Killer Colt Page 16
Promptly at 10:00, the proceedings got under way. With a sharp rap of his gavel, Judge Kent called for “perfect silence” in the courtroom and ordered the spectators—many of whom had risen for a better view of the defendant—to “take their seats at once.” Clerk Vandervoort was then directed to call the roll of potential jurors. No sooner had he begun, however, than Dudley Selden rose with an objection.
Owing to the feverish attentions of the penny press, Selden argued, the case had received an unprecedented degree of publicity. “The subject matter of this trial has been more extensively published than any other that has ever occurred in this country,” he claimed, “and it has entered every house and every room of the city.” As a result, finding jurors with no preconceived opinions was a particularly challenging task.
“We want to distinguish between the man who can look with kindness on his fellow man and the one whose heart is hardened and knows not mercy,” said Selden. Having been provided with the names of the three hundred potential jurors only the previous afternoon, he contended that the defendant had been deprived of a fundamental right.
“I call the attention of the court,” said Selden, “to the statute which provides that every prisoner shall be informed as to the jurors so that he shall be enabled to meet them in challenge. Is it possible in twenty-four hours to ascertain whether or not the panel has been made up of men who are enemies to the prisoner, or who have made up their minds in regard to him?” Insisting that he had no desire to cause an unnecessary delay, Selden nevertheless asked for an additional “two days’ time for scrutinizing” the list of jurors.
After hearing counterarguments from the district attorney—who again invoked the precedent of the Ezra White case and argued that the intense public excitement generated by the present crime was no “reason for the trial being thus deferred”—Judge Kent handed down his ruling. “The trial,” he announced, “must proceed.”
Vandervoort then proceeded to call the roll of names. Of the 300 men summoned, 228 answered. One by one, they came forward and were questioned: dentists and dry-goods dealers, cobblers and confectioners, booksellers and grocers, watchmakers and merchants, hardware clerks and housepainters. For twelve full hours, the examinations went on, interrupted only by a one-hour recess at 3:00. At 11:00 p.m., with 220 men having been called, just 11 jurors had been sworn. Directing them to be sequestered at the Knickerbocker Hotel on Park Row and “furnished with any refreshments they might require except spirituous liquors,” Judge Kent then adjourned until 10:00 the next morning.
In all the monotony of that exhausting day, one moment stood out for James Gordon Bennett. It happened shortly before 8:00 p.m., when the City Hall bell began to toll, “pealing an alarm of fire in the Second District.”
For Bennett, the ringing of the bell added a disturbing note to the proceedings. “This is at all times a mournful and unwelcome sound,” he observed, “but it falls with a peculiar chill upon the ear when a murderer is present and the ministers of justice assemble to pass upon life and death. Such was the case here.” Months would pass before that tolling of the fire bell took on an even more uncanny significance—not as a chilling accompaniment to the start of the trial but as a grim premonition of its terrible outcome.11
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A great “rush of persons” tried to shove their way into the courtroom when the doors opened on Thursday morning. Thanks to the stave-wielding constables, however—who “put forth all their energies with a view to preserving order”—a degree of decorum was imposed, and “no more were admitted than could comfortably be seated.”1
Dressed in his usual garb—black pantaloons, black satin vest, dark blue half overcoat, and a black silk handkerchief tied neatly around his neck—John was brought into the courtroom shortly before 9:00 a.m. With him were his brother Sam and, for the first time, their sixty-two-year-old father, Christopher, Sr.—“a venerable, fine, benevolent-looking man” who, according to James Gordon Bennett, “appeared as if he had been crying bitterly and long.”2
The proceedings began promptly at 10:30 with the selection of the final member of the jury. No sooner had he been sworn in than several of his fellow jurors—anticipating a prolonged separation from home—asked permission to pay a visit to their families, “preparatory to the arduous and unceasing day and night work that was before them.” Colt’s counsel offering no objection, Judge Kent granted the request. The jurors departed, each accompanied by a constable who was ordered “not to lose sight” of his charge and “suffer no one to speak to him on the subject of the trial.”3
After a ninety-minute delay, the jurors returned. At a few minutes past noon, Thursday, January 20, 1842, the trial of John C. Colt commenced in earnest.
