantiated by a tale current among the South Side police. The taxi driver had really been mutilated, it was said, by the brother of a girl he had raped. But that still left a good deal of mystery about Artie’s other crimes.

The boys should have been studied further, Willie declared. Had I heard of the recent death of Dr. McNarry?

I hadn’t. Indeed, it took me an instant to think myself back into the trial, to place him as the head of the psychiatric defence.

What a fitting thing it would have been, Willie said, if the three families had gone through with McNarry’s idea. Maybe the idea still could be revived, right now, as a memorial to McNarry, one of the first psychiatrists in America open-minded enough to accept Freud.

But what idea of McNarry’s was he talking about? I asked.

Why, hadn’t I known? Just after the trial Dr. McNarry had suggested a wonderful idea to all three families – the Kesslers, the Strauses, the Steiners. After all, they were linked in the tragedy; each had lost a son.

Dr. McNarry had proposed that the three bereaved millionaire families set up a joint fund for the study of mental diseases. “A great research centre in Chicago.”

“He proposed it to all three families?” I asked.

“I think it came fairly close, at that. Paulie Kessler’s father saw it. You know, that little man had a great deal to him.” And Artie’s mother had been most eager for the plan. “I suppose it would have relieved poor Mrs. Straus of some of her guilt feeling to have her tragedy acknowledged in that way.”

But real opposition, Willie said, had come from Randolph Straus, who could not bring himself to have his son’s crime thus perpetuated.

“What a pity, what a waste of great material!” Willie said. The first task would have been a depth study of the crime itself. “After the sentence, they could really have gone into all that material that didn’t come out.”

What material? Was he going to tell me, even now, something of the mysterious crimes, A, B, C, D? Had Willie after all known something? I felt a curious reluctance to be drawn into the whole thing again, but I had to face the story. “Was there really more?”

It was a different kind of material that he meant. Interpretive material.

I recalled that he himself had tried an explanation and had brought up some strange theories. The chisel, the tool – but something else came back to me from that long-ago discussion with Willie. Two things he had mentioned, the tool and the burial place. About the second one I had never understood. The tool had been Artie’s idea. But Judd had picked the swamp.

“That’s it,” Willie said. “That was Judd’s part. Artie, the tool. Judd, the receptacle.” Was the whole act, then, a symbol? Willie must have felt my resistant bepuzzlement, for he took another approach. “Do you know about the death instinct?” All life was a struggle with the death-wish, and we had seen the victory of that wish in the cases of Judd and Artie.

“Don’t we always tend to fit events into the latest theory we have acquired?” I said.

“Why did Judd pick that particular place?” Willie resumed.

“The swamp? He was familiar with it. He went birding there.”

“He went birding in a lot of other places. Something impelled him to go to that particular spot, instead of the dunes or the lake or anywhere.” Artie, for instance, must have used other places at other times – if one accepted that there had been other crimes for Artie. Yet this time it was Judd who insisted he knew the exact spot.

“All right,” I said. “Why did he pick Hegewisch?”

“It’s not Hegewisch – it’s the particular spot there.”

“Under the tracks?” I said. “The cistern?” That had indeed always seemed peculiar to me, for it was obviously a not very safe hiding place.

“Well?” Willie demanded. “Don’t you see what it represents?”

I thought of the hole, the white concrete pipe, and it represented nothing to me.

“The cistern.” He was staring at me until I thought, yes, perhaps Willie was a little like Judd and Artie, possessed by his own brilliant mind. “A naked body in the cistern,” he said. “It was a pretty tight fit, wasn’t it, and the fluid, the body in an aqueous environment, a slow amount of fluid flowing through the cistern-”

I stared back at him, beginning to feel his meaning.

“How many times did Judd say he wished he’d never been born?”

I knew his meaning, then, and rejected it completely, almost revolted by it, even while – all the more revolting, like an obscenity – my mind kept adding the picture of the bushes screening the entrance to the pipe.

As though forgiving my slowness in apprehension, Willie became torrential. I had to picture Judd as a baby. The last baby of a mother who had become an invalid through his birth. His mother had paid such a price for having him – her life, everyone believed.

“Remember, this idea became overt with him. He told Dr. Allwin that he felt he had killed his mother because her illness stemmed from his birth. But what he actually meant, what he couldn’t say was that he felt his father had killed her, through the male demand on her.”

“You got that far last time,” I recalled, “including his Madonna fixation, as a way of getting rid of his father.”

