The Lost Pilots Page 18

  Of course some people will have condemned me already, and will have said that I am lost to the world, at least the world as I would have you know it. A world of brightness, of ambitions, of love. But this is not so, because they put me in gaol without real cause. They accused me of something that I did not do. And the newspapers carried stories of the circumstances as they would like them to be (to sell their papers), not as they really were.

  Soon an opportunity will be given me to tell the true story, and to produce the evidence which will support the story. Then things will be much better, because I shall be released from the gaol, and everyone will say that I was treated badly. . . .

  Your Mother, dear sweet person that she is, wrote a letter to the lawyer who is helping me with my case, and she told him of two ways to put forward a defence. She did not know the true story, but had just read warped reports printed in the newspapers. Still it was kind of her to obtain the opinion of some learned lawyer in England.

  Your Mother, Pat, is one of the nicest mothers in the whole world a little girl to have, and I hope you will always love her very much, and be sweet to her, helping and loving her so that she too will love you so much.

  You see darling, Old Bill knows. He has wandered all over the world, and met many many people. But never has he met anyone nicer than your Mother. Always think of this, and try to do things which will make your Mother happy, and glad that she has you for her little girl. When Nina Ann grows as big as you are now, you must tell her too.

  Some day you may meet me again, flying an aeroplane back to the same field that I flew away from. I have tried very hard to make this possible during the last five years, but somehow the days, months, and years have come and gone, and still I have no aeroplane in which to fly back. I wonder if you would be very excited and joyful if this did happen.

  I think of you often, and wonder how tall you have grown, and what you are doing, and if you are becoming a clever girl. London, where you are, is the nicest town in all the world. America is not really a nice place to live in. American people are so insincere and crude. Of course not all of them. I have some American friends who are just as nice as anyone in England.

  . . . Perhaps I had better tell you a little of the true story which will be told in a little while for all the world to know. You see they said I shot a man and killed him. But this man shot himself, because he did not want to live any more. He was not a nice man at all. He had no money, and he was a failure. He drank to excess, and he used a dope which had undermined his constitution. Well, he went from bad to worse, and finally he decided he had nothing more to live for, so he took his own life.

  Now he was my friend, so I did not want everyone to know what kind of a man he was. But now I am afraid everything will come out, as there are other people who knew all about this, and they insist on telling, as they think they should do this for my sake.

  Then the doctors had to confer over the case, and exhume this man, so as to be able to express an opinion as to what caused his death. They were very clever doctors, and I had to pay a lot of money for their services. But they talked and talked, and examined everything, and finally agreed (all of them), that this man took his own life.

  All this is not a very nice thing to talk about, and you will have to ask your Mother to explain it all to you. She has probably been very worried about it all. For remember darling, if you ever do wrong, or are accused publicly of doing wrong, it hurts people who are your relations, or friends, as in my case now. But when the truth is made known, and it is shown that you really did not do wrong, in a measure things are put right.

  When you write, address your letter to the Army & Navy Club, New York City. Kiss Nina Ann and Mother for me. And remember my thoughts are of you darling. By the grace of God, and the love of your Mother, you will grow up to be like her and never be in a situation such as I now find myself in.

  Goodbye darling until my next letter.

  Bill

  Despite the slight against Americans, the letter effectively presents the image that Lancaster wanted to cultivate: that of a decent, caring man who has been victimized by circumstances and railroaded by the press. He certainly spoke the truth in regards to Kiki’s character, whatever she may have meant to him. But his assessment of the medical evidence in the case, following Clarke’s autopsy, was excessively rosy, whether by ignorance or design. He may have been trying to comfort his daughter—or himself—or Carson may have somewhat misled him. Regardless, the medical commission could not declare conclusively that Clarke had committed suicide.

  Three weeks later, on July 14, Lancaster wrote a private letter to Kiki in which he again portrayed himself as an innocent, hapless victim, and again railed against America:

  Your letter of July 4th reached me this afternoon. It is one of the few things that are worth while that have come to me for such an age.

  When Haden Clarke shot himself he placed me in a ghastly position, which I made even worse by trying to get him to sign notes which I had typed—self-preservation instincts caused me to do this. I did no wrong in the matter.

