Part 1Cold Open
Santa Cruz, California. The ninth of September, 1933 — Admission Day, the state's own holiday — and up on Beach Hill, above the bay, the afternoon is coming down soft and warm.
In the garden of a house called "The Cabins," a young nurse named Helene Roberts is sitting in a chair, talking with the man she looks after. Francis J. M. Grace is fifty-nine years old — a retired shipping executive, a rich man, and an invalid. His heart will not let him do much of anything anymore, so the garden chair is where he spends his afternoons. His wife has driven downtown to shop, with her companion. The house is nearly empty. The butler is in the kitchen, starting dinner.
And then a woman comes up the path, and stops at the edge of the lawn.
Roberts sees her first, and she knows her. It's the nurse who used to work in this house. The one who was let go.
Grace notices her. He gets up, crosses the lawn, and the two of them talk — for two or three minutes — while Helene Roberts sits a short distance away and cannot hear one word of it.
Then Grace turns and walks back to his chair, and Roberts can see that he is disturbed. She walks over to the woman and asks her to leave, because she is agitating Mr. Grace. The woman refuses. She paces back and forth on the path, and keeps saying, "that's all right."
So the nurse and the old man start for the house. They reach the edge of the lawn.
And there is a shot.
Grace cries out, lurches toward the house, gets through the screen door, and goes down in the hallway. Roberts turns — the woman is standing a few feet away with a pistol in her hand. Roberts grapples with her, can't get the gun, and calls for the butler. He comes running out of the kitchen and takes it out of her hands.
Then Helene Roberts kneels down beside her employer. He is lying in a pool of blood, bleeding from the mouth, and his pulse has just about gone. She telephones for a doctor. And then she asks the woman why she has done this dreadful thing.
The answer isn't a confession. It isn't a denial, either. It's a sentence nobody in that garden would ever forget — and it is not the whole answer.
"I had a reason."
She says it again to the butler, when he asks her. She says it to Mrs. Grace, in the lawn swing, as the car comes back up the drive — I had my reasons. And by that night she will be saying it in the county jail: I had a good reason for shooting Mr. Grace.
Once, she went one step further. The account the nurse gave the police the next morning has it this way: I had my own reasons. He didn't do what he promised to do.
A promise, named and never explained — and before the sun is down, she has swallowed sixteen tablets of sedative at the garden faucet.
By midnight, Santa Cruz knows this much: a woman shot a millionaire in his own garden, in front of a witness, and admitted it. Nobody disputes it. Nobody ever will.
What nobody has — not the police, not the newspapers, not the district attorney — is the reason.
She had a reason. She said so four times. And for the next ten weeks, no one in Santa Cruz could get her to say the rest of it.
Let me take you back to the beginning.
Part 2Show Introduction
Hello everyone, and welcome to Forgotten True Crime. My name is Trevor Shelby, and in this episode we are going to discuss a killing in Santa Cruz, California, in 1933 — and the woman a jury refused to hang for it.
One city. One garden. One shot, fired in front of a witness, on a Saturday afternoon. And one sentence the woman who fired it said over and over again to everybody who asked her why.
I had a reason.
She never finished it. Not to the nurse who watched her do it, not to the butler who took the gun out of her hand, not to the police, not to the district attorney. She sat in a cell for ten weeks with the reason in her head, and she would not say it out loud.
And here's the thing I want to put in front of you before we get into it, because it's the reason this story matters, and it's the reason we're telling it.
In 1933, an accused woman's why was legally beside the point.
The prosecutor told the jury so himself. Whatever had happened between this woman and this man, he said, does not constitute a defense in this case — and the court, he promised them, would instruct them to disregard it. The only thing that courtroom would hear was accident. The gun went off by itself.
A woman shoots a man, and the one thing she has to tell the world is the one thing the trial cannot consider. So the trial becomes about a trigger — whether a hand pulled it, whether it slipped, whether a gun went off in a garden — and the question of why gets pushed out of the room and left standing in the hallway.
Today?
Today, a trial like that would be a different trial. Consent, power, and what an employer is allowed to do to the people who work inside his house — a modern court would hear all of it. What hasn't changed is the arithmetic underneath. A servant's word against a wealthy man's. Twelve people in a box deciding which of them to believe. And a dead man who cannot be cross-examined, which is its own kind of advantage.
So I'm not going to spend this episode asking whether she fired the shot — nobody in Santa Cruz argued about that. The question we're here for is the other one, and it never got a clean answer, in that courtroom or anywhere else.
Was justice served?
A jury heard ten days of evidence and took ten and a half hours to decide. I'll tell you what they decided, and what happened to both of them afterwards — because in this case the aftermath is its own kind of verdict.
