A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [19]
“Grofer,” he said and pleaded with the sheriff to come to his rescue.
Cleveland shook his head. “Can’t do it, Louis. Look at the clock. The officers are doing their duty.”
Only when Goetz’s simmering temper came to a boil did Cleveland let him in on the practical joke.
The frat-boy atmosphere of the sheriff’s department took a solemn turn when Cleveland had to hang a man—Erie County’s first public execution of a prisoner in six years. The crime was matricide.
Patrick Morrissey was born in County Tipperary in Ireland. His parents took him to America, and they settled in Buffalo. As a youngster, Morrissey got into a few scrapes; and when he was eleven, he was sentenced to six months in the Western House of Refuge, the first prison in the United States built for juvenile delinquents. When he was fourteen, he ran away from home and signed on to a schooner as a roustabout. First he sailed the Great Lakes, and then the world—Brazil, Liverpool, the West Indies, Amsterdam, Sicily, St. Petersburg, and many other ports of call. Aboard the clipper George Peabody, he made a voyage that took 122 days—from New York to San Francisco, around Cape Horn—the sailors’ graveyard. In June 1872, back in Buffalo on one of his occasional visits home, he went to see his mother.
Patrick Morrissey was short, about five foot four, with wavy chestnut hair and light blue eyes. Ann Morrissey, fifty-five years old, ran a waterfront saloon and boardinghouse at No. 7 Pratt’s Dock, near the Erie Canal. She was a hard woman and a heavy drinker, with a “most savage and ungovernable temper.” Mrs. Morrissey was cutting cold meat with a sharp carving knife, preparing dinner for her boarders and saloon patrons, when her wayward son came in drunk. He demanded money from her. Harsh words were exchanged; she called him a bastard and ordered him to leave, threatening to send for the police if he did not get out immediately. Enraged, he threw her to the floor. “You had better kill your mother and be done with it,” she spat.
Morrissey wrestled the knife from his mother’s hand and plunged the seven-inch blade into her left breast. Five minutes later, she was dead. Her final word was “Oh!” as her son stabbed her.
Morrissey made no attempt to escape. When the police arrived, they found him slumped over in a chair. He never denied the killing, only that it was not premeditated. He told police he would “give the heart out of his body” if he could only bring his mother back to life.
Justice moved swiftly in those days. The trial was held three weeks later. Testimony lasted a single day. The verdict, rendered on July 10, 1872, was guilty. Sentencing was immediate. The judge told Morrissey he was to be “hanged by the neck until you are dead” on September 6. Morrissey’s lawyers appealed for a new trial on grounds that a member of the jury had fallen asleep during important testimony and that another juror was over the age of sixty. The appeal was denied, and when the governor of New York, John Hoffman, refused to grant a respite, Morrissey’s fate was sealed.
The Morrissey saga gripped the city. An immigrant son stabbing to death the mother who bore him—it had all the elements of a Greek tragedy, by way of Buffalo. The buildup to Morrissey’s date of execution was covered in every vivid detail. It was Grover Cleveland’s responsibility as sheriff of Erie County to carry out the hanging. He found it so detestable a responsibility he actually considered resigning. How he resolved his conflicted state said much about him as a man.
Grover journeyed to Holland Patent to talk things over with his mother, now sixty-six years old, and it felt good to be home. Ann Cleveland was still living in the parsonage of her late husband’s church. The bighearted parishioners