The Trials of Laura Fair

Sex, Murder, and Insanity in the Victorian West

Carole Haber

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781469626468, 9781469607580
• eBook ISBN: 9781469607597
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

On November 3, 1870, on a San Francisco ferry, Laura Fair shot a bullet into the heart of her married lover, A. P. Crittenden. Throughout her two murder trials, Fair’s lawyers, supported by expert testimony from physicians, claimed that the shooting was the result of temporary insanity caused by a severely painful menstrual cycle. The first jury disregarded such testimony, choosing instead to focus on Fair’s disreputable character. In the second trial, however, an effective defense built on contemporary medical beliefs and gendered stereotypes led to a verdict that shocked Americans across the country. In this rousing history, Carole Haber probes changing ideas about morality and immorality, masculinity and femininity, love and marriage, health and disease, and mental illness to show that all these concepts were reinvented in the Victorian West.
Haber’s book examines the era’s most controversial issues, including suffrage, the gendered courts, women’s physiology, and free love. This notorious story enriches our understanding of Victorian society, opening the door to a discussion about the ways in which reputation, especially female reputation, is shaped.

1

THE SHE-DEVIL KNOWN AS MRS. LAURA D. FAIR

Four months would elapse between the shooting of Alexander Crittenden on the El Capitan and the much-publicized trial that began on March 27, 1871. During this time, although Laura was quickly entombed in the city prison and later moved to the county jail, she was never really out of sight or mind. Even before Crittenden finally succumbed, after lying for two days “in terrible pain” surrounded by his family and friends, the press crowded into the jail intent on uncovering the cloaked woman.¹ Although in the first few days, as the newspapers reported, she was often hysterical, unable to sleep, and conducting mad conversations with her dying or dead lover, few suggested that these actions were proof that the murder was the act of an insane individual. Rather, in an attempt to reveal the woman who lurked behind the veil, newspapers around the country delved into her history and searched for those who had crossed her path. While everyone immediately knew that she was thirty-three, tall, fair-haired, and beautiful, this description hardly satisfied the public’s curiosity. What were her motives? How could she commit such a heinous act? Was she actually as mad as she seemed, or was she a revengeful, spurned lover who knew exactly what she was doing at all times?

The basic outlines of her history gave little comfort to those who wanted to portray her as a mistreated innocent or an individual shorn of all reason. The story of her exploits captivated the nation; her ability to interact with the elite of western society seemed both surprising and shocking. Although throughout her life, she would continually worry about her reputation and assert that she was always a “true lady,” she was never the pure, pious, domestic, or submissive female idealized by Victorian culture.² Rather, as portrayed by the press and later the prosecution, her ignominious marital history, her overt sexuality, and her aggressive incursions into the public arena all demonstrated that she was both “manly” and “bold.” The heinous murder, then, newspapers concluded, was only the expected culmination of a vile and ill-spent existence.³

Born Laura Hunt on June 22, 1837, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, she was a member of a rather small family, consisting only of herself, one brother, her mother, and her father, who would die in 1853. Traveling throughout the South, the family eventually settled in New Orleans. There at the early age of sixteen, and at the prompting of her dying father, she married William H. Stone, who was several decades her senior and assumed to possess great wealth. The marriage, however, did not last even two years. As Laura later testified at her first trial, Stone was “a dissipated man . . . and would not stop drinking.” He died shortly after their marriage, Laura explained, “of something like cholera morbus.”⁴

According to court documents found after the shooting, however, the story of Laura’s first marriage was far more complicated than she cared to explain. With Stone still alive, the couple separated and moved toward divorce procedures. At first, it appeared that the action would not require the intervention of a judge. The marriage was to be amiably dissolved, and Laura was to receive a sizable cash settlement of $2,500. Ultimately, however, although the court documents offered no explanation, the negotiations fell through and the case went before a judge.⁵ But even before the final papers were signed, Stone expired (some claimed suspiciously). At the age of eighteen, the soon-to-be divorcée became a grieving widow with an ultimately worthless claim to a 12,000-acre estate in Texas.

