Beauty Defense

Laura James

Description

Justice is blind, they say, but perhaps not to beauty. In supposedly dispassionate courts of law, attractive women have long avoided punishment, based largely on their looks, for cold-blooded crimes. The Beauty Defense: Femmes Fatales on Trial gathers the true stories of some of the most infamous femmes fatales in criminal history, collected by attorney and true crime historian Laura James.With cases from 1850 to 1997, these 32 examples span more than a century, across cultures, ethnicities, and socioeconomic status. But all were so beautiful, as James demonstrates, that they got away with murder.When Madeline Smith, a Glasgow socialite, tried to end a relationship with one man to date another, her jilted lover proved difficult to shake. She solved the problem, James writes, with arsenic-laced chocolates. And in Warrenton, Virginia, mild-mannered heiress Susan Cummings gunned down her polo-playing boyfriend, Roberto, following a disagreement. While these two women lived in different centuries and on different continents, both of their lawyers argued that they were too beautiful to be killers. And in both cases, the juries bought it.In telling the stories of Madeline Smith and Susan Cummings-and 30 others-James proves the existence of the so-called Beauty Defense and shines a spotlight on how gender bias has actually benefited femmes fatales and affected legal systems across the world.

Sujets

• True crime

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 25 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781631013997
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE BEAUTY DEFENSE
TRUE CRIME HISTORY
Twilight of Innocence: The Disappearance of Beverly Potts · James Jessen Badal
Tracks to Murder · Jonathan Goodman
Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome · Albert Borowitz
Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon · Robin Odell
The Good-bye Door: The Incredible True Story of America’s First Female Serial Killer to Die in the Chair · Diana Britt Franklin
Murder on Several Occasions · Jonathan Goodman
The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories · Elizabeth A. De Wolfe
Lethal Witness: Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Honorary Pathologist · Andrew Rose
Murder of a Journalist: The True Story of the Death of Donald Ring Mellett · Thomas Crowl
Musical Mysteries: From Mozart to John Lennon · Albert Borowitz
The Adventuress: Murder, Blackmail, and Confidence Games in the Gilded Age · Virginia A. McConnell
Queen Victoria’s Stalker: The Strange Case of the Boy Jones · Jan Bondeson
Born to Lose: Stanley B. Hoss and the Crime Spree That Gripped a Nation · James G. Hollock
Murder and Martial Justice: Spying and Retribution in World War II America · Meredith Lentz Adams
The Christmas Murders: Classic Stories of True Crime · Jonathan Goodman
The Supernatural Murders: Classic Stories of True Crime · Jonathan Goodman
Guilty by Popular Demand: A True Story of Small-Town Injustice · Bill Osinski
Nameless Indignities: Unraveling the Mystery of One of Illinois’s Most Infamous Crimes · Susan Elmore
Hauptmann’s Ladder: A Step-by-Step Analysis of the Lindbergh Kidnapping · Richard T. Cahill Jr.
The Lincoln Assassination Riddle: Revisiting the Crime of the Nineteenth Century · Edited by Frank J. Williams and Michael Burkhimer
Death of an Assassin: The True Story of the German Murderer Who Died Defending Robert E. Lee · Ann Marie Ackermann
The Insanity Defense and the Mad Murderess of Shaker Heights: Examining the Trial of Mariann Colby · William L. Tabac
The Belle of Bedford Avenue: The Sensational Brooks-Burns Murder in Turn-of-the-Century New York · Virginia A. McConnell
Six Capsules: The Gilded Age Murder of Helen Potts · George R. Dekle Sr.
A Woman Condemned: The Tragic Case of Anna Antonio · James M. Greiner
Bigamy and Bloodshed: The Scandal of Emma Molloy and the Murder of Sarah Graham · Larry E. Wood
The Beauty Defense: Femmes Fatales on Trial · Laura James
THE BEAUTY DEFENSE
Femmes Fatales on Trial
L AURA J AMES

