The Soiled Dove Plea

One morning in 1899, accused Oklahoma prostitute Minnie Stacey was scheduled for trial when the judge found that she had neither an attorney nor the money to hire one. Attorney Temple Lea Houston agreed to defend her and delivered this speech extemporaneously:

Gentlemen of the jury: You heard with what cold cruelty the prosecution referred to the sins of this woman, as if her condition were of her own preference. The evidence has painted you a picture of her life and surroundings. Do you think that they were embraced of her own choosing? Do you think that she willingly embraced a life so revolting and horrible? Ah, no! Gentlemen, one of our own sex was the author of her ruin, more to blame than she.

Then let us judge her gently. What could be more pathetic than the spectacle she presents? An immortal soul in ruin! Where the star of purity once glittered on her girlish brow, burning shame has set its seal and forever. And only a moment ago, they reproached her for the depths to which she had sunk, the company she kept, the life she led. Now, what else is left her? Where can she go and her sin not pursue her? Gentlemen, the very promises of God are denied her. He said: ‘Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.’ She has indeed labored, and is heavily laden, but if, at this instant she were to kneel before us all and confess to her Redeemer and beseech His tender mercies, where is the church that would receive her? And even if they accepted her, when she passed the portals to worship and to claim her rest, scorn and mockery would greet her; those she met would gather around them their spirits the more closely to avoid the pollution of her touch. And would you tell me a single employment where she can realize ‘Give us our daily bread?’

Our sex wrecked her once pure life. Her own sex shrink from her as they would the pestilence. Society has reared its relentless walls against her, and only in the friendly shelter of the grave can her betrayed and broken heart ever find the Redeemer’s promised rest.

They told you of her assumed names, as fleeting as the shadows on the walls, of her sins, her habits, but they never told you of her sorrows, and who shall tell what her heart, sinful though it may be, now feels? When the remembered voices of mother and sisters, whom she must see no more on this earth, fall again like music on her erring soul, and she prays God that she could only return, and must not — no — not in this life, for the seducer has destroyed the soul.

You know the story of the prodigal son, but he was a son. He was one of us, like her destroyers; but for the prodigal daughter there is no return. Were she with her wasted form and bleeding feet to drag herself back to home, she, the fallen and the lost, which would be her welcome? Oh, consider this when you come to decide her guilt, for she is before us and we must judge her. They (the prosecution) sneer and scoff at her. One should respect her grief, and I tell you that there reigns over her penitent and chastened spirit a desolation now that none, no, none but the Searcher of all hearts can ever know.

None of us are utterly evil, and I remember that when the Saffron Scourge swept over the city of Memphis in 1878, a courtesan there opened wide the doors of her gilded palace of sin to admit the sufferers, and when the scythe of the Reaper swung fast and pitiless, she was angelic in her ministering. Death called her in the midst of her mercies, and she went to join those she tried to save. She, like those the Lord forgave, was a sinner, and yet I believe that in the days of reckoning her judgment will be lighter than those who would prosecute and seek to drive off the earth such poor unfortunates as her whom you are to judge.

They wish to fine this woman and make her leave. They wish to wring from the wages of her shame the price of this meditated injustice; to take from her the little money she might have — and God knows, gentlemen, it came hard enough. The old Jewish law told you that the price of a dog, nor the hire of such as she, should come not within the house of the Lord, and I say unto you that our justice, fitly symbolized by this woman’s form, does not ask that you add to the woes of this unhappy one, one only asks at your hands the pitiful privilege of being left alone.

The Master, while on Earth, while He spake in wrath and rebuke to the kings and rulers, never reproached one of these. One he forgave. Another he acquitted. You remember both — and now looking upon this friendless outcast, if any of you can say to her, ‘I am holier than thou’ in the respect which she is charged with sinning, who is he? The Jews who brought the woman before the Savior have been held up to execution for two thousand years. I always respected them. A man who will yield to the reproaches of his conscience as they did has the element of good in him, but the modern hypocrite has no such compunctions. If the prosecutors of the woman whom you are trying had brought her before the Savior, they would have accepted His challenge and each one gathered a rock and stoned her, in the twinkling of an eye. No, Gentlemen, do as your Master did twice under the same circumstances that surround you. Tell her to go in peace.

The all-male jury voted to acquit Stacey as soon as they reached the jury room. Some trial attorneys still cite Houston’s “plea for a fallen woman” as the perfect closing argument.

