Some Cases Never Die, or Even Fade

By Frank Trippett

Is any case ever closed? The question is irresistibly provoked by three moldering cases that blurted into the headlines in the past few weeks. Consider:

> Just 49 years after high-living Judge Joseph Force Crater was last seen stepping into a cab in Manhattan, somebody phoned New York City police that the missing man, declared legally dead in 1939, could be found having a drink at Pat's Emerald Pub in Queens. The breathless tip proved phony, of course, as do all 300 or so reports on Crater's whereabouts that the police receive each year.

> Almost 64 years after legendary Labor Agitator Joe Hill was executed for murder by a Utah firing squad, a retired union publicist named Leslie Orear has launched a campaign to persuade Governor Scott M. Matheson to pardon him.

> Fully 114 years after Maryland Physician Samuel Mudd drew a life sentence for complicity in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, President Carter has exonerated him of guilt in his treatment of John Wilkes Booth's broken leg.

Cases of mysterious disappearances and controversial verdicts, of marvelous disasters and battlefield riddles, of private scandals and public tragedies -- all can live on and on. They offer fields for debate long after the studies, investigations, decisions and acts that ostensibly closed them.

Obscure fact often mixes with popular fancy, fuzzing up the truth and perpetuating legend. The old story of Thomas Jefferson's rumored love affair with a slave is opened for fresh examination in a new novel, Sally Hemings, by Barbara Chase-Riboud. The late Agatha Christie's brief, unexplained disappearance during her first marriage inspired a fictional explanation in the book and movie Agatha, which intensified speculation about the case and could stretch it out for years to come.

Footnote-minded historians, to be sure, try to keep alive even the most obscure human misadventures. Yet certain cases thrive quite apart from the historical impulse that might keep them stirring in the public imagination. It is not mere fascination with history that has kept the British forever trying to solve the murders by Jack the Ripper in 1888, or Americans perennially intrigued with the fate of Amelia Earhart, the aviation heroine whose plane disappeared in the Pacific in 1937. Various speculations have made butcherous Jack out to be a perverted prince of British royalty or a deranged midwife, and have made tragic Amelia a spy executed by the Japanese on a Pacific island or still alive and living in New Jersey.

Apparently when a personality possesses certain compelling traits, when an event carries some content of morality or ideology or suspense or horror or romance, some ambiguity, even an engaging murkiness, he, she or it is claimed by the public and used as a source of everything from mythmaking to sheer entertainment. The phenomenon provides glimpses of the subtle human chemistries from which folklore is manufactured. To know how such mythmaking works is to be freed of all surprise when dramatic events evoke numberless theories to account for them or produce songs, plays and novels to celebrate, rehash and elaborate them.

Assassinations of high public figures almost automatically become cases that are never closed. There was no way that the Warren Commission report could have put to rest the John F. Kennedy murder case, or that the conviction of James Earl Ray could have concluded the case of Martin Luther King Jr. As Jimmy Carter's action in the Mudd case shows, even the assassination of Lincoln was not a closed case as of 1979.

The files never seem to stay permanently shut on long gone heroes. Congress in the past few years has reopened the dossiers of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis to restore U.S. citizenship to those two Confederate stalwarts. Military analysts and moralists alike still pick over the cases of swashbuckling blunderers. Was General George Custer a fit officer or a dumb egomaniac who assured his own annihilation by his foolhardy bravado at Little Big Horn?

Celebrated outlaws are also perpetual sources of popular revisionism. While the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid purported to document conclusively that the two bank-robbing adventurers died during a fling in Bolivia, some Wild West buffs insist to this day that Butch beat it back to the U.S. around 1910 and lived quietly with relatives out West. Jesse James stirred such a spirited buzzard of legend and myth that, after he was shot dead, subsequent generations were persuaded by transparent impostors that the St. Joe desperado was, yessir, still alive. Questions about James (Was he a Robin Hood or mere hood?) will long stay alive.

The sheer public craving for romance has kept alive the case of Anastasia, daughter of Czar Nicholas II, who may or may not have escaped the Bolshevik assassins in 1918; undying interest has given wide hearings to several claimants to the identity of Anastasia. The divergent ideological fevers of mid-century America guaranteed that the Alger Hiss perjury case would stay effectively open right along with the case of the executed spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The arguments in both trials are still thundering forth in such books as Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case by Allen Weinstein (against Hiss) and We Are Your Sons by Robert and Michael Meeropol (for the Rosenbergs, who were indeed the Meeropols' parents). There is always the hope of posthumous vindication: Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927, but only two years ago, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis proclaimed that because of prejudice in their trial no stigma should attach to their memory.

Probably not even these cases will ever last as long as that of Joan of Arc. Five centuries after she was burned at the stake, every facet of her person, her trial and the surrounding events are still scrutinized and argued by lawyers, theologians, historians, mystics, psychologists, poets and playwrights. Even medical pathologists have joined in the continual replaying of the trial of the Maid of Orleans. In 1958 Scholar Isobel-Ann Butterfield and her physician husband John theorized that an advanced infection of bovine tuberculosis might have led to the phenomenon of Joan's hearing voices. Critic Albert Guerard was right when, in a review of one of the thousands of books about her, he said: "The last word on Joan of Arc will never be uttered."

True, most cases do get closed, passing into history and out of memory. That so many linger, alive and kicking, speaks mainly of the human urge not only to look at the past but to lug it into the present, reshaping it into folklore. Which is always handy to have around for nourishment and entertainment, Alger Hiss in case the present goes dry.-- Frank Trippett

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