The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

THE HOOPLA MURDER TRIAL by Sydney Horler

To everyone’s surprise, Jessie Costello was cleared of murdering her fireman husband by dosing him with a poisonous compound used to burnish her kitchen boiler. The American Edmund Pearson, who was at the trial in 1933, put the comely Mrs Costello’s acquittal down to twelve male jurors “as helpless as twelve rabbits under the influence of those glittering ophidian eyes”. This account is by a British author, Sydney Horler (1888-1954), a former Daily Mail reporter who wrote dozens of thrillers in the 1920s and 1930s in the style of Edgar Wallace. Never one to mince his words, Horler described Mrs Costello’s acquittal and subsequent Broadway career, as “the most astonishing crime-farce within living memory”.

In these days of highly-publicized crime, murderers often get newspaper space which might well be devoted to more worthy individuals. At least, that is the plaint of the moralists, the high thinkers and the what-nots generally. Well, they have this consolation: if things are bad enough in this country, they are very much worse in America. Every now and then in that continent of fierce turbulence of one kind and another, there springs up a crime possessing so many bizarre features that something like 120 million people are held enthralled, fascinated, or repelled according to the nature of their mentality.

Having delivered ourselves of this brief homily, let us now examine in some detail the truly astonishing case of Jessie Costello. This woman may be said to have run the whole gamut of human emotions, not through her own merits but through the stark fact that she was accused of murdering her husband by means of cyanide of potassium poisoning. During her trial she became the most important figure in all the Americas: immediately after the trial she was besieged by film and music-hall agents with dazzling offers-and, final and most bewildering phase of all, two months after her acquittal from an ordeal which a spirited writer in the New Yorker called “as luscious a trial as any in the gaudy annals of American jurisprudence,” she stood beside Mrs Aimée Semple Macpherson, the hot-gospeller revivalist, and sang “The Old Rugged Cross”, maybe with fervour, but certainly with an eye to the main chance.

If ever a woman can be said to have determined to capitalize the notoriety due to having stood in the dock on a charge of murder, it was Mrs Jessie Costello. She had believed-and hoped-that she would find her inevitable way to the Bright Lights of Broadway as a result of having been placed in the pen; but when the wheel of Fate turned about and landed her instead by the side of that other truly remarkable character, Aimée Semple Macpherson, she felt not only bewildered but reproachful. As the writer in the New Yorker so ably put it, “as she faced 8,000 devout people in Boston’s Arena, even the ecstatic amens and hallelujahs that greeted her throaty blues-singer’s voice did not completely banish her resentment. Her trial had brought her to God instead of to Broadway, and if she was a bit rebellious who can blame her?”

All things considered, I am of the opinion that the Costello trial-practically unknown in this country, let it be added-and what followed it constitutes the most amazing piece of criminal jurisprudence within the last fifty years. If any should doubt this assertion, and it is very possible, all I ask is for that sceptic to read on.

The remarkable Jessie was a Maid of Salem. Before her great advancement she strutted on the meagre stage of Peabody, Massachusetts. Peabody is a small, drab, entirely undistinguished factory town of 20,000 inhabitants, distant some thirty miles from Boston. Born in 1902, Jessie had always disliked school, and at the age of fourteen had refused ever to return. She is said to have resembled her father, a breezy, blunt, go-to-hell type of a fellow, with a temper to match his ham-like hands. From an early age-but here I must borrow again the inimitable prose of the New Yorker writer:

Jessie was destined for higher things. The success she achieved at the Salem Court-house was perhaps no surprise to those connoisseurs of seductiveness who, lolling against corner lamp-posts, had watched Mrs Costello’s provocative and rather hefty sensuosity wriggle off into the distance. Frequently, in the past, they had given her dark, intense figure, whose ample torso bent a little forward from burgeoning hips, that accolade of approval expressed by the phrase “get a load of that!” In their way, they were pioneers. Perhaps, too, those of Mrs Costello’s neighbours who had engaged with her in certain fierce debates were not surprised by the fire and dash she later revealed. She had a certain masculinity of expression, rich, varied and yet precise, which she occasionally employed in the heat of combat.

From the above, a very good impression will be gathered of the type of woman this was.

She could not settle down to any ordinary employment; perhaps the visions of her future greatness prevented it. In any case, she tripped, in a single year, from a bakery shoppe, to the operation of an adding machine, and from this on to a Peabody Corset Emporium, where she was the chief sales-girl. (With her impressive bust she made a good model, no doubt.)