  Trial is now set for August 2nd. The authorities have been unfair, but NOT as unfair as have the Miami newspapers. It is going to be an ordeal, but I am fortified by the knowledge that I am innocent of the charge.

  Unless there is unfairness, which is not unlikely, the courts here are rotten, I shall be cleared in an honourable way. James Carson, my chief lawyer, is a learned man, a “gentleman.”

  I have been terribly handicapped by a lack of money. In America “justice” is a matter of dollars and cents. Have been 3 months in gaol the whole time in a cell 10 feet by 8 feet. They are setting the court in the typical American manner (for a gloating public), wired so that everything can immediately be given out. The various newspaper syndicates sending special representatives etc. etc.

  You can depend on my keeping the chin up! No white feathers around. Just annoyance. I suffer greatly at the thought of such harm as may be done to you and the babes through all this.

  Will write again before the trial. Appreciated photos sent by Pat. Kiss the babes for me.

  B

  Two weeks remained before the world’s attention focused on Miami and the sensational trial just getting under way. On July 31, Lancaster issued a statement: “I am very glad that the time has come for me to be given a trial. I have been in custody for three months, but during this time I have been fortified with the knowledge that I did not kill Haden Clarke.” He pronounced himself satisfied with the jail’s conditions, and with the “kind consideration” shown to him by the jail’s officials. After praising Carson and Lathero’s unstinting efforts to gather the facts of the case, Lancaster declared, “I am anticipating an honorable acquittal when all these facts are presented.”

  Shortly before the trial, Jessie gave her own interview to the press. “My love for Captain Lancaster was worn out before I met Haden,” she said, “though I consider Lancaster the finest human being. Haden and I suddenly loved with the maddest rapture, hysterically. He came and helped me with my autobiography. We hardly worked; we loved madly and insanely. Both of us were broke. Haden always said, ‘God will provide.’ I usually did. We were delighted in each other and hated separation. I could scarcely buy food, and the lights were often out. When downtown for a few hours, Haden would spend a precious nickel and ask if I still loved him. He adored my voice, and I read aloud every day, mainly from Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol,’ which was like a symbol of our love. In great sorrow, I am realizing the great wrong Haden did me. I planned to marry him. Captain Lancaster, whom I loved without being in love after years of companionship in flying adventures, was upset but only wanted my happiness. On that dreadful night I heard Captain Lancaster and Haden talking and laughing. Haden’s voice and laugh were the last I remember of him.”

  PART III FLIGHT TO NOWHERE

  17

  THOSE DIM DAYS OF THE PAST THAT ARE DEAD

  At 9:30 a.m. on August 2, 1932, t
he first day of Bill Lancaster’s trial, State Attorney N. Vernon Hawthorne took his seat at the prosecutor’s table, next to his assistant state attorney, Henry Jones, and a special assistant prosecutor. In an unannounced move, Haden Clarke’s brother, Dr. Beverley Clarke, head of the New York Telephone Company’s chemical research laboratory, strode into the courtroom and took a chair between Hawthorne and Jones. He would, it transpired, be consulting for the prosecution. The crowd in the swarming, overheated courtroom was vocal in its surprise.

  Another shock presented itself shortly: Carson, Lancaster’s attorney, abruptly moved to postpone the trial. One of the defense team’s key witnesses, Dr. Dodge, the psychiatric expert, was experiencing heart trouble, and so he would not be available until the following month. Carson explained to Judge Henry Atkinson that Dr. Dodge had dealt with numerous suicides during his long career. This intimate knowledge, Carson argued, gave Dodge’s assertion that Haden Clarke had committed suicide the weight of fact. (In Dodge’s wording, Clarke’s mental makeup, along with the powder burns on his head, made suicide “eminently probable.”) Carson also planned to argue that Clarke was addicted to marijuana; Dr. Dodge, as it happened, was a rare expert on the effects of the drug’s use. Dodge’s testimony was therefore singular, Carson argued, and crucial to the defense’s case. Lancaster listened tensely but without any outward show of emotion as Carson made his case.

