Chapter XV: A “lifer” in Sing Sing

The amazing part of my story is that I am alive to relate it. I have often asked myself how it happened that I did not finish what I set out to do, and I am sure that this thought must have been even more puzzling to my friends and probably to nearly all who read this. Some considerate persons have tried to convince me that God had a purpose in prolonging my life, but I wonder what the purpose could be, other than to give me opportunity for repentance. Life seems so bleak and useless when one is in prison.

It has been said by others that after taking the life of my wife I lacked the fortitude to kill myself. The assumption is justifiable, but it is untrue. With nothing left to live for, it was easy to die. It required far greater courage voluntarily to walk into a police station and deliver myself into custody, knowing what it would mean to me and what I must go through when once I was made a prisoner. There were two loaded revolvers in my pocket. I had but to press the trigger of one and in the fraction of a second I would be beyond the reach of human punishment.

When I gave myself up to the police I realized as vividly as I ever realized any act of my life, that I would be put in prison, placed on trial and convicted, and that I would have to go through the ordeal of ignominious death by legal execution. The thought that I might escape the electric chair and spend the remainder of my life in prison, never came to me. I believed when I walked into the police station that but little time would elapse before I would be put to death. Had I thought otherwise, I would surely have chosen the easier way.

Whatever my mental condition may have been a few hours earlier, my mind at this time was perfectly clear. I had come to myself and I knew what I was doing. At the time of the tragedy I had scarcely slept for more than a week. My nerves were unstrung and there was a prickling sensation as if my brain was being tortured with red hot needles. I felt that I was going mad and I was fearful that insanity might so twist my brain that I would be unable to carry out what I had planned to do. What if I became insane and killed myself and left my wife alone in the world, without relatives or friends, to suffer and starve, after all her loving devotion through our long married life. This thought was a constant torment. I wonder now how I ever remained sane.

My wife never knew that the man she loved killed her. She died while peacefully asleep. That is all the consolation I shall ever have and it makes easier to bear what I must face as long as I live. It would have been horrible if she had known.

Had death come to her instantly, I would now be lying by her side in Glenwood Cemetery at Washington. She lingered for two hours, unconscious and without pain. Had I killed myself while she were yet alive and she had survived, all that I sacrificed to save her from penury and want would have been in vain. I did not dare end my own life while she breathed. So I knelt by her side, her hand in mine, and prayed that God would understand and forgive. When her life fluttered and went out, there came to me a strange exaltation and with it all the worries that had been tormenting me faded into nothingness. I had nothing more to worry about. No harm could ever befall her. Then my brain went dead.

What happened immediately afterward I but dimly remember. I have tried to piece together what I did throughout that day and all of the night but it is like trying to gather the elusive threads of a fast-fading dream. I left our hotel to go into Central Park and finish there what was in my mind to do.

Then came delusions. It seemed to me that no matter where I went there were hundreds of outstretched hands waiting to snatch my weapon and prevent me from carrying out my purpose. I now realize that these fancies were vagaries of an overwrought brain. I grew numb, insensate. All day and all night I rode about the city on elevated trains and in the subways. I went over to Brooklyn and sat for hours in Prospect Park, waiting for the crowds that seemed to surround me to go away and give me a chance to die. In the blackness of the night I found myself trying to get into Bronx Park. It was raining and at the sound of a footstep I fled in terror, lest a policeman seize me and take away my weapons. No thought of arrest for what I had done came to me. I thought only that an encounter with a policeman would result in the loss of my two revolvers and that I should then be without the means of destroying my life.

Throughout the night I rode up and down in the subway, from end to end and back again, crouched in a seat at the end of a car. I fancied myself dead and that it was the shell of what once was me that sat so silent and still in a subway train. It was as if I were in a trance. My hands were like lumps of ice. The blood in my body seemed frozen. For hours I couldn’t even think. I had no sensation of thirst or hunger. I just rode on and on like a dead man might.

In the early morning I got off at a station and went to a lavatory. A boy was opening a bundle of papers when I came out. I bought one and got on a train to go to my office, just as I had done every morning at that hour for more than twenty years. I read all of the war news on the front page. When I turned to the inside a headline glared at me. My eyes were fascinated with the horror it told. In black type at the top of the page was:

“CHARLES CHAPIN WANTED FOR MURDER!”

Then it all came back. I wasn’t dead; I was alive and was wanted by the police for murder! How many headlines like that I had written in my forty years as a newspaper man! And now it was me who was wanted for murder. I got off the train at the next stop and made for the nearest police station. A voice within kept urging me to kill myself while opportunity remained, but I deliberately walked to the station house, placed my two revolvers before the astonished eyes of the officer in charge and told him my name and why I was there. He looked at me as though he thought I was crazy.

