Part 1Cold Open
Monday night. The fourth of August, 1919. Half past nine. There's a house on the East Side of Binghamton, New York. A plain frame house with a porch on the front and a little porch on the back. And tonight it's full of people. The family has only just moved in. A mother and her two grown daughters. And a crowd of young people from around town, and a few from out of town, have come by to welcome them. You can hear them laughing all the way out to the street. It's been a long, hot evening. Some of the men were roped in to set up the family's kitchen stove. A big cast-iron range. They got it in place a little after nine. And one of those men, just home from the war, is hot and tired. So instead of going into the sitting room with the women, he turns off the kitchen light and steps out onto the back porch to cool off and have a cigarette.
Out front, the guests are saying goodnight. Somebody's sister heads off for a walk with a couple of young men who drove over from out of town. The last of them go down the steps. And for a little while, it's quiet. Then a big touring car comes up Robinson Street with its headlights on. It pulls over near the East Side fire station, a little way up the block. A man gets out. He's tall. Heavy set. He walks up the sidewalk. He goes up the front steps of the house where the party was. And he goes inside.
Out on the back porch, the young man doesn't hear a doorbell. He doesn't hear anyone talking. He's just sitting there in the dark. He's been out there about ten minutes now. And then he hears four loud bangs. He doesn't jump up. He'll tell a courtroom later that he figured it was some boys. Kids setting off torpedoes on the streetcar tracks. That happens. So he sits there. And it gets very still.
And then, he'd say later, he just had a feeling that something was wrong. He gets up. He puts his hand on the door to the kitchen. Everyone in that house knew the man who came through the front door. Proving it in a courtroom was going to be another thing altogether.
Part 2Show Introduction
Hello everyone, and welcome to Forgotten True Crime, the true crime podcast where we tell the stories of crimes that happened long ago. If you're a true crime fan, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. That way, when we have new episodes, you'll be the first to know. Also, check us out on our YouTube and Facebook pages, "Forgotten True Crime." And visit our blog, Section29.com, where we post the cool things we find for every episode. This one, The Murder of Vera Rickard, has some great stuff for you to look at: the Binghamton Press coverage from 1919, the photographs the paper ran that summer, and a fire-insurance map that shows the house, the train station and the courthouse exactly as they stood the year before. The links to all of that are in the description below. Parts of this story may contain opinions and speculations and should be taken as such. What I'm going to do today is tell you this story the way I've come to understand it, built out of the newspaper record and the sworn testimony from the trial. Where I'm reading between the lines, I'll tell you I'm doing it. These stories depict violent crimes of all types and may be a trigger for some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. So. Binghamton, New York. Summer of 1919. The war's over. The boys are coming home from France. The shoe factories out in Johnson City are running. Two railroads, the Erie and the Lackawanna, run right through the middle of town. And this summer, you can't walk into a bar in Binghamton and buy a glass of whiskey. It's wartime prohibition. The best they'll pour you is a light wine. It's a city that likes to think of itself as a pretty respectable place. And in August of that year, it got a murder case the whole town followed for months. Let me tell you what's in this one. A railroad policeman who'd lost his job a month before. A soldier just back from France. A house-warming on Robinson Street. Four women in a taxicab, and a bar that wouldn't sell a man a drink. A dying woman, a patrolman, and a notebook. Five hundred men called in for jury duty. A bundle of letters that nobody expected to hear read out loud in a courtroom. And the one man who saw it all happen. Who would never take the stand at the trial. This is the story of Vera Rickard. And of the man who came up her front steps on a Monday night. And of what it took, after that night, to make a jury believe what everyone in that house already knew. So let's start at the beginning. And the beginning isn't in Binghamton at all.
Part 3Soupe
To understand what happened on Robinson Street, we have to go about sixty miles east and two years back. Across the state line, to a little town in the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania called Honesdale. In 1917, a man named Frederick Rickard ran a livery stable in Honesdale.
Horses, rigs, a sales barn. The family had been there for years. Frederick, his wife Isabel, and two daughters. Lulu, the younger one, was a schoolteacher. And the older one, Vera, kept the books for her father's business. She ran the office. Vera was about twenty-seven. And by every account, she was the one who kept that place running. Right out in front of the Rickard barns stood a hotel, the Allen House. And in the spring of 1917, the man behind the bar at the Allen House was a big, broad-shouldered fellow from over the line in New York. He used to wander back to the barn. Into the office. Mr. Rickard would later say that's how the two of them got acquainted. His name was Newell Yale Evans.
Newell came from Deposit, New York. A little railroad village on the Delaware River, right on the line between Broome and Delaware counties. His father, Arba, ran the electric light plant there. He had an older brother, a younger brother and a sister. He was born in May of 1880, as near as anyone can pin it down. The records don't agree on the year. He'd worked in the shoe factories over in Johnson City as a young man. He'd tended bar, clerked in hotels. And along the way he'd picked up a nickname. Everybody who knew him called him "Soupe."
Hang on to that name. He'd married young, at twenty-one, in 1901, right there in Deposit. But it hadn't lasted, at least not in any way that counted. By his own account, he hadn't lived with his wife in eight or ten years by the time he met Vera. He'd also had a couple of run-ins with the police in Binghamton. Picked up for drunkenness in 1914. Again in 1916. The first time, the judge suspended the sentence. The second time, it cost him five dollars. The year before he met Vera, the state census found him back home in Deposit, living with his parents on Second Street. Occupation: bar keeper. Now. You might be wondering what a family like the Rickards made of him. Well, he was charming when he wanted to be. Generous. He came to the house. He had dinner with the family more than once. He took them out to eat. And he told Vera's father, more than once, that she was "one girl out of a hundred." He talked about marrying her. And Mr. Rickard would say he always gave the same answer. Vera was almost invaluable to him. He didn't know how he'd get along without her. But Mrs. Rickard didn't like him. Not one bit. He drank. And the family said he quarreled with Vera. And the more he came around, the less welcome he was. Later, when a lawyer asked Mr. Rickard in court whether Newell Evans had always been welcome in his home, the most he could bring himself to say was: "Well, I don't know that I would hardly say that he was welcome."
There was somebody else in this picture, too. Donald Loomis. A Binghamton boy. He'd been friends with Vera for close to eight years. And before the war, the two of them had been engaged. But just before his unit shipped out, they'd had some kind of a falling-out. And once he got to France, they stopped writing. Loomis was with Battery C of the 104th Field Artillery. Part of the 27th Division. He saw a lot of hard service over there. And while he was gone, Newell Evans was right there in Honesdale. One evening at the Rickard house, Newell was teasing Vera about Donald, asking where he'd got to. Vera told him Donald was in the army. And Lulu remembered exactly what he said back. "Evans then told my sister that he had come to take his place."