  Judge Atkinson, a genial, white-haired man of seventy-one, quickly denied Carson’s motion. Because Dodge had chaired the medical commission in charge of Clarke’s autopsy, Atkinson said, his essential testimony was present in the commission’s report, which the court possessed. Lancaster accepted the court’s unfavorable ruling without change of expression.

  Hawthorne and Carson then began to question prospective jurors. Both sides emphasized that Lancaster was a British citizen, and sought in their questioning to determine whether this would influence people’s judgments. Carson also focused on the concept of “moral laxity,” the fact that Lancaster had spent years living with a woman who was not his wife. He asked pointedly whether this would prejudice prospective jurors. By 2 p.m., when the court reconvened after a lunch break, twelve final candidates had been chosen. The trial arguments began.

  Hawthorne launched into his indictment by characterizing the story of Clarke’s shooting as “containing practically all the elements of human interest,” including “drama, tragedy, adventure, love, hate, and financial reverse, riding one day on the crest and the next day in the gutter.” Behind it all, he said, was “the undying love of Bill Lancaster for Chubbie, which was exploded when he received the news that his beloved half had been taken by the best friend of his life.” Before heading off on the Latin-American Airways venture, Hawthorne said, Lancaster “became so ‘sold’ on Haden Clarke that he regarded him as the one individual he could trust to keep Chubbie for him during that absence.”

  Once Lancaster was out west, Hawthorne continued, “he began to hear rumors and reports that Chubbie was falling in love with Clarke and that they were having wild drinking parties,” and he recorded his fears, “his very heart throbs,” in his diary. When Lancaster received confirmation that Jessie and Clarke were having an affair, he “paced the floor saying ‘I’ll get rid of him,’ ” adding later that he would “kill that son of a bitch.” One week later, Hawthorne said, Lancaster repeated this latter phrase “in the presence of associates, adding that he ‘had seen hundreds of dead men, and one more won’t matter.’ ”

  Hawthorne described how Lancaster had arrived in St. Louis and read the letters from Jessie and Clarke. “It was then that he bought a pistol and a box of cartridges,” Hawthorne intoned. “On the last night out from Miami, in Nashville, Tennessee, he broke open the box of cartridges in a hotel room, and loaded the pistol.” Hawthorne took the jury through Lancaster’s return to Miami, the tension at dinner with Clarke, and the way Lancaster “threatened” to leave and return to St. Louis, until he was “prevailed upon to remain.” At three o’clock that morning, Hawthorne said, Ernest Huston received a call that Clarke had shot himself.

  When the ambulance arrived at the house, the driver discovered that Clarke was still alive and that Jessie was “more or less hysterical,” Hawthorne reported, but Lancaster, while agitated, was “holding his own.” Lancaster’s primary concern, Hawthorne said, was whether Clarke would be able to talk again.

  In his conclusion, Hawthorne noted that Lancaster had admitted to forging Clarke’s “suicide” notes; that the pistol used to shoot Clarke was the one Lancaster had bought in St. Louis; that Lancaster had asked Ernest Huston to claim ownership of the pistol; and that the pistol had been wiped clean of fingerprints. The facts spoke for themselves, Hawthorne argued: not only was Clarke’s murder premeditated, but Lancaster had attempted to mislead the subsequent investigation into his shooting.

  After Hawthorne took his seat, Carson began his opening statement by saying that, while parts of Hawthorne’s statement were “absolutely untrue,” the defense agreed that the case contained “almost every possible element of human and dramatic and emotional interest.” He cast Lancaster as a “war hero,” one of “the great and famous fliers of the world,” who now sat in a courtroom in a strange country, four thousand miles from his home in England, on trial for murder.

  Carson acknowledged, too, that the case contained circumstances that were “sufficient to arouse the greatest suspicion.” There would be, he admitted, “no denial that the so-called ‘suicide notes’ were forged by Captain Lancaster.” But the defense would prove, Carson said, that the notes “were written after Haden Clarke had destroyed his own life by shooting himself in the head with a pistol; that they were written under the stress of great excitement; that they were written perhaps with a view in the Captain’s mind of preventing the ghost of this dead man coming between him and Chubbie, whose devotion Mr. Hawthorne has told you that he so ardently desired.”

