Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 139, No. 6, September 14, 1940

You’re the Jury: The Lost Hour by Peter Paige

Unlike the pat endings of fiction where the murderer is inevitably exposed in the final paragraphs, life itself offers countless examples where the jury verdict is, at best, guesswork — where even the fact that it was murder was not established beyond a reasonable doubt.

Such was the Carlson[7] case, an American tragedy of human bondage that well might have been penned by Dreiser or Maugham, a case where all the threads unraveled into one “lost” hour — lost somewhere in Chicago.

Justice, here, must remain forever blind!

When Eric Carlson mounted the stairs to his flat on Chicago’s South Side, he was not a happy man. For thirteen hours he had jockeyed an elevator up and down a Market Street office building, but it was not that which depressed him. Eight solid years in the elevator lay behind him. Work never fazed Eric. And it wasn’t Chicago. He had emigrated from Sweden as a boy and he was satisfied with Chicago.

He was satisfied with the United States.

He was not satisfied with the spectacle that greeted him when he opened the door to his flat. Lena, his wife of eight years, was staggering about the dining room, half in and half out of her clothes.

Instead of supper, an empty whiskey flask lay on the table. Instead of a wifely kiss, Eric was greeted by a string of obscene curses that had been gathered from saloons and gutters.

And Eric was greeted also by the sight of his six-year-old son, Neil, huddled in a corner and staring at his mother out of terror-stricken eyes.

What emotions were Eric’s do not appear on the record. This does: He seated himself at the table without uttering a word. Then he stood up again as Lena, furious at his outward calm and indifference, grabbed up a fork and hurled herself at him.

Eric seized the fork, thrust her away, took his son by the hand and led him back down the stairs and out of that house forever.

On the night of August 11th, 1922, Eric Carlson was a most unhappy man.

He had the misfortune to love his wife.

Whether it was because she was the mother of his son, or because, in spite of her degradation, she was the girl he had wooed and won, is not for us to say. But that he professed his love in the face of repeated betrayals is a matter of record.

On the other hand, Lena Carlson was no whit happier. She had the misfortune to love her bottle. Where Eric’s sorrow is understandable and easy to depict in words, her passionate craving for drink had obscurer roots.

Lena was also Swedish, also an immigrant. Before her marriage she had been a seamstress. It had been a marriage of love because there was no wealth or social position to be gained by wedding an elevator man. She became a “boozer” after Neil was born — as the testimony will show.

That she was miserable is on the record; the dry testimony of acquaintances of how she often cried: “Life is not worth living!”

Whether her thirst was strictly habit, whether it was escape from Eric and the cares of life, whether it stemmed from mental unbalance or ill health — that is a matter for psychoanalysis or the pen of a Maugham.

The record is blank. It tells only the sordid tale how she became intoxicated with clock-like regularity, how she became the prey of almost any male stranger, how drink sapped her morale until she was little better than a streetwalker.

The record tells also of the extent of Eric’s love — how three times she flaunted in his face the names of other men and how three times he forgave her.

This time he didn’t. He took Neil to a neighbor’s, induced a friend to run his elevator while he searched for new lodgings and finally brought the lad to a room on Seeley Street on the North Side of Chicago.

Lena moved to a Wells Street rooming house owned by a Mrs. Ames where she lived for seven weeks.

What transpired in this period is only sketchily mentioned in the testimony. This much is certain: On September 19, 1902, Eric Carlson filed a bill of divorcement and Lena Carlson was handed a summons to appear in court on Monday, October 6th.

She never did. Eric appeared, but in a different court — to be indicted by the Grand Jury for causing the death of Lena Carlson by giving her whiskey which contained strychnine!

A murder trial usually results in voluminous testimony, dozens of technical points — frequently contradictory. A murder jury usually has to sift through this great mass of conflicting evidence to arrive at a slim thread of fact.

Not in the case of the People of Illinois versus Eric Carlson! Here the testimony is sketchy and the contradictions revolve on questions of character.

Here, as witness after witness reconstructs that last day of Lena Carlson’s life, one hour remains blank — the hour in which Eric was charged with giving his wife the fatal whiskey!