“Yes,” Willie said, but since then, there had been some interesting ideas on the myth of virgin birth. Making the mother a goddess and a virgin – wasn’t that a perfect barrier against incest wishes in the boy? Wasn’t Judd particularly attached to his mother? And as he grew up, wasn’t his fear of having anything to do with women a fear of using them, and therefore an incest-fear of using his mother, of hurting his mother?

“Yet he wanted to kill a woman,” I objected. “It was his idea that the victim should be a girl.”

“The complement of over-tenderness is over-violence,” Willie responded. “But there was even more to it, about wanting to kill a girl.”

He came to it, through all of Judd’s history. Hadn’t his mother wanted this last baby to be a girl? So she virtually made Judd into a girl. “She sends him to a girls’ school. The report said the old man wanted boys to be boys – but the mother was crazy for neatness and cleanliness. Here is where you get a couple of the characteristics that show up in Judd. All this feminine passion for order, for having things in their place. You see the conflict growing in him – is he a girl or a boy? And there was that terrific thing, when he got to public school, about not using the toilet. Holding himself in! The sissy from the girls’ school! And that’s just when he tells us he started teaching himself never to have any emotions, to hold it all in! Well, where is it you don’t feel anything at all?”

Did he mean death? Then the other state echoed to me. We had just talked of how often Judd repeated it. He wished he never had been born.

We were walking more slowly. “Then he goes to Twain. He’s odd and sickly and always erupting all over with skin diseases, he’s allergic, he can’t stand the world. He’s a lone kid, the crazy bird, the last one they mention in the school annual – well, hell, we all knew Judd by then. I was older than he, but we all knew he was supposed to be queer, nasty, conceited, all that. Now, he develops his mania for languages and for birds. The languages – what’s language but communication? He couldn’t communicate with anybody. He had no close friends. He was looking for the key, the way to communicate, the universal language. And the birds, I haven’t quite got it – flight, you know, is commonly a sex symbol – wait a minute!” Willie halted, cocked his head. “What was the first bird he was looking for?”

I must have looked stupid.

“A child, watching birds. What bird does any little child wonder about first of all? The stork. He’s sceptical. Allwin reported when the nurse first told Judd the stork story, Judd said she had a sneer on her face. So he asked his father and the father said babies were bought in stores. Little Judd was going to find out who was right. He began watching for birds, to solve the great mystery that all children feel compelled to solve. Even in Hegewisch, he was still a child watching for the stork.”

I must have looked dubious, because he said, “All right. Put that aside. We’ll see. Take him from Twain. That’s when he began to get these crushes, first on his brother in uniform, then on a camp-counsellor, and then he fixed on Artie-”

“We all had kid crushes like that,” I objected. “It didn’t make us all homosexual. Or did it?”

“A little bit, all of us. But we got out of it. The trouble for Judd was, with all the girl stuff in his childhood, he still didn’t know-what he was. So he got into it. And his conflict must have been worse than ever. Because don’t forget his nurse got him all tangled up when he was a kid, got him mixed up about sexual release, so that even if he didn’t know it he wanted it the way she showed him, the first way, the oral stage, or probably he was polymorphous perverse – the exploratory stage. He gets a fixation on Artie, and even when he tries sex with a girl, he sees her as Artie. But he must have been struggling all the time in himself to become a male. He’s in this adolescent period, the worst period, when his mother dies – the one real attachment, apparently, that he had.

“Then the scheme starts. The revenge on life. In Judd’s mind, it is a scheme to kill a girl. He kept pulling for it all the time, trying to convince Artie it ought to be a girl.”

“He had that mixed up with the war,” I reminded Willie.

“All right. That’s where he got the image. From a war poster. Man stuff. But that only added to the hatefulness of the world. And himself in it. And he was going to rid himself of all this by killing a girl. What girl?” Willie looked at me and said with finality, “The girl in himself. Judd had to kill the girl-part of himself, before he could become a man.”

It was really ingenious, I told him. He had built up a really clever theory. Perhaps it was a good thing the alienists had not brought such an idea into court, because Horn would have had a field day with it.

“Yah?” Willie’s voice became argumentative. “Now look at the act of murder. How were they going to accomplish it? They talked about it for weeks, they developed the details. There was the chisel, to knock the victim on the head – that was Artie’s part, we know that. And it was Artie who used it. But then they had all these other things they planned to use. There was the ether. They were going to put the victim to sleep. Judd saw it not as killing, but the sleep of death, the sleep before life, you could say. The ether was Judd’s idea, connected with the birds. But the ether wasn’t all. After that, the plan was to use a cord, strangling the victim with the cord, a silken cord they wanted, not a rope, each holding on to an end for equal participation.

“Isn’t this idea a birth in reverse? What were they reading at the time? Judd was full of Huysmans’ A Rebours. And the perversity, the inverted ideas of writers like Huysmans, the ideas like the Black Mass, the conception of doing everything backwards, by the substitution of opposites, black for white, girl for boy, death for life – the cord – you can’t discard that clue entirely.”

I said I would admit it as an obscure possibility; I would still go along to see where it would all lead.

“It led to the cemetery,” Willie said. And, reflectively: “You know, that’s a possible connection I hadn’t thought of before. Judd was driving. And in his confession he says they went up a side road to a cemetery and waited there until it got dark – a couple of hours. Now, why the cemetery? Certainly because death was in his mind, by then, and Judd must have been as though calling for his mother, the way a kid does when everything has gone wrong and he is scared. This wasn’t the particular cemetery where his mother is buried, but he had been visiting his mother’s grave, he said, almost every week, and so the association was there, and he was drawn to a cemetery as to his mother; and that was where they waited, with the dead kid, until it got dark. Then they drove to the real burial place he had picked out in advance, and before they put the body into the cistern there was one more ritual, and this was Judd’s too. Remember, he was so queasy he couldn’t strike anyone, he couldn’t touch a dead body, yet this was a thing Judd did and not Artie: he took the can of hydrochloric acid that was intended to obliterate recognizable parts of the body – they imagined it would dissolve the flesh-” Willie glanced at me and his eyes emphasized again the birth in reverse. “Judd took this acid, and he said he poured it on the face, and he poured it on the penis.” He became silent.

“They said it was with the idea that a boy might be identified-”

“Look, they knew better than that,” Willie said.

“Well, it was circumcised – he could be identified as a Jew. In fact, that’s how I came to identify him.”

“And wasn’t that part of it, for Judd?” Willie said, rather softly. “Wasn’t that one of his conflicts? Didn’t he have to obliterate the problem of being a Jew? To dissolve it, so that the sign would be gone, the mark in the flesh, it was even in his fantasy, the brand on the inner side of the leg, the brand that could sometime be removed.”

Something in me gasped at this leap of his imagination. Yet, resist the idea as I might, wasn’t it a possible connection?

“And there was more,” Willie said. “Oh, the id is extremely cunning, that’s one thing we’ve learned, it is poetic and cunning. You don’t know how clever it can be, how the associations leap – I suppose because it’s all open, there’s nothing to block them; and how literal it can be, too.”

Willie brought out his last point, quite casually, the way an actor sometimes throws away his most important line, using reverse emphasis. “If there were no penis at all, wouldn’t it be a girl that he had killed?”

I could, indeed, see how his whole argument came together. If Judd had always wanted to cease being feminine, if this had been his great conflict, if he had wanted to kill a girl symbolically in an act that was self-destruction as all murder is self-destruction, then in this final gesture with the annihilating acid – had he not been doing it? Killing the girl in himself? He had first sought to obliterate identity in the face, so that the child could be himself, and he had then sought to obliterate the male sex. The child, thus, could be representationally himself as a girl, and this child had been placed naked in a womb, returned to pre-birth. And the womb was a sewer – the way he had always thought of females.

If he wished he had never been born – wished he had never been born as a girl kind of boy – then the gesture was complete; he had exorcised the curse on himself. He had become unborn, in the womb of the mother who was in the earth.

And then there came to me the other possibility. If he had destroyed the male element and returned the body to the womb, was it not equally understandable as a way to rectify a mistake, to say that it was as a girl that he really should have been born? There was, indeed, as Willie had said, an incredible cunning, an amazing poetic compression in this way of thinking. For here was the duality of nature symbolized – here was Judd’s conflicting wish to be a boy, to be a girl – expressed in the symbol that could be fitted in either direction!

And would Judd not there, together, have had a seeming solution of both his conflicts, since a girl could not have the mark in the flesh of the Jew? It was both a death gesture, then, and a life gesture that he had made, impelled by a wish for being unborn, and a wish for rebirth.

We walked on silently.

Finally I asked of Willie, “You once thought the killing could have proven a catharsis for him. If they hadn’t been caught.”

Willie said, “In physical infections, the body creates poisons with which to kill the pathology and cure itself. Perhaps so does the psyche.”

