After the confession had been signed, Charlie’s mother-in-law came to visit him in jail. She told him that his wife had given birth to a daughter that morning. Charlie was overjoyed. She also told him that Nelson was in jail, too. Charlie was confused and asked her why.
District Attorney Knickerbocker put them both before the grand jury. Nelson Green pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was given life in Elmira. The court had termed him “mentally deficient.” In court, Charlie said he never confessed, but he was still sentenced to die on September 5, 1915. He was taken to Sing Sing—and the Death House—immediately.
Grace read the next part a couple of times. There was some sort of ballistics expert who proved that the bullets were definitely from the nickel-plated, black-handled Young American pistol found in Stielow’s barn. Grace didn’t know how that could be proved, although she wondered why the defense was not allowed to call a refuting expert.
Grace pushed herself back from the overwhelming words and voices on the pages in front of her and wondered why she was here. Like any criminal matter, there were two sides to the case. The bottom line was that Charlie had seemingly been caught by a combination of bad detective work and backstabbing family politics. There might have been some of the third-degree from this Newton character, but there was definitely evidence to convict. She still couldn’t get herself to close everything up. She fished around in the files until she found Charlie’s confession: two pages bursting with cramped black type. She touched the paper in her hands. She knew right then that Charlie Stielow was innocent.
Grace wrapped up the Gennaro Mazella case by successfully knocking him down to a life sentence. She knew that they were cheering in the Death House, as the residents always did when one of their own got off the Last Mile. As Grace thought of that small, dense hallway, cheering and loud, she couldn’t help thinking of the gigantic Stielow and that small note from his daughter. In July, some newspapers reported that Charlie had already gone to the chair. Grace’s breath caught when she heard this, but the papers were wrong. Charlie was still breathing in Sing Sing, though his hours were growing short. She made up her mind. Grace knew that there would be no vacation for her this summer. She was getting used to that.
Grace remembered the Tolla case again and how, in those early years of her career, she had to do everything herself. She was wiser now. She picked up the phone and called David White, Charlie’s young attorney, who, though he had made mistakes in the case, had never given up. White wrote Charlie nearly every day and was working hard to get him a new trial. After getting off the phone with Grace, White then contacted the curly-haired Misha Appelbaum, the outspoken leader of the public-morals group the Humanitarian Cult, which met every two weeks in Carnegie Hall. The group was fiercely against capital punishment and now boasted over 100,000 members after just two years of operation. Grace added her own Stuart Kohn, a sharp lawyer who worked with her, as the new head counsel for the appeal. Their enemies called them the “Emotionalists.”
Grace was flabbergasted that this case had received almost no press coverage outside upstate New York. Grace knew that she would be busy on the ground, so she made a call to a young writer whose work she liked. Sophie Irene Loeb had been writing for the New York Evening World for years, starting with columns about husbands and cooking before running a deep exposé of the lives of New York’s tenement children. Sophie wrote about the heaps of choking dirt and refuse that surrounded these boys and girls like a sprawling monster. Sophie despised inhumanity, in all its ugly forms. She changed welfare laws, wrote news articles, and gave lectures. But she wasn’t like one of the old temperance reformers with their lace and velvet; she was a young divorcé who wore a short hairstyle with pearls and wrote electric sentences. She immediately agreed to join their crusade.
Someone suggested they contact another Humanitarian Cult member, Inez Milholland Boissevain. She was bona fide famous, beautiful, and rich: her father had made his money in the pneumatic tube business. Her true claim to fame was wearing a flowing gown while riding a white horse named Gray Dawn as she led a sea of suffragists at the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson in 1913. She was a member of the radical National Woman’s Party, captain of the hockey team at Vassar, and an outspoken voice for women in America. She got her law degree at the New York University School of Law in 1912 after being rejected by Yale, Harvard, and Cambridge because of her sex. She also famously said that it took only ten minutes a day to complete her housework. Inez worked for a time at Osborne, Lamb, and Garvan, where she had to investigate some of the crueler conditions at Sing Sing. At the time, Inez wanted to see what it felt like to be an inmate, so she had herself handcuffed to one. With their defense team now formed, Grace took off for northwestern New York. She knew that her role in this case was not that of a lawyer. She needed to be the detective.
Grace arrived in Buffalo and took a room at the Iroquois, a stylish hotel done up in the French renaissance style. As soon as she was settled in, Grace set out to investigate what was left of the crime scene. Orleans County in July was full of apple trees, now out of their full bloom but still green and bright. About three miles south of Medina, the largest town in the county, stood the town of Shelby. When Grace finally got there, she counted about a dozen small houses, a grocery store, a saloon, and a church, all placed around four corners, where the two main roads crossed. Grace continued on to a mile-length stretch of road to the town of West Shelby. The houses there, white and flaking, were set at long distances from each other, separated by farmland. There were trees and fields and broken fences.