CROCODILE TEARS

"Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her Mother forty whacks.
When he saw what she had done,
She gave her Father forty-one."

Lizzie then languished in the Fall River jail -- dry-eyed as a
crocodile.

I propose to hide behind Article VII, Section 3 of our by-laws
which prevents discussion of a paper until it has been forgotten,
The statistics supporting my statements are, I hope, a judicious
blend of the factual and the factitious, as in previous papers
the use of incomplete or incorrectly analyzed statistics has
occasionally been deprecated -- not to say viewed with alarm.
In the interest of simplicity and clarity I mix Milton and Ten-
nyson in one aphorism; "Let Truth and Falsehood grapple"
"lest one good custom should corrupt the world".

In 1959 30.4% of all females arrested were charged with
murder, aggravated assault, disorderly conduct, or violation of
the sex, drug, and liquor laws. Only 15.9% of male arrests fell
into these categories. Since all other offenses classified in-
volve the profit motive, we may assume that women are less
mercenary than men.

Men, after weighing the risks against the rewards, and con-
sidering the obligations of honour, loyalty, and self-interest,
murder for such commonplace reasons as financial or political
gain, possession of desired objects (usually female), or as an
unfortunate by-product of commercial enterprises such as robbery.

Their techniques tend to the orthodox, forethought is given to
ensuring the silence of confederates, if any, and victims are
selected on a businesslike basis without personal animus.

Women, on the other hand, murder male relatives by preference,
in spite of the fact that they are more apt to die a natural death
if they murder mere acquaintances (such as Lana Turner's friend,
Johnny Stomponato). Disposing of their own male issue is also
relatively safe. Should they rise to assassination, which is
murder with good public relations, they may with Justice expect
a ticker-tape parade on Broadway. Women seldom murder women —
destruction of character or stealing their visible means of support,
if he doesn't snore, is more sporting.

At heart all women are alchemists, unswerving in their
determination to transform base males into pure gold. The frustra-
tions attendant upon this laudable enterprise sometimes force the
zealous researcher to make a fresh start with a new subject.
Disposal of subjects whose further usefulness is limited by over-
exposure to an imperfect philosopher's stone is called murder and
its practitioners are often severely dealt with because, as Thomas
deQuincy said: “Once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon
he comes to think little of robbing, and from robbing he comes
next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility
and procrastination. Once being on this downward path, you never
know where to stop."

Actuarially, assassination is preferable to assignation. Lady
Macbeth died young but she died in bed. Tosca died by her own hand
after applying a blunt instrument to Scarpia. Charlotte Corday,

after stabbing Marat in his bath, had every right to look forward

to a respected old age, but Robespierre's Terror cut a wide swath
through the intended beneficiaries of her practical politics.
When Judith returned to Bethulia with the head of Holofernes she
was hailed as the saviour of her people, whereas Joan of Arc,
who crowned the head of Charles VII instead of removing it, was
burned for witch-craft.

Longevity is the reward of the Mother who removes her son
"From the world and its toils and its cares".

Mme. Butterfly killed her infant son out of concern for his
future. Not for remorse did she then kill herself — she ran out
of breath on high C,

Medea cut up her brother and threw him overboard piecemeal.
Retrieving the remains so delayed her pursuers that she and Jason
and his argonauts were able to escape to Greece with the Golden
Fleece. She then murdered Jason's uncle in an unsuccessful attempt
to secure his throne. Next she murdered. Jason's fiancee, as she
considered that mothering his children was sufficient confirmation
of her own engagement to Jason. Finally, she murdered their two
sons so that grief might be Jason's punishment. No one knew better
than Euripides that you can't make an omelette without breaking
eggs. Medea’s later life was far from restful but it ran its
appointed course.

The humanity of the Empress Irene matched her piety. While
creating some of the greatest works of early Christian architec-
ture she upheld the most oriental of Byzantine traditions. She
kept her regency by the simple expedient of having her son blinded.

In 1728 Margaret Dickson was brought to trial in Scotland

for the murder of her infant son who had been conceived, born,

and buried during her husband's absence on naval duty. After she
had been duly hanged her body was given to friends for burial.
While the mourners assuaged their grief in a pub by the way, she
revived and was subsequently restored to perfect health. The pro-
hibition of double jeopardy prevented her being hung again so
she remarried her sailor husband and lived happily through another
quarter of a century. The moral of this episode is that "she who
lives more lives than one, more deaths than one must die".
"All men kill the thing they love,

Some with a flattering word.

