“What about the doctor?” asked Swann, referring once again to Cocchi’s insistence that Maria had sought an abortion.
“Mrs. Beck never secured a physician for me on any occasion when I was either pregnant or ill,” Maria said. “She never secured a midwife. I never attempted to abort or cause to be aborted while I was with child.”
As the witnesses left, Swann knew that he would probably never see them again. That thought stayed with him as he himself left the building. That, and a nagging thought that he could not dismiss. How had they missed this? How had they all missed it?
Swann packed up the testimony and ordered it to be sent to Italy. He also wondered, considering how damning this all was, if they weren’t still playing right into Alfredo Cocchi’s hands. It was almost as if Cocchi was prosecuting himself, either to seal his fate in Italy, free of the chair, or to protect someone else. Swann had another piece of new information that he contemplated sending along as well but was uncertain what effect it might have.
In Bologna, the trial of Alfredo Cocchi resumed on October 24, 1920, and lasted four more days. The new testimony had been offered for the record. Though neither state nor federal prosecutors had been able to extradite Cocchi, Swann had finally been allowed to send Owen Bohan, as assistant, to testify to the new information gathered in New York. So, on the last day of the trial, the judge allowed it. Owen didn’t say much. He testified that Cocchi’s wife had been exonerated by the police upon further testimony and was an upstanding member of society. At the end of his statement, Owen also said that Cocchi’s eldest daughter, Georgette, was dead.
The room stopped as everyone turned to look at the prisoner’s face. Cocchi stood alone in the dark prisoner’s cage. He wore a dark suit and was almost completely covered in shadow. His face was nearly white. Someone took a photograph of him.
Cocchi had previously testified that he made his original confession of guilt to protect his beloved wife and children. His second confession was, according to Cocchi, to save his children from his insane wife. Judge Bagnoli scowled. The American, Swann, had affected this trial after all. Owen explained that after a long illness, Georgette Cocchi, Alfredo’s daughter, had died on December 6, 1918, of pneumonia. She was only two years old, having been born right before Ruth Cruger’s murder. Owen added, almost mercilessly, that Athos was doing well at school.
Cocchi collapsed in his cage in the courtroom.
When it was time for the verdict, the judge looked at Cocchi and spoke in Italian. The American reporters and photographers who couldn’t understand the language only knew what happened when Alfredo Cocchi collapsed. Their translators handed them sheets of paper with misspellings. Cocchi was convicted of the attempted rape and murder of Ruth Cruger in New York. In their statement, the judges said that they thought his fury was caused by Ruth’s spurning. They concluded that he killed her to avoid having a witness and getting in trouble. They also convicted him for traveling under a false name. Cocchi’s claim that his wife had done it was ignored utterly.
The Italian criminal code, the Zanardelli Code as it was known, provided strict sentencing guidelines, though the punishment decreased if the crimes were committed abroad. The code demanded 25–30 years for murder. For rape, it suggested one to six years. There were some other reductions and mitigations that had to be quibbled and negotiated over. Signor Venturini was able to take a few years off because of some discrepancies in the language. In the end, Alfredo Cocchi was sentenced to 27 years, 2 months, and 26 days for the murder of Ruth Cruger. Venturini maintained his optimism; he hoped that a future king would pardon his client outright. When Cocchi was taken back to his cell, he went on a hunger strike. For that, he was sentenced to ten years of solitary confinement. He was then allowed in the common prison population, to disappear among the killers and thieves.
In the end, it was determined that there was no vast web of white slavers tailor-made for the newspapers, only deep, unknowable evil, now consigned to a cage.
23
Her Dark Shepherd
In 1919, Grace and Kron were still working together as the New Justice Detective Bureau. Grace had also put together a magazine called New Justice. Its purpose was “to call women citizens to their civic responsibility for young girls in every untoward condition of life.” They charged $1.50 a year for a subscription. In November, the New York Supreme Court, on appeal, ruled on Grace’s suit against Universal Animated Weekly. The court decided that the newsreel she had been featured in was different from a photoplay, another popular genre of the day in which real events were acted out by professional actors in magazines or on film.
A photoplay is inherently a work of fiction. A news reel contains no fiction but shows only actual photographs of current events of public interest. The news reel is taken on the spot, at the very moment of the occurrence depicted, and is an actual photograph of the event itself. The photoplay, as the result of fiction, retains its interest, irrespective of the length of time which has elapsed since its first production, whereas, a news reel, to be of any value in large cities must be published almost simultaneously with the occurrence of the events which it portrays. This news service, as far as it goes, is a truthful, accurate purveyor of news, quite as strictly so as a newspaper. While a newspaper account conveys the news almost entirely by words, the news service conveys the same by photographs with incidental verbal explanation.
If a newsreel was more like a newspaper, then it could print publicly taken photographs without permission. Newspapers were allowed this power because they functioned as the truth of the world. The initial judgment was thus reversed, and Grace was ordered to pay back the damages. The images that were being contested showed Grace walking out of the motorcycle store, smiling and bowing.