Well, there Jessie was-an opulent-breasted, big-hipped wench, full of zing, craving for life, never able to stay put for very long in one place, attracting the attention of all the males in the neighbourhood, seeing all the movies, attending all the dances, reading all the highly-spiced sex magazines in which American journalism abounds. It was, we are told, “a rich, full life”-and it was to be infinitely richer and infinitely fuller.

When she was seventeen-that was in November 1919-Jessie, looking at least ten years older in spite of the short skirts which were the fashion in those times, attracted the attention, whilst standing on a street corner selling poppies for the disabled veterans of the world war, of a tall, bleak-faced young fireman of Celtic cast, who was walking swiftly by. In the ordinary way, William J. Costello, himself a veteran of the war, and now an employee in the Fire Department of the Peabody Corporation, did not pay any attention to females; he was not that type. Sex meant nothing in his austere life. But this girl was different: when Jessie, reaching out, nabbed him by the arm, passers-by smiled; it was such a characteristic gesture of this go-getting wench. To those who were not beset with arid puritanism, the picture might have been a pleasant one-these onlookers could not have seen the shadow of death hovering in the distance.

Shortly after Jessie pinned a poppy on the coat lapel of William J. Costello, they began courting. Four years later they were married.

Now it does not require a skilled psychologist to opine that a girl of Jessie’s characteristics and mentality was a piece of human dynamite to which to be hitched-unless the husband could manage her with a firm hand.

Bill Costello, we are informed, was a bit on the staid side. Compared with his exuberant bride, he looked like one of the Pilgrim Fathers. He had not told the life-loving Jessie beforehand that he spent several hours every day on his knees; that he was given to brooding not only on his God but on his stomach: for Bill, the fireman, was both religious and suffered from chronic indigestion. Furthermore, Bill was not much of a one for talking. In this he clearly resembled the late President Calvin Coolidge who, when asked by his wife what the Sunday sermon was about, briefly answered: “Sin”, and when further asked what views the preacher had expounded, coughed up the laconic rejoinder: “He didn’t approve of it.”

To be fair, as every historian should be, I must say that Bill Costello could not have been by any manner of means a lovable character-he was too grim, too rugged, too introspective for that. Apart, altogether, from his unfashionable habit (in these days) of praying for hours on end, his indigestion, and his introspection, he had a somewhat nauseating habit of taking his boots off when he got home from duty and propping his socked feet on the radiator. It does not require much imagination to agree with the New Yorker writer already quoted, Mr Richard O. Boyer, that “Bill had little of the tender sparkle of the heroes Jessie read about in True Stories.”

But whatever failings the Peabody fireman possessed, he must have satisfied-at least, for the time being-his wife’s requirements as a husband. He did his duty-perhaps grimly, perhaps introspectively, but he did it: after the marriage, we are told, “there were four children in a sequence almost as swift as biology would allow”.

But children bring diapers-and diapers weren’t much in Jessie’s line. She regarded them as an unpleasant adjunct of modern civilization. What was more, four young children, all requiring a mother’s loving care, cramped her style; she was now no longer the admired girl on the sidewalks; marriage had caught her fast in its toils, and she was buried and lost amidst the multitude of other young housewives of Peabody. It was a melancholy reflection-especially as she had gained forty pounds in weight and had now passed her thirtieth year. Oh, dear!

In a word, Jessie was ripe for mischief when Fate sent across her path the man who was destined to become nationally known as the “kiss-and-tell-cop”.

This shortly-to-be-blazoned-abroad personage was a pouty-mouthed and tow-haired patrolman (constable, in this country) called Edward J. McMahon. This ornament to the Peabody Police Force moved through life in the typically lethargic manner peculiar to his kind; he could aptly, we are told, be described as both mawkish and moon-calfish; nevertheless, he was a great favourite with the ladies. There was, no doubt, a reason.

Almost immediately after our heroine made the acquaintance of McMahon, she was seen to undergo a renaissance. Questioned on the matter, she said-only in plainer, blunter terms-that the relationship between her and the patrolman (“Big Boy”) was entirely spiritual, and that she admired McMahon only in a platonic way. When this statement is compared with the astonishing confessions of lecherous intimacy, which McMahon, surely one of the strangest self-accusers who ever stepped into a witness-box, made at the trial, Jessie’s love of the truth was, with some degree of fairness, questioned.