Now, real quick. If you're a first-time listener, to experience this podcast to its finest, hit that subscribe button — so when we have new episodes, you'll be the first to know. And then head on over to Section29.com, where you'll find my case file on this one and everything I dug up — the newspapers, the court reports, the photographs, and the record of a woman who lived forty more years after this and never told her story to anyone.
A few words before we go, the way we always do. Everything in this episode is a true story, and it's built from the record — the newspapers of the day, the court reports, the documents. Some scenes are recreated the way they must have played out, because that's the best way to live a story. The opinions you hear are my opinions. And this one is heavy: it has a killing, an allegation of sexual assault, a pregnancy, and a district attorney asking twelve people for a woman's life. Listener discretion. It always has been, and it's one of those weeks.
All right. This is the story of a reason, and of what a courtroom in 1933 was allowed to do with one.
Now let's get on with the show.
Part 3The House on Beach Hill
Santa Cruz, California, sits at the north end of Monterey Bay, about seventy-five miles south of San Francisco — a beach town with a boardwalk, a pier, a winter crowd of fishermen and a summer crowd up from the city.
In 1933 it was the fourth year of the Depression, and the town was quiet. The money in Santa Cruz was old, and careful, and it lived up on Beach Hill — a rise above the bay where the big houses sat behind hedges and gardens, looking down at the water.
One of those houses belonged to Francis Joseph Morgan Grace Senior.
Frank Grace, as the papers called him, was fifty-nine years old. He had been born in San Francisco in 1873, the son of a man who ran the family's business on the west coast, and the nephew of the late W. R. Grace — whose name was on one of the great shipping and trading houses of the Americas. Frank Grace had been part of it: an executive of the Grace company, "identified with the importing and exporting pursuits of the Grace family," and in the words of the wire services, "one of the most prominent shipping men in the United States."
But by 1933 that life was behind him. He had retired more than a decade earlier, and he had brought his wife down the coast to Santa Cruz to be quiet. He was not a well man. His own doctor had been treating him for a heart ailment for ten years, and would describe him as "far from a robust and active man."
The house had a name. The family called it "The Cabins." Some of the newspapers called it "The Gardens." Either way, it was a showplace on Beach Hill — lawns, hedges, a path, a garden chair — and inside it was a household built around two invalids.
Mrs. Grace had been in a wheel chair for years, and she had a nurse to attend her. There was a companion who took her downtown to shop. There was a cook. And there was a butler named Richard Frank — a former officer in the guard of the Russian czar, who now answered the door and started the evening meal in a house on a hill in California.
A house like that runs on staff, and staff come and go. Nurses especially.
In January of 1931, the Grace household hired a nurse. She was in her early forties, from Pennsylvania, a veteran of the World War, with a record the San Francisco nurses' registry called most excellent, and six years at one address in the city. She worked in that house on and off for a little over a year.
And about eighteen months before the killing, she was let go. Discharged. And a younger nurse was hired in her place — Miss Helene Roberts, twenty-eight years old. The woman who was sitting in the garden chair on the afternoon of September the ninth.
The man whose job it would be to sort all of this out was the district attorney of Santa Cruz County. J. Frank Murphy had been elected in 1930, at twenty-eight years old — at the time, the youngest district attorney in the state. He was thirty-one when this case landed on his desk.
That's the house, and the man, and the world he lived in. A rich man, a sick man, a wife in a chair, a staff of servants, and a nurse who had been let go.
In the summer of 1933, nobody in Santa Cruz had ever heard the name Frieda Weltz. By November, twelve people would spend ten and a half hours deciding what to do with her — and the only question they would be allowed to answer was whether a gun went off by itself.
Part 4The Woman Nobody Could Place
The story broke on Sunday morning, the tenth of September, and the headline writers had already made up their minds about her.
J. M. Grace Is Victim Of Woman's Ire. Discharged Employee Shoots Millionaire At Santa Cruz. And in the capital, one wire service printed the truest headline of the whole case: Police Seeking Motive Of Nurse In Grace Murder — Woman Who Shot Retired Capitalist Refuses To Divulge Reason For Act.
By Monday, the papers could tell their readers who she was.
Her name was Frieda Wilhelmina Augusta Weltz, and she was forty-three years old. She had been born in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, to German-born parents, and trained at the Kensington Hospital for Women in Philadelphia. When the United States went into the World War, she went with it — an army nurse, home from France in the summer of 1919. She came out to California in 1927 and went to work as a private nurse, and she had been in San Francisco ever since, serving what the wire service called "many prominent San Francisco families."
The registry she worked through — the San Francisco County Nurses Association — told police her reputation was "most excellent," and that they had never known her to be in any trouble. She was quiet and reddish-haired, and her landlady of six years told reporters she was "most kind," that she had nursed her through pneumonia the year before, and that "she must have gone insane in a single moment."