The testimony on which that day, October 2nd, was reconstructed follows:

Miss Olga Johnson, unemployed, had been sharing Lena’s room and rent for three weeks prior to October 2nd.

According to Miss Johnson, on that fatal date the two women had been in each other’s company from eleven A.M. when they started out in search of employment until six P.M. when they dined in the rooming house.

After the meal, at seven P.M. to be exact, Lena urged Miss Johnson to accompany her for a stroll.

Eric Carlson stood waiting on the first corner. He asked to speak to Lena alone and Miss Johnson left them.

The scene shifts back to the kitchen of the rooming house where Mrs. Ames, the motherly landlady, was baking cakes. At nine P.M., according to this worthy, she heard the front door open and muffled voices of a man and woman. Within a few minutes Lena Carlson appeared in the kitchen and Mrs. Ames heard the front door slam.

“That was my husband that has just gone out,” explained Lena.

An old story to Mrs. Ames whose young female lodgers changed “husbands” nightly. She made no issue of it because so long as the couples were not disorderly she didn’t mind. But she did notice that Lena seemed “...well... and in better spirits than usual.”

Lena returned to her room, about ten feet from the kitchen, and, five minutes later, Mrs. Ames was startled by a hoarse scream coming from that direction.

Rushing down the corridor, she met Lena staggering from her room and saying: “I have taken some whiskey that my husband gave me to make me sleep.” As Mrs. Ames helped Lena back to her bed, the latter screamed: “I am going to die; my heart has stopped beating!”

In the words of Mrs. Ames: “...then she wanted a doctor and mentioned Division Street, and I said right away, ‘I will send for one I know,’ and I sent over on Oak Street for a doctor I knew and he couldn’t come and, while the little girl was gone for the doctor, she had a spasm...

“She straightened up... and said, ‘I am going to die and I am not ready to die... pray for me!’”

Mrs. Ames asked what had brought on the attack and Lena replied: “The bottle is right over there!” When Mrs. Ames could find no bottle, Lena got off the bed and secured the flask from under the dresser!

“She said several times it was the one her husband gave her,” went on Mrs. Ames. “Sometimes she said that it was something she took that her husband gave her to make her sleep, and then she would say it was the whiskey...”

Here is a picture of Lena Carlson gasping her last — incoherent one moment, able to get off the bed and secure the bottle from under the dresser in another. In one breath she asked for prayer; in the next, babbled words that the State was to later weave into a rope fitted for her husband’s neck!

Miss Olga Johnson returned at ten-thirty. Two doctors were present as well as a surgeon and three detectives. In her own words:

“I saw Mrs. Carlson on the bed with convulsions but she was able to speak. When I asked where she had been, Mrs. Carlson said, ‘With Eric...’ and that they had been to Lincoln Park, walking.”

Miss Johnson did not hear Lena claim she had been given whiskey by her husband — “to make me sleep” — although, according to Mrs. Ames, this statement had been repeated after ten-thirty when Miss Johnson returned.

However, other witnesses, including a storekeeper and two doctors, did hear from Lena Carlson’s lips that the whiskey she drank had been given her by Eric.

At any event, there in that sordid little chamber, in full view of half a dozen strangers, Lena Carlson writhed and screamed her death agony and, finally, in the early hours of the morning, passed away — from strychnine poisoning according to medical testimony.

Was it a fitting irony that Lena should die from a tainted potion of the beverage that had destroyed her home and driven her into dissolute exile?

That is for a Higher Judge to say. For us — only the facts.

Eric Carlson stated, in his own defense, that he was with his estranged wife from seven-fifteen until eight — when they parted and he boarded a trolley car for Seeley Street.

He claimed they had walked around during the forty-five minutes without stopping at any bar or liquor store. He said the reason he was waiting for her was that his son (who had been seeing his mother on occasion) had told him Lena wanted to ask him for something. He said she asked him for a sewing machine that had been left behind in their old apartment and that he did not return to the Wells Street house with her.

He denied having ever given his wife whiskey, poisoned or otherwise.