But the main thing is that “Big Boy’s” admiration and adoring tactics provided a much-needed tonic for Jessie. She might have posed at this stage of her life, as a “before” and “after” witness: if the patrolman had had some rejuvenating pills named after him, his testimony would have sold a wagon-load at every street corner.

Yes, Jessie bloomed again. Once again she came to the forefront, glorying in the limelight. Leaving her dishrags and diapers, she set out to “go places and do things”. She sold tickets for Policemen’s Balls; she participated in Penny Bazaars; she collected funds for the Unemployed, and was a member of several committees. Altogether, a remarkable recrudescence was hers.

“Love had planted roses in her heart,” the newspapers later said. The newspapers would…

And then came that fatal February. Up to this time, any thought of a hand of the Law-that same Law with which she was at this time so intimately connected-reaching out to grab her, was unthinkable, but-

The actual date of Jessie’s arrest was 17 March 1933. This was exactly a month after the death of her husband, who-poor man!-a long, lank, lugubrious corpse, as in life he had been a long, lank, lugubrious fireman-was found sprawled outside the bathroom of his home on Fay Avenue, a rosary lying near it.

In her dim, fumbling way, Jessie had always dreamed of Greatness-and now the newspapers thrust this dubious quality upon her with unstinting hands.

Disregarding the fact that she had passed the age of physical perfection (remember the extra forty pounds motherhood had thrust upon her) it pleased the US journalistic world to portray her as “Beauty in Distress”. We are informed that “reporters unable to talk to the widow because of gaol rules, were forced to create their own version of her.” Thus, they thrust upon her all the seductiveness of Helen of Troy, one paper going demented and declaring that “all the modest sex appeal of Lady Godiva plus clothing but minus horse was hers”. For a few hectic weeks, Jessie thrust all the fashionable film stars away from the front page; she became the shopgirls’ ideal. Photographs in abundance were published: “Male members of lonely hearts’ clubs all over the country went to bed thinking of Jessie!”

The Boston Press, usually reflecting the real New England modern puritanism, cast aside all its former restraint and went stark, raving mad. Here was a chance to cash in on their own special sensation, and they did so with such wild abandon, that their confrères all over the American Continent followed suit. To quote the spirited Mr Boyer once again: “The Boston Press beat the tomtoms so wildly that their echoes were heard by the journalistic brethren from coast to coast and brought them on the run. Perhaps some genuine aficionados of the murder trial ran a bit reluctantly. One might not have expected to find the perfect American trial, with all the hoopla and idiocies the genre require, in austere New England. Salem, where the House of the Seven Gables [39] still casts its bleak Puritan shadow, seemed to lack the lavishness of temperament that was needed.”

When the alleged murderess (for the charge against Jessie was the specific one of poisoning her husband by means of cyanide of potassium) made her appearance in the dock, she was seen wearing a black dress, ornamented simply with white collar and cuffs. This dress soon became as well known as her smile. (She smiled throughout the trial, let it be added.) The jury, we are told, did not at first display that goggling undisguised admiration that they were to evidence later. They were coy to respond; the Costello magic took time to cast its spell. The bailiff who shortly was to send a bouquet of roses to the prisoner each day, on the opening morning behaved as official decorum dictated; in other words, he looked straight ahead of him and concentrated purely on his duty. Nor did the crowd, who were to cheer Jessie wildly each day as she made her triumphant progress from gaol to court-house, develop these maniacal tendencies until later. In short, the opening morning of the trial gave small indication of the tempest of excitement which was to follow.

Indeed, had it not been for the striking personality of the accused, this might have been just another murder trial. But, and here again I have resource to Mr Boyer,

facing a possible death sentence, Jessie bloomed like a rose. Her personality dominated the proceedings. Even dull moments seemed to contain a certain breathlessness, a certain lilt, derived, perhaps, from the cadenced hop, skip, jump, wave and smile with which Jessie, four times a day, streaked to and from her limousine through the cheering crowd on her way in and out of the court-house. Then she would pant up the stairway, the fortunates in the building racing in the wake of her broad and straining buttocks. Gaining the second floor, she would stand at the window and wave to the crowd in the street beneath. One day a retinue of vaudeville midgets stood below and received Jessie’s wave as if it were a benediction. Their manager henceforth advertised them as The Troupe That Had Been Waved At By Jessie!