That fall, Newell left Honesdale. He went to Syracuse and worked as a policeman for the Solvay Process Company. Then, in the spring of 1918, the Erie Railroad took him on. First as a brakeman. Then as a railroad patrolman, working out of Susquehanna. When he registered for the draft that September, he gave his job as Erie patrolman, at the Erie station in Binghamton. Tall. Stout. Blue eyes. Brown hair. And he wrote letters. Lots of them. To Vera, every chance he got. And to friends. In one, that September, written over the bar at a Binghamton hotel, he told a friend he couldn't get Vera off his mind for one minute. He said he'd never ask her to marry him. He'd just take her to the justice of the peace and, quote, "get tied so tight to her that she wouldn't even have room to roll over in bed." And he was jealous. Of a man back in Honesdale who walked her home from church. In that same letter, he joked about it. "Some jealous," he wrote. "What say you." That letter would be read out loud someday. To a jury. Later that year the Erie moved him to Jersey City. Before long, they'd made him a lieutenant. But in December he came all the way back to Binghamton, where Vera was keeping books that winter, just to see her for a few hours a day. He wrote to the same friend about that, too. "There is no fool like an old fool," he wrote, "and that's me."
That winter Vera went to New York to see him. According to his sister, by then the two of them were engaged. And then the war ended. And the soldiers came home. And Donald Loomis came home to Binghamton. And some friends of theirs made a point of getting him and Vera back in the same room. According to the Binghamton Press, the old feeling came right back. Every week, the two of them were seen together a little more. And by the summer of 1919, people were saying the engagement was back on. Somebody made sure Newell Evans heard about it. The Press put it this way. "Gossips carried the news of the meetings to Evans, it is said, and gradually the demon of jealousy coiled its talons into his brain."
Part 4Which Is It to Be
In February of 1919, Newell Evans's wife finally divorced him. It was granted in the Supreme Court in Binghamton. And according to the Press, which went and looked up the court record, the charge was that he'd been living with a woman who wasn't his wife, in the Wickwire block back home in Deposit. So, on paper at least, he was free.
That spring, Vera was down in New York. Her father had left the livery business by then and taken a job as a steamfitter in the Erie Railroad shops at Port Jervis. And Newell kept turning up. He came to see Mr. Rickard at Port Jervis and handed him a locket to pass along to Vera. He wrote to him about a job he had lined up for him in Hoboken. Mr. Rickard went down on the day Newell told him to. Newell never showed. And once, Mr. Rickard sat down to dinner with the two of them at a place in Port Jervis called Bower's Inn. When a lawyer asked him later if it was an eating and drinking place, he said yes. He had dinner, and then he went back to work.
Then the railroad job came apart. Newell had been made a lieutenant over in Jersey City. Now he was knocked back down to patrolman. The Press would say there'd been some trouble in Jersey City. Nobody ever said what. And by the start of July, the Erie was done with him. He moved back in with his mother in Deposit.
At the end of June, Vera came to Binghamton. She stayed with her aunt, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, at 240 Robinson Street, on the East Side. And she started getting a house ready for her mother, a few doors down at 208. Her mother hadn't been well.
Lulu had a teaching job lined up at the Bevier Street School for the fall. The rest of the family came over from Honesdale on the twenty-third of July. Donald Loomis was around a lot that summer. He was in and out of the Fitzpatrick house. He was a friend of the family. And Newell Evans kept calling. He'd telephone the house over and over. He'd come by. And the family got to the point where somebody always made sure to be in the room, so he could never get Vera alone. When he did, he'd start in on her about Loomis. According to what Vera told her family, he threatened to kill himself if she didn't come back to him. Then he threatened to kill her, and then himself. And more than once, the Press reported, he told her, "If I don't have you, nobody else will." Her cousin Clara would testify that she once saw Newell sitting on a porch across the street, just watching the Fitzpatrick house, while Vera and Donald were inside.
On Sunday the twenty-seventh of July, Vera and some of the family went out with Loomis to his camp at Brisben, on the Chenango River. And according to the Press, Newell Evans had a detective watching the camp. Two days later, the twenty-ninth, Newell took Vera and Clara to dinner at the Carlton Hotel. He told Vera he hadn't eaten or slept in twenty-four hours. She asked him why. And he said he thought she was double crossing him. He said he guessed he'd go out West and try to forget. And Vera told him she thought it would be a good thing if he did. Afterward the three of them went and listened to a concert on Court House square, and he kept on about it. Going West. And Vera liking Loomis better.
Clara would remember other things he said to Vera that month. She'd repeat them under oath. Sometime in those last couple of weeks, Vera and Lulu went into the Fisher store on Court Street, and Vera bought a dress. With money, she said, that Newell had given her. He'd tell the jury he bought her a dress on Thursday, the thirty-first. And that night, wherever he'd been, he got home to his mother's door in Deposit at ten past three in the morning. And that morning, the first of August, he sat down and wrote to her. "My dear little girl." He told her the shingles and the scaffolding had come for the roof at home, but the carpenters hadn't. His mother had been up all night crying. His brother was sick in an army hospital in Carlisle, and they were afraid he wouldn't make it. He said he wanted to telephone her that morning, but he didn't dare. And then he wrote this. "I am in a bunch of trouble and know my little girl is to, so won't mention mine." And near the end: "There was no messages here for me dear and I am afraid it is all up with me. I hope I don't loose my little girl to, will I if this is the case. I know I am one big empty headed fool." He signed it "Newell." All that week he kept calling the Fitzpatrick house, and every time, Vera was out. Finally she called the Lewis House, the hotel near the Erie station where he used to board when he was in Binghamton, to find out what he wanted. He'd left word for her. He'd be in on Monday afternoon, on the 5:30 train.
On Sunday, Vera and Clara and a few other girls spent the afternoon at Ideal Park. That evening Loomis came by and asked if any of them wanted to ride out to Brisben with him to pick up his mother from the camp. Only Vera went. When they got there, his mother had already gone home. So the two of them turned around and drove back. And by his own testimony, Newell Evans spent that Sunday night in a room at the Lewis House.
Monday morning, the fourth of August, he left a note for the clerk at the front desk. "If anyone calls Evans on the telephone today tell them I will be back at 5:35 on train 3 and that I have gone to Deposit." He went home to Deposit. He worked up on the roof all morning, shingling. He had dinner at home. Then he went downtown, and he ran into a taxi man he knew, Burr Keller, and Keller drove him back to the house to change his clothes. Evans would say he finished off about half a pint of whiskey out of his grip that afternoon. Then the two of them drove out to Creek Settlement, a few miles off, and back. Keller would say he never saw a gun on him that day. He did see a blackjack. And that afternoon Keller dropped him at the Erie station in Deposit, and Newell got on train Number 3 for Binghamton.
