136 NY 423 (1893)
In Gilded Age New York City, as many as 20 English-language newspapers were on sale each day. The fierce competition for readers contributed to the rise of “yellow journalism,” featuring exaggerated headlines, unverified claims, scandalous and salacious happenings and sensationalized accounts of criminal trials. One of the more sensational “trials of the century” involved a wealthy young medical student, Carlyle Harris, who went to the electric chair for giving his secret teenage bride a fatal overdose of morphine.
A Secret Marriage
On February 8, 1890, Harris and Helen Potts, who was 18 at the time, were secretly married under assumed names without her parents’ knowledge or permission. When Helen became pregnant, Harris, whose studies were focused on gynecology and obstetrics, tried to perform an abortion. The procedure did not go well and Helen, in great discomfort, sought further treatment from her uncle who was a physician in Pennsylvania. Helen’s mother was thus made aware of the secret marriage. She threated to expose Harris and gave him a deadline to remarry his daughter in a public ceremony on the first anniversary of their City Hall marriage. Harris, who was still only 22, greatly feared public disclosure. It would ruin his promising medical career. His wealthy uncle was likely to disinherit him. And Helen was not his first secret bride.
In late January 1891, Harris, who was not yet a doctor, prescribed morphine pills for Helen when she complained of frequent headaches. The pills were supposed to contain four and a half grains of quinine and one-sixth of a gram of morphine. He gave four capsules to Helen. She took three without feeling better and did not want to take the fourth pill, but her mother convinced her to do so.
A Mysterious Death
According to witnesses who saw her on the evening of January 31st, Helen appeared cheerful and in good health while reading in her boarding school’s sitting room. During the night, however, Helen’s roommates awoke to her moaning. Finding her unresponsive, they called the school’s physician, Dr. Fowler, found her in a state of “profound coma.”[1] More doctors were called, and emergency treatments were administered, including hypodermic injections of atropine, caffeine, whiskey and digitalis, but nothing could revive her. Helen died at 11:00 a.m. on February 1st. Dr. Fowler found an empty pill box with the initials, “C. W. H., medical student.” Dr. Fowler sent for Harris who told him that it had contained capsules filled with certain quantities of quinine and morphine. Dr. Fowler told Harris that those quantities could not have produced such profound opium poisoning. He advised Harris to go back to the druggist to see if a mistake had been made in preparing the prescription. Harris reported back that no mistake had been made and that the prescription was prepared exactly as written by him.
The Press Keeps Digging
The coroner’s office concluded that Helen Potts died by morphine poisoning. Even though the circumstances were unusual District Attorney De Lancey Nicoll declined to pursue the case, probably because there had been no investigation at the scene, no autopsy performed and the pillbox with the morphine pills was missing. The case would not die, however, kept alive by suspicious reporters who kept uncovering new details about Harris’s lurid past, including the botched abortion on his young bride, his numerous infidelities, including with the 17-year-old daughter of a wealthy Kansas cattleman, and his involvement in operating an unlicensed gambling club. Though much of this evidence was later deemed inadmissible at trial, it convinced Harris’s lawyers to keep him from taking the stand “for fear that some or all of this would come in by the back door.” [2]
Under pressure from the constant press reports, the D.A.’s office disinterred Helen and performed an autopsy 55 days after her death. Performed by Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton, MD, LLD, FRS,[3] the grandson of founding father Alexander Hamilton and one of the leading “alienists” or psychiatrists of his day, the autopsy confirmed the presence of morphine in Helen’s organs in sufficient quantity to confirm the theory that Harris had spiked the fourth pill with a lethal dose of morphine. On May 13, 1891, Harris was charged with first-degree murder.[4]
Trial of the Century
The trial, which took place before Recorder Frederick Smyth in the Court of General Sessions for the County and City of New York, garnered national headlines and helped launch the careers of two of New York’s most famous prosecutors, Assistant District Attorney Francis L. Wellman, and Harris’s lead defense attorney, William Travers Jerome, who would go on seventeen years later to prosecute Harry Thaw for the murder of Stanford White in yet another “trial of the century.”