Word of the wonderful things that were to be witnessed at the Salem court-house soon got abroad; with his finger characteristically on the American reading-public’s pulse, that overlord of the printed word, W.R. Hearst, began to press buttons. He sent such notable United States writers as Will Irwin, Katharine Brush and Adela Rogers St John thither to write their flowing cadences. The Hearst papers, we read, “were full of typographical aphrodisiacs. Every phrase describing Jessie as a glamorous siren, irresistible to men, seemed to increase the irrelevancy of her guilt or innocence.”

Stimulated by reading such purple prose, was it any wonder that the crowd panting to get into the court-house increased every day-indeed every minute? Once the populace, led by the Press, had firmly come to the opinion that Jessie was the most lovely feminine creature that had been reared in New England for a decade, was it any wonder that the jurors caught the general infection? After all (as Mr Boyer so sapiently points out), they were only men, and Jessie was merely a woman.

Sentiment-mawkish, heavily-scented, sex-pulsating, dreamy-eyed-ruled the camp. Justice went overboard-and who can wonder at it amidst such an atmosphere? It is recorded that one of the jurymen actually inquired if he could send the prisoner a box of candies as a slight gesture of his esteem! So crazy had become the atmosphere of the court-house that, during the recesses, the jurors formed a male voice quartette, and the hot summer air vibrated to their renderings of such songs as “Sweet Adelaide”, “My Wild Irish Rose”, and “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”.

If Jessie became the heroine, her “Big Boy”, the “kiss-and-tell-cop”, became the villain-after all, you can’t have two heroes in a murder trial: that’s asking too much! Even the Hearst papers jibbed at printing all of McMahon’s testimony; this was so sizzling in character that strong men were seen to blush, and haughty matrons to (pretend to) swoon. A particularly daring publisher put the moving words into a little red booklet, and this sold in cartloads. Meanwhile, “Jessie, heady with adulation and resembling some buxom prima donna entering the opera-house amid the cheers of her admirers, cantered through the crowd from limousine to court-house and back again.”

The American male is a chivalrous if simple creature-and seeing Jessie as the heroine of this sordid piece, he commenced to write letters to the prisoner at the rate of five hundred a day. Here are two which were read in Court-both of them in verse, it will be seen.

The first:

– Robert E. Lee.

The second:

A Mr J. E. Hazeltine was responsible for this much more mature effort.

Mr Hazeltine, whilst pouring out his admiration for Jessie, poured out also a liberal dose of verbal prussic-acid for the man who had confessed that he went to bed with Jessie on innumerable occasions-especially when Bill the fireman was out looking after his fires. He wrote of McMahon in the following blistering words: “I would not give him a job cleaning out a pig-pen. I would have more respect for the pigs.”

Mr Hazeltine was evidently a deep and profound thinker.

This astoundingly egregious criminal farce wound its way slowly to a close. Every day the radiant happiness of Jessie could be seen depicted more clearly on her dimpled face. For by now there had entered another element: inspired by what they had read in the newspapers, and getting all hot under their vests at the photographs they had seen printed, agents for the burlesque theatre (where “art” is confined to shapely women provocatively taking off their clothes, piece by piece) arrived on the scene. They all carried contracts in their hands.

Before the Defence had closed its case, there were men in the crowd who talked knowingly of screen tests. Newspapers were said to be prepared to bid fortunes for the rights of Jessie’s life story. The Bright Lights of Broadway seemed as inevitable as acquittal when she faced the jury and said simply, but with dignity: “Gentlemen, send me back to my children”.

How could they-being men with hearts beating-do anything else? Yes, although the most was made of the evidence, Jessie was acquitted.

She came back to the world, her head dizzy with prospective further triumphs: amongst other tangible proofs of her popularity, she had a contract for eleven hundred dollars, representing two appearances daily for four days in a New York theatre. Besides the contract, she had also been provided with a maid, a theatrical agent, two thousand four hundred dollars for the exclusive newspaper rights of her life-story, and two reporters who were to act as her Boswells.