Following the reading of the indictment—charging that Colt, at the “instigation of the devil,” had made an assault with a hatchet on the person of Samuel Adams and inflicted a fatal wound on the side of his head—James Smith, the young assistant DA, rose to open the prosecution’s case.
What rendered the jurors’ job particularly difficult, Smith told them, was the intense public feeling aroused by the crime. Owing to the “unparalleled atrocity” of the murder, the case had excited an unprecedented degree of excitement in the community, as evinced by the “immense concourse which has here assembled to witness these proceedings.” Everyone appeared to have formed an opinion on the case. The jurors, however, had been selected “after strict examination” because they had declared themselves as “being entirely free of bias.” It was their responsibility to render a verdict based strictly on the facts. While they were obligated to give the prisoner the “full benefit” of any evidence that was “elicited in his favor,” they must not allow their sympathies to affect their final verdict. “You may feel them,” Smith declared, “but the jury box is not the place for their display.”
After reviewing the details of the case, Smith concluded by anticipating—and taking a preemptive swipe at—the defense’s strategy. “The prisoner’s counsel will not, I believe, pretend to deny that Mr. Adams was killed by Mr. Colt but that this did not constitute murder. They will seek to reduce the crime to manslaughter by showing that there was no premeditation in the act, but that if Colt did kill Mr. Adams, it was done under the influence of a momentary passion, excited by a state of facts which perhaps justified such a feeling. Evidence will prove, however, that Mr. Adams was a man of such habits and disposition that he could not have done anything to excite feelings of animosity in any person. The violent character of the prisoner and the contrary one of the deceased leave but little doubt that the murder was willful and premeditated.”4
• • •
Asa Wheeler was the first to take the stand. After providing a few basic personal facts—married, lived on Twentieth Street near Broadway, made his living as an instructor of bookkeeping and penmanship—he explained that he had first become acquainted with Colt in 1838, when the latter approached him about supplying an endorsement for his textbook. The two had not seen each other again until August 1841, when Colt appeared at the Granite Building to ask about renting Wheeler’s vacant second room for six weeks.
Wheeler then provided a lengthy description of the layout and furnishings of the two rooms. District Attorney Whiting, who had brought along a diagram of the second floor of the Granite Building, passed it among the jurors to help them visualize the scene.
Most of Wheeler’s testimony—which continued late into the afternoon, with a one-hour recess for dinner—consisted of a detailed account of the events of September 17, beginning with his arrival at his office at 2:30 p.m., when he had seated himself at his desk to work on a sample of “ornamental writing” to be used as an advertisement for his penmanship lessons. He described the entrance of his sixteen-year-old pupil Arzac Seignette a half hour later; the strange sound, like the “rattling or clashing of foils,” that had startled them from their work at around 3:15; his attempts to peek into Colt’s room to see what had caused the peculiar noise. Though Wheel
er offered a few small, previously undisclosed details—mentioning, for example, that Sam Colt had evidently come by John’s office on the morning after the murder, looking for his brother—the story was already familiar to everyone who had followed the unfolding of the case in the newspapers.5
Dudley Selden’s cross-examination, which began in the late afternoon, seemed somewhat scattershot to most observers, though it did manage to establish one key fact. As James Smith had indicated, John’s counsel clearly intended to argue that the killing of Adams had been an act of manslaughter, the tragic climax of an altercation that had grown increasingly violent and out of control. Wheeler had made it plain, however, that he had not heard any sort of commotion from Colt’s room until the odd clashing sound that had interrupted his lesson with Seignette. Now, under questioning from Selden, he revealed that, despite the damp and chilly weather, his windows, which overlooked Broadway, had been “wide open.”
“And is there much noise from Broadway at that time of day?”