Another thought came to me, changing the conception I had had until then of the crime. “Then Judd was not merely Artie’s accomplice. He wasn’t there only because he was in love with Artie. He had to do the murder because of some compulsion in himself. Just the way Artie did.”

“That’s what I think,” Willie said. “Once Artie started them on it.”

Automatically we had turned, to circle back. Willie remarked again about the choice of spot. Wasn’t it there that Judd took his class of children, perhaps literally to watch for a stork, a rare visitant in the Chicago area? And the children must have echoed for Judd his own childhood absorption in the source of the birth mystery. Thus it became inevitable that he should return the child’s body there, almost as though he had delivered his soul to the original source. And what did he lose, there? His glasses, his eyes. He didn’t need to see any more, in the womb or in the tomb.

For me, the depths of Willie’s explanation brought on an oppressive feeling. If something like this were valid, then we were hopelessly driven, in the grasp of such dreadful forces. This was only an elaboration of Wilk’s mechanistic philosophy, with the physiological determinants augmented by the mechanics of psychology and psychoanalysis.

If someone had seen what was happening in Judd, could he not have helped him? Couldn’t a less dangerous form of catharsis have taken place? Hadn’t he been on the verge of emergence into normal relationships with women?

Willie’s mind seemed to have walked with mine. “What became of Ruth?” he asked.

Even then, her name affected me. “I don’t know.”

“Myra was here,” he said.

“In Vienna?”

“She was in analysis.” Suddenly there had come over his face a grin so painful that I was caught in the pain. I wondered if Willie could have been in love with Myra. And only then did I fully see her in her own wretched frenetic prison, another innocent victim of the tragic crime.

Willie continued, with an air of complete control. “I don’t suppose you know you entered into her fantasies. Perhaps at a given moment you could have helped her. She’s gone back to the States.” He added, almost in a mutter, “I think she made a fairly good adjustment.”

When we parted he met my eyes with a kind of furtive look, his mouth grinned, and he turned and strode away.

A few years later, I met Myra in New York. She was a psychiatric social worker, still over-tense. I took her to the theatre, then we went back to her interior-decorated little apartment, filled with modern art; we drank a good deal; she told me all about herself, her affairs – there had even been a brief marriage. So generous, so quick, so filled with the latest things, the newest books, the newest psychoanalytic theories, playing the newest jazz records – boogie-woogie at the time. And always staggering with a host of illnesses and calling them psychosomatic.

She died of cancer. It was in the same year that Artie Straus was murdered, in prison, by a jealous inmate.

During those years I thought occasionally about Willie’s hypothesis. There was, for example, the fact that the burial place, the womblike cistern, was under a railway track. And as the train as a sex symbol became part of our popular vocabulary about dreams and fantasies, I saw a final detail in Judd’s compulsive selection of the place – the ruthless engine of sexuality for ever running over the cistern-image of the mother.

But then I would discard such ideas as intellectual play. In the thirties, in the forties, we elaborated, rather, on economic causation, and the Straus-Steiner case faded from importance.

Yet all this time, the analytical way of thinking had progressed, and today Willie’s hypothesis does not seem particularly bizarre. Nor does it seem so hopeless. For even in this short span of time, a single generation, we have seen some success in the manipulation of the dark forces.

It must seem ironic to speak with an accent of hope, when during these same years we have seen an outbreak of paranoia and a Nietzschean mania connected with the death of millions. Yet today an Artie or a Judd, while still in childhood, might more likely arrive at the desk of a therapist.

Although the alienists of the twenties were careful to predict that this crime in its peculiar form could scarcely be repeated, we have had adolescents in pairs and in larger groups, and also alone, in whom the destructive urges broke through. Perhaps this very pattern of disturbance increases shortly before the controls become generally available, just as the incidence in polio seemed to increase enormously shortly before the preventive vaccine was developed. And I sometimes believe that for me, in a curious way, the case itself served as a vaccine. For there was an incident, or a potential incident. It came during the war.

I married, divorced, and during the war I was a correspondent with the Third Army. It was toward the very end of the war, in the last weeks, that the Steiner-Straus case came finally home to me.

We had crossed the Rhine; we were, in those weeks, all in a state of unrecognized battle shock, a kind of wind-up frenzy, and I, like some other correspondents, rode with a tank column running wild and free across Germany. For jeepmate, I had a daredevil photographer from one of the news weeklies, a man who had jumped with the paratroopers and made something of a legend of himself.