Jessie sped like a meteor-rather a weighty one, with too much flesh round her hips and sagging breasts-towards the Bright Lights of Broadway. In doing so, she disappointed at least one of her admirers-that same Mr Hazeltine, who has been mentioned earlier in this chronicle. Mr Hazeltine was a knight who would not have disgraced himself sitting at King Arthur’s table; he had believed that his heroine might struggle for vindication, but never for profit. To commercialize her great ordeal in the way she had done, was something that threatened to break Mr Hazeltine’s heart. As for Mr Robert E. Lee, it is said that he talked darkly of taking his life…

America never does anything by halves; this truism was rarely better demonstrated than in the case of Jessie Costello. Contracts were thrust upon Jessie by the handful; they descended upon her like the autumn leaves. And, being so much sought after, Jessie became capricious; amidst the frantic hullaballo in which she now lived, amidst the never-ceasing, hard, unwinking Bright Lights of Broadway, she turned down scornfully a $20,000 contract for a ten-week burlesque appearance. Her lady-like excuse was that “she didn’t think that taking off her clothes in public was refined,” and so she hurried back to her main occupation-which nowadays was shopping. Feeling that she was a great person in her own right, she conducted it on a lavish scale. “A dozen pairs of shoes in one place, half a dozen hats in another, silk underwear by the bundle, hosiery, dresses by the score-everything,” was the description one of her reportorial Boswells wrote, swimmy-eyed, in his paper.

Arrayed in all this finery, Jessie did not lead a retired life: on the contrary, she was frequently seen in the fashionable places. In these resorts of the élite she could be seen, “the cynosure of all eyes, as she sits down in a beautiful gown and ermine wrap, a smart, self-possessed, well-groomed widow”.

When such famous Broadway columnists as Walter Winchell of the New York Daily Mirror and Ed Sullivan of the New York Daily News came up to be introduced, she was graciousness itself “as they offered sympathy for the trouble and torture she had been forced to endure.” The picture of Walter Winchell, that hard-boiled commentator on mankind’s frailties, offering sympathy for the troubles and tortures which Jessie had endured, should have been photographed-as, no doubt, it was.

Meanwhile Hollywood itself had got busy. Those modern magi, who know what the public wants even before the public has given any indication of it, were gathering in the offing like so many potbellied vultures. Presently they descended in shoals, demanding the radiant widow’s appearance on the screen.

So here she was, sitting pretty as the saying goes, being besieged by all kinds of entrepreneurs. It must have been a gorgeous sight for the observing gods.

Even more gorgeous was the spectacle which almost immediately followed. There was a certain, but as yet inarticulate, portion of the American public, that saw not the trailing clouds of glory, but national disgrace in the acquitted widow’s wholesale grabbing of newspaper-space. They resented the fact that a woman who had been accused of murder, and who, according to the man who said he had been her lover, had displayed lascivious tendencies too shocking even to be printed in the newspapers, should be thrust upon the public’s consciousness in this manner. They were old-fashioned enough to think that, hidden away somewhere or other, was the merest hint of bad taste. Just a soupçon, perhaps, but still there.

So they went to Mr Will Hays, who, as the world knows, is the judge of what shall and shall not be seen in American motion pictures.

Mr Hays, who has been described as “that great Presbyterian moralist,” saw eye to eye with them. The result was swift, devastating and astonishing; told in plain language that this was one of the things that must not be done, the screen magnates lost all interest in the fascinating widow overnight, and the next morning Jessie was left high and dry. All washed up, in fact.

Difficulties now descended upon Mrs Costello, even more quickly than her former successes. It was not to be wondered at, perhaps, that Jessie did not quite understand the difficulties that now lay in her path. She was still artistically obstreperous. She began her second day in the Metropolis, we are told, by actually rejecting an $18,000 contract in burlesque, before hurrying out to do some more shopping. She had been about to sign the document, which stipulated $1,600 a week payment for twelve weeks, when her duties were explained-these duties consisted of acting a little scene, “clean but affectionate” between herself and an actor impersonating the unspeakable McMahon. For an instant Jessie was her old trenchant, eloquent self as she ejected the agent. Then she rushed out and bought a refrigerator, furniture for her six-roomed country cottage, gifts and clothing for her children, and purchases for her friends.

But the thunderclouds were rapidly gathering; the bad news was broken to Jessie by one of her Boswells that she was no longer saleable. Instantly she changed her front; from being the pursued, she was now the pursuer. No story-book detective could have been more assiduous in tracking down the murderer than she was in tracking down the agents who, warned by Mr Hays, were determined now to have nothing more to do with this bad risk. (As Mr Boyer put it: “It wasn’t fair; it was almost un-American.”)