An hour later, at Police Headquarters, I made as complete a statement as my shattered nerves would permit to an assistant district attorney and a group of police officials. They warned me that anything I told them might be used against me in court, but I had nothing to withhold and no defense to offer for what I had done. I was ready to receive the punishment the law demands and told them so. I was never more unafraid in my life. Before night I was in a cell in the Tombs, a watchful guard at the barred door to prevent me from cheating the executioner. A bright light was kept shining on me throughout the night, for I was under “observation” in “Murderers’ Row.”

Many lawyers called next day to tender their services. Some were old friends and they generously offered me financial aid as well as legal. I wanted nothing of them and told them so. I wanted only to be left alone and to let the law finish me as quickly as possible. Hundreds of letters and telegrams came. Many asked why I had not let them know of my financial difficulties. “I would gladly have paid your debts twice over had you come to me,” I read in some of the letters. The offers came too late, for the one worth saving was beyond human aid and I was a murderer.

When I was arraigned in court I asked the District Attorney if he would obtain consent for me to attend my wife’s funeral, pledging in return for this one favor that I would waive all formalities of trial and save the State from further expense in expediting my execution.

It may seem strange, in view of the fact that a newspaper man is supposed to know about such things, that I was unaware that a prisoner charged with a capital offense is not permitted to plead guilty. Whether he wishes to or not, a plea of “not guilty” must be arbitrarily entered and it is then incumbent upon the prosecuting attorney to prove him guilty. Could I have had my way, there would have been nothing to do in disposing of my case but to sentence me. The executioner would have attended to the rest.

When a plea to the indictment had been entered and I was remanded to the Tombs, a newspaper friend brought Abe Levy to see me. I had known him for twenty years as one of the ablest criminal lawyers in New York and he and I had had many a wordy scrap when he fancied that something our paper printed was detrimental to his client, for Levy is a zealous champion of every man whose defense he undertakes. I explained to him that I had no means to employ counsel and that I wished for none, as I had no intention of making any defense when my case was called for trial. I further told him that after the prosecution presented a prima facie case against me, which would occupy but a few minutes, I expected to announce to the court that I had no witnesses in my behalf and no defense to offer.

“And then what?” asked the lawyer.

“The judge will sentence me and my troubles will soon be over.”

“And do you think there is a judge in our Criminal Courts who would permit you to do such a thing? If there is, the Court of Appeals would surely not tolerate it. Now, you do need a lawyer and you need one very much, and at the request of many of your friends I am going to act in your behalf, not for any fee, however, for I want none. I look upon it as a sacred duty to save you from yourself.”

I was much distressed the following day to learn that my counsel had appeared in court to ask for the appointment of a commission to inquire into my sanity, although I was much gratified when told that Justice Malone had appointed three men of the highest integrity to preside at the hearing. They were George W. Wickersham, formerly United States Attorney General; Lamar Hardy, Corporation Counsel of New York during the administration of Mayor John Purroy Mitchel; and Dr. Jelliffe, a famous specialist in mental diseases. I knew that these men would not permit me to be railroaded to an asylum for the insane. I further realized that no matter which way they reported to the court, their finding would be above criticism. I shall always feel grateful to these important men who gave up their valuable time and listened so patiently to the great mass of testimony that was presented by my indefatigable counsel.

I sat a silent spectator at the sessions of the Commission and attentively listened to well-meaning friends and my former office associates testify to everything they could conjure from their resourceful memories that would help to prove me irresponsible. Every little act of mine that could in any way be twisted into an indication of an insane mind was dug up and elaborated, until they got me to wondering whether I was a moral idiot, a paranoiac, or just an ordinary unclassified lunatic.

It seemed to me that in all my life I had never heard so much unconscious perjury. One reporter interpreted as an indication of a deranged mind that many of his political items went into my waste basket. Another that I would rush to a telephone booth while he was conversing with me. I didn’t explain that I went into a telephone booth because there was an irate creditor on the wire and that I did not wish others in the office to hear what I said to him. A cub reporter was sure that I was crazy because I gave him tickets to a banquet and told him to go there and enjoy himself, but only as a guest, as another reporter had been assigned to write about it. Four famous specialists told of interviewing me in the Tombs on several occasions and of their explorations into my anatomy in search of bugs. One took as an indication of paresis that I joked with him and smoked a cigar while he bored into my spinal column and drew from it two tubes of fluid for laboratory analysis.