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword."

With this flapdoodle of Oscar Wilde’s women have no patience.

They prefer George Bernard Shaw's dictum that "the fear of God ;

may be the beginning of wisdom but the fear of man is the beginning
of murder". Once having despaired of the perfectibility of man
or, perhaps, having despaired of measuring up to men, imperfect as
they are, direct and violent action is the obvious remedy. Generally
women who live by the sword, die by the sword and it is after
disposing of their spouses that they become particularly accident-
prone. In the interests of purely objective scholarship let us
first note some exceptions to this rule:

Florrie Maybrick, a southern belle with an ambitious Mother,
was disappointed that she had married only a Liverpool cotton-
broker, whereas her Mother's second husband had a title. Dis-
satisfaction with her husband's fortune and position pre-disposed
her to adultery. Although her seducer lacked a title, he did move
in sportier circles and borrowed money from more dashing friends.

To clinch her new romance (which had consisted of one night in a
London hotel) she flavored her husband's coffee with arsenic which
she had distilled from fly-paper. The story that this established
a custom in making British coffee is apocryphal. However, the
enriched coffee sent Maybrick to his reward and Florrie to hers,
which was commuted to life imprisonment because Queen Victoria
thought it unseemly for a gentlewoman to hang. Good behaviour got

her off in fifteen years and in 1947 she expired as a recluse
in South Kent, Connecticut, surrounded by cats and old newspapers.

Salome, contrary to the wishful thinking of Oscar Wilde and
Richard Strauss, made two happy marriages and died of old age
after demanding the head of John the Baptist.

Catherine the Great had such a multiplicity of lovers that
there may have been safety in numbers. When she superintended
the liquidation of her husband, the Tsar, the finger could not be
pointed at a single individual, or even a manageable group.

Wagner added the extra fillip of incest to the marital and
geneological tangle that is "Die Walkurie". Hunding's wife,
Sieglinde, took up with her twin brother, Siegmund. In the ensuing
fracas Siegmund was protected by his half-sister Brunhilde (who
subsequently married Siegfried whose begetting caused all this
trouble) and Hunding was protected by his father-in-law, Wotan
(an uncongenial task for one who was more noted for protecting
girls). Alas! the hearts of the protectors were not in their work
for the combatants killed each other -- like Ivan and Abdul the
bulbul Emir. The only punishment for the widowed Sieglinde, who
started it all, was to be scratched from the cast of the next opera.

Having disposed of the exceptions, a cursory examination of

some more typical cases will show that crime does not pay if the
yictim, is, or should be, a husband.

In 1897 a farmer on Long Island noticed that his ducks emerged
from a pond adjoining his property dyed red. Red ducks being less
marketable than the better known varieties, an investigation was
instituted. The red dye turned out to be blood trickling from
packages of assorted size stored in a shed on the banks of the pond.
Each package contained a human limb wrapped in oil-cloth and
imperfectly encased in plaster of Paris. When reassembled the
relicts added up to a masseur named Guldensuppe. His misfortune
was that, to avoid paying rent, he made his landlady his mistress,
thus hoping to endow himself with her worldly goods. She saw no
reason why adding her favors to her services should reduce the
value of either. A vacancy in her boarding-house seemed more
profitable than a free-loader and this she promptly set about
creating with the help of another boarder who was a butcher by
trade. Both paid the extreme penalty.

Holinshed, the Elizabethan historian whose accounts of English
and Scottish kings were dramatized by Shakespeare, tells of a
marital dispute in merrie England that was later the subject of
a play, “Arden of Feversham" by either Marlowe, Thomas Kyd or,
as Swinburne insisted, Shakespeare.