The Kent State University Press
KENT, OHIO
© 2020 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ISBN 978-1-60635-394-3 Manufactured in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical reviews or articles.
Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
24  23  22  21  20 5  4  3  2  1
FOR JOE, for everything
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Femme Fatale
Beulah Annan
Elvira Barney
Adelaide Bartlett
Countess Linda Murri Bonmartini
Kitty Byron
Florence Carman
Jessie Costello
Susan Cummings
Germaine d’Anglemont
Blanca de Saulles
Pauline Dubuisson
Princess Fahmy
Laura Fair
Annie George
Clara Smith Hamon
Alice Hartley
Claudine Longet
Nellie May Madison
Julia Morrison
Charlotte Nash Nixon-Nirdlinger
Grace V. Nottingham
Madalynne Obenchain
Beatrice Pace
Gertrude Gibson Patterson
Nan Patterson
Alma Rattenbury
Daisy Root
Abe Sada
Madeline Smith
Marguerite Steinheil
Vera Stretz
Countess Marie O’Rourke Tarnovska
Epilogue: The Femme Fatale Lives
Notes
INTRODUCTION
The Femme Fatale
According to an ages-old lex non scripta , beauty alone is an affirmative defense to any criminal charge, even premeditated murder. 1 A seductive woman who is aware of her privilege is dangerous to her lovers. We know her kind from legend, the Bible, fiction, true crime, and film. For four hundred years, we have called her a femme fatale. 2
Some of the ancients believed that beautiful women are venomous, and early stories of the femmes fatales who live and kill among us describe them as literally poisonous. The Greek philosopher Socrates is said to have warned that a beauty’s kiss was deadlier than a spider’s venom. “What do you think you would suffer after kissing someone beautiful? Would you not immediately be a slave rather than free?” asked Socrates. “I counsel you… whenever you see someone beautiful, to flee without looking back.” 3
Classical literature is filled with infectious damsels and dead heroes. “The betrayal of a king or hero by his mistress is, in short, a story both old and popular,” writes historian Wolfgang Lederer, “and many a man has actually lost his life because of it: from Samson who lost his hair and hide through Delilah, to the various victims of Mata Hari and her successors of today…. The ‘demon woman’ is a mythological type, and appears either as the companion of the enemy, or as the seductress of the hero; she sleeps with him—or at least promises to—and kills him.” 4 The old tales always depicted the femme fatale as a grown woman, not a girl. “Since the World began, Lilith has been a mature woman,” observed an aesthete. “In history and literature the Dangerous Woman was always the Older Woman.” 5
Among the faded legends from that ancient time are the stories of immortals who were beautiful and terrible and who were specifically infamous for slaughtering men. They were Medusa, a great beauty before a curse made her visage fatal to men; Circe, who lived in a cave and turned men into swine; the Sirens, whose promising calls led sailors to shipwreck; the Irish goddess Anu, who lived in a cave and ate men alive; Scylla, the six-headed bitch who lived in a cave and ate sailors alive; Lilith, the night demon with a ravenous appetite for men; Kali, the Hindu goddess and slayer of men; and even Aphrodite, otherwise known as Venus. It is easy to forget that the ancient goddess of love and sex also commanded every woman on the island of Lemnos to murder her husband. According to the old stories, they obeyed her command. 6 Cave amantem was the saying of the ancients— of her love, beware.
The Bible also regales us with accounts of toxic beauties, from Eve who tempted Adam to the alluring descendants of Eve. Judith, a beautiful widow, adorned herself with ribbons, rich perfumes, and fine jewels to seduce the enemy’s general Holofernes, and then she beheaded him with his own sword. Delilah bewitched and then betrayed her lover Samson to the Philistines for twelve hundred pieces of silver, becoming a wealthy woman. Salome danced for Herod and demanded the head of John the Baptist, murdering by proxy with sex appeal alone. They have served ever since as synonyms for fatally seductive women and as the muses of innumerable artists, immortalized in oil by the likes of Caravaggio, Klimt, Rubens, and so many others drawn to the junction of beauty and bloodshed.

Samson and Delilah by Peter Paul Rubens (1609). (Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)
As wicked and fascinating as these legendary women have always been, the most frightening examples of the “fairer sex” are to be found not in old stories but in the case law. Our collective legal history teems with larger-than-life women who committed outrageous acts and whose good looks are the only explanation for the illogical outcomes of their cases.
CITY OF ATHENS VS. PHRYNE (336 BC)
First Recorded Instance of a Successful Beauty Defense
Modern historians assure us this old trial report is probably true. In Athens, Greece, twenty-four hundred years ago, Phryne, thirty-five, a famous courtisane , which we can generously translate as a woman of many lovers, was charged with impiety and put on trial. The mandatory penalty was death. The case went badly for Phryne. When it became apparent that she may lose her life, her attorney Hypereides, who was also one of her many lovers, took desperate measures. She had no other defense. He pulled off her robe under which she wore nothing and showed the judges her beauty bare. Silently pleading on behalf of all mankind, he studied the reaction of the officials to the sight of Phryne’s body. Moved by her, undoubtedly experiencing émotions complexes , officially moved by pity, the judges acquitted the lovely defendant.
The legend of Phryne’s physical form survives today in oil and marble. Botticelli and many others have painted her, and she was rumored to be the inspiration for the most famous sculpture of Aphrodite, goddess of love (and, lest we forget, goddess of husband-slaughtering). In more literate times, her name was a euphemism for nudity; one could be said to appear “as Phryne before the elders.” 7 In criminal history, she serves as a symbol of that barest of defenses—feminine attractiveness.

Oedipus and the Sphinx by Gustave Moreau (1864). (Public domain, via Creative Commons.)
Thousands of years later, a lawyer in France rested a light hand on the shoulder of a certain American stunner to be named later. Turning to the men in the jury box, he declared, “Elle est trop belle pour tre mauvais” (she is too beautiful to be bad). He did not have to disrobe her to make his point. The jury indeed acquitted her of fatally shooting her husband.
The sordid story of a lovely woman, a weapon, a dead man, and an acquittal has played itself out in courtrooms across the globe, on front pages around the world, for generations. Regardless of evidence, burdens of proof, and jury instructions in a supposedly dispassionate court of law, justice is not blind to beauty. Even in a trial concerning the coldblooded, premeditated murder of another human being, it is the defendant’s looks, good or bad, that are judged first. If she is pretty, jurors will hear her out and even want to believe her; if she is ugly, they will hear both sides.