They took her to the county jail on the night of the ninth, and for the next two days Santa Cruz could not get a straight sentence out of her. The papers said she was "in a stupor" — that she had swallowed either "a drug or poison"; doctors thought "a sleeping potion." She roused herself long enough to give the jail her correct name — and to say two things.
The first was "I am sane."
The second was that she had good reason for what she had done. She told Sheriff A. T. Dresser, "I had a good reason for shooting Mr. Grace." And when he asked her what it was, she said, "You wouldn't understand it if I told you."
And she said something that followed her for the rest of her life: "Isn't it fortunate my bullet didn't hit Miss Roberts?"
That dose is why she could not answer questions, and it very nearly killed her. The papers said twenty tablets. She would later swear it was sixteen tablets of a sedative, one and a half grains each — twenty-four grains in all — swallowed at the garden faucet, standing over her victim's own plants, minutes after she shot him. When the butler took the pistol out of her hands she had begged him for it back, saying she wanted to kill herself. He gave her a cigarette instead, for her nerves.
On Monday, September eleventh, a coroner's jury in Santa Cruz considered how Francis Grace had died. They heard four witnesses — two doctors, the nurse who watched the shooting, and the butler who took the gun. Their verdict: Grace died of a gunshot wound. Nothing more.
An open verdict. The jurors said afterward that "no one testified as to who fired the shot" — even though, they added, it had been "made perfectly clear that Miss Weltz appeared in the Grace garden with a revolver in her hand immediately previous to the firing."
None of that troubled the district attorney. J. Frank Murphy had already announced she would be charged with murder, and he was already telling reporters what she had told him in the jail: that she had been trailing Grace, that she had planned it since the day she was discharged, that she had waited for her chance — and that eight months earlier, in a San Francisco hotel apartment, she had come at him once before and been disarmed by attendants and thrown out.
And the police had one more piece, printed the same week: that in the days before the killing, under an assumed name, she had taken a room across the street from the Grace house — a room from which she could watch the garden and the front door.
By the middle of September, Santa Cruz had its story straight: a discharged nurse who had watched a rich man's house, walked into his garden, and shot him dead in front of a witness.
And they still did not have the first word about why.
Part 5The State's Case: A False Name and a Room With a View
By the time this case went to trial, the state's theory of it could be said in one sentence, and the district attorney said it in court: the killing of Francis Grace had been "intentional and deliberate," and it had been "cooly planned over a period of more than a year."
Here is what J. Frank Murphy had to work with.
He had the woman's own movements. When the trial opened, the state put two hotel keepers on the stand — W. H. Branyan, who ran the Hotel McCray, and Mrs. Mabel Benson, who managed the March Rooms at 34 Second Street. Both of them are directly across the street from the Grace garden. Both of them brought their registers.
According to those registers, Miss Weltz had stayed there about seven separate times between June of 1932 and September of 1933 — each time under the name "Mrs. L. Johnson."
And Mrs. Benson had one more thing to say. "She always asked for room No. 1," she testified. "Room No. 1 overlooked the Grace gardens."
The police searched that room after the killing and found something nobody in that courtroom could explain: a number of lead sinkers. Fishing weights. They went into evidence. The defense said it had no idea what they signified; Murphy declined to say what he thought they meant. And when the prosecutor asked her about them directly, she said she would not tell him — only that she had not found cause to use them.
Then there were her own words, taken down in the first days after the killing by the district attorney and the sheriff, while she was still coming out of the sedative — an account the state would read aloud to a jury ten weeks later.
She had gone into that garden, she said, and told him, "I came to give you what I promised you." He knew what was coming. And he said, "Can't you postpone it?"
She said she had asked him for three hundred dollars — enough, she thought, for a month in a sanatorium where she could get her health back. She said she "could not stand his lies and insults." She said he "wouldn't apologize." And asked whether an apology would have stopped her, she said no — it would have made no difference.
To the sheriff she said something harder: "I gave him six months to do what I asked and he refused to do it." And to a shorthand reporter, in a statement taken down word for word, she said she had seen Grace alone in his garden two weeks before the killing and could have killed him then — but she decided he was drunk, and she did not want to shoot him while he was drunk. She wanted him to fully realize what was happening — and why.
That is a prosecutor's case. A false name, a room with a view, a seven-times guest across the street, a set of unexplained fishing weights, a demand for money, a six-month deadline, and a woman who deliberately waited for her target to be sober.