The court refused him permission to state what had been the subject of their conversation during the forty-five minutes!

And that was all the direct testimony covering the last day of Lena Carlson’s life!

No mass of conflicting evidence here — just a slim, broken thread of fact emerging from the lips of three people. From eleven to seven. From seven to eight. From nine to eternity.

From eight to nine — blank!

The State based its case on Lena’s deathbed statement. Accepted, it would suffice to convict Eric Carlson — as will be shown in the court’s charge to the jurors. To support the statement, the prosecution brought to the witness stand Mrs. Julia Norgstrom, Lena’s sister.

“About three weeks before her death,” said Mrs. Norgstrom, “Lena told me she had been in a trolley car with Eric when she suddenly felt weak. They went out and sat down and Eric offered Lena whiskey which Lena took. It made her sick and she threw it up and she told me there was poison it.”

“That’s what she told all the girls about every man!” replied the defense, in effect. Recalling Miss Olga Johnson to the stand, the defense asked if, to her knowledge, Lena Carlson had ever previously complained of being poisoned.

“Mrs. Carlson told me she had eaten something in a restaurant that made her sick,” stated Miss Johnson. “‘Weren’t you out with somebody?’ I asked. She said yes. I asked who. She said no one I would know.”

That, argued the defense, could not have been a reference to Eric because Miss Johnson knew him quite well and Lena knew it!

At which the State shouted: “Objection!”

The court agreed: “Sustained! The clerk will strike that testimony from the record!”

The defense, with an eye to a possible appeal in case Eric should be found guilty, cried: “Exception!”[8]

The defense did succeed in discrediting Lena Carlson’s damning words, uttered that fatal night when she entered the rooming-house kitchen and remarked to Mrs. Ames: “That was my husband that has just gone out.”

A street car conductor testified that Eric had been a passenger on his car all the way to the North Side car barn at that hour. There was no mistaking the time because trolleys ran on schedule.

The defense went on to claim that Lena Carlson had taken her own life; that separation from Eric, the loss of her child, the divorce coming up and her inability to control her thirst depressed her to the point of suicide.

To back this up it was established that the contents of Lena’s room on Wells Street included a whiskey flask, a beer bottle and a small phial containing strychnine!

The State proved the phial had been full when found!

Miss Johnson claimed the whiskey bottle containing the poisoned whiskey had been in their room three days prior to Lena’s death!

Then the defense warmed up and had Eric testify he had never been inside the Wells Street house. The defense pointed out no witness had been produced who had ever seen him there.

The defense called back Lena’s sister, Mrs. Julia Norgstrom, asked her: “...is there any reason why you don’t like this defendent here?”

“I don’t like him because I think he poisoned my sister!”

Then followed the trinity of all courtroom dog fights:

“Objection!”

“Overruled!”

“Exception!”

Eric then returned to the stand in an effort to show his wife had slipped downward enough to arrive at the depressed state that precedes a suicide. In his own words:

“The first year we led a very happy life, but in the second — well we did live very happy until her sister (Mrs. Julia Norgstrom) came over from the old country. After that it started to get a little trouble now and then, but we always got along fairly well until after about three years of married life...

“...we did have a little trouble, but it didn’t amount to anything until the last couple of years.

“It was because she used to drink quite heavy. I asked her why she done it, or if she wouldn’t quit. I says, ‘We have got a good home and everything and have got a child.’

“And she says, ‘Well, I am not drinking much.’ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘you hadn’t ought to drink anything. What is the reason you drink? Why do you drink?’ And she answers nothing.”

The State turned this into a partial motive for murder by introducing a friend of the family who said the Carlsons always quarreled and it was always about the same thing... “He complained that she drank and kept company with other men.”

To which the defense replied with Olga Johnson to show how depressed Lena had been. Lena kept whiskey in their room, was in the habit of drinking heavily and would often say that she was lonely and... “Pshaw! What is the use of living?”