Puppy Love

Con man Joseph Weil once paid a Chicago bartender $10 to watch his dog, saying he had an urgent business meeting. He told him it was a pedigreed hunting dog. He then sent in a confederate, who admired the dog and offered to pay the barman $300 for it. When the bartender said he was only watching it, the confederate left him with a phone number, asking him to call if the dog’s owner proved willing to sell it.

Weil returned, looking downcast and saying that his business deal had fallen through. Sensing an opportunity, the bartender offered to buy the dog for $250. Weil declined at first, but the barman persisted, and eventually the deal was struck. Weil departed with the money, the phone number turned out to be fake, and the dog was an unsaleable mutt.

Weil claimed to have earned $8 million over the years in schemes defrauding greedy gamblers and stock manipulators. “Each of my victims had larceny in his heart,” he wrote. “I never fleeced anyone who could not afford to pay my price for a lesson in honesty.”

July 24, 2025July 23, 2025 | Crime

The Gentleman Highwayman

In “Short Notes of My Life,” Horace Walpole records an alarming experience:

One night in the beginning of November, 1749, as I was returning from Holland House by moonlight, about ten at night, I was attacked by two highwaymen in Hyde Park, and the pistol of one of them going off accidentally, razed the skin under my eye, left some marks of shot on my face, and stunned me. The ball went through the top of the chariot, and if I had sat an inch nearer to the left side, must have gone through my head.

After an account of the robbery appeared in the London Evening Post, he received a letter:

Sir: seeing an advertisement in the papers of to Day giveing an account of your being Rob’d by two Highway men on wedensday night last in Hyde Parke and during the time a Pistol being fired whether Intended or Accidentally was Doubtfull Oblidges Us to take this Method of assureing you that it was the latter and by no means Design’d Either to hurt or frighten you for tho’ we are Reduced by the misfortunes of the world and obliged to have Recourse to this method getting money Yet we have Humanity Enough not to take any body’s life where there is Not a Nessecety for it.

The highwayman returned Walpole’s belongings in exchange for the reward that had been offered. He turned out to be James MacLaine, second son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, who had turned to crime after his wife’s death. Over the course of six months, he and his accomplices committed 20 highway robberies, wearing Venetian masks and treating their victims with courtesy. When MacLaine was captured the following year, Walpole refused to appear against him, and when he was condemned Walpole noted that 3,000 people went to see him in his cell at Newgate.

January 16, 2025January 15, 2025 | Crime

A Pirate’s Credo

Cruising off Rhode Island in 1717, pirate Samuel Bellamy plundered a Boston sloop and granted his crew’s wish to sink her. Before putting the captain ashore, Bellamy told him:

I am sorry they won’t let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do any one a mischief, when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we must sink her, and she might be of use to you. Though you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye altogether: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment?

The captain replied that his conscience forbade him to break the laws of God or man. Bellamy returned, “You are a devilish conscience rascal! I am a free prince, and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a hundred sail of ships at sea and an army of 100,000 men in the field; and this my conscience tells me! But there is no arguing with such snivelling puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure.”

(From Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, 1724.)

January 6, 2025January 5, 2025 | Crime · Society

Two Dire Punishments

Under Roman law, subjects found guilty of patricide were subjected to poena cullei, the “penalty of the sack” — they were sewn into a leather sack with a snake, a cock, a monkey, and a dog and thrown into water.

In his Life of Artaxerxes, Plutarch describes an ancient Persian method of execution known as scaphism in which vermin devour a victim trapped between mated boats:

Taking two boats framed exactly to fit and answer each other, they lie down in one of them the malefactor that suffers, upon his back; then, covering it with the other, and so setting them together that the head, hands, and feet of him are left outside, and the rest of his body lies shut up within, then forcing him to ingest a mixture of milk and honey before pouring all over his face and body. They then keep his face continually turned towards the sun; and it becomes completely covered up and hidden by the multitude of flies that settle on it. And as within the boats he does what those that eat and drink must needs do, creeping things and vermin spring out of the corruption and rottenness of the excrement, and these entering into the bowels of him, his body is consumed.

Happily Plutarch seems to have based his account on a report by the Greek historian Ctesias, whose reliability has been questioned, so perhaps this never happened.

October 3, 2024October 3, 2024 | Crime · Death · History

To Whom It May Concern

After his Connecticut home was burgled in September 1908, Mark Twain posted a sign on the front door:

NOTICE

To the Next Burglar

There is nothing but plated ware in this house now and henceforth.

