On April 10, 1836, a New York City woman working under the name of Helen Jewett was murdered in her brothel.   A 19-year-old man named Richard Robinson was arrested and charged with the crime, and was tried but acquitted.

            In the early 1830s there were a number of inventions that greatly increased the speed and ease with which newspapers could be printed, thereby reducing the costs.    Newspapers had existed for years before then, but a new type of newspaper now emerged, the penny press.    For a generation after that, "newspapers" sprouted up in New York City (and other places) at a great rate of speed.   They were more like blogs than they were like modern newspapers.  They didn’t have sports sections, cartoons, advice columnists, Sudokus, classified advertising, photos, or, for the most part, news from around the world.   They were, in general, one man and two man operations, and they printed whatever news they could find or, if need be, invent.

            In this climate of many competing newspapers with small audiences and extraordinarily lax editorial practices, the story of the murder of Helen Jewett emerged as one of the most famous crimes in American history.   Patricia Cline Cohen wrote a 1998 book about this case,   The Murder of Helen Jewett, published by Alfred A. Knopf.

            Helen Jewett was a prostitute, yes, but in saying this I am as much misinforming you as the opposite.   She was a prostitute, but Robinson and Jewett had an intense, passionate relationship which had been going on for a year before her murder.   They wrote one another love letters, dozens or probably hundreds of them.  They bought one another gifts; they went to the theater together. They teased one another and fought petty battles that seemed to both of them larger than life.   They shared secrets.  They carried small, hand-drawn pictures of one another.   She sewed on his buttons, and mended his shirts.   When Robinson had dalliances with other women, she was furious with him, and he had to work his way back into her good graces.

            She was, then, more of a surrogate wife or a surrogate girlfriend than she was simply a sex worker, as we think of a prostitute in the 21^st century.   What is unclear, even having read the book, is to what extent this was unusual in 19^th century New York.   Jewett had and had had similar relationships with other men, although certainly less intense than her relationship with Robinson.

            The only time in my life when I was ever around prostitutes, very much, was when I was in the Army in Korea (1972-73)—and actually, those arrangements were much more like the Helen Jewett-type arrangement than they were like the images of prostitution that we have in contemporary media.    In Korea I was on an isolated battery, a company of about 110 to 120 men living in a small town nowhere near the rest of the Army.   There were a group of prostitutes there; I don’t know how many of them, maybe 30 to 40.   Probably half the men in the company consorted with the prostitutes, who were called "yobos" (or yoboes) and about half did not.  The yobos all wanted to marry Americans and come to the United States—and, in fact, a few of them did; in the year I was there I would guess five to seven soldiers married their yobos.   Each girl’s first object, then, was to "yobo" with a soldier; yobo was the term that the soldiers used for the prostitutes, but it was also the term that was used for a one-on-one, exclusive relationship between a soldier and a Korean native.   If a girl could yobo with a soldier, then she had a chance to take the relationship to the next level.   The next level involved an airplane and a passport.

            When a new soldier arrived in Korea, the yobos would often offer him free services in an effort to build a relationship.   The yobo was committed to the soldier—and vice versa.   She cooked for him, kept her apartment as nice as she could for him; she provided a refuge for him away from the base, although usually only a two-minute walk away from the base.   She took care of his clothes.   They bought groceries together, and very often had pets together.   They entertained friends together. She was a surrogate wife or a surrogate girlfriend—like Helen Jewett.

Some of the "abstaining" soldiers had wives back home, and many had girlfriends, but I had neither.  Some of us just really couldn’t relate to hiring prostitutes—but even so, we had friends who did, and I don’t recall that we looked down upon the other half.  I do recall that those who did associate with the yobos would sometimes give us a hard time because we didn’t; somehow we were less than men to them.   We were equal in number, but theirs was the dominant ethic.

            I remember I had a good friend who had the same name as a famous basketball coach; we’ll call him Dean Smith because that wasn’t his name.  Dean was one of the few college men on the base; I think there were less than five of us.    He was a year younger than I was, but he seemed much younger.    He was small, slender, very pale but very nice-looking.  He had gone to a small, private college in Ohio or Indiana or someplace, where he either lived at home or went home on weekends, and he was still under his mother’s thumb.   Soon after he came to Korea he hooked up with one of the youngest, prettiest and nicest of the yobos.   I used to hang out at their place.  He was very conflicted about it; he wanted to marry her, and she desperately wanted to marry him, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to cross the line.   I never knew how it ended; he was a couple of months behind me, still in country when I left.    To be frank, I kind of hoped he would marry her; she was an awfully nice girl, and she treated him well, and the only reason he didn’t marry her was that his mother would freak out about it, which wasn’t a good reason.  I don’t think they got married; he only had a couple of months left when I departed, and it took some time to get the paperwork in order to bring a girl back to the US.   He was behind schedule.