The drive from press camp to the front strung out longer each day, as the tank penetration went into high, and on those long rides, Frank and I took turns driving, and we played a kind of game. It was a game almost all men at war have played. The game was imagining a rape.

It began with tales of G.I.s, of a pair who had somehow ruled a German village for a day and had commanded the mayor to bring them two virgins. And how the townsfolk had finally conceded.

And somehow these tales evolved into a fantasy that we should find us a German girl and rape her. We had had our share of complaisant German girls and chocolate-bar girls, but this idea, this game, persisted, on the pretext that we would not truly have known war or known life until we had given ourselves this ultimate war experience.

Our game consisted in elaborating on the set-up: Some day on a road just opened by the tanks, with the infantry not yet come up to occupy the area, there would appear a lone girl…

The game held us together in a peculiar way. Only far back, in Chicago on my first job on the Globe, had I partnered so well. And here, as in those Chicago days with Tom Daly, it was because I felt my partner to be the real thing, the tough, complete newspaperman.

As for the imaginary game of rape, I told myself it gave vent to hatred burned deep into Frank in those early Normandy days when he had had it rough with his paratroop outfit. He had seen boys picked off while they hung in their caught silk in the trees, and he needed a revengeful release on the krauts.

Then one day we found the ideal situation. It came as we were drawing near the Elbe. Frank and I went a little farther forward than the others had gone. It was a nice open road, and Germans could be seen working in the fields here and there, as though there had never been a war.

As we rounded a bend, we saw a felled tree across the road. We pulled up. And there was a fraulein. She was walking along a field, carrying a lunch basket. She was everything we had specified in our game: young, perhaps seventeen, and very pretty.

Frank shouted, “Halt!” and she halted. “Come here!” She approached. We both got out of the jeep. Only a shallow ditch was between us and the girl. All around, the area was deserted. Moreover, we were beyond the final line; our army would never come here to receive complaints.

“Where are you going?” Frank demanded in pidgin German. She said she was fetching lunch to her father, in the field.

“Have you seen any Russians?”

“No,” she said, trying to keep her air of calm.

Frank looked at me. “This is it,” he said. And he ordered the girl, “Lie down.”

She stared at us.

“Lie down!” he commanded and pulled out his revolver. Though correspondents were not supposed to be armed, most of us carried pistols.

“Nein – nein-” the girl began to stutter.

I felt parched. All these weeks we had been building ourselves to this. Surely we had meant it. Surely I had meant it too.

And at the same time I felt terrified of Frank. He’d do it and then shoot her. I had shared it all the way, goaded him on; I had wanted it, too. And if I stopped him I was a quitter, a coward.

I laughed, a forced laugh. “Can it, Frank. The hell with her,” I said.

He gave me a wild look, as though he would slam me one. The whole thing could just as well have gone the other way. “It isn’t worth it,” I said. “The war’s over.”

He seemed to sway a little. Then he stuck back his revolver. He laughed. The girl gasped, turned and ran. We climbed into the jeep.

After the war I was living in New York, working on the foreign desk of a news service. One evening at a respectable kind of party of United Nations people and such, I met Ruth. She was there with her husband, an economist. She was sitting across the room from me, and for a moment we weren’t sure we recognized each other.

I got up and went to a refreshment table, and presently she stood beside me. “Yes, it’s me,” she said.

She looked nice. That was always the word, a nice girl, a nice woman. It was twenty-five years since I had seen her.

We filled in about our lives. Ruth had two kids in high school.

We didn’t speak of Judd. When the party broke up and we were both at the door in a little crowd, there was a moment of hesitation between us. Looking at her, I was thinking, It could have been. It all could have been. And it could all come back. And I thought, it could even have been, for Judd.

So I said, as she was about to invite me, “I suppose you’re in the phone book. I’ll give you a ring sometime.”

And I tended my job and married again, and we live in Norwalk.

I’m fifty this year. So is Judd Steiner.

So it happened that one day the news came through that Judd was going to have a parole hearing. And somebody around the place, an old-time newsman like myself, said, “Say, weren’t you…”

Later, I recalled Jonathan Wilk saying something about there being no thought of a chance for freedom for those two, “not until they are forty-five or fifty, when they have come into another phase of life”.

My editors put through this assignment for me to go and interview Judd in prison, for after all, perhaps better than anyone else still alive, they said, I knew the story. What I wrote about him, they said, might have a good deal to do with whether or not he would be released.