The prosecution’s theory was that Harris convinced Helen to secretly marry him because she was determined to remain a virgin until marriage and he could find no other way to sexually seduce her. When Helen’s mother threated to expose Harris he panicked and secretly poisoned his secret bride. The case against Harris was based entirely on circumstantial evidence and featured a battle of competing experts on whether or not the cause of death was a morphine overdose.
The trial was zealously contested. On the first day, while posing a technical medical question, Jerome collapsed from exhaustion and was unable to continue. According to the New York Times, “Mr. Jerome’s voice faltered, and he put his hand to his head. ‘I can’t go on with this case, and I won’t go on,’ he said, ‘while I cannot ask questions and think connectedly. I cannot think. I –’, and with this Mr. Jerome sank into his seat crying.”[5] The judge adjourned the trial until the following Monday. At another point, Wellman and Jerome exchanged angry words in open court and Wellman called his adversary a liar and a “sneak.”[6]
Jerome put on a sophisticated defense premised on scientific evidence suggesting that Helen’s cause of death could not be definitively proven since the symptoms of morphine poisoning were identical to those of uremic poisoning, a kidney disease. Wellman, however, discredited Dr. Horatio Wood, the defense’s main expert, in dramatic style. Dr. Wood opined that dilated pupils were not necessarily associated with every case of morphine overdose since he had heard of a case where only one eye was dilated. Unfortunately for Dr. Wood, Wellman knew that case better than he did. He enlightened Dr. Wood and the jury to the fact that the patient in question had a glass eye.[7]
Sensation-Hunters
The trial was a public spectacle. Hordes of fashionable young women crowded into the courtroom, including “[a] young woman who has been in almost constant attendance on the trial [who] presented a bouquet of violets to Harris.”[8] Harris’s mother, “a very minor celebrity who lectured about temperance and child-raising under the name ‘Hope Ledyard,’”[9] added pathos to the performance, wrapping her arms around her son’s neck at every opportunity while repeatedly kissing him.[10] The New York Times went so far as to publish an editorial decrying the whole scene, especially
the indecent assemblage during the sessions of crowds of well-dressed but ill-behaved women . . . drawn merely by an unwholesome and indecent curiosity for the details of an indecent case. . . . A human being on trial for his life is not properly a source of public entertainment. It appears, however, that there is a considerable number of sensation-hunters among the women of New York who are quite as devoid of womanly feeling as the Spanish women who adore the toreros, or as the Roman vestals who demanded the sacrifice of the Christians.[11]
On February 8, 1892, the second anniversary of his secret marriage to Helen Potts, the jury took just 80 minutes to find Carlyle Harris guilty of first-degree murder. Harris was sentenced to death by electrocution. Harris’s desperate mother hired William F. Howe, the most famous and flamboyant criminal defense lawyer of his day, to secure a reversal on appeal. She did so even though Howe had previously injected himself into the case on behalf of the prosecution, offering Wellman, his frequent adversary, advice on how to conduct his closing statement.[12]
The Court of Appeals and the Power of Circumstantial Evidence
The Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed the judgment of conviction in an opinion by Judge John Gray, an opinion notable for its painstaking review of the factual record and lengthy dissertation on the nature and probative value of circumstantial evidence in criminal cases. Judge Gray did not consider it problematic that the “evidence connecting the accused with the commission of the crime charged was wholly circumstantial” or that there was no eye-witness testimony.