There was also the matter of her mind. Three doctors examined her for the state on the twelfth of September — Dr. J. S. Scanland and Dr. A. W. Mullen of Agnew State Hospital, and Dr. Reginald Rood, the physician for the Santa Cruz Portland Cement Company. Murphy kept their reports to himself for a few days, then used them. Her own lawyers had alienists who would never be called, because the only way to call them was for a jury to convict her first. She was pleading not guilty, and she was pleading not guilty by reason of insanity — which in California in 1933 meant two trials, and the second one only if she lost the first.
And in October the state got one more document, from the other side of the grave. Grace's will was filed in superior court: an estate of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and of the four people in it, two were servants — a Japanese houseboy named K. Okino, and a nurse formerly employed by Grace, Miss Catherine Nelson. The wire service added a sentence nobody could get out of their head: Miss Weltz had said at the time of her arrest that Grace and Miss Nelson would know her motive.
So the state had everything it needed. Everything except the one thing the whole case was about.
And her own lawyer had promised them that too. Back in September, Stanford Smith had told a reporter he had found the reason she shot Francis Grace — and he said, "It will create a sensation if I succeed in substantiating it. In my opinion, when proofs are furnished, it will fully justify Miss Weltz' act."
Justify. That was the word he used in September.
Ten weeks later, in a courtroom in Santa Cruz, that was the one thing her lawyers would not be allowed to argue.
Part 6The Trial Opens: The Widow and the Statements
The trial opened on Monday, the thirteenth of November, 1933, before Judge J. L. Atteridge. They had to bring in extra chairs. It was the biggest crowd that courthouse had ever held — women outnumbering the men, people standing on chairs in the corridor, the overflow spilling into the street, and a bailiff, "Noke" Alzina, spending his week turning away spectators who had talked their way in by claiming to be reporters for newspapers that did not exist: the Bingville Bugle, the Osage Oracle, and one "sob sister" from nowhere at all.
The jury was picked in a single day — eleven men and one woman: farmers, a rancher, a retired grocer, salesmen, a carpenter, an airport manager, a creameryman, a restaurant man, a laundry manager, a poultryman. The woman was Mrs. Ruby Enemark, a housewife from Freedom, and the jury elected her foreman.
And on the first day, before a witness was called, one ruling decided the shape of the whole trial. The defense asked the court to let them call it "the accident." Murphy objected that the word was inaccurate and improper. Judge Atteridge ruled for the defense. From that moment, the only question those twelve people were permitted to answer was whether a gun had gone off by itself.
Then the state put on its case. The hotel men first, with their registers. Then the eyewitness, Miss Roberts, who told the jury what she had told the police — and who admitted on cross-examination that in the moments after the shooting, Frieda Weltz was standing "as if in a trance."
Then the butler — Richard Frank, once an officer in the guard of the Russian czar, speaking slowly and choosing his words. He told the jury how he ran out of the kitchen and took the pistol from her hands; that she asked for it back; that she asked whether Mr. Grace was dead, and when he said he feared he was, she said, "Oh, what is the use!" And that she asked him for a cigarette, saying she had never smoked before. He gave her one.
A police officer named George Cavanaugh put the gun in evidence: five shells, one of them discharged.
On Wednesday morning the courtroom got very quiet, because the state brought in the widow.
Mrs. Theodosia Grace had spent years in a wheel chair, and she was wheeled into the well of the court in it. She described the ordinary afternoon that ended the way it did — the drive downtown, the shopping, the ride home. Asked to confirm that the man she came home to was dead, she said, "Yes — he was dead." And for a moment, that was the only time her composure went.
Then the defense asked her the question they had been trying to get answered for two months. Wasn't the defendant's real job in that house to treat her husband for alcoholism? And the widow said: "No. He was suffering from heart trouble."
That afternoon, the clerk of the court read Frieda Weltz's own words back to the courtroom — two statements taken down by the district attorney and the sheriff in the first days after the killing, while she was coming out of twenty-four grains of sedative. The Sentinel called it what it was: a faltering, disjointed, almost incoherent story.
The defense let every word of it in, on purpose. That was the point — to show the jury what a woman sounds like when she is answering questions she will not remember answering. And they called the people who had seen her that way. The jail matron, Mrs. J. D. Kenney, testified that the prisoner was "dazed and stupefied," that she could not hold a handkerchief, could not hold a cigarette. And they asked the sheriff about his own description of her: had he said her tongue was as thick as this? No, he had not. Well — maybe. He had been referring to the thickness in her speech.
And there was one more piece of it, and it was legal rather than human. Judge Atteridge ruled that the statements could be admitted "only as evidence, and not as confessions" — and it developed that neither of them had ever been signed by the defendant. The state's heaviest exhibit had no signature on it.