You will find it in that brass thing in the dining-room over in the corner by the basket of kittens.

If you want the basket put the kittens in the brass thing.

Do not make a noise — it disturbs the family.

You will find rubbers in the front hall by that thing which has the umbrellas in it, chiffonier, I think they call it, or pergola, or something like that.

Please close the door when you go away!

Very truly yours,

S.L. Clemens

July 30, 2024July 29, 2024 | Crime · Literature

Moonlighting

In 1788, when two thieves were arrested for robbing an Edinburgh excise office, they identified a surprising accomplice — William Brodie, a respected city councilor and president of a local trade guild.

Brodie had been leading a double life, using his day job as a cabinetmaker and locksmith to learn about residents’ security practices and to make copies of their keys, then becoming a housebreaker by night, robbing the same customers.

It appears he’d kept this up for 20 years. He was using the proceeds of the burglaries to fund a gambling career and to support five children he’d had by two different mistresses.

After the discovery he fled, but the authorities caught up to him in Amsterdam as he prepared to leave for America.

He was hanged before a crowd of 40,000 people, and his double identity helped inspire Robert Louis Stevenson to write Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

March 20, 2024March 19, 2024 | Crime

A Typographical Banknote

In 1819, as the Bank of England struggled against counterfeiters, T.C. Hansard proposed a note that combined such a variety of typefaces that a lone forger couldn’t hope to duplicate it — the faces descended all the way to Diamond, the smallest available, and the bottom of each note would be filled with 140 lines of fine print containing hidden “private marks,” such as individual letters printed in italic or small capitals.

To create even the authentic version would have required a team of 20 people, from punchcutters to engine makers, to fulfill the typographical and other design flourishes. Hansard estimated that producing the first note would have cost as much as £2,000 and taken up to a year, “but after that the production will be so rapid, that with the labour of four Men only, without the assistance of any Steam Machinery, 40,000 Notes may be produced in a Day of the finest Workmanship, at the Expense, including Paper, of Half a Farthing each Note.”

In the end the proposal wasn’t adopted — small notes were withdrawn from circulation in 1821, and the search was dropped.

(Virginia Hewitt, “Beware of Imitations: The Campaign for a New Bank of England Note, 1797-1821,” Numismatic Chronicle 158 [1998], 197-222.)

March 7, 2024March 6, 2024 | Crime · History · Technology

Shop Talk

An odd little item from the New Zealand Police Gazette, Sept. 20, 1893:

Christchurch. — William Strange and Co. report that between the 2nd and 4th instant their premises were broken into, and a determined but unsuccessful attempt made to break open the safe, the words ‘No time and little room; bad luck’ being written thereon with a piece of candle by the offenders. Nothing stolen.

The Strand reported that the photograph was “taken by a burglar, and subsequently sent to the makers of the safe that resisted his efforts.”

March 1, 2024February 29, 2024 | Crime

Sweet Dreams

In an 1894 feature on peculiar furniture, the Strand describes a “suffocating bedstead” used to dispatch unwitting inn guests in the days of coach travel:

Nothing whatever of a suspicious character revealed itself to the eye of the wayfarer, yet when the scoundrel who meditated crime had satisfied himself that the man slept, he would quickly lower an interior portion of the canopy of the bedstead, firmly imprisoning him in an air-tight cavity until suffocation ensued. Struggling and shouting would be useless under such circumstances, as the weight of the box would be tremendous.

This recalls Wilkie Collins’ 1852 story “A Terribly Strange Bed,” in which a visitor at a Paris gambling house realizes the canopy over his bed is moving:

It descended — the whole canopy, with the fringe round it, came down — down — close down; so close that there was not room now to squeeze my finger between the bed-top and the bed. I felt at the sides, and discovered that what had appeared to me from beneath to be the ordinary light canopy of a four-post bed was in reality a thick, broad mattress, the substance of which was concealed by the valance and its fringe. I looked up and saw the four posts rising hideously bare. In the middle of the bed-top was a huge wooden screw that had evidently worked it down through a hole in the ceiling, just as ordinary presses are worked down on the substance selected for compression.

In his preface to the collection in which that story appears, Collins claims that it’s “entirely of my own imagining, constructing, and writing” but credits painter W.S. Herrick for “the curious and interesting facts” on which it’s based. The Strand article, published 40 years later, doesn’t mention Collins, but perhaps the idea had entered English folklore by that point. Or maybe it’s true!

February 20, 2024February 19, 2024 | Crime · Literature · Oddities