There was a doctor in the Tombs who is supposed to minister to sick prisoners. He came to my cell and tried to win my confidence by telling how he had hurried back from his vacation when he learned that I was there and in need of medical attention. He bobbed up at the hearing as a witness. I heard him proclaim himself an insanity expert and I thought I detected a smile of derision on the countenance of Dr. Jelliffe, one of the most celebrated of insanity experts, and if I read his thoughts aright he was mentally exclaiming, “You poor fish!” To the astonishment of everyone present and plainly to the disgust of the three gentlemen who were presiding, the doctor drew from his pocket a voluminous manuscript which purported to contain a report of every word that had passed between himself and me during the many visits he had made to my cell in his capacity of physician. I had always talked freely with him. It now developed that every time he talked with me he went straight to his office and wrote out for the District Attorney’s use all he could recall of our conversation. He had a treacherous memory. What he failed to remember he filled in from imagination. For this service he earned an extra fee of fifty dollars.

When he had finished reading his manuscript he passed it over to the District Attorney and it was put in a portfolio with other papers. Confessedly, the doctor was less of a physician than he was “stool pigeon” for the District Attorney. There was nothing that he could testify to that could harm me, for I was beyond any harm he could do and, besides, I courted the worst that could possibly befall me. But I shudder when I think of the incalculable injury he may do to others by prostituting his calling as he did in my case. Dr. Jelliffe took him in hand after the manuscript had been read and interpolated with theories and opinions, and what he didn’t do to him in the way of showing up his ignorance and bumptious pretension, was because Dr. Jelliffe grew tired of his own ruthlessness.

The witness who most interested me was Katie. She testified that she had been my wife’s personal maid for eighteen years and in all that time she could not recall having heard me utter so much as a cross word. “He was her constant and devoted companion,” said Katie, “more like a lover than a husband.” Katie said a lot of nice things about me and so did the intimate women friends of my wife. Their testimony convinced everyone present that there was no motive connected with the tragedy other than was shown in my own frank statement.

The hearing dragged along for nearly four months. Sometimes there would be an interruption for several weeks, because of the illness of someone, or some other would be importantly engaged elsewhere. Nearly a thousand pages of typewritten testimony were taken. I was on the witness stand for seven hours, telling as connectedly as I could all of the circumstances that led up to the tragedy. I made no attempt to justify my act or to give my hearers the impression that I was in any way irresponsible. On the contrary, I did everything I could to defeat what my able and resourceful counsel was so ingeniously trying to accomplish. And I succeeded. When I had finished telling my story the District Attorney was so well satisfied that out of my own mouth I had proven my sanity that he announced that he would call no witnesses. He didn’t even review the testimony that had been given or address the Commission. Mr. Wickersham personally wrote the report of the Commission, which I was afterward privileged to read. It was an ably constructed document of nearly forty pages and summed up my case with remarkably clear understanding. It was fair, logical and not without sympathy. I marvel that anyone could have come so close to my own appraisal of what I did. The finding declared me legally responsible. Dr. Jelliffe injected into it an inference that although legally sane I was medically insane, a distinction without much difference. These dear old doctors, bless their souls, whenever they delve profoundly into psychiatry, get so they “kid” themselves into believing that almost everyone except themselves is a “bug.”

I recall one question that Mr. Wickersham put to me while I was testifying that perplexed me beyond reply. It was: “You believe in God and in His watchful care and mercy. If you had killed yourself and not your wife, haven’t you enough faith to believe that God would have looked after your wife and provided for her wants?”

When the question was asked there flashed through my mind the vivid picture of the little old woman in black who tremblingly stretched out her hand for alms that last Sunday morning when my wife and I were starting for Brighton Beach. No doubt she had faith in God and often went on her knees to Him for help and strength, yet there she was in her dire extremity of keeping body and soul together, a poor little beggar in the streets of a cold and pitiless city. Truly, the inscrutable working of the Divine mind is beyond human comprehension.

I falteringly attempted to reply to Mr. Wickersham, but grew confused lest I be misunderstood and simply told him it was the only question for which I was unable to frame an answer. I believe he understood what was in my mind.

A day was set for my trial and Justice Bartow S. Weeks of the Supreme Court was chosen to preside. Just a week before the trial was to begin, Lawyer Levy came to see me in the Tombs, accompanied by one of my friends. It was his first visit since the day, four months before, that he applied for a commission to inquire into my sanity. All through the hearing almost the only words exchanged between us were when I asked about his son, sick with a fever at one of the army encampments. All feeling of resentment had long since been merged in the admiration I felt for the lawyer when I watched his masterly method of piecing together testimony to support his theory. His shining bald pate conceals a magnificent intellect.

Mr. Levy informed me that he had just come from the District Attorney. The latter had sent for him, he said, and had told him that the complete testimony taken during my insanity hearing had been submitted to five Supreme Court judges and that after going over it they had given a unanimous opinion that I could not be convicted of first degree murder. The District Attorney had proposed that I consent to plead guilty to a lesser degree, saving myself from a trying ordeal and the State from the expense of a trial by jury.