At about 5:30, the train pulled into Binghamton. And Vera was there to meet it. An Erie police lieutenant, John Duryea, saw the two of them walk out of the station together. They walked over to the Lewis House. And Vera could tell he'd been drinking. She told him to go to bed. He said he was tired, he'd been up on the roof all day. He promised her he'd go home to Deposit that night. And then, Vera told her cousin, he gave her an ultimatum. She had to choose. Him, or Loomis. "Which is it to be, Loomis or I." And, "If I can't have you, nobody else can." Vera left him there without giving him an answer. And on the street car going home, she broke down and sobbed the whole story out to Clara.
That evening, Newell got on the telephone and called some women he knew, and invited them out to dinner. He met them at the Armory Hotel. Four women all told. One of them was visiting from New York and had never laid eyes on him before. At about a quarter to nine, a taxi driver named Ely Haight picked them all up out front. Haight told the paper two days later that Newell seemed quite drunk, though he could handle himself. The women told police he hadn't been drinking to excess. One of them said he was unusually quiet, for him. "Drive us to Jack Frost's place," Newell said. Frost's was a hotel out on Burr Avenue. Jack Frost himself was sitting in the barroom when they came in, and he'd known Newell for fifteen years. "Hello Soupe," he said. "You are quite a stranger." Newell stepped up to the bar and asked for a drink of hard stuff. And the manager, Jack Kane, told him they didn't have any whiskey. Wartime prohibition. They could give him a light wine. And Newell flew into a rage. Haight said he called Kane every name he could think of, and threatened to start a fight. Then he turned around and insisted that Haight have a drink with him. Haight said he didn't drink. Newell wouldn't let it go. So Haight took a cigar. They were in and out of there in maybe ten minutes. They dropped two of the women back at the Armory Hotel. Then Haight drove down Exchange Street and let the last two out at the corner of Exchange and Court. And as they pulled up, Haight looked up at the big clock on the Court House. It was just 9:30. Then Newell told him to drive to Robinson Street. And to stop in front of the fire station. When they got there, Newell got out. And he said to Haight, "I will get you between here and the next corner within a few minutes." He hadn't paid for the ride. So Haight got out and walked back a little way to see where he was going. There was a light in front of one of the houses. Haight saw him turn in at it. And as Haight turned to go back to his cab, he heard them. Four shots.
That's what Ely Haight told the paper two days later. Under oath, he'd turn out to be a whole lot less sure.
Part 5208 Robinson Street
So. Back to the porch. Donald Loomis opened the screen door into the kitchen. And just as he did, Vera came staggering out of the dark kitchen toward him, into the little storeroom off the porch. And she fell in the corner, right at his feet. He looked up. And standing in the kitchen, with a revolver in his hand, looking down at her, was Newell Evans.
Now, Loomis told this two ways. The day after, he told the paper that Evans swung the gun up at his head, and he ducked. Nine days later, under oath, he said he didn't think Evans even saw him come in. Either way, he went for the gun. He grabbed it with both hands, and the two of them fought for it in that tiny back porch. Evans went over the wash tub. Loomis tore the revolver out of his hand and beat him over the head with it. He went down. Loomis beat him again until he lay still just inside the kitchen door. And then, in his own words, "I kicked him." Neither man said a word the whole time.
He bent over Vera. Then he ran to the front of the house. And there was Mrs. Rickard, on the floor of the front room by the door, in a pool of blood. She'd been shot twice. And she said to him, "I have been shot; I am dying."
Across the street, in front of the Gilmore Brothers pool room, a few young fellows were sitting out on the porch. Clarence Whitham, who was twenty-one, and a fifteen-year-old named Victor Hall, who'd just bought himself an ice cream. They heard the shots. And they ran across the road. Just as they reached the front steps, the door burst open and Loomis came out, swearing and shouting that there'd been a murder. He ran for the pool room to telephone the police and an ambulance. And he left the front door wide open behind him.
Whitham had gone around the side of the house. And for just a few seconds he saw someone come off the back porch and walk away into the dark, toward the grocery store on the corner. A man. A good-sized man. Not running. Walking. Just moderately, he'd say. Inside, Mrs. Rickard was moaning, asking someone to help her. Loomis came back. He and Hall and someone the paper only ever called Sophia lifted her onto the couch in the corner, while Whitham piled up the pillows. Whitham fanned her with his straw hat, because nobody could find a fan. Then he ran down the street to 240 to get her sister, Mrs. Fitzpatrick.
Loomis went looking for something to give her. He couldn't find the light switch in the kitchen. Hall found it, and turned it on. And they went back toward the porch, and Loomis bent down to lift Vera. He took one look at her face. "My God," he said, "she is dead."
Hall found a leather blackjack on the kitchen floor and set it on the stove. The new stove. And Loomis picked up the revolver off the floor, carried it into the front of the house and laid it down. Hang on to that, too. In the front room, Mrs. Rickard kept asking how badly Vera was hurt. Loomis told her Vera wasn't as badly hurt as she was. That she'd be all right. And Isabel Rickard looked up at him and said, "Donald, I think you are lying to me."
Then a patrolman named William Ford came in, with a notebook in his hand. And he started asking her questions. And she answered him. What she told him wouldn't come out for a month. The ambulance came. Before it got there, she'd slipped into unconsciousness. They took her to City Hospital. And a coroner and an assistant district attorney went straight there to try to take a formal statement from her. She was too far gone.
The call came into police headquarters at about ten. Within minutes, every patrolman they had was out. They watched every road out of the city. They searched every train leaving the Erie and the Lackawanna stations. One patrolman, an old railroad man, saw a man with no coat or hat riding on top of an oil tank on a westbound freight, jumped onto the train at about twenty miles an hour and arrested him. Wrong man.
Meanwhile, Lulu Rickard and her cousin Clara were sitting in the little park over on Burton Avenue with the two young men from out of town. Sometime between half past nine and ten, a big man in dark clothes came walking past their bench. No hat.
Clara would swear it was Newell Evans. Lulu couldn't say who it was. And Ely Haight was still sitting in his cab up by the fire station, waiting to be paid. He said he didn't think anything of the shots at first. Then he saw the police patrol pull up in front of the house.
About half an hour after the shooting, two patrolmen, William Shinners and Lacey Abel, were working their way up Robinson Street and down Mason Avenue, toward Court Street, where the railroad tracks run along a bank. And in the tall grass beside a billboard, Shinners saw a man.
