“Your Honor, I humbly apologize to you. It is the first time in a practice of thirty-five years that I have allowed my temper to get the best of me in court.”
The last person to be tried was the biggest fish, Captain Cooper, the former head of the Fourth Branch detectives. On August 3, 1917, Cooper had been indicted by the grand jury. Judge McIntyre fixed bail at one thousand dollars. When the trial phase began, only one juror was selected when Justice Goff declared, at the request of Osborne, that he was sure there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Cooper. The judge dismissed the indictment against him.
On April 18, 1918, John Lagarenne, the only one to be convicted, went before Justice Goff for sentencing. Lagarenne was offered the choice between a $250 fine and 250 days in jail. John Lagarenne paid the money and was released. When the final bill for the investigation came out of the comptroller’s office, the district attorney had spent $7,302.01 for “Special Expenses in Connection with the Murder of Ruth Cruger.”
That same month, in a different courtroom in Baltimore, John Snowden was found guilty of murdering Lottie May Brandon. The jury deliberated for thirty-five minutes. Snowden, who had never once confessed, nearly collapsed in court at the verdict. The judge waited a week to sentence him in hopes that the volatile atmosphere of marchers and crowds would settle down. Neither the Times nor the Post ran the story on the first page in an attempt to defuse a violent reaction. On February 13, 1918, Snowden was sentenced by Judge Duncan to hang. The governor would fix the date.
By October, the case finally reached the court of appeals. It is there that the world finally heard Val Brandon’s full story. On that fateful day, Val took the ferry from the experimental navy station, walked through the front door of his home, and whistled. There was no response, so he walked through and went into the bedroom. He saw his wife on the bed. Already seven months pregnant, she was lying on her side. He called her name, but there was no answer. He began to worry if she was sick or had fainted, so he walked up to her and touched her shoulder. She still didn’t say anything. All of the shades were drawn. He left the room, then the house, and went to the neighbor’s house.
From there, Val went down to the bakery, where they tried to telephone for a doctor, without luck. Val then ran into a Mr. O’Neill, who went to go get a doctor. O’Neill told Val to go back to his house and wait. By the time Val arrived at his home, the doctor had just arrived.
“Did you see your wife after that?” the prosecutor asked.
“Not until late that evening. I got in there, and the doctor went in to the middle room and shut the door and left me in the front room with some of the neighbors; I didn’t know really what happened until late that night when several detectives came around and took me with them and I identified the body of my wife.”
“You didn’t lift her up to see whether she was fainting or she was dead?”
“No, sir.”
“That is all you did, laid your hand on her shoulder?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That was as far as you went?”
After receiving no answer, the prosecutor resumed his questioning. “On Tuesday night after you retired, it has been testified you had intercourse with your wife. What did you do after that intercourse? What was done, what did your wife do?”
“She got up right away and went out in the other room,” Val said, his eyes downward.
“What did she do?”
“Well, she didn’t tell me what she was doing, but I know what she was doing.”
On February 22, Governor Harrington said that he would meet with any last-minute petitioners at eleven o’clock in his office. All other appeals had failed; only a single man’s mercy remained. Somewhere between two hundred and four hundred people showed up, many with signs and song. All of the jurors who convicted Snowden, save one, were present, having signed a petition for his release. Sixty leading white businessmen signed the same document and stood out in front with the crowd. A band played gospel music outside.
Ella Rush Murray was there too, as well as the mother of the two girls who were the key witnesses, Edith Creditt and Mary Perkins, who had since moved from the area altogether, having become scared for their safety. Murray had changed her mind about Snowden and now wanted him freed. Grace was there as well, though not as a reporter or as an ad hoc detective. She wanted Snowden—the man she had helped convict—to be freed.
Snowden’s sentence weighed heavily on Grace because she knew she had helped put him there mostly through circumstantial evidence. So she had returned to Baltimore to do the thing she did best—set the dead free. She had been working on the case since she last left Washington. But Grace had something more than argument; she had new evidence about the Brandon marriage. Grace had knowledge of a “mysterious friend” and an alleged confession by Val Brandon that was overheard as he was dreaming.
Governor Harrington listened to Grace. But he still believed that the case was simple at heart. “I was inclined to think it was robbery,” he said, “and for that purpose the woman’s stockings were taken off, believing that she kept her money in her stocking and that coming into contact with the white woman’s flesh aroused the beast within him and he committed the greater crimes, murder and rape. He has had a fair trial,” the governor said. “It is not up to me to try this case. I will not interfere.”
On February 27, the night before the scheduled execution, two companies of infantry with fixed bayonets, ordered up by the governor, appeared at the jail to patrol any unruly crowds. The city was under martial law. Snowden had only been to school for six months of his life. Earlier that day, the sheriff passed out white tickets of admission to anyone who wanted to witness the hanging of John Snowden at daylight. Inside his cell, Snowden was still proclaiming his innocence, meekly and quietly.
Grace was still trying a full range of legal tactics, but the governor was unswayed.
“I am firmly convinced of Snowden’s guilt,” he said, “and you can appeal to me until Doomsday for ‘clemency’ and you will not get it. I wish that my lips were unsealed and I could tell you all I know, and they will be unsealed if necessary.”