On the evening of February fifteenth, l55l Arden was playing
cards with the party of the third part who had replaced him in
the affections of his wife, Alice, when he was murdered by Black
Will and George Shakebag. These worthies had been hired by Alice

when she felt that the ardor of her lover, Mosby, was beginning to

cool. Her liberation was immediately celebrated by a party where
no stint of food or wine, of song or dance, marred the festivities.
Before dawn, while the celebrants were still able to walk, Arden's
corpse was removed from the kitchen table and carried to the fair
ground where it was left in the snow in nightgown and slippers.
Next morning it was found by the Mayor of Feversham, as were the
footprints in the snow leading to the Arden front door, Alice was
burned at the stake and her four accomplices were hung.

The more recent case of Gertrude Gibson Patterson relieves
this grim recital by its message of hope and trust in divine justice
which corrects the oversights of the law as well as the whimsic-
alities of juries.

Gertrude, a winsome blonde of nubile proportions and accom-
modating morals, had a lover richer than her husband but less
single-minded in his devotion. Her husband, Charles Patterson,
was dying of tuberculosis -- the only trouble was that he took so
long about it. So, one Sunday morning after church, Gertrude called
him at the sanitarium and suggested taking a walk together. She
was even thoughtful enough to meet him half way. After a perfunctory
greeting she took a revolver from her purse and shot him dead.

On the day of her acquittal she sold the story of her life to
Hollywood and, taking the leading role herself, reenacted the entire
scene exactly where it had taken place. This done, she and her
protector took a long honeymoon in Europe in anticipation of their
marriage. They returned on the Titanic.

Mayhem seldom restores one's faith in human nature but there

is poetry in the devotion of Alma Rattenbury and Percy Stoner

of Bournemouth, England. At their trial in 1935 for the bludgeon-
ing of Mr. Rattenbury, no amount of questioning or legal trickery
could make either implicate the other in the crime. Ultimately,
when Stoner was sentenced to life imprisonment, the light of his
life committed suicide rather than face another day without him
at her side.

On the other hand, Ann Wells was as capricious as her two
suitors. Her distaste for Brewen grew as he showered her with
gifts. When he threatened arrest unless she returned his engagement
ring she found it expedient to marry him. On their wedding night
she pleaded a previous engagement and spent it with her first
choice, Parker, who suggested and agreed to provide the poison
with which Ann would lace her bridegroom's sugar-sops. During the
remaining two weeks of her husband's life Ann shared his bed but
insisted upon celibacy. Two years after her bereavement, in spite
of her lament that her apron was riding higher, Parker still re-
fused to marry her, claiming that he was afraid of what might
happen to him in view of her proven predilection for widowhood.
As they grew more vociferous, the arguments on this subject were
overheard by the neighbors and resulted in complete confessions.
Ann was burned at the stake facing the gibbet from which Parker
was hung.

The absence of logic which makes the species so engaging
provides a clue to the demise of many heads of household. A
husband becomes an impediment when his existence precludes the use
of marriage vows to secure the waning affections of a lover.
Curiously, this reasoning does not apply to the lover's wife. It
has also been mistakenly assumed that complicity in crime forges

a bond between the perpetrators. The fact is that having an
accomplice is merely a guarantee that the grim reaper is licking
his chops.

Mary Stuart, first widowed at eighteen, found her weeds so
becoming that at twenty-five she donned them again for the funeral
of her consort. Lord Darnley, whose strangling she had plotted with
the Earl of Bothwell. The fact that Darnley had disembowelled
her confidante, David Rizzio, in her presence may have embittered
Mary but provides a less compelling reason for his early sleep
in Abraham's bosom than her marriage two weeks later to Bothwell.
At forty-five she lost her head completely.

Bothwell and, more recently Judd Gray, both proved that men,
when associated with women, can also live without logic. Neither
had instituted divorce proceedings at the time of assisting in the
extinction of their partners husbands. What is sauce for the
goose appears to be gravy for the gander.

Judd Gray travelled in corsets. What could be more natural
for him than to give a free sample of his wares to a chance
acquaintance who had been good enough to lunch with him. His
thoughtfulness, of course, included a careful fitting and such
other attentions as would make the occasion memorable to any
sensitive woman. This was the first infidelity for both Gray and
Ruth Snyder but they showed such a natural aptitude that their
assignations were soon transferred from the flesh-pots of Schraaft's
and a brief stop in his company's stock room to week-ends at the
Waldorf, and even a ten-day motor trip. Ruth Snyder found the
whole affair as exhilarating as Gray found it debilitating.