For the first time, although hardly the last, Laura then set about reinventing herself and the story of her past relationships. As would be true throughout her existence, migration allowed her to create a new narrative of her life. Moving to Mobile in 1851, she presented herself as the devoted young widow of a “harmonious” marriage whose unfortunate history deserved the compassion and support of her community.⁶ Even twenty years later, when the Times of New Orleans and the New York Times finally did publish the court records of the divorce, she never acknowledged the failed relationship or the disputed divorce. Upon arriving in Alabama, she enrolled in the Convent of the Visitation in Mobile, ostensibly to be trained as an upstanding Christian teacher.⁷ Laura’s stay in the convent, however, was brief. After six months, she emerged from the institution into the arms Tom Grayson, who, as the newspapers later discovered, had been named by Stone for paying undue attention to Laura, and perhaps for committing adultery. A month later, they were husband and wife.

But, as the story of Laura’s life before the fatal event in November 1870 unfolded, this marriage was doomed as well. Although, at the trial, the prosecution would repeatedly challenge Laura’s assertion that she had been legally divorced from Grayson, they never questioned her characterization of the marriage. Nor, in the first trial, was her mother or Grayson—who, according to Laura, was now on his third wife—called to the stand.⁸ Laura later testified that her second husband was also addicted to alcohol and hard living. Following a wedding trip to Vicksburg, the couple returned to New Orleans to reside with his mother. Here, Laura explained, her life was anything but pleasant: “Mr. Grayson would come home at night drunk and have to be brought in by his uncle and the cabman and his mother, and I would have to undress him when he was unable to stand. When he was in liquor he would shoot over my head in bed with a pistol and he has drawn a dirk knife on his mother when he was intoxicated. . . . He was continually drunk; he would make me lie in bed as he leveled his pistol to shoot over my head to show what a good marksman he was.”⁹

Hardly willing to subject herself to such treatment, she saw little reason to be a submissive, dutiful wife. After a mere six months, she declared she would no longer continue to risk bodily harm simply to uphold her marriage vows. While to modern sensibilities, such an action might appear prudent, to the nineteenth-century readers who followed the case, her behavior was a sign that she, rather than her husband, posed a serious threat to society. Even at a young age, the Times of New Orleans asserted, her failure to respect her marital vows demonstrated “that ‘ways that are dark and tricks that are vain’ clustered thickly about the threshold of what has been a stirring and eventful career.”¹⁰

In fleeing the marriage, Laura put herself directly in conflict with middle-class prescriptive ideology. In the 1850s, scores of writers of magazine articles and religious tracts admonished women on the importance of marriage. In the changing urban and industrial environment, they pointed to the family as the bedrock on which social virtue and stability were to be founded. Without it, they feared, the very foundations of American society would crumble. Individuals would care only for their selfish needs; children would fail to learn honor and sacrifice.

To secure the nation’s destiny, therefore, young women had to surrender their own wishes and concerns to the desires of their husbands and the sanctity of the home—even when men’s behavior did not live up to expectations.¹¹ Although social commentators portrayed the proper husband as temperate, understanding, and compassionate, they realized that not all individuals could meet this ideal. Nonetheless, writers counseled women not to seek an escape from the marital state but to remain patiently alongside even the cruelest of husbands.¹² If conflict or even abuse existed in the household, the “true woman” was to endure her plight without expressing reproach, remembering that she must always be submissive to her husband’s will. “To suffer and to be silent under suffering,” wrote an author in Godey’s Lady’s Book, “seems the great command [a woman] has to obey.”¹³ By acting accordingly, married women not only accepted “the terms of salvation” but created a proper home.¹⁴ “To bear the evils and sorrows which appointed us with a patient mind,” asserted Lydia H. Sigourney, “should be the continued effort of our sex.”¹⁵

According to these writers, patience, sacrifice, and submissiveness were expected—characteristics that Laura obviously neither possessed nor thought central to her existence. At no time in her life, as the prosecutors would repeatedly remind the jurors at her trials, did she ever understand that she should “suffer and be silent under suffering.” Believing instead that her own wellbeing far outweighed the expectations of society—and caring little for the advice of women’s magazines—she saw no more reason to remain married to Grayson than she had to Stone. Laura quickly retreated to a lawyer’s office and requested that he begin procedures to end her difficult marriage.