Abel put his flashlight on him. He was lying on his coat in the grass. Shinners reached down and grabbed his left hand, and something flashed in the right one. A small pearl-handled penknife. According to the officers, he slashed at Abel and cut open his trouser leg before they clubbed him down. And then he started to get up and said, "For Christ's sake don't kill me." He had no hat. And pinned to his suspenders was his Erie detective badge. In his pocket they found a quart bottle of whiskey, about a quarter full.
They flagged down a passing car and took him to headquarters. On the way, he kept asking for a cigarette. When they got him into the office, he slid off the chair onto the floor. So they took him to the City Hospital to be patched up, and then back to a cell. At about one in the morning, the assistant district attorney, the chief of detectives and the sheriff questioned him. He seemed dazed. He didn't seem to remember anything. He kept asking why he'd been locked up. He said he didn't mind being locked up for drunkenness, but they didn't need to abuse him. And the guards outside his cell said that over and over, he'd ask, "What did I do." And when they told him, he cried out: "No! No, I couldn't have done what you say I did, Vera was my little pal. She was the only friend I had had in the world aside from my mother."
The next morning, they did the autopsy on Vera. One bullet. It went in at the top of her left shoulder, through the big artery under the shoulder blade, through her lung and through her windpipe. They couldn't find where it ended up. They had to take her to the hospital for an X-ray, and there it was, under her right collarbone. She'd choked on her own blood. She was twenty-nine.
At 12:25 that afternoon, Tuesday, Isabel Rickard died at City Hospital. She was about fifty-four. Her husband came in from Port Jervis that day. The paper said he collapsed when they told him what had happened. Lulu and Clara had gone to the hospital that night, and they both had to be treated by doctors before they could leave. On Thursday morning, the seventh of August, the two of them were put on the 4:50 Erie train for Honesdale. Vera and her mother. The funeral was at the First Presbyterian Church that same morning. They were buried together in the family lot.
And in a barred room at City Hospital, under guard, Newell Evans told everyone who asked that he couldn't remember a thing.
Part 6The Only Witness
By that Tuesday afternoon, Newell Evans had a lawyer. His mother came over from Deposit, found his younger brother Ellicott here in town, and the two of them went and hired a Binghamton attorney named Harry J. Hennessey. That same afternoon Evans started shaking all over, like a man with a chill, and the doctors had him moved to City Hospital, to a barred room with two policemen outside. He didn't eat. He smoked constantly. The officers said he didn't seem to care what became of him. And as for that Monday night, he said he didn't remember any of it. Not the taxi. Not the house. Nothing between getting off the train in Binghamton and the police finding him. Within a few days, you could see the shape of his defence. Hennessey wouldn't say it out loud. But the people around the case said it'd be some kind of insanity. That Vera had given him every reason to believe she'd marry him. That he'd spent money on her, taken her on trips, bought her clothes. And that when he heard she was back with Loomis, the jealousy drove him out of his mind. His sister Zeola came up from New York to help, and she told the Press that Vera and her brother had been engaged since the winter. On Friday, the eighth, they brought him into City Court and read him the charge. Murder in the first degree. He sat there turning his panama hat around in his lap. He was still wearing the coat he'd had on that Monday night. Dark blue, the same cloth they used for police uniforms. Torn in a few places from the scuffle. Hennessey entered a plea of not guilty and demanded a hearing. And the paper reported something else. The prosecution's case, it said, would rest mainly on a signed statement Evans gave the assistant district attorney and two detectives on the morning after the shooting. Nobody outside that room ever printed a word of what was in it. The gun was another thing people talked about. Erie detectives carried automatic pistols. This was, as the paper put it, "an old Smith Wesson." Where he got it, nobody ever said. The hearing was Wednesday, the thirteenth of August, in front of City Judge Harold Hart. A crowd was waiting outside City Hall to get a look at him. He came in wearing a slate-coloured suit and the panama hat. There was still a little bruising around his left eye. His father sat beside him. His sister. His brother Ellicott was there. First the doctor who'd done Vera's autopsy, Arthur Chittenden, described the wound. Then Ely Haight, the taxi driver, got up on the stand, and this time his story was a good deal quieter. Under oath, he said the man in his cab resembled the prisoner. But he'd never seen Evans before that night, and he couldn't positively say it was him. He said the man had been drinking, but wasn't noticeably drunk. No rage at Jack Frost's bar this time. Just a man unhappy that all he could get was "soft stuff." At one point the district attorney asked Haight to walk right up to Evans and take a good look at him. Evans turned his head and looked him straight in the eye. And the paper said that was the only moment all day that he went a little pale.
And then they called Donald Loomis. He said he lived on Gold Street and worked for the Binghamton Light, Heat and Power Company. He'd been home from France about three months. He'd known Vera for years. He'd never laid eyes on Newell Evans until that night. And he told them the whole thing. The stove. The porch. The four bangs, and the boys with their torpedoes. The feeling. The door. Vera falling at his feet. The man with the gun. He wasn't good on the small details. He said the kitchen light had been off, and he'd seen by the light from the next room. He couldn't describe what the man was wearing. Hennessey made him go through the fight in the kitchen again and again. The paper's headline that night put it right at the top: "Uncertain on Details." But on the one thing that mattered, he didn't move an inch. The man he took that smoking revolver from was Newell Evans, sitting right there.
Judge Hart held Evans for the Grand Jury, on a charge of murder in the first degree. That afternoon they took his measurements at police headquarters, the old Bertillon system, and drove him to the Broome County Jail. They put him in a cell on the second floor of the north wing. The sheriff made a point of telling the paper whose cell it had been. Two men before him had sat in it waiting on murder charges. Three guards, eight-hour shifts, around the clock. To keep him from escaping, and to keep him from killing himself. Two days later, the chief of detectives, Loren Rummer, filed an affidavit with the court. In it he swore that Evans had planned the murder of Vera Rickard ahead of time.
So that was the case, as August went on. An eyewitness who'd gone into that kitchen and come out with the gun. A taxi driver who'd put the man at the door, more or less. And a defence that was going to say he couldn't remember any of it. The trial would be in the fall.
Saturday morning, the twenty-third of August. Donald Loomis was at work. He was up on a pole with three other linemen from the Light, Heat and Power Company, at the southwest corner of Hawley and Exchange streets, in front of the new Y.W.C.A. building. They were splicing a wire near the top of the pole. The wire they were working on usually carried twenty-three hundred volts. The men said it had been cut back to a hundred and ten, so they could splice it safely.
Bird Allison was holding the wire.
Loomis was leaning and went limp. Allison grabbed him and pushed him clear of the wire, and shouted for the others. It took them a good fifteen minutes to rig a rope and pulley and get him down off that pole. The police came with the pulmotor. They worked on him for more than half an hour. A doctor who happened to be walking past that corner stopped to help. It was Dr. Arthur Chittenden. The same doctor who'd done Vera's autopsy, and sat in that courtroom with Loomis ten days before. Then the coroner came and pronounced Donald Loomis dead.
The other linemen couldn't explain it. Every other wire up there seemed to be properly insulated. One idea was that somebody had thrown the switch too soon, and the full voltage had come back on the line. A Press photographer got up to that corner within minutes. He took a picture of the wire. There's an arrow on it, pointing at a bare spot at the splice. He'd been home from the war three months.
That corner, Hawley and Exchange, is right at the edge of the courthouse grounds. The county jail sits on the same lot. A few hundred feet away, in a cell on the second floor of the north wing, was the man Donald Loomis was supposed to testify against. That night the Press said it plainly. The prosecution had lost the only person who'd been there. Newell Evans had been arrested by two patrolmen, identified by a man who was now dead, and driven to the door, maybe, by a taxi driver who wouldn't swear to his face. And the trial hadn't even been scheduled yet.
Part 7Soupe, as He Is Called
With Donald Loomis gone, the lawyers around Binghamton started doing the arithmetic. Everything he'd said in City Court had been taken down by the court stenographer. But he'd never signed it. He never got the chance. And in the opinion of various attorneys around town, the Press reported, that made his testimony "absolutely useless as evidence." The district attorney didn't agree. He had Judge Hart and the stenographer swear the transcript was a true record, and he made it plain he meant to use it. But even the paper thought the case would now turn on something else. On Friday, the fifth of September, the Press ran a story under a long headline. "Witnesses Declare They Heard Dying Woman Tell Patrolman That Evans Fired Fatal Shots." You'll remember Patrolman William Ford, by the couch in the front room, notebook in hand. A month later, two of the young men from the pool-room porch told the paper what they said they'd heard. Clarence Whitham had run down the street to fetch Mrs. Fitzpatrick, and when he got back, there was a policeman in the room with a notebook. Victor Hall, the fifteen-year-old, was right there by the couch. This is how the Press laid out the exchange, from what those witnesses told it. Ford asked who did the shooting. "Evans." He asked for the first name. "N. Y. Evans or Soupe as he is called." And he asked what the trouble was about. "Jealousy over Vera, my daughter."
Soupe. The nickname from the shoe shops. The one Jack Frost greeted him with in his barroom, less than an hour before the shots. Isabel Rickard didn't just know who he was. She knew what his friends called him. Both young men said she told Ford one more thing. That she'd ordered him out of her house, and that's when he started shooting. Mrs. Fitzpatrick, Vera's aunt, was in that room too, according to the paper. When a reporter asked her about it, she said she wasn't allowed to talk about it yet. But she didn't deny it. Ford himself was never quoted on it. Every word of this came from the neighbours, a month after the fact. And Whitham told the paper something else. He'd talked with Loomis before Loomis died. And Loomis had told him the horror of that night hit him so hard that he'd acted almost without knowing what he did. A lot of the details hadn't come back to him for days. With those witnesses, the Press said, the authorities now thought a conviction was certain. The Grand Jury sat in the middle of September, and the Evans case was the first big one on its list. On the sixteenth, the hallway outside the Grand Jury room was full of people waiting their turn: witnesses everybody knew were connected with the case. On Friday the twenty-sixth, they came back with two indictments. Murder in the first degree, for Vera. And murder in the first degree, for her mother. With, in the words of the charge, "malice aforethought and with deliberate and premeditated design to effect the death." He was charged with her death too. That charge never went to trial. On the back of each indictment were the names of the witnesses who'd testified. Lulu. Clara. The women from the taxi. The taxi driver. Ford. The patrolmen who caught him. Hang on to that list. In a couple of months, there'd be a fight in court over a name that wasn't on it. On Monday the twenty-ninth, so many people crowded into the courtroom to get a look at him that the district attorney put off the arraignment until later in the day. At half past three, Newell Evans stood in front of Justice Abraham Kellogg, heard both indictments read, and pleaded not guilty. The district attorney chose to try him for Vera's murder first. The trial was set for the tenth of November. The autumn went by. In October, the state compensation commissioner took up the case of a lineman killed on the job at Hawley and Exchange. Nobody appeared. He ordered that Donald Loomis's mother be paid five dollars and seventy-seven cents a week. Over at the county jail, the guards said Evans seemed indifferent. He smoked. He read the papers and magazines. He ate well, though they wouldn't let him have a knife. He'd talk about the news with them. But in all those weeks, he never once brought up the night of August fourth. One of his guards was a soldier just home from the war. Another was a sailor. They told the paper he seemed quite cheerful at times. Then, on the Friday before the trial, a telegram came. From an army hospital in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. You might remember the brother in that August first letter. The one in the hospital at Carlisle, the one his mother sat up crying over. That was his older brother, Leland, a lieutenant. He'd been hurt, the paper said, while his unit was getting ready to ship out for France. And he'd been in that hospital for months, after an amputation. The family had been afraid to tell him. Nobody told him his brother was charged with murder until a couple of days before. And as soon as he heard, he wired home with instructions. Hire Thomas J. Mangan, to sit beside Hennessey. That same day, the Press laid out what everybody expected. Loomis's transcript, it said, "probably cannot be introduced." The prosecution would lean mainly on Mrs. Rickard's dying statement. If the district attorney could get that in front of the jury, it would be the most important link in his whole case.
Monday morning, the tenth of November. A Press photographer was waiting outside. Evans came across to the courthouse handcuffed by his right wrist to the under-sheriff, John Bartley. The sheriff walked at his left. A deputy came right behind. A hundred and seventy extra jurymen had been summoned. Every seat was taken before a quarter to eleven, and hundreds of people were turned away at the doors.
Lulu sat in the front rows, with the other witnesses. His father, gray-haired, took his son's hand, with tears running down his face. His sister kissed him. That afternoon his mother came in from Deposit. She took his hand and kissed him too. And he smiled, just barely, and looked down at the floor.
So that's how everybody expected it to go. The dead man's story was useless. The dying woman's words would carry it. First, they needed twelve men.
Part 8Five Hundred Men
It took them a week to find twelve men. On the first morning, more than seventy-five of the extra jurymen asked to be excused. Farmers with nobody to mind the farm. Exempt firemen. Discharged soldiers. And most of the rest couldn't serve. They'd read the papers and made up their minds. Or they were against capital punishment, and this was a capital case. That first afternoon, after thirteen men in a row had been sent home, the judge, Abraham Kellogg, said from the bench, "This is the most abnormal situation I have ever faced in my judicial career." Some of them were a show. A farmer from Windsor was asked if he might go easy on the defendant out of sympathy. He might be chicken-hearted, he said, and he might not. "You can't tell exactly how a harness is going to fit until you try it." And in the questions, you could hear what the defence was going to be. Hennessey kept coming back to drinking. And at one point he read a juror a section of the Penal Code. Section 1220. It starts like this. "No act committed by a person while in a state of voluntary intoxication shall be deemed less criminal by reason of his having been in such condition." But then it turns. Where intent is part of the crime, it says, "the jury may take into consideration the fact that the accused was intoxicated at the time". That's the defence in a sentence. Being drunk doesn't excuse a murder. But first-degree murder meant a deliberate, premeditated design to kill. And if he was too drunk to plan anything, the jury could take that into account. On Monday the seventeenth, just before noon, they got their twelfth man. A retired garage owner from Johnson City, George Lindsey. The paper said he was the first man out of five hundred or more they'd examined who hadn't read about the murders. He said he was usually "too busy" to read. That afternoon, the district attorney, Urbane Lyons, stood up to open for the people. "As that clock shall tick off the hours during this trial and as witness after witness takes the stand, the story of the most fiendish murder in the history of this fair county will be told." He laid it all out. The taxi. The fire station. Loomis grabbing a gun that was, he said, "sufficiently hot to burn his fingers." And the motive. "Jealousy, that green-eyed monster, was responsible for this murder as we will show you." Vera's father was the first witness, then Lulu, in deep mourning. You've heard what they said. But on cross-examination, Hennessey handed Mr. Rickard a stack. Twenty post cards. Eight letters. Fifteen photographs. Most of it, he said, was in Vera's hand. The defence had every piece marked as an exhibit. Nobody read them out. Not yet.
Then the prosecution called a witness the defence said it never saw coming. Peter Cornell, a bartender at the Lewis House. He said that three hours before the shooting, he'd seen Vera and Evans together at the hotel, and they'd quarrelled. The defence went up in arms. Cornell had been in front of the Grand Jury, they said, and his name wasn't on the back of the indictment. Hennessey accused the district attorney of "bad faith" and "deceit." The DA said the Grand Jury had struck Cornell's testimony out, so he didn't have to list him. Kellogg worked on it into the early hours. And he let Cornell's testimony stand. The defence would have a good deal more to say about Peter Cornell before this was over. A few days later, the Erie lieutenant, John Duryea, was asked how the two of them looked when he passed them on the station platform that afternoon. Angry? "No," he said. "They were smiling and talking."
Then came the women from the taxi. Five of them, one after another, and they told it the same way. Evans ordering a round at the Armory, then announcing he had no money, and the girls digging for pennies. Rapping on the wall at Frost's with a blackjack to call the driver. Trying to waltz, and one of them said he was "so top-heavy" he couldn't. They asked Sadie Lane if he walked straight. "No, he staggered and stumbled." And Catherine Horrigan remembered him nearly sliding off the seat as they came around the corner from Court Street. "Soupe, straighten up or you'll fall out." Back in August, the women had told police he wasn't drinking to excess. Now, under cross-examination by his lawyers, every one of them said he was drunk.
Then Ely Haight, the taxi driver. On direct, he called his passenger "the man" from start to finish. He told how he'd turned his car around and followed the man down Robinson Street in the dark, and lost him. "The only thing I saw was the sparks from the cigarette, thrown in the street further up." Over the defence's objections, the district attorney asked him if the man was the defendant. To the best of his recollection, Haight said, he was.
Then Hennessey got up. Hadn't Haight told them at the hearing in August that he couldn't say? Yes. "Is your recollection any better now?" "No." "Then you don't know whether this defendant was the man or not, do you?" "No." And that same day, the dead man testified. Judge Hart and the court stenographer took the stand to vouch for the transcript. The defence threw objection after objection. Kellogg overruled every one. And late that afternoon, the forty-five typewritten pages of Donald Loomis's testimony went in front of the jury. And the very next morning, it went the other way. Clarence Whitham was on the stand, telling how he'd looked in through the open front door and seen Mrs. Rickard lying on the floor. The defence objected. And Kellogg ruled. Evans was on trial for one murder, Vera's. Anything about the killing of her mother was out, except what was needed to tell Vera's story. He had that part of Whitham's testimony struck from the record. And with it went her dying words. The papers believed the judge's ruling shut it out, and there's no sign it was ever read to the jury. So in the space of a day, it all flipped. The dead man's unsigned words, the ones that could never get in, were in. The dying mother's words, the ones that were going to win it, were out.
That same morning, Hennessey tried something. Whitham had told how Loomis came back from telephoning, went to the back of the house, and came out with a revolver, and laid it on the library table. So on cross-examination, Hennessey asked him, with what the paper called "pronounced emphasis": "Was Loomis the first man you saw with a revolver?" Whitham said yes. It was only a question. But everyone in the room could hear where it pointed. And when the district attorney summed up, he called it what it was: an "attempt to throw suspicion on Loomis."
So let's be plain about it. Donald Loomis was never suspected by the police, and he was never charged with anything. He was the man who ran for the telephone. That question was the defence doing its job, with a witness who couldn't answer back.
Then came the things you could hold. The revolver, four chambers fired. The blackjack. And a panama hat, which a detective swore Loomis handed him in the house that night. The police said that the next morning, Evans told them all three were his. "Do these belong to you, Mr. Evans?" And he said they did. They brought in the shirtwaist Vera had been wearing. And Lulu broke down and wept.
Then the two patrolmen who'd found him in the grass. William Shinners told the jury what was said, with one knee on Evans, beside the billboard. He'd asked what he was trying to do with that knife. "I tried to do the'dutch' if I had a gun, I'd finish it." The "dutch" was slang, in 1919, for killing yourself. And then Shinners asked him, "What did you do the job up above for?" "I loved her and she jilted me." The paper said Evans slid down in his chair until his chin was on his chest, and stared at the floor. Right behind him, on the other side of the rail, sat his brother Leland, home from Carlisle on crutches. Hennessey went after Shinners on one point. Was the man drunk? Shinners said he'd arrested about a thousand drunks in his time. "He appeared absolutely sober." So there it was. Five women said he could hardly walk. The two policemen who caught him, within the hour, said he was absolutely sober. Somewhere between those two stories was the difference between first-degree murder and something less.
On Monday the twenty-fourth, Vera's cousin Clara took the stand. She told about a night in July, after a picnic, at an ice cream parlour. She said Evans looked straight at Vera with an expression that was "stern and ugly," and he said: "If I knew half that goes on when I am away, mother earth would cover your body before morning." And another time: "If you or any other woman ever double-crossed me, I would kill her quicker than a wink." Then a railroad engine mechanic from Port Jervis, John Barr. He swore that in August of 1918, a full year before the murder, he'd overheard Evans tell another man: "If I can't have Vera Rickard, no other man can, if I have to kill her and the whole damn Rickard family." And when Barr told him a few days later he was talking pretty rough, Barr said Evans answered, "When mother-in-laws don't like you and lovers have a quarrel, a fellow is liable to say most anything."
On Tuesday morning, the twenty-fifth, the district attorney read three of Evans's own letters to the jury. You've heard them. "Some jealous." "No fool like an old fool." "I am afraid it is all up with me." And at ten to four that afternoon, the people rested.
Now it was the defence's turn. And they had a stack of letters of their own. Twenty post cards. Eight letters. Fifteen photographs. In Vera's hand.
Part 9Dear Boy
The defence opened its case that same Tuesday afternoon. His mother, his father and his sister all took the stand. The paper didn't say much about what they said. The next morning, a soap maker from New York City named John Moon told the jury he'd happened to be walking past police headquarters on the night of August fourth, just as the police were carrying a man out to a car. Two officers had him by the shoulders, one by the feet. And Moon said the man was "covered with blood so you could not recognize his face." Then Burr Keller, the taxi man from Deposit. Yes, he'd driven Evans around that afternoon. No, he never saw a revolver on him. A blackjack, yes. And then, a little after that, Newell Evans got up and walked to the witness chair. He answered in an even voice. He told them he met Vera in January of 1917, when he was tending bar at the Allen House in Honesdale and she was keeping the books at her father's barn out back. And he told them how it started. "I had two bottles of beer wrapped up for her father. I took them in the barn and asked her to give them to him. I told her they were some trout that had been left for him." A few days later, he said, they made a date. And after that, he said, "I saw her every day and every night." He took them through the next two years, place by place. Syracuse. Susquehanna. Jersey City. He said she met him in Scranton and Carbondale every two or three weeks. That she wrote him every day, and sometimes two or three times a day. And he told them about something he'd bought in Scranton. A wedding ring. He said Vera picked it out, and he paid for it. "I bought the ring intending to make her my wife. My wife at that time was getting her divorce." Then his lawyers started handing him the exhibits. The post cards, the letters, the snapshots the defence had marked a week before. One at a time. Whose handwriting? "Vera." And the next. "Vera." And the paper said that after he'd said her name enough times, his voice kept getting fainter, until they had to keep telling him to speak up. The snapshots were all of Vera and her girlfriends that summer, he said. May, June and July of 1919. She'd mailed them to him. Then Harry Hennessey stood up and read her letters out loud to the jury. And for the first time in this whole story, we get to hear from Vera. The letter that hit hardest, the paper said, was one she'd written while he was an Erie patrolman down in Susquehanna. It started, "Dear boy." According to the Press's account of that letter, her mother had found out he was a married man. And she'd given Vera a talking-to for keeping company with him. Vera started packing her things to leave home. And her mother fainted. So Vera stayed. But she still wouldn't give him up. Her mother had written to people in Scranton about him. They wrote back that they "could say nothing good about Evans." They called him a "hard drinker." And her mother told Vera she'd disgraced the family, and herself. Her mother was opening the mail, Vera wrote, so he'd better send his letters to a friend in Honesdale from now on. And then, in her own words: "Give the booze up. I have seen too much trouble from it. Cheer up and don't worry; remember that true love never runs smooth. I feel worse when you are drinking than I do about anything mama will say." There's one more line in that letter. We'll come back to it. The rest of the letters and the post cards were read out one after another. Little lines, mostly. "Now, my honey, don't be foolish." "Here are two snaps of your little honey gal." "Be good till I see you babe." And one that's hard to read now: "I miss you so much, as I always felt that you felt for me and sympathized with me. Now there is no one." They were signed "V." Or "Vera."
Evans had started to break down while he was still in the witness chair. The judge let him go and sit beside his lawyers while the reading went on. And there, the paper said, he "wept like a child." He buried his face in a handkerchief, and his big shoulders shook. When it was over, it was a while before he could stand up to be taken back to the jail for lunch.
So this is the Vera we didn't get from her family. All summer, the papers had her engaged to Donald Loomis, dodging the married man who wouldn't leave her alone. And maybe some of that was true. But here she was, in her own hand, calling him "dear boy," and "sweety," and promising to keep writing behind her mother's back. Some of those snapshots were from July. The month she was supposedly back with Loomis. Was she torn? Was she stringing one of them along? Was she trying to let Evans down easy, and couldn't? Her letters don't say. And nothing in them changes who walked through that front door with a gun.
He went back on the stand that afternoon. They put in the post office receipts. A hundred dollars to Vera in June. Ten dollars in May. He said he'd sent her his first paycheck as a lieutenant, eighty-two dollars and fifty cents. And he said he'd bought her that dress on the thirty-first of July. They read the jury his note from the Lewis House desk. "Back at 5:35 on train 3." He told them he'd worked on the roof all morning and finished off about half a pint of whiskey out of his grip that afternoon. What he told them about that night, after the train got in, isn't in the pages we have. The paper went to press in the middle of it. From the way the district attorney answered it later, the defence's story was that his mind had gone blank. A lapse.
On Friday, the twenty-eighth, Thomas Mangan got up to plead for his life. He started at twenty past eleven in the morning. He finished at ten to five in the afternoon. His big question was the afternoon. If Evans had planned to kill her, why didn't he do it at 5:30, at the Lewis House, when they were alone together for three-quarters of an hour? "Why did he wait until 10 o'clock that night, going to her house where there were other people and through streets where he could have been easily seen and finally going to one of the most traveled streets in the city?" He read Evans's own letters back to them, the ones the prosecution had used. "I have never read letters more expressive of a man's love for a woman than these," he said. "Books are written on such letters as these."
And then he went after the witnesses. Peter Cornell, the man from the Lewis House who'd sworn Vera was in a "temper" that afternoon? Mangan reminded the jury that Cornell had admitted two convictions for crimes in New York. And he set him against another man from the same hotel, the clerk, Frank Shattuck, who'd been called by the prosecution. Shattuck had testified the two of them were together there for more than three-quarters of an hour, on what seemed the friendliest of terms. And that Vera left by the side door at 6:05. He knew the time because he'd just looked at his watch. "Which of these two men are you going to believe," Mangan asked, "Cornell, the'Bowery Rube,' with two convictions to his credit, or Frank Shattuck, the honest square man that he is." And John Barr, the engine mechanic who'd overheard Evans threaten the whole Rickard family a year before? Mangan asked the jurymen if they'd ever met a "sweet old woman gossip." If there ever was one, he said, "John was it." He sat down at ten to five. The district attorney would answer him first thing in the morning. They were starting at eight.