On Thursday morning the state called its last witness: Catherine Nelson, a stewardess on the Grace liner Santa Lucia, who spoke in a Swedish dialect the reporters had to lean in for — and who testified that she had told Miss Weltz that Mr. Grace employed a woman named Lucy. At the mention of that name, the paper noted, Miss Weltz appeared hurt.
Then the prosecution rested. And the defense called its first witness.
Her name was Frieda Weltz.
Part 7She Takes the Stand
The largest crowd in the history of that courthouse came to hear the woman in the chair talk.
She had been in the county jail for nine weeks by then. The paper's description of her that morning was four words long: ashen pale, and composed.
Her lawyer stood up and called her to the stand. John Duggan — a Pittsburgh attorney, an old friend of her family, a man who had flown across the country twice for this — asked her to tell the jury, in her own words, what had happened to her. And Frieda Weltz said this.
That in June of 1932, Mr. Grace had come to her apartment on Jones Street in San Francisco — a house where she had lived for six years — and asked her to drive down to Santa Cruz with him. He had been drinking, she said. He wanted to get away somewhere quiet. And he drove her to his house on Beach Hill, "The Cabins," where they were alone except for the gardener.
That on the second night, June the ninth, he asked her to have some wine with dinner.
She drank about three-quarters of a tumbler of it. There was no strange taste, no unusual smell — "I know nothing about wine," she told the jury. And then she became dizzy and ill and went to her room, and laid down on the bed without undressing, and knew nothing until she woke up the following morning.
"I was desperately sick," she said. "My abdomen was sore and I was bruised. I examined myself and then knew what had happened. I was so sick I was unable to get out of the bed."
He came into the room about nine o'clock. And she accused him of drugging her and assaulting her.
"He admitted it," she told the jury, "and laughed about it. He said I was a nurse and ought to be able to take care of myself."
She was too ill to travel home alone, so he drove her. On the road they passed his son and his son's wife, and he got out and talked to them for a while, and got back in and drove on. She went to her apartment and went to bed, and she did not call a doctor — "I was afraid to call a doctor in San Francisco," she said, "because of my profession and my reputation."
Five or six weeks later, she learned she was pregnant. She told him when she saw him downtown. He told her not to worry; he would care for her. And then the days passed, and she saw him several times, and they wrote to each other — "I have lost the letter he sent me," she said.
Early in August, he suggested she take drugs. She told him she was afraid. And he told her she must — that it would ruin him if she had a baby.
So on the twenty-first of August, she took it. "It produced the desired results," she told the jury, "but ruined my health. I had no medical attendance. I weighed a hundred and thirty-five pounds then, and today I weigh no more than a hundred and ten."
That is why she was in Santa Cruz. That is why she had taken a room across the street under a false name — "I did not want him to try to avoid me" — and why she had chosen a room where she could see the garden, so that she would know when he was alone and Mrs. Grace was not there.
And that is why there was a gun in her handbag on Saturday, the ninth of September. "I had determined," she said, "that this was to be my last attempt to get help. If he refused me this time, I was going to kill myself."
She saw Mrs. Grace leave the grounds in her car. She crossed the street and went into the garden and stood in the pathway at the edge of the lawn. He came to her. They stood two or three feet apart.
"I told him that I had been waiting a week or so for him to sober up so I could talk to him. I said, 'You brought me to Santa Cruz. I believed you. You betrayed me and then you refused to help me.' I told him I wanted to have the baby and was afraid an abortion might kill me."
"He replied, 'You know it would ruin me if the baby was born.'"
"I asked him to send me away to some place for my health. I said, 'I don't want your money. I want you to carry out your promises, or I will commit suicide. I have always worked, but I can't work now.'"
Then, she said, he told her to wait a minute — that he would send Miss Roberts into the house. He walked over to the other nurse. But Miss Roberts did not go inside. She came to Frieda Weltz instead and asked her to leave. And the two of them turned and walked back toward the house, with Mr. Grace in front of them.
"As they passed within four or five feet of me, Mr. Grace did not speak. I opened my purse to get my gun to kill myself. I was trembling. I heard a crash — a shot."
A moment later, she said, Miss Roberts had her hands from behind. "I did not make a move, as I was afraid I would hurt her." The butler came and took the gun, and she asked him to give it back. And then she remembered the bottle in her purse. "I had a bottle of sixteen tablets of one-and-one-half-grain luminal tablets in my purse, so I swallowed them."
After that: Mrs. Grace on the telephone, saying she did not have to worry because the woman would not go away. Then the chief of police. Then a car.
"I remember no more," she said.
She remembered nothing, she told the jury, until the third or fourth day after her arrest. She remembered nothing whatsoever about giving any statements to the district attorney or to any other officer. And under Duggan's questions she made a categorical denial of everything the state had read aloud from that witness stand the day before.