Another “dog fight” resulted in defeat for the defense when it claimed it could produce twenty signed affidavits by neighbors that — “For a long time before the separation... Lena Carlson led a life of drunkenness and debasing lewdness, and that in saloons, while on sprees, she would announce that she was tired of life and had poison enough in her possession to kill a whole family.”

Twenty affidavits were actually sworn but not admitted at the trial!

In desperation, the defense argued that “...A dying declaration may be impeached in any of the modes by which evidence of Mrs. Lena Carlson could have been impeached had she been alive and testifying on a witness stand.” Thus, affidavits as to her character and reliability as a witness should be admitted!

“Bunk!” replied the State, in effect. The woman was dying. What possible motive could she have had in accusing her husband and father of her child falsely? A woman whose last thought was for prayer! The declaration was true, insisted the State, and all the vengeance was on the side of Eric when he induced his wife to take the lethal potion!

“Bunk and double bunk!” replied the defense, in effect. The man’s vengeance lay in the divorce he was sure to get. The matter was settled. As for the night of the death, he had seen Lena on her request. It could well have been a deliberate plot on her part to bring him near the scene of her prospective suicide before a witness (Miss Olga Johnson) so that blame for her death could revert to him!

Her frequent fits of melancholy, the decay in her mind from years of hard drinking, the impending divorce — all could have unseated her mind to the point of plotting such a dastardly deed.

The State sucked in its breath and produced a clincher to its argument. Eric Carlson stood to benefit from an insurance policy to the tune of three hundred and eighty dollars on his wife’s death — a goodly sum in the year 1902 for an elevator man.

The defense expelled its breath in a blast to the effect that Eric had wanted to let the policy lapse after the separation. The defense produced the agent who testified to this and that Eric had continued paying the small premiums only on his, the agent’s, insistence.

Seventeen witnesses paraded through the courtroom to swear that Eric Carlson’s reputation for peace and quietude was of the highest.

Dozens of other witnesses appeared on the stand to fill in minor details of the picture offered above.

Still it all boiled down to one paramount issue: What actually happened during the “lost” hour?

If Lena Carlson’s dying statement that her husband gave her the whiskey to “...make me sleep...” was true, Eric was guilty!

If Eric Carlson’s claim that he had merely walked and talked with her and then taken a trolley home was true then he was not guilty!

Alas for modern crime detection! Nobody searched the fatal bottle for fingerprints! No effort was made to check the stores and saloons of Chicago to determine if Eric had purchased whiskey that night or any other night. (He claimed never to have done so.) The detectives present at the death of Lena failed to put her statements in writing and get her signature before witnesses!

But this was Chicago, 1902. This was long ago when Cuba was becoming a Republic, when President Theodore Roosevelt was settling a gigantic coal strike in Pennsylvania. This was years before Colonel Arthur Woods set a nationwide example by his reorganization of the New York City Detective Bureau.

So the fate of Eric Carlson rested on a blank hour slipping away on the pages of time...

The thirty-fourth point of the court’s charge to the jurors was:

“As a matter of law... an accessory before the fact includes... him, who, not being present, hath advised or encouraged the perpetration of the crime, and, in this case the court instructs the jury that, even though you may believe from the evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, that the defendant, Eric Carlson, was not present in person, still if you believe... that the defendant had knowingly and wilfully counseled and procured, advised or encouraged Lena Carlson to take and swallow a part or all of the contents of a certain bottle, and that at such time the defendant knew such bottle to contain poison sufficient in quantity and strength to cause the death of a human being, and if the jury further believe that... Lena Carlson... did take and swallow any... of the contents of such bottle, and if the jury further believe... that such act, so brought about by the said Eric Carlson, caused the death of the said Lena Carlson in a manner and form as charged in the indictment, then and in such case you should find the defendant Eric Carlson, guilty!”

“Objection!” cried the defense. “Even if Eric Carlson did give his wife poisoned whiskey, the only charge could be aiding and abetting the crime of suicide!”

“Overruled!” stated the court and the twelve jurors, all the facts implanted firmly in their minds, filed out to settle, once and for all, the fate of Eric Carlson, elevator man.

The verdict?

That will appear in an early issue of Detective Fiction Weekly together with your’s!