Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [72]
Mrs. Hort was rushed to Fitch Hospital. She had ugly gashes on her left shoulder, right arm, and right hand, but her head suffered the worst damage. Doctors counted twenty-six cuts in her skull, varying from one to four inches in length. They removed the loose shards of skull and tried to stop the bleeding, but there was little they could do. Tillie Hort died seventeen hours later.
Even before she died, reporters and the police had been piecing together the story of her life. One of the first things they learned was that Mr. and Mrs. Hort were not married. In fact, neither of them was legally named Hort: He was William Kemmler, and she was Tillie Ziegler. About a year and a half before, Kemmler was living in Philadelphia and working as a huckster, selling food from a wagon. One night, while drunk, he married a woman he knew only slightly. Desperate to escape the situation, he sold his horse and wagon and disappeared. He did not leave town alone. Matilda Ziegler, who was related to Kemmler by marriage, was unhappily wed to a man whose "fondness for fast women" had resulted in his contracting "a loathsome disease." She bundled up her young daughter, Ella, and ran away to Buffalo with Kemmler. They called themselves the Horts and settled down as man and wife. William—known to his friends as "Philadelphia Billie"—took up work as a huckster again and prospered. Before long he owned four horses and three wagons and employed a handful of men and boys who helped him peddle fruit, vegetables, butter, and eggs. He made more than enough money to support his small family, but he drank too much, and his fights with Tillie sometimes kept the neighbors awake.2
William Kemmler and Tillie Ziegler
After his arrest, the police supplied Kemmler with a glass or two of brandy, and he admitted to the crime. Illiterate, he signed his confession with an X. When the trial started a month later, on May 7, 1889, the courtroom galleries filled with what a reporter described as "the usual crowd which hastens to a murder trial as to a picnic." Kemmler entered the courtroom looking uncomfortable in a new brown suit. A slender man of twenty-eight, he had been deeply tanned from long days peddling vegetables, but a month in jail had bleached him out. From the moment of the arrest, newspapers made a point of saying that Kemmler took the situation "cooly" and expressed neither defiance nor remorse. He was similarly inscrutable during the trial, spending most of the time gazing at the floor, his elbows on his knees, snapping his thumb as if shooting marbles. Often his head sank so low that it rested on the table in front of him. The Express believed that Kemmler's calm indicated not murderous coldness but "mild-eyed imbecility."3
If Kemmler's sorry appearance inspired sympathy, the testimony quickly dispelled it. The prosecution took only a day to present its case. Kemmler's motive for murder was jealousy. He believed that Ziegler had become "too familiar" with one of his employees, a Spaniard named John "Yellow" DeBella. Mary Reid and Asa King described the gruesome crime scene and testified that Kemmler had admitted his guilt. A doctor from Fitch Hospital detailed Tillie Ziegler's wounds and handed the jury a paper box containing seventeen skull fragments removed from her head before her death. Dr. Roswell Park, later a noted cancer researcher, had consulted on Ziegler's case. When a defense attorney bizarrely asked whether Tillie Ziegler was "good-looking," Park grimly replied, "Not as I saw her."4
Kemmler's attorney did not bother to dispute much of the evidence against him. "We will not ask you to acquit this man," the lawyer told the jury, "for I believe it would be monstrous to turn loose upon society a man with such propensities