When she finished, the courtroom had heard the reason.
And that afternoon, the defense called the butler's wife.
Her name was Mrs. Richard Frank. She was Russian, like her husband the butler, and she was a nurse — and that January she had been called in to look after Francis Grace at his apartment in San Francisco. He had been drinking, she said, and then one day he got a little bit sober, and he seemed nervous and worried, and she asked him what a rich man with everything he needed had to worry about.
He told her he had big trouble. He said he did not want to tell her, but he would, if she promised never to tell anybody.
"He said, 'I was in love with a girl and had a child by her.' I said, you are a rich man, and you should support her. He said he couldn't understand her. She replied she didn't want money. She is old-fashioned, like you are. I am a dirty beast. I ruined her life. Don't ask me any questions."
She asked him who it was. He would not tell her. He said, "I can't tell you. She is a nice, respectable girl."
And then he turned his face to the wall.
Part 8The Thirteen Nurses and the Cross-Examination
Before the butler's wife was called that afternoon, the defense had brought in her life.
Thirteen witnesses, mostly nurses, most of them from San Francisco, walked to the stand one after another and said the same thing in different words: that Frieda Weltz's reputation, among all the people who had ever hired her or worked beside her, was excellent. The landlady of the apartment house where she had lived for six years. The chief registrar of the nurses' association that kept her registry card. The retired chief of nursing at Letterman General Hospital, and her assistant. Women who had stood next to her in wards for twenty years.
And then one of them, a Letterman nurse named Mary E. Kennedy, finished her testimony and stepped down out of the witness chair — and on her way past the defendant, she bent down and kissed her.
The courtroom came apart. People clapped. They cheered. They stamped their feet. The sheriff pounded his desk for silence; the bailiff rapped for order; and Judge Atteridge stood up off the bench and threatened to clear the room if it happened again. The Sentinel called it "the most startling demonstration ever beheld in a local court of law." It was not applause for a killing. It was applause for a woman — for the one in the chair, in the biggest murder trial that county had ever held.
There was one more piece of ammunition that afternoon, and it was aimed at the sheriff. Two of those nurses — Miss Ruth Gustafson, the director of nurses at the San Francisco hospital, and Mrs. Marie Peretti of Letterman — testified that about two weeks after the killing, Sheriff Dresser had told them, in his own office, what Frieda Weltz's tongue had looked like the night she was brought in. Swollen, he said, to about two inches thick — so thick that when they pumped her stomach at the county hospital, the hose would hardly pass her throat.
The day before, the defense had asked the sheriff on the stand whether he had ever described her tongue as being as thick as a stack of paper — "Didn't you in your office tell me that 'her tongue was as thick as this'?" He had said no. Then he had said, well, maybe.
That was Thursday. On Friday morning, the district attorney stood up to cross-examine her, and he was on his feet for nearly three hours.
He started with the ugliest thing he had. "Isn't it a fact that you told Mr. Grace that you had a baby by him, and tried to blackmail him?" Both defense lawyers were up instantly, objecting, and Judge Atteridge told the jury that the question was highly improper and was to be disregarded entirely. But it had been said out loud, in a room full of people, and newspapers all over California carried it.
Then he went to work on the story. He got her to admit that in all the years she had worked for Grace — except for that one night in June — he had always treated her, in her own words, like a gentleman. He went after the pregnancy, asking whether she knew that it cannot be determined before the third month, and that symptoms before then often turn out not to be pregnancies at all. "They often do," she answered, "but I had the symptoms, and I was sure I was in that condition."
He asked whether she knew how improbable it was that a man of Mr. Grace's age and condition could father a child at all. The defense objected; the judge sustained it; the question went unanswered.
He asked whether she had demanded money from him. She said she had never demanded money — but yes, that January she had met him on Polk Street in San Francisco and asked him for five hundred dollars, which she thought would be enough to support her while she went away somewhere to get well.
And then he handed her the pistol. The gun, she had told the court, was a gift from her brother, who sent it to her through the mail three years earlier. She had no permit to carry it. And now Murphy put the empty revolver into her hands and asked her to pull the trigger — and the jurors watched the woman who said the gun had gone off by itself in her handbag point the barrel at the floor and pull the firing pin with noticeable effort.
"Isn't it a fact," Murphy asked, "that you shot directly at him, and aimed at him?"
"No," she said.
"Do you want us to believe that the gun accidentally went off?"
"I don't know. All I had in mind was my intention to shoot myself."
"After Miss Roberts had left you in the garden — after insisting that you depart — you had an opportunity to leave the grounds and shoot yourself, didn't you?"
"I didn't want to go," Frieda Weltz said. "I wanted to shoot myself on the Grace grounds."