Despairing of the films, she thought twice about the burlesque theatres. Perhaps, after all, what she had been asked to do was not too bad; she went to the manager who had offered her the $ 18,000 contract referred to above. To her indignant surprise, she was now told that the offer no longer held good. The Bright Lights of Broadway were dimming with a vengeance.

Jessie stood alone.

There was nothing else for it but to return to her Boston home. She returned with no contracts, little money, and a magnificent wardrobe. She returned to find a city of angry critics-and no real friends.

Reaction, you see, had set in; the public had switched their views within an hour. Whereas before there were none so cruel as to impugn her motives, now she found none so brave as to support her. The general comments were summed up in a pregnant phrase by a leader in the campaign for decency. He said: “Public morals forbid commercializing such a tragic event.”

Determined to snatch what little might remain of her previous astonishing glory, Jessie descended the scale with a sickening thud. No longer able to show herself on stage or dance-hall, she took to the sawdust floor of a Boston public-house. This was owned by Jack Sharkey, the highly temperamental Lithuanian, who had once been heavy-weight champion of the world. In the month of September she entered Sharkey’s employ as a “hostess”.

Then came the most amazing turn-about of this whole epic of hoopla. Jessie had been working among the sawdust, the spittoons, the drunks and the photographs of other great prize fighters for a fortnight, when she sent word to the local newspapers that she had something to tell them.

The result was this: On 3 October the local Press carried a statement signed by her to this effect: “I am about to be associated with the noted Los Angeles Evangelist, Mrs Aimée Semple Mac-Pherson.”

To quote the fuller details about this staggering prospect, she explained that “she had gained Sister Aimée’s consent and would begin work for the Lord on 15 October, when Sister Aimée would open a revival in Boston.”

In order to dress befittingly for the part, Jessie, we are told, “bought a becoming nun-like costume of black and went immediately into training”. Her trainer was the Rev. Mr William McLam, Boston’s Representative of Aimée’s nation-wide organization. After a long training session, the Rev. Mr McLam emerged into the open and reported progress.

“I’m always glad,” he said to the reporters, “to co-operate with anyone seeking to enter the Harvest Field. The Master is calling for labourers. We hope Mrs Jessie will come into the great blessing of God’s love. I get down on my knees and pray with her.”

Well, what could be fairer than that?

Clemenceau, when he had been a newspaper-man, would have found the opening night of the Revival (Jessie’s) a fitting subject for his pen. But even then the withering cynic could not have done justice, perhaps, to this mighty theme.

In the absence of Clemenceau, let us be content with recording the heart-searing words of Mr Boyer:

When the great night arrived, Sister Aimée’s heart must have dropped a beat when she saw her glowing protégée. No one knew better than this aged prima donna of the sawdust trail, that the allure which had called so many to God, was beginning to fade. Yet she had retained her coquettish technique. The years that had lined her face had given her such skill that she could sometimes still create the illusion of youth, providing that no younger person stood near.

But now, in the glare of the Boston Arena’s lights, she stood before 8,000 people, and, beside the electric Jessie. It was a cruel contrast. The young widow radiated triumph. After many vicissitudes, she had gained an audience. There was something tense, positive, and compelling about her figure. In contrast, Aimée’s ageing muscles seemed to sag.

But the old warrior did not go down without a fight.

“I have in mind tonight,” Aimée said, “a woman who has been separated from her children, and is now finding her way back to God.”

It was unfortunate, no doubt, that her voice sounded thin and reedy; or that her white nurse’s uniform, her straw-coloured hair and her pasty face blended with the yellow lights and made her difficult to see: on the other hand, it was even more unfortunate, from her point of view, that Jessie’s solid figure was in black.

Aimée continued:

“You must, you know, be broken at the feet of Jesus before you can do anything worth while. Mrs Costello told me, ‘Oh, sister, I have been broken at the feet of Jesus and think I can help the poor.’ She told me she’d like to do something for Jesus and that she ‘didn’t want to die empty-handed.’ “

Called upon to do her stuff, Jessie began her Evangelist work by lifting up her voice and singing that old favourite, “The Old Rugged Cross”. She gave it all she had-which was plenty-and, it is recorded by the faithful Press present on the occasion, “the more orthodox ‘Amen!’ was drowned in secular cheers.”

The sound must have been wine to Jessie-it recalled, no doubt, the resounding huzzas of the Salem court-house-and she warmed to the 8,000 of the faithful.