“I promptly told the District Attorney that I would agree to nothing in the way of compromise,” declared Mr. Levy, “and I further told him that I am confident of acquitting you at the final trial of your case. But, after a conference with some of your friends, they have asked me to explain what you will probably have to go through if you are placed on trial. I am reasonably certain that no jury would ever convict you, but it is very doubtful if twelve men could agree on a verdict. This would mean another trial, with perhaps the same result, and the trials that would follow would perhaps run through more than a year, possibly two or three years. If the jury should agree and found you guilty, it would be at least a year before the Court of Appeals could act upon it, and if a new trial was ordered many months more would probably elapse before it could be reached. All this time you would be confined and closely guarded in the Tombs or in the condemned cells at Sing Sing. The case might drag along for several years and in the end, unless there was an acquittal, we would be back to where we are to-day. Your friends insist that you have not the physical strength to stand such an ordeal. I will not attempt to advise you what course we shall pursue. You must now decide that for yourself.”

It was appalling the way he described it. I already had spent four months in the dreadful Tombs, surrounded by vicious and depraved men. I witnessed and heard things that made my blood run cold. The horror of it no pen can describe. Dante’s conception of hell made of it a paradise as compared with the iniquities of that bedlam of a prison. I realized that if I had to endure it much longer a commission wouldn’t need to waste much time in finding me stark mad. God, what a hole to stick men in!

To Mr. Levy, I replied: “Let me make clear to you that I have no wish to dodge my fullest responsibility to the law for what I have done. My desire is for the quickest possible finality. I feel now, as I have from the day I came here, that I can go to the execution chamber without fear. If the choice is left to me I would prefer the electric chair to imprisonment. But I am not unmindful of all that you and my friends are doing for me, and I am greatly distressed at what it all means to the newspapers with which I was associated for so many years. If what the District Attorney has said about not being able to convict me is true, and I have no reason to doubt his sincerity, I am willing to do as he suggests, providing that it is made clear in open court that my plea of guilty to the lesser degree is offered only to save further trouble and expense, and because the District Attorney is convinced that I cannot be convicted of the crime for which I am indicted. A life sentence to State Prison at my age is to be preferred to even one year in the Tombs.”

The following morning I went before Justice Weeks, accompanied by Sheriff Knott, and was sentenced to serve at hard labor not less than twenty years or more than natural life. The entire proceeding that terminated forever my activity in the world outside of prison walls was over in three minutes and a few days later I was brought to Sing Sing.

For many months after I put on the gray garb of a felon, I was so ill and dazed that much of the time I could scarcely realize my surroundings. I wanted to crawl out of sight of everyone and cry. And there was the almost constant dread that I would soon break down completely and be transported to that far away asylum in the mountains of the North for the criminal insane.

Gradually the nervousness and apprehension wore away and my health began to improve. Fear of insanity has now almost entirely left me. I have been treated with great kindness and consideration, not only by prison officials but by my associates in gray. My closest friends of bygone days could not have been more kind than these unfortunate men who are serving long sentences of imprisonment. There is so much good in the worst of them, so much sympathy and generosity among them all. I expect to be here as long as I may live and I am trying to serve God and be helpful to my fellow men as best I can. The past is behind me. What I have done I cannot undo. I give no thought to what may come. The yesterdays are gone, the to-morrows will take care of themselves. I try to get as much as I possibly can out of each day as I live it.

Almost two years have passed. In the solitude of my cell I have subjected myself to a more searching examination than the most analytical prosecutor could put me through, and the verdict that is firmly fixed in my mind is that I did the only thing that was left me to do. There was no other way of saving my wife.

Transcriber’s Note:

Punctuation has been standardised. Hyphenation and spelling have been retained as in the original publication except as follows:

Page 16
An Autobigraphy of a Hotel Office Chair _changed to_
An Autobiography of a Hotel Office Chair

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burlesque actresss, put _changed to_
burlesque actress, put

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ever line in it _changed to_
every line in it

Page 62
Mrs. Garrigle was as _changed to_
Mrs. McGarrigle was as

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I telegraphed five colums _changed to_
I telegraphed five columns

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It was the _Decameron_ of Bocaccio _changed to_
It was _The Decameron_ of Boccaccio

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ticket to Chicago They _changed to_
ticket to Chicago. They

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I was familar with _changed to_
I was familiar with

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the additional informaation _changed to_
the additional information

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Riley, told me _changed to_
Riley told me

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During that winter months _changed to_
During the winter months

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I I bought stocks _changed to_
If I bought stocks