She denied things, too. She denied ever saying, "I had my reasons." She denied that Miss Roberts had struggled with her for the gun — "I did not struggle," she said. And she denied any memory of the statements the state had read aloud.
The reporter watching her that day noticed one thing. For three hours, with a prosecutor shouting blackmail at her, the only sign of nerves she showed was that she kept turning her white gloves over in her lap.
The defense finished the week with the two nurses from the county hospital who had taken care of her the night of the killing: unconscious when she arrived, they said, and groggy the whole time she was there.
Then the trial adjourned for the weekend — and the district attorney had one more exhibit to produce.
Part 9The End of the Trial
On Monday morning — the twentieth of November — he produced it. A bank book.
Frieda Weltz had asked Francis Grace for three hundred dollars to pay for a month in a sanatorium. The pass book showed that at the same time she had or controlled about nine hundred: four hundred and fifteen dollars in a joint savings account with her brother, a joint checking account with about two hundred in it, and three hundred of her own in another bank, which she volunteered to the court herself.
"But every cent of the money was my brother's," she said. "I did not have the right to touch a cent of it." And her sister explained that afternoon why the family's money was sitting in San Francisco at all: back home in Connellsville, six of the seven banks had closed.
Murphy asked her why, if she meant to kill herself, she had chosen the drug she chose. Her answer was the coldest thing said in that courtroom: "I did not want to use a drug for which the antidote was commonly known."
He went after the gun again, demanding a yes or a no on whether she had pointed it at Grace. What he got was four words: "I deny pointing."
Then the state tried to use her own telegrams, and it went badly. Two wires, signed by her, sent to her brother and sister in the first days after her arrest, telling them not to come: "It is no use." The prosecution read them to the jury as proof of a woman who wanted no one near her.
And then the defense called the jail matron — the same Mrs. Kenney who had called her dazed and stupefied — and Mrs. Kenney testified that she and the sheriff had written those telegrams themselves, because Miss Weltz was not able to frame a wire. She had shown her the wording, she said, as a courtesy. And she had added one sentence of her own to the last one: "I would love to see you. I thought she should have someone here with her."
The defense called a doctor and his wife who had visited her cell three days after the killing and found her, in their words, mentally confused. Then they called her sister Meta, who had flown across the country twice and who described walking in on a woman whose knees had given way. Then the defense rested.
And the state answered with medicine.
The autopsy surgeon, Dr. Stanley Dowling, told the jury that Grace had suffered from "the worst case of pericarditis I have ever seen," along with a healed case of tuberculosis, and that in his opinion it was highly improbable that the assault she described could have produced a pregnancy. Asked whether any drug could put a woman into the kind of coma she claimed, he said there was no drug he knew of that would do it.
But on cross-examination the defense produced a medical textbook — and Dr. Dowling agreed it was correct — showing that as little as fifteen grains of the sedative she took had killed people. She had swallowed twenty-four. The state's own expert had said seventy-five to a hundred were needed to kill.
Grace's own doctor of ten years took the stand and agreed, too, that chronic drinking damages the heart. And a local sporting goods dealer measured the trigger on the pistol: nineteen pounds of pressure to fire it.
Then Murphy made his argument for the state. He told the jury the motive was jealousy — that she was jealous of the other nurses hired in her place, and maddened at having no connection left to that family. He called her story smut and filth. He said, "Everything has been taken care of — even the baby that did not arrive." And of the nurses who had kissed her in that courtroom, he said it was an old courtroom trick — "to the uninformed it may have appeared impressive, but to lawyers schooled in trial procedure it only afforded a laugh."
The defense's answer took forty minutes. "They want you to believe," Duggan told the jury, "that this nurse, whose entire life has been devoted to acts of mercy, is a cold-blooded murderer. She has carried her cross to Calvary. Don't let them crucify her!"
And they went after the one piece of hard science in the case. The bullet, Duggan said, had entered and left Francis Grace's body on an upward course, with no bone in its path to deflect it — a gun fired at a man of five foot seven from a few feet away, by a woman drawing it out of her handbag.
Then the defense tried one more thing. They recalled the butler's wife, Mrs. Frank, and asked her whether, while she worked in that house that January, Francis Grace had tried to attack her too. Murphy objected, vigorously. The judge sustained it. The witness was withdrawn.
Murphy closed for the state in under forty-five minutes. He said that if the woman's story was not true, then hanging was too good for her.
And then Judge Atteridge read his instructions and handed the jury five verdicts to choose from: first degree murder, which with no recommendation meant the death penalty; first degree with a recommendation of life; second degree; manslaughter; and not guilty. He also told them to confine themselves to the ninth of September.