            There were two "clubs" or bars, just outside the gates of the compound, where the girls congregated; we called them dance clubs.   The company commander, a Captain from a small town in Kansas, hung out off-duty in one of the dance clubs as much as he hung out on base, although it would have been frowned upon for him to actually consort with the yobos, or at least frowned upon for it to become known that he did.   One thing about it that seems weird in retrospect is that the Captain negotiated a fee structure with the yobos.    He was very proud of this, and would talk about it often.   Soon after he got in country, he asked the yobos to elect a "head", a "mama san yobo", and he negotiated with her a series of set fees:   $5 for a short time, $10 for overnight, $30 a month for a yobo arrangement.   He had these fees printed on cards, and he made certain that every new soldier knew that that was the deal, these were the prices.  It was part of the orientation.

            He was concerned, he would say, that the girls would take advantage of a new soldier if he didn’t know the deal.   He didn’t want his soldiers to be taken advantage of.   I’m pretty sure that, when he sent reports to Division summarizing what he had done, establishing this fee arrangement was high on his list of accomplishments.   It may be that the Army wanted him to do this, or even instructed him to do it, I don’t know.

            Soldiers weren’t "allowed" to bring wives in country.  When they sent you to Korea they told you that you weren’t allowed to bring your wife, and if you asked if you could bring your wife, you would get an emphatic "No".   About four months before I left, another one of the college-educated soldiers brought his wife over anyway.   "What the hell do you mean I can’t bring my wife?" he asked.   "It’s a free country, isn’t it?  Who’s going to stop her from coming over here if she wants to?"   The Army was annoyed, but there was really nothing they could do about it.

            Of course, relationships between the soldiers and the yobos were sometimes awkward and sometimes ended badly, and there were three or four incidents involving violence toward one of the women in the year that I was there.   I knew all the ugly details, because I was the company clerk; I had to type up the reports.  But then, relationships between soldiers and American women were often awkward and ended badly. I remember we had one soldier, whose name was Joe, who sent about 80% of his paycheck every fortnight back to the states to a woman to whom he was engaged.   He was an outstanding soldier, one of the best, most reliable men in the battery.  Literally on the day before he left to go back home, expecting to be married in two weeks, he got a Dear John letter; sorry, Joe, I married this other guy a couple of months ago.   She had spent all the money.  Joe went out and got horribly, rip-roaring drunk, and there was some sort of unfortunate incident about 3:00 in the morning of the day he was supposed to go home, involving property damage but no injuries.   I took a call from Division about 9:30 AM, telling us to put a hold on his departure; he would have to stay in country and answer what was called a SOFA charge, SOFA standing for Status of Forces Agreement.   How the hell Division even knew about this we never knew; some Korean knew a General somewhere.  Anyway, I called the First Sergeant into the Captain’s empty office and explained the situation as quickly as I could.   We did what we thought was right; we called Division back and told them Joe had left the compound two hours earlier, and then we put Joe in a jeep and got his ass to the airport as fast as we possibly could.   With modern computers they’d have had him sure, but all we had were field telephones that worked best if you shouted into them at the top of your lungs, and we were able to get Joe on a plane before the paperwork could catch up with him.   That’s why we couldn’t figure out how Division even knew about it.   The telephones weren’t that good.

            I had a point there, which was this.   We look upon the Helen Jewett-type of prostitution as strange, because it does not match our modern image of how a prostitute works, but I suspect that, across the plain of history, it may be that the Helen Jewett-type of prostitution has been more the norm than the exception, and that the short-term, transactional prostitution of modern urban life, stripped of all romantic pretentions, has little history.  I know about that place in Pompeii; don’t send me e-mails.   Experts debate whether that even really was a brothel, although they tell the tourists it was.

            Anyway, back to the book.  Ms. Cohen’s research is quite remarkable, and the story she tells is twice that remarkable, at least.   Helen Jewett’s name at the time of her birth was Dorcas Doyen.  For several years as a young girl Dorcas worked as a live-in domestic servant with the family of Judge Nathan Weston, in Maine.   It’s a distinguished family; Judge Weston’s grandson became Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.   In the 1820s there was a woman named Mrs. Anne Royall, who travelled around the United States visiting towns and staying with people and recording her experiences in travelogues that were often petty and vindictive.    Ms. Royall visited the Weston house, met Dorcas Doyen briefly, was very much charmed by her, and wrote a couple of very flattering paragraphs about her in one of her nasty little books.  No one at the time made any connection between this unnamed servant girl and the woman who, nine years later, became the infamous Helen Jewett, but Ms. Cohen nonetheless finds the passage and uses it effectively to help re-construct Ms. Jewett’s early life.