If Laura’s casual attitude toward marriage characterized her as most unusual, her attempt to procure two divorces within a year of each marriage certainly marked her as nothing less than “remarkable”—a term that newspapers would repeatedly assign to her. As historian Michael Grossberg has noted, in the nineteenth century, a woman’s decision “to seek a divorce was a bold assertion of individual rights at odds with the submissive demeanor expected of wives.”¹⁶ Not surprisingly, then, middle-class writers had outright censure for those who willingly destroyed the bonds of matrimony. In the 1850s, government officials railed against attempts to weaken divorce laws while newspaper editors, such as Horace Greeley, predicted that the overthrow of marriage “would result in a general profligacy and corruption such as this country has never known.”¹⁷

Given such concerns, in the 1850s in most states, the grounds for divorce remained extremely strict.¹⁸ Not only were the injured parties required to have established residence in the state, but they also had to prove adultery, desertion, impotence, excessive danger, or extreme cruelty.¹⁹ Yet, even if such conditions existed, as Laura discovered, engaging a lawyer could be both time-consuming and expensive. Although she had apparently received funds from Stone that allowed her to initiate proceedings, she now lacked the necessary resources and was rebuffed at the lawyer’s door.

Laura, however, was not deterred from pursuing a course of separation. Neither her financial insecurity nor the beliefs of commentators seemed reason to stay in the unpleasant relationship. Unable to obtain the necessary funds to file for divorce, she simply decided to leave Grayson and encouraged him to sue her for divorce on the basis of her desertion. While she did not worry about the legality of such an act, she remained concerned about its impact on her social standing. How would her actions affect her reputation? Would she be seen as the guilty party who had deserted a happy marriage? Would she be ostracized in her community and labeled a social pariah? She convinced herself, though, that as long as people knew that she had suffered great abuse and Grayson did not counter with charges of improper behavior, she would be able to protect her reputation. “I let him sue,” she explained in court years later, as long as he brought “no false charges against me.”²⁰ Pleased a year or so later by the news from her lawyer that Grayson had finally filed for the divorce and that she would be a free woman a year later, she assumed she had escaped the marriage with her respectability firmly intact.²¹

Thus, sometime in 1856 or 1857 (Laura herself was unsure), confident that she would eventually be legally divorced and that she could restore whatever damage had been done to her name, she and her widowed mother moved to San Francisco.²² Once again, she created an improved narrative of her life. Now, she was the ill-fated young widow of an elderly landholder and the sympathetic assumed-divorcée of an abusive man. She seemed oblivious to the fact that, in years to come, her actions would lead her to be labeled a bigamist who had obvious disdain for the sacred institution of marriage.

Rather, like thousands who traveled to San Francisco, Laura was sure that a profitable future, as well as a new identity, was to be hers. In choosing to travel across the country, she followed scores of fortune seekers who believed that California was the untapped land of opportunity. With the discovery of gold in 1848, San Francisco had become a destination for men and women who, leaving their past behind them, saw California as the land of promise.²³

By 1852, 35,000 individuals had swarmed into San Francisco. Overwhelmingly young and male, these individuals saw the potential of amassing considerable capital, either through the gold they dug out of the earth or by providing necessary services to those who mined the ore. Even those of the working class found that their talents were much in demand. Mechanics, for example, earned as much as twenty-five dollars a day, while laborers were paid sixteen dollars or an ounce of gold dust a day.²⁴ Almost instantly, the city became a commercial center focused around its port and home to mills, trading houses, and commercial activity.

Like many who entered the city, Laura believed that she too would find her fortune. Following the example of many widowed and single women, she planned to open a boardinghouse in San Francisco. After the boom of the discovery of gold, boardinghouse keeping had flourished in the city, serving young men who needed a place to stay. Charging single men rates as high as thirty dollars a week without board, these establishments at first appeared wonderful sources of revenue.²⁵ By 1860, 114 women were employed in the city running hotels, boardinghouses, or restaurants.²⁶

Yet, if the trip across country offered Laura the ability to reinvent herself, it did not provide her with the financial security she had envisioned. While the early years of San Francisco’s development had been extremely profitab...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Trials of LAURA FAIR
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: LAURA FAIR AND THE UNWRITTEN LAW
• 1: THE SHE-DEVIL KNOWN AS MRS. LAURA D. FAIR
• 2: THE CASE FOR THE PROSECUTION
• 3: THE DEFENSE RESPONDS
• 4: THE APPEAL
• 5: THE SECOND TRIAL
• 6: THE FAIR LUNATIC
• EPILOGUE: THE MANY FACES OF LAURA FAIR
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX