Christmas approaches. This will be my last homicide for the indefinite future, and that’s a promise. But you need to know that in 1909, in Essex County NJ, three weird sisters, the impoverished daughters of an old, ruined Southern family named Wardlaw, were indicted on charges of having committed a ghastly and incomprehensible murder. The signature feature of their flamboyantly eccentric behavior—labelled a folie à trois by the fascinated metropolitan press, which for a year kept the case headlined on its front pages—was that all three were never seen wearing anything but heavy, enveloping black mourning dresses with full veils. This meant that they were seldom actually seen at all. The semi-starved body of a young woman, Oceana Martin Snead—the daughter of one of the sisters (Caroline Martin) and the niece of the two others (Virginia Wardlaw and Mary Snead) lay dead in the water of a bathtub at the top of an old rented house in East Orange, a nearly empty house in which there were only a few sticks of furniture. She had been dead for at least twenty-four hours when her aunt Virginia Wardlaw, apparently the unfurnished house’s only other inhabitant, tried to summon the coroner. According to the aunt, poor young Ocey (as she was called)—discouraged by the death of one young child, the necessity of having to commit a second baby to a charity hospital, and the disappearance and presumed death of her husband (who also happened to be her first cousin)--had drowned herself. This was also the gist of a supposed suicide note at the scene. This note seemed a bit fishy to the authorities at the time, given the fact that there was in the house no paper and neither pen nor ink. Their suspicions were not allayed when in the course of investigation in various parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan through which the Wardlaws had left a trail of unpaid bills for short-term rentals, they uncovered dozens of similar suicide notes, written by one hand, signed by another. They also discovered that Ocey’s young life had been lavishly insured by her relatives, that the Wardlaw ladies indeed were surrounded by a veritable cloud of witnesses of conveniently insured dead associates, and that the bizarre transactions of their peripatetic lives constituted a pattern of elder-care anticipating that in Arsenic and Old Lace. (It turned out that their thing was actually morphine.)
Many years ago I was involved in recruiting for our department the eminent feminist scholar and general all-around great lady Sandra Gilbert, co-author of a book much admired then and now, The Madwoman in the Attic. Readers of Jane Eyre will at once recognize the reference to Mrs. Rochester, née Bertha Mason, the demented, incendiary wife of Jane’s brooding heart-throb, kept under wraps in permanent house arrest on the top floor of creepy Thorncroft Manor. Not good mental health therapy, perhaps. The “madwoman” theme has been brilliantly developed by feminist literary criticism. But Virginia Wardlaw demonstrated the dangers of letting the madwoman out of the attic. Death by fire, death by water: take your choice. Virginia’s own lawyer declared her mad, and her ministerial brother tried to save her from the trial of being tried by having her committed instead. But she took charge, went on a hunger strike and died before the Law could arrange either her punitive or her protective confinement. The State of New Jersey took the other two sisters to trial. At the last minute Caroline Martin plead guilty to manslaughter, while Ocey’s surviving aunt got off on a legal technicality, there being no such thing as an accessory to manslaughter.
There are limits to the amusement to be found in eccentricity, which often enough masks grave distress. What I know of this matter comes from a delightful book, and I have adopted the tone of its lighter moments.* However, there was much, much more to the story, some of it tragic; and Ms. Wardlaw’s tragedy played out on several levels: mental illness, the upheaval of war, the inequities of a Man’s World. For there is definitely a feminist dimension to the Wardlaw disaster. All three women, dependent upon male lawyers, were patronized offensively by court and counsel alike. They explicitly made the point, made also by other female defendants, that an all-male jury could hardly be regarded as a “jury of their peers”.
The sisters’ stuffy lawyers told them to keep their mouths shut. “I want to talk,” one of them said to eager newspaper reporters, "but I am like one of the six hundred who rode to their death through obeying orders.” This was, of course, an allusion to Tennyson’s famous poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” the subject of which is a horrendous military snafu in which Lord Ragland’s Light Cavalry brigade of six hundred men was mistakenly sent against an inappropriate artillery target at the Battle of Balaclava (1854), resulting in nearly forty percent casualties.
Into the Valley of Death
Rode the six hundred...
Honor the charge they made!
Honor the light brigade!
Her point was that her lawyer’s gag order was stupid, but had to be followed. “I do not mean that we are surely going to our death. We are innocent.” My point is that in 1909 she could assume that any reporter, and possibly most Americans capable of reading a newspaper, would pick up on on a citation of the British poet laureate. It was a different age. In a moment of whimsy I once wrote those final two lines in very small print on the memo line of the payment check for a steep monthly PSEG electric bill. The result was a phone call from a puzzled employee at a “payment center.”
The most interesting thing I learned from this bizarre criminal case was incidental. It concerns the history of American education, particularly the education of young women. All three of the sisters were well educated teachers. One of them had had a distinguished career in the New York high school system—a statement far from meaningless in 1900. Before they left the South, all three sisters had been active in the organization and administration of two highly successful “female seminaries”.
I was only vaguely familiar with this term, the modern synonym for which would be “girls’ school”; and to the limited degree I had ever thought about the subject at all, I suppose I imagined them as rather trivial “finishing” schools for the daughters of the upper middle classes. So they were, to some extent. The curriculum normally included such things as piano, needlework, freehand sketching, painting on velvet and other domestic skills thought socially necessary for a family matron and the mistress of a household, the destiny presumed for their pupils. But among the six thousand female seminaries active in the United States on the eve of the Civil War, many also taught Latin, Greek, French, geography, mathematics and laboratory sciences. Many were well equipped with scientific instruments, for which there was a bull market beginning in the 1850s. In New England, not a few of them were hotbeds of Abolitionism and therefore, almost necessarily, of the nascent movement for Women’s Rights. Obviously, this was not true in the same way in the South, but many schools there were also “progressive” in the context of the time. Two of the sisters had with considerable success organized and nourished excellent schools in Murfreesboro TN and in Christiansburg VA, near Roanoke. The Soule Academy in Murfreesboro, the flagship educational institution of vigorous Tennessee Methodism, was of ante-bellum founding and boasted a strong science curriculum. The Montgomery Academy in Christiansburg had flourished under the headship of a Mrs. Oceana Pollock, after whom the bathtub victim had been named. In both instances it would appear that successful Wardlaw enterprises were finally overthrown by the deranged interference of the mentally ill Virginia. Blood was thicker than water, and the Wardlaws stuck together. Education was one of the limited number of arenas in which women were allowed to make significant public social contributions in the old South, and the sisters unquestionably made theirs. In the bankrupted and reactionary climate of post-Reconstruction, the Wardlaw sisters, like so many others, found it much more difficult to continue to do so. Like so many emigrées from other national cataclysms, the French or Russian Revolutions, for example, they had been cast into a hostile world which they could face only when shielded by the heavy black garments of eternal mourning and inconsolable loss.
*Norman Zierold, Three Sisters in Black (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968)