            That’s remarkable, right?   There are many such discoveries in her research.   Nathaniel Hawthorne attended Bowdoin college at the same time as a nephew or cousin or something of Judge Weston, and visited this same small town in Maine for several weeks one summer when he was in college, flirting with a servant girl who worked in his friends’ house.   Hawthorne wrote about this, and wrote about the family and the little town in letters or journals that still survive, and Ms. Cohen finds these and uses them to re-construct the time and place.  The wallpaper in one room of another cousin’s house still survives, in an off-the-beaten track museum somewhere, and Ms. Cohen finds this wallpaper and writes about it.    Ms. Jewett, as a prostitute, had several other small run-ins with the police, and was on one occasion profiled in a newspaper by a sympathetic reporter (who was also a client), and Ms. Cohen has found this profile and used it to help re-construct her life—as well as the court records of all of these other little dustups.

            She finds letters from one family member to another, discussing social events at which Dorcas Doyen would have worked, and, as Doyen/Jewett was an avid reader and a great lover of books, she finds advertisements in small-town newspapers for books that Doyen might have read and probably read, and she finds articles that appeared in local newspapers that describe events or stories that Doyen would have known about or participated in.    She finds descriptions of people that Doyen would have known.   She finds court records and census records that make passing reference to Doyen’s grandfather or her great-grandmother or her next-door neighbor’s dog.  She finds the addresses at which Jewett lived in New York, and she finds out who was living next-door and what they did for a living, and who lived in all the houses up and down the street and what the nearby businesses were.

            It would be ungracious of me not to mention that, having read countless crime books, I have never before encountered anything remotely like this level of research.   By "research" I do not mean hitting Google and Wikipedia.   I mean living for weeks in old libraries and dusty courthouses, trying to recognize a name in a stack of 200-year-old property transaction records, and then moving on to the next old library, the next old courthouse or the next university archive or the next small-town museum or the next stack of census reports.    I’m a pretty good researcher; I couldn’t begin to do this.

            It would also be gutless of me not to call this what it is.   It’s academic show-boating.   In 1804 Jacob Doyen, who was Helen Jewett’s grandfather, filed a small-claims court action in Hallowell, Maine, against a man named Stephen Smith, having to do with a $12 debt, and then failed to appear in court when the case was heard.   Ms. Cohen finds the record of this action and infers actively from it, but it doesn’t actually have a damned thing to do with the story of Helen Jewett; it’s just showing off Ms. Cohen’s research skills.    As much as we might admire her research, this sort of thing becomes tiresome when it is repeated a few hundred times.    But I understand; 99.99% of book researchers would never find a record like that, and almost all of us, if we did, are damned well going to find some way to get it into the book.

            It is show-boating and it is tiresome, but it is also this that I most admire about crime books in general:  that they preserve an image of the lives that are lost.   It is the saving grace of crime stories that details become tremendously important.   The controversy of the death, like a cosmic flash bulb, illuminates ever crevice of the victim’s life and the lives entwined with it, and preserves that record for posterity.   Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish monger, took delivery of a barrel of eels on December 20 or December 21, 1919.   It was the tradition in the Italian community to prepare pickled eels for Christmas dinner, and Vanzetti is supposed to have been delivering these eels around his neighborhood at the time of a robbery; this was his alibi.  Because we still care about Sacco and Vanzetti, we still have that small image of life in a community that has otherwise vanished without a memory.

            So is it with crime stories in general, and never more than here; Ms. Cohen’s over-the-top research preserves snapshots of life in Maine and life in New York that are more vivid than a hundred sober histories of dear and respected citizens.   The best source, of course, is their own letters; these star-doomed lovers bounced letters off of one another like ping-pong balls, often demanding that a same-day response be returned by a private porter.   It would be an understatement to say that these were literate people.   Here are a few quotes from the letters and journals of Richard Robinson.

            Nell, how pleasant it is to dream, be where you will and as hungry as you will, how supremely happy one is in a little world of our own creation.  At best we live but one little hour, strut at our own conceit and die.  . .Come will ye embark? –then on we go, gaily, hand in hand, scorning all petty and trivial troubles, eagerly gazing on our rising sun, till the warmth of its beams (i.e. love) causes our sparkling blood to o-erflow and mingle in holy delight.