The jury went out at 11:30 in the morning. At 4:28 in the afternoon they sent word that agreement was impossible and asked to be discharged. The judge refused, and read the whole charge to them again — forty minutes of it. At 9:45 that night, having given up on a verdict, he swore a deputy and his wife in as bailiffs to take the jury to a hotel, and most of the room went home: the judge, both defense lawyers, the district attorney.
The bailiff opened the jury room door to tell them it was time to go.
"Just a minute," a juror said.
The door shut. A minute later it opened, and the bailiff was told there was a verdict. Telephones started ringing. Duggan was still in the building; he ran down Smith, who came back from home at a run. The judge returned. Murphy returned.
At 10:12 the jury filed in. The foreman, Mrs. Ruby Enemark, handed the folded paper to the clerk. Frieda Weltz stood with her chin shaking, staring at him, with John Duggan holding her left hand and the jail matron holding her right.
"Not guilty," the clerk said.
The room stamped its feet and cheered. And then Mrs. Enemark tried to thank the court for the way the jury had been treated — and she choked, and her eyes filled, and she stepped down out of the jury box and walked straight into the arms of the woman she had just set free. The two of them stood there, both crying, on each other's shoulders, for more than two minutes.
Five ballots, the foreman said afterward. Eight to four for acquittal on the first. Then nine to three, ten to two, eleven to one, twelve to nothing.
And the man who had asked twelve people for a death sentence left the courtroom the moment the verdict was read.
Part 10Was Justice Served
So what did that verdict decide?
It decided that Frieda Weltz would not hang, and would not go to prison, and that the state of California would never again be able to prove that she had murdered Francis Grace. It also meant the second trial never happened — the one where five alienists would have fought over her mind, and where two defense doctors who never got to testify would finally have had their say.
She spent that first night as a free woman in the county jail, in her own cell, with the jail matron who had come to court and called her dazed and stupefied. Her lawyer told the newspapers that her heart went out to the people of Santa Cruz for their kindness and fairness. And the next day she went with her brother and sister to San Francisco, and then home to Pennsylvania, to rest until her health came back.
It was in January that she had asked him for five hundred dollars — the last time she ever saw him in the city. She was forty-three years old when this ended, and she had forty years left.
She went back to a coal town in the middle of the Depression and she lived quietly. She never married. She never spoke about the killing in public again. And she died in Los Angeles in July of 1973, at the age of eighty-three — and she is buried under a government headstone that says three things about her: Nurse. Army Nurse Corps. World War I.
Francis Grace was buried in Santa Cruz, out of the Old Mission chapel, with a requiem mass. His estate came to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and it was divided between his widow, his son, his Japanese houseboy — and a nurse who had worked in his house. Another nurse. A different one.
Now. Was justice served?
Here is the case for saying yes.
A jury of eleven men and one woman, in a county where the dead man had been a leading citizen, sat through ten days of this, and heard — from the dead man's own household, out of the mouth of his butler's wife — that he had told her he was in love with a girl who didn't want money, that he had ruined her life, that he was a dirty beast, and that she was a nice, respectable girl. They heard that he had gone to his grave without ever being asked to answer for any of it, because the one lawyer who tried to ask the question was stopped. And they refused to hang the woman.
Here is the case for saying no.
The assault was never corroborated by a single witness. She told nobody for fifteen months — not a doctor, not a friend, not a priest, not the police; the first people she told were the lawyers her family hired. The bullet went into his side while the gun was in her hand. She had spent months working out where he would be alone. And when she was asked whether an apology would have made any difference, she said no.
And here is the thing underneath both of those, which is what this case is really about.
The trial never asked whether Frieda Weltz had been wronged. It wasn't allowed to. The jury was told to confine itself to the ninth of September, and to decide whether a gun went off by itself. That is a question about a trigger, not about a life. And when those twelve people finally answered it, their answer didn't say she was right. It didn't say he was innocent. It said only: this is not murder, and we cannot say more than that.
Eleven men and one woman, ten and a half hours, five ballots — and a foreman who cried in the arms of the woman she had just set free.
Two people walked into that garden on a Saturday afternoon, and only one of them ever got to explain what happened there. She said she had a reason, and a courtroom spent ten days deciding it wasn't allowed to ask her for it. When she finally stood up and gave it to them anyway, they took ten and a half hours and let her go.
Was justice served? A hundred and fifty thousand dollars went to the people he left behind. A woman who said "I had a reason" went home to Pennsylvania and lived to be eighty-three. And nobody in America ever asked her again.
I'll leave that one with you.
If you want to see the case file on this one — the newspapers, the photographs, the trial as the local paper printed it day by day, and the record of a woman who never told her story — it's all at Section29.com. And if you're new here, hit that subscribe button so you'll know when the next one lands.
Thank you all for listening. I'll see you next time.