Wheeler allowed that there was. Even with the windows tightly shut, the din from outside penetrated his room. When they were raised, the noise—particularly from the omnibuses rumbling over the cobblestones—often made it hard for him to communicate with his pupils: “much incommoded me in hearing them,” as he put it.
“So it is possible that there might have been sounds coming from the room next door that you were unable to hear?” asked Selden.
Wheeler considered for a moment before replying. “Yes, persons might have talked quite loud in Colt’s room at that time of day, and me in my room never hear it.”6
• • •
Two more witnesses, Arzac Seignette and John Delnous, took the stand that day. Beyond a few minor details, they added little to Wheeler’s testimony, though Delnous did provide a moment of levity during Selden’s cross-examination. A few minutes after mentioning that he was “very nearsighted,” the young bookkeeper described how “agitated” Mr. Wheeler looked when he, Delnous, first arrived.
“But you couldn’t really see the expression on his face unless you were very close to him, isn’t that true?” asked Selden, attempting to raise doubts about Delnous’s credibility.
Delnous admitted that he had trouble “distinguishing persons” unless they were right beside him. Indeed, even at the distance Selden was standing—less than five feet away from the witness box—the bookkeeper could not “tell him from anyone else.” Then, as though to prove that, despite his visual limitations, he was still a reliable eyewitness, he added: “But I can tell a white man from a black.”
Selden did a double take. “Tell a white man from a black?”
“Yes, I can tell that you are white, not black,” Delnous solemnly declared, as guffaws burst from the spectator section.7
• • •
Just a few hours after adjournment, a nearly verbatim account of the proceedings—transcribed by James Gordon Bennett with the speed and accuracy of a professional court reporter—appeared in the late edition of the Herald. Of course, there was nothing new or surprising in the testimony; the shocking bits were still to come. Even so, Bennett found a way to provide his readers with the kind of lurid thrills they expected from him.
At a time when “large woodcut illustrations were still an expensive and time-consuming rarity in a daily newspaper,” Bennett splashed an exceptionally gruesome picture across the top of page one.8 It showed a naked male corpse arranged on a table, knees raised, limp arms bent at the elbow, the upper half of the torso propped up against a pile of cloth. What made the image particularly ghastly, however, was the monstrously disfigured face—a hideous fright mask with a caved-in brow, crushed nose, shredded cheeks, exposed jawbone, and great gaping cavity where the right eye should have been. Even today, when graphic images of bloodshed and bodily mutilation are the stuff of daily entertainment, the picture retains the power to shock. To Bennett’s contemporaries, unaccustomed to such sights, it must have seemed appallingly real.
The accompanying caption did perfect justice to the sheer horror of the image. “Samuel Adams, the Printer,” it read, “Before He Was Cut Up and Salted.”9
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Bennett wasn’t the only scandalmonger eager to cash in on the public’s fascination with the Colt case. On the same day that the Herald published its picture of Samuel Adams’s mutilated corpse, another penny paper—John Dillon and John M. Moore’s New York Tattler—ran its own shocking illustration. In this one, an enraged, hatchet-wielding Colt looms over Adams, who has been thrown to the floor. With one hand, Colt clutches the front of Adams’s shirt. With the other, he prepares to deliver a deathblow to the head of his terrified victim. Beside them stands the crate that will soon hold the printer’s mutilated corpse.
Given such inflammatory publicity, it was no wonder that, as the Herald noted, “excitement over the trial” seemed to “increase with each passing day.” On Friday, January 21, the crowds around City Hall “were greater than at any previous trial in this city.”1 Notwithstanding the heroic exertions of Deputy Sheriff J. C. Westervelt and “a strong body of officers,” the hallway outside the courtroom turned into a mob scene as the crowd made a mad rush for spectator seats as soon as the doors opened.