She spoke in a husky voice, tremulous with emotion.

This is what she said:

“I want to say tonight that I thank God I am saved and that He has brought me back again.”

With that, according to the strict instructions she had received beforehand, she made about to retire. But the crowd would not have it. Again to quote the sprightly Mr Boyer,

surely it was not the redeemed who rudely shouted the widow’s name as her rival fought onwards with the service. There was a miniature sailboat on the stage. The pale-faced Evangelist gestured towards it and one could see her mouth open and shut as she recited her parable. Now and again she tortured her face into a smile, and sometimes phrases sounded through the confusion-“sinking in the sea of sin, sinking to rise no more”-and then at last it was over. Sister Aimée had fought the good fight and it had not been pleasant. Sister Jessie received an ovation as she distributed paper-bound copies of the New Testament; when similar scenes happened on succeeding nights, it was unbearable. Mrs Aimée expelled Sister Jessie from her organization, declaring that she had not been sufficiently trained to preach or to make public appearances for the Lord.

The hard-boiled reporters panted for revelations.

“Are you jealous of her?” they asked pertinently.

The reply was as good as could be expected in the difficult circumstances.

“In the Lord’s work,” said Aimée Semple MacPherson, “one is not afraid of a pretty face.” Her own was twisted as she spoke; she might have been eating a sour plum.

That was the end. Released from the Lord’s service, Jessie had no further cards to play; she bumped downhill as though she were descending to Avernus on a rickety toboggan. “Expelled” by Sister Aimée, it was just as though she was the victim of a curse.

She fought back. She even wrote to President Roosevelt about it, but it was no good; her cup became filled to overflowing; bitterness seeped into her soul.

One must have a certain sympathy with this extraordinary woman. She had been granted a vision of glamour and wealth, and this died hard. She had been told to expect illimitable riches- whereas, all she had actually gained was a sum equivalent to £700, plus clothing, furniture, presents and living expenses.

No heroine of maudlin fiction suffered more or so intensely. She became the heroine of Victorian melodrama; she was ejected from her old home-exactly twelve months after her triumphant acquittal. It snowed that day…

In May of the following year, she was forced to ask for relief. She was entitled to do this because her husband had been in the world war, and she was thereby enabled to claim protection under the State Soldiers’ Aid Fund. The authorities gave her the exact sum of sixty-five dollars a month, to keep her and her four children.

The end?

My friends, it is a sad one. According to the latest information to hand, our heroine is still alive. But, alas, oblivion has descended upon her in a blue-black cloud. On the afternoon that she received the first instalment of the Soldiers’ Aid Grant, she moved with her four children to a five-roomed apartment on the second floor of a two-family house on Ethel Avenue, Peabody. Her rent there was twenty-five dollars a month, and she paid it from her welfare allowance. Is it any wonder that one of her friends recently declared “that the children might do with a little more clothing, and that food is not too plentiful”?

Jessie is now said to be thin, although there are no grey hairs on that once thickly thatched black head. Her skin, we are told, is still very white. She can look out of her kitchen window and see her old home just one street away. Perhaps sometimes she thinks of the fireman on his knees-and lying starkly still outside the bathroom.

One might have thought that her spirit would have been broken. Not at all; the same courage that enabled her to face the applauding audiences at her trial now enables her to plan for the future. She has an eye, we are told, on another residence, which could be bought for just over one thousand pounds. She has not the money, but she is hoping that this will turn up.

Perhaps a New Hampshire farmer who knocked at her door one night, his face flushed like a crimson moon, and who said apologetically that “he hated to bother her, but he wanted to marry her. His wife had died and he was pretty well off,” could have been prevailed upon to provide it-but Jessie said “No!” For, you see, there was a tag tied to the offer: the New Hampshire farmer naturally wanted a wife who would live with him down on his farm.

Jessie did not see her way to grant such a request. Living in the backwoods was not for her. After all, she had once been a great figure-her name had been in every paper, crowds had cheered wildly every appearance she made. How could she hide herself away in the bleak Middle-West? She turned this farmer down-cold.

The last recorded words of our heroine may or may not be pathetic. When a reporter called upon her concerning the last offer of marriage, she swept a hand round her present shabby abode and said contemptuously: “This is only temporary, I shall climb again.”

Time alone will provide the answer to this statement.

Time-and that ever-crazy country, America.