The mind may be reluctant to conclude upon the issue of guilt in criminal cases upon evidence which is not direct and, yet, if the facts brought out, when taken together, all point in the one direction of guilt and to the exclusion of any other hypothesis, there is no substantial reason for that reluctance. Purely circumstantial evidence may be often more satisfactory and a safer form of evidence; for it must rest upon facts, which, to prove the truth of the charge made, must collectively tend to establish the guilt of the accused. . . . . In the evidence of eye-witnesses to prove the facts of an occurrence, we are not guaranteed against mistake and falsehood, or the distortion of truth by exaggeration or prejudice; but when we are dealing with a number of established facts, if, upon arranging, examining and weighing them in our mind, we reach only the conclusion of guilt, the judgment rests upon pillars as substantial and sound as though resting upon the testimony of eye-witnesses. The necessity of a resort to circumstantial evidence in criminal cases is apparent in the nature of things. For a criminal act is sought to be performed in secrecy, and an intending wrongdoer usually chooses his time and an occasion when most favorable to concealment, and sedulously schemes to render detection impossible. All that we should require of circumstantial evidence is that there shall be positive proof of the facts from which the inference of guilt is to be drawn and that that inference is the only one which can reasonably be drawn from those facts.
After reviewing the factual record in the case, “[p]erhaps, at too great [a] length,” Judge Gray could reach “no other conclusion” than that Harris was guilty.
Unable to gratify his passion for [Helen], except by making her a wife, he persuades her to a secret marriage under assumed names. He soon tires of her. He endeavors, unsuccessfully, to remove the fruit of their marriage. . . . When her mother learns of it and presses for a public marriage . . . he prescribes for the deceased a remedy of quinine and morphine in capsules. . . Immediately she sickens and dies, with every symptom of what the physician describes as profound morphine poisoning. . . . In the retention of the capsules for a day, he had the opportunity of substituting in one of them the poisonous dose of morphine. There was motive for the crime in the fear that discovery would inculpate him as a bigamist, because of his previous secret marriages . . . all of this conduct envelopes him with the atmosphere of guilt and is inexplicable except upon the theory of guilt.
The Electric Chair
In a last ditch effort to get a new trial, Howe offered newly-discovered evidence in the form of “affidavits from various witnesses of dubious character”[13] purporting to show that Helen was “a habitual morphine eater, and had died from an overdose administered by her own hand.”[14] In March 1893, Recorder Smyth denied Howe’s motion, branding some of the affidavits as “rank perjury.”[15] Indeed, William Travers Jerome later used one of the perjured affidavits to successfully convict “the previously untouchable Abe Hummel on a charge of perjury” leading to his disbarment.[16]
As Harris awaited his date with the electric chair in Sing Sing his mother started a campaign to save him. She collected 60,000 signatures, enough for Governor Flower to appoint a referee to review the case. However, there was no pardon or commutation for Harris. He was executed on May 8, 1893. “Carlyle Harris’s mother was faithful after death. Into her beloved son’s coffin, she dropped one of the affidavits alleging that Helen Potts was a morphine abuser. And on top of the coffin, she affixed a plaque engraved:
Carlyle W. Harris
Murdered May 8, 1893.”[17]
[1] People v. Harris, 136 NY 423, 430.
[2] Richard H. Underwood, Gaslight Lawyers: Criminal Trials & Exploits in Gilded Age New York, Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2017, at 34.
[3] Fellow of the Royal Society, a prestigious title bestowed on those who have made significant contributions to science, engineering or technology.
[4] Cait Murphy, Scoundrels in Law, Smithsonian Books, 2010, at 81-87.
[5] Opening of the Defense: Carlyle W. Harris’s Answer to the Charge of Murder, New York Times, Jan. 30, 1892
[6] Hot Words in the Court, Lawyers in the Harris Case in a Wrangle – Mr. Wellman Calls Mr. Jerome a Liar, New York Times, Jan. 29, 1892.
[7] Murphy, at 84-85.
[8] New York Times, Jan. 29, 1892.
[9] Murphy, at 82.
[10] New York Times, Jan. 29, 1892.
[11] The Harris Case, New York Times, Feb. 3, 1892.
[12] Underwood, at 34.
[13] Id. at 35.
[14] Harris’s Appeal Denied: Recorder Smyth Refuses Him a New Trial, New York Times, March 17, 1893.
[15] Id.
[16] Underwood, at 34-35.
[17] Murphy, at 87.