(From another letter)

            I know my letters cannot be very interesting to you, Nell; they are full of oh! how I love you and a piece of other nonsense, exactly what they all write you.   They all call you dearest Nelly, so do I.   I suppose you think us all alike.

(From a journal)

            This is the last day of the races; the day on which they run out all the dregs and draw off the equestrian settlings, the spavined, the ring-boned, the stifled, the blind, lame and halt.   Friend P. advises me not to bet; he gives me so much advice that, in fact, it would require more wisdom to profit by it than to live without it; his system of morals is like J. R.’s patent dog churn, which was a most excellent machine only it required three hands to tend it.

(From another journal)

            It is good policy, in carrying a point against an obstinate adversary, to seem to yield, for by this means he is generally disarmed.   To convince an obstinate and conceited man, it is sometimes necessary to throw arguments around him and within his reach, which, though he may not observe it, really go to sustain the opinions you wish him to embrace.

            These are the words of a 19-year-old store clerk accused of a brutal murder!   Actually, when he wrote the journal entries he was 16 or 17, and there are letters he wrote when he was fifteen that are equally striking.

            Men of letters in the early 19^th century wrote overwrought, self-conscious prose that is today almost unreadable.   Thomas Carlyle wrote an 1837 history of the French Revolution (written 1834-1837) which is brilliant and entertaining if you want to work hard enough to decipher it, but so convoluted with rhetorical flourishes as to be borderline unintelligible to a modern reader.   Robinson wrote in that vein, or, if you prefer, vain.   Jewett did not; Jewett responded in clean, clear, unpretentious prose that is as lucid and graceful today as the day she wrote it:

            My Dear Frank—You have passed your promise by two nights, and yet you have not thought proper to send me a single line, even in the shape of an excuse.   Do you think I will endure this.   Shall I who have rejected abundance for your sake, sit contented under treatment which seems invented for my mortification.

(From another letter)

            The day, as you know was extremely cold, so much ice in the Delaware as to render it impossible for any boat to take the passengers, therefore, we had to make the journey all the way on the railroad, and then had to cross from Camden in a small ferry boat, without any cabin or fire, and when we arrived, we were nearly perished from the cold, and but for the kindness and attention of a gentleman whom I met in the car, I never should have got along.

(From another letter)

            Mr. R. P. Robinson:  If you think it requisite that I should remain longer in this most painful suspense, you must pardon me for saying that I think differently.   If you were placed in my situation (with all your independence) you would ere this have demanded an explanation. . .I do not ask you to fix upon any time, nor do I ask you to come here if disagreeable to you.  But I certainly do ask a note before this night from you, in which you will mention a time and place when I may see you, and you will find me punctual.

(From another)

            I wish you could have seen me an hour after you left my room.  His Grace the Duke, the Captain, Louisa and myself cracked nearly a dozen bottles of champagne; however, this must be uninteresting to you, and having little time to say the much I would say—sum it up in four wards, may God bless you.

            These letters go on for pages.  Her punctuation is at times a little non-standard, but the message is always crystal clear.  These are the words of a destitute shoe-makers’ daughter, dropped off at age twelve to grow up as a domestic servant to a wealthy family, and given a few months of schooling by her generous masters.   I venture to say that, if you took the letters of a murdered 21^st-century prostitute, you would not likely to find such eloquence.

In fact, there is a great deal in this story that calls into question the notion of progress.   The life of Helen Jewett, apart from its terrible ending at the business end of a small hatchet, seems infinitely better than the life of a modern prostitute, as best I understand that from the images on my television.    She did not service a hundred clients a week; more likely five to fifteen.   She lived in a large house with beautiful furniture, where sumptuous meals were regularly served as an inducement to the clientele.   Paintings hung on the walls that today hang in museums and are well known to art historians.   She drank champagne, and she spent her days reading novels and writing letters and making a daily promenade to the post office.   She wore beautiful dresses.  She went to the theater several times a week.   Some of the theaters had special seating areas for the prostitutes.   They valued their patronage, because the presence of the glamorous ladies drew out-of-town businessmen into the theater.

She did not have a pimp, or a drug habit.   There was a madam who ran the brothel, but the madam worked for the prostitutes as much as the other way around; there was a business arrangement between them, in which the ladies drew in the men who ate the expensive meals and bought the no-doubt-overpriced champagne, and the woman paid something more than the standard rent on their rooms, but Helen Jewett was free to leave and go to some other house anytime she was unhappy with the accommodations—and, in fact, she had moved several times in the previous three years.    There were ruffians who like to break out the windows of brothels and frighten the women, and I am not suggesting that it was an idyllic lifestyle; merely that it seems quite a bit better than working for a 21^st century escort service.

She was, of course, a top-end prostitute; there were also street-walkers, and there were women working out of houses that were not nearly as clean and comfortable.   Helen Jewett was quite attractive, and more than that she was very gracious.   She was very good with a needle, a central domestic art of the period, and she could play the piano.   (Piano-playing marked a woman as "refined", in that era, because only rich people had pianos.)

It is thus surprising that Robinson, who was living in a rooming-house where he shared a bed with another young man and who was working as a clerk in a large dry goods store where he was paid virtually nothing, was able to afford the services of such a lady.    In part this may have been because Jewett, who was emotionally involved with Robinson, charged him only what he could afford to pay, and in part it was certainly because Robinson was pilfering from his employer.   "Pilfering" is probably not the right word; he appears to have been embezzling at a pretty good pace.   Exactly how he was doing this is not entirely clear.  His wallet, at the time of his arrest, was found to be stuffed with a thick wad of third-party checks addressed to his employer, and his letters to Jewett allude frequently to clandestine activities of an unknown nature.   He may have been selling stuff out the back door; the store where he worked was apparently a pretty big operation.

Robinson, then, was a brilliant young man—and a very capable thief.  And handsome; apparently he was stunningly handsome; Jewett’s beauty may well have been over-stated by the press to sell papers, but there is strong evidence for Robinson’s.  What is unclear in Ms. Cohen’s very detailed recreation of these remarkable people is exactly to what extent they were remarkable, even in their own time, and to what extent they merely seem remarkable to the modern reader, who expects a prostitute and her accused murder to be grunting savages whose idea of a great day is grabbing a case of Budweiser and tearing through the back country on three-wheeled scooters with mud tires.   Ms. Cohen seems to assume that these people were as remarkable in their own time as they would be now, but because she assumes this she never demonstrates that this is true, or even says that it is true; it is merely implied.   She thinks (and says often) that Robinson was arrogant, which was no doubt true, but he was also a child of the romantic era; all men of substance in that era spoke and wrote and dressed and acted in a way that would seem very unnatural now.   To what extent did the young men that Robinson worked with (and lived with—many of the clerks that he worked with also lived in the same rooming house and, now that you mention it, consorted with the same prostitutes). . .to what extent did these other young men also write and think with the boldness and sophistication of Richard Robinson?   We simply don’t know; we don’t get any clue to that from this book.

Jewett was, to an extent, a con woman, a young woman who acted the part of a devoted girlfriend for any man who would pay her to do so—but at the same time, all of these men knew what she did for a  living.  To what extent was Jewett truly conning these men, and to what extent were they merely acting out a romantic fantasy in which they all knew the rules?   We do not know—and Cohen, intent on tracking down the pedigrees of the most peripheral figures—seems curiously untroubled by the gap.    When Robinson strayed, Jewett took offense and demanded penance just as a girlfriend would do, even though she herself was sharing her bed and body with a different man every night.   But did she do this because she truly expected Robinson to be faithful to her, or because, being a surrogate girlfriend, she was trying to do what a real girlfriend would do in the same situation?   It is critical to the story to know which—and we simply don’t get a clue.   Cohen seems to assume, unstated, that those were real emotions.   I don’t know, but it seems to me more likely that it was part of the game.

Cohen is 100% convinced that Robinson murdered Jewett.   I am not saying she is wrong; I am suggesting that the evidence doesn’t get you to 100%.   Seventy percent, maybe.    Near midnight on April 9, 1836, a man knocked on the door of Helen Jewett’s brothel, announced himself as "Frank Rivers", and asked to see Helen Jewett.   It was a cold, wet Saturday night; he had his cloak pulled up around his face and his hat pulled down low.    The madam of the house, Rosina Townsend, looked him over and admitted him to the house, and he went up to Jewett’s room.   About an hour later she rang for service in the room, and Rosina brought champagne and two glasses.   Not long after that the servant girl went into the room and tended the fire.

Sometime well after midnight, Rosina was awakened by a man pounding on her door and demanding to be let out of the house.  Rosina told him to have his woman let him out, which was the rule of the house; the women were supposed to escort men to the door, so that they didn’t pick something up on the way out.    The main doors locked inside and out, and required a key from either side.   Rosina went back to sleep.

Sometime later in the night, about 3 AM, she was awakened again by a knock on the front door, a regular customer arriving for a pre-arranged late-night assignation with another prostitute.  Stirring through the house, she now noticed things amiss.   A back door, which could be opened without a key, was setting wide open, and a lamp that belonged on the second floor had been carried to the first.    Escorting the customer to the second floor, Rosina smelled smoke, which she traced to Helen Jewett’s room.   Entering the room, she found