The proceedings were delayed briefly so that the jurors, who had been sequestered for several days, could pay a short visit to their homes. A few minutes after 10:00 a.m., they returned to the courtroom “looking as refreshed as men who have enjoyed the toilet, the cheering touch of invigorating linen, and have parted in health and cheerfulness from those they love.”2
Law Octon was the first witness scheduled to testify that morning. Before he could be summoned to the stand, however, Dudley Selden rose and, in a voice that rang with indignation, launched into a fierce denunciation of the Herald and the Tattler for running their lurid woodcuts. Describing each of the offending images in detail, Selden maintained that the titillating tactics of Bennett and his ilk—their “calculated efforts to inflame public passion”—threatened the very foundations of justice. “The ordinary representations are sufficiently bad,” said Selden, “but when you come to that kind of publication that is intended to operate upon the prejudice and passion of the people, how is it possible to obtain witnesses capable of giving unbiased testimony or a jury that will fairly weigh the facts?”
Warming to his subject, Selden proceeded to make an argument that continues to be advanced to this day by critics of media violence: that continuous exposure to images of bloodshed and cruelty has a corrupting effect upon the audience, which demands progressively savage forms of entertainment to satisfy its atavistic cravings. If sensationalistic sheets like the Herald were permitted to operate unchecked, Selden warned, American civilization would inevitably revert to the barbarity of ancient Rome.
“The disease is rapidly growing,” said Selden. “Your Honor, from his extensive reading, surely remembers the incidents in early history where slight and at first disgusting exhibitions of brutal combat finally became incorporated with public taste and sentiment and the Colosseum had to be raised to gratify public passion, where the gladiator displayed his power, and death and rapine became the food of an adulterated population. The same process is going on now. What yesterday would have struck the public with a sort of unwillingness to touch, today they approve of, and in a week they seek as food on which the human mind feeds.”
Citing the statute dealing with those who “interfere with administration of justice,” Selden concluded by calling on the court to “do what it ought to do and what I believe it will do”—namely, issue warrants of arrest for James Gordon Bennett and the Tattler’s John Dillon and John M. Moore.
Judge Kent, however, was unmoved by the argument. While sharing Selden’s concern over the growing power of the penny press to shape popular opinion, he insisted that it was “not the duty of the court to grapple with such mighty questions” or to “undertake to reform the community.” As for the pictures in the Herald and the Tattler, Kent was confident
that the jury had been shielded from their pernicious influence.
“In the proceedings in this case,” said the judge, “it has been the effort of the court, and I believe one which has been attended with perfect success, to keep the jury beyond the reach of all external effect. Since empanelled they have been strictly prohibited from conversing with others or of being placed in a situation where their minds could be likely to receive any outside bias.”
Just the previous day, Kent continued, “one of the jurors asked permission to read a newspaper, but I thought it my duty to deny his request, and I have reason to believe, and do believe, that the jurors have been kept perfectly safe from everything that could operate from abroad in relation to the trial.”
Concluding that “the jury has been kept pure and unaffected and can present a fair and impartial decision,” Kent denied Selden’s motion—a decision that drew effusive, if not sycophantic, praise from James Gordon Bennett. In an editorial that ran the following day, he extolled the judge for “surrounding the bench with that high-toned, moral, holy, and intellectual atmosphere that commands the admiration of society and advances the cause of civilization.”3
• • •
Proceeding with his methodical reconstruction of the case, Whiting called Law Octon, superintendent of the Granite Building and the only witness whose racial characteristics—“light yellow skin colored man”—the newspapers found it necessary to specify. Substantiating Wheeler’s account, Octon described the peculiar events of September 17 and his own firsthand observation, on the following day, of John Colt’s struggles to move the heavy pine box downstairs.
Selden’s cross-examination seemed designed to suggest that someone other than Colt might have committed the murder. He had Octon identify all the other tenants of the building, explain who had keys to the rear door, and describe the layout of the backyard. Since there was no doubt that Samuel Adams had died at Colt’s hands, this line of questioning left some observers nonplussed, especially James Gordon Bennett, who—still smarting from Selden’s attack on his integrity—derided it as “foolish and unnecessary.”4