Part 10The Lifer's Tier
Saturday, the twenty-ninth of November. Court opened at eight in the morning, so they could finish that day. And the district attorney, Urbane Lyons, started talking the minute it did. "If I was not convinced from the soles of my feet to the furtherest ends of the hair in my head, that this defendant was guilty of the crime of murder in the first degree, do you believe for a single moment that I would be before you, gentlemen, asking for a verdict against this man?" At one point his voice gave out on him. The judge sent the sheriff out for lemons, and all over the courtroom people were digging in their pockets for throat lozenges. He went straight at the defence's story, that a drunk man's mind had gone blank. A man in a fog didn't tell a taxi driver which side of the fire station to stop on. He didn't walk away from a house instead of running. He didn't lie still in the grass behind a billboard while two policemen went by. He was "playing'possum," Lyons said, the whole time. And he pointed at a hole in Evans's own story. The night before the murder, Evans had been out on the town for two or three hours. He'd sworn he was sober. And he'd sworn he couldn't remember a single person he'd met. Then Lyons turned and pointed his finger at Evans, and charged him with three crimes. Taking up with a good girl while he was a married man, ten years older. Killing her. And then, he said, coming into that courtroom and reading her letters out loud to save his own life. He said Evans had "crucified the memory of the girl he says he loved." He asked them for first-degree murder. He finished at 11:47.
And right then, Kellogg ordered the courtroom cleared. One of the jurors, a farmer from Chenango Forks, was sick. A doctor came in and found tonsillitis and a high fever. If he got any worse, the whole trial could end in a mistrial. He stayed. After lunch, Kellogg charged the jury for about an hour. And at seven minutes past four, the twelve men went out. At six, they took the jury out to supper. At the Carlton Hotel. The same hotel where, back in July, Newell Evans had sat across a table from Vera and told her he hadn't eaten or slept in twenty-four hours. They were back before seven. At ten to nine, the foreman, a farmer named Ollin Schermerhorn, opened the jury-room door an inch or two and told the bailiff they had a verdict. It went through town like wildfire. Within ten minutes every seat was taken and people were jammed into the aisles and out into both corridors.
Six policemen under Captain Shay held the doors. Kellogg was already in the building; he'd come over to lock the jury up for the night if they hadn't decided by eleven. At 9:20, they brought Evans in, handcuffed to the under-sheriff. While they waited for the district attorney, somebody handed him a glass of ice water. The paper said his hand was perfectly steady. The clerk asked if they'd reached a verdict. "We have." "Do you find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree as charged in the indictment?" The foreman stood there a moment. "We find," he said. And stopped.
"We find," he said again, "the defendant guilty of murder in the second degree." The room broke out talking. It was 9:36. Four minutes later, newsboys were selling a Press extra on Court Street. They sold about five thousand copies before half past ten. Second degree. The indictment had charged a killing with a "deliberate and premeditated design." Twelve men decided he killed her. They didn't find that he'd planned it. The word around the courtroom was that they'd taken only one ballot. His lawyers asked for a new trial. Kellogg said he couldn't imagine any grounds for one, and denied it on the spot, so they could appeal straight away if they wanted to. And at 9:45 he passed sentence. The most the law allowed. Twenty years to life, in Auburn State Prison. Evans wouldn't answer the clerk's questions, on his lawyers' orders. Only his name and his age. Two minutes later he was on his way back to the jail. His lawyers talked about an appeal. If one was ever filed, we haven't found it. On Tuesday morning, the second of December, the sheriff and the under-sheriff delivered him to Auburn. And just as they handed him over to the warden, he turned around and put out his right hand to the two of them. "I want to thank you both," he said. For all they'd done for him in the county jail. They gave him a cell in what the paper called "the lifer's tier." He said he was going to obey all the rules and get out as soon as he could. Under the law, the paper said, with good behaviour, he could be out in about fourteen and a half years.
So here's what's left of Newell Evans, after that. It's almost all census forms. 1920. Auburn State Prison. An inmate, thirty-seven. Cabinet maker. 1925. Still there. The state census writes him down as a railroad laborer. 1930. Running the ice machine in the prison kitchen. Fourteen and a half years came and went. So did the end of 1939, and his twenty-year minimum. 1940. Still there. Inmate number 37366. Fifty-eight years old. During the Second World War, when the government registered the older men, he filled out a draft card too. For his home, he still put down Second Street, in Deposit. His mailing address was 135 State Street, Auburn. The prison. Why was he never let out? We don't know. His prison file still exists. It's in a box at the New York State Archives in Albany, in a series for inmates who were "discharged by death." It might hold the answer. We haven't seen it yet. On the seventeenth of July, 1947, Newell Evans died inside Auburn Prison. He'd been there twenty-eight years. The state's death index gives him one line.
So I keep thinking about the three voices in this story that came back from the dead. Donald Loomis, who saw it, and who was killed on a pole three weeks later. His voice made it into that courtroom anyway, in forty-five typed pages he never got to sign. Isabel Rickard, who looked up from that couch and named the man who shot her, and told the patrolman why. If the neighbours heard her right, those were the clearest words anyone ever spoke about that night. The jury never heard them. And Vera. Whose letters were read out loud by the lawyers defending the man who killed her, because they showed she'd loved him. I can't tell you which of those voices decided it. The jurors never said. But I think about that verdict. Not premeditated. Maybe it was the drinking. Maybe it was the lapse. Or maybe it was twelve men listening to a girl write "Dear boy" to the man sitting in front of them, and deciding that whatever happened on Robinson Street, it hadn't been planned in cold blood the way the district attorney said. That's me reading between the lines. Nobody wrote it down.
Remember that letter? "Dear boy." "Give the booze up." There was one more line in it. According to the Press, she wrote that she'd wait for him twenty years if she had to. He got his twenty years. And then some. She never got to be thirty.
That was the murder of Vera Rickard. If you have an idea for a future case you'd like us to dig into, reach out to me at Section29.com. I'm always looking for the next forgotten story. The Binghamton Press pages, the photographs, and the fire-insurance maps of the house, the station and the courthouse are up on the blog at Section29.com. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Forgotten True Crime. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who loves true crime. All the links are in the description below. Until next time, I'm Trevor with Forgotten True Crime. Stay safe out there. Just know you are unique, you are special, and you are loved.