  Carson framed his subsequent remarks by saying that in cases of circumstantial evidence, “the circumstances depend almost entirely for their efficacy upon the point of view” from which one examines them. If one starts with the belief or presumption that Lancaster is innocent—a presumption, Carson reminded the jury, that the law requires—then the circumstances are consistent with the theory of innocence. But if one starts out from the viewpoint of the prosecution—that a man is guilty—then every circumstance merely confirms that belief.

  Carson traced the history of Lancaster and Jessie’s relationship, their record-setting flight, their journey to the United States in “those dim days of the past that are dead, [when] all the money in the world was supposed to be in America,” their move to Miami, and their subsequent struggles for money. He described the arrival of Haden Clarke, “a young man evidently of brilliant mind, of charming personality, of interesting imagination.” But, he cautioned the jury, while Clarke was undoubtedly brilliant, charming, and interesting, the evidence would show that “emotionally he was unstable, almost unbalanced, probably neurotic and certainly erotic in his disposition.”

  Carson detailed the intense financial difficulties the trio faced in Miami, the times when the lights in their house were cut off, when they had to steal chickens in order to eat, when their only stove was a homemade fire in the backyard. After Lancaster headed out west with Latin-American Airways, Carson said, he received almost daily messages telling him how broke Jessie and Clarke were in Miami, even as he realized his own venture was a wash-out. The stress on Lancaster intensified, made all the worse by the whispers that Jessie and Clarke were having an affair.

  On the night Lancaster returned to Miami, Carson said, there “was tension unquestionably on the way to the house,” as Lancaster learned for the first time that, about two weeks into his journey out west, Clarke and Jessie had gotten drunk and “begun having sexual intercourse with each other,” and that the intercourse “had continued with excessive violence for about two weeks.” Until, that is, a shocking discovery had been made
: Clarke “was suffering from one of those vile diseases that people who spend their lives in certain ways may expect.” (Carson avoided the word “syphilis.”) This discovery had not only halted Jessie and Clarke’s lovemaking, it had forced them to stop drinking.

  And yet, Carson said, that night at the dinner table Lancaster and Clarke had not quarreled exactly, nor had there been any violence, only “a passage at arms with words.” Despite some obvious tension between the three, Lancaster, Jessie, and Clarke had gone to bed on good terms. But when Lancaster was woken by the sound of the pistol shot, and saw Clarke in his “death struggle” on the bed, he panicked at the thought of how Jessie might perceive the situation. He then made the “colossally foolish” mistake of forging the notes. “Except for those two notes,” Carson argued, “there would be no indictment here.”

  Carson then listed the subsequent events that looked “terribly suspicious” when viewed through the lens of Lancaster’s innocence: the doctor who examined Clarke’s body at the house was Ida Clarke’s personal physician, Dr. Deederer; Lancaster and Jessie were jailed for a day or two but then released; Ida Clarke had spoken in signed stories of her son’s suicide; and Clarke was buried without a coroner’s inquest or autopsy. Carson pointed out that Lancaster had voluntarily admitted, against his lawyer’s wishes, that he had forged the suicide notes, and he had immediately agreed to the idea of exhuming Clarke’s body for an autopsy. “All the defendant had to do if he had been guilty,” Carson said, “was to let the body stay where it was.”

  The defense would also show that in January of that year Clarke had been in New Orleans, drinking heavily and, Carson said, “taking drugs in the form of torpedoes or cigarettes, a drug which is known as marijuana, which is a derivative of one of the drugs of the hasheesh family,” and which had “a very upsetting and nerve-racking effect on his nervous system.” While in New Orleans Clarke had talked repeatedly to a friend about suicide, saying that if one wanted to kill oneself, there was “no use fooling with poison” and “no use jumping in the river”; the only way to do it was “by shooting yourself in the head with a pistol.” In addition, Carson asserted, two or three weeks before Lancaster’s return to Miami, Clarke had sat in the living room of 2321 S.W. 21st Terrace and discussed suicide with two friends, bragging, “I know where is the safest place to shoot yourself, and that is the only safe way to commit suicide, and the safest place is just above and slightly behind your right ear”—not far from where the bullet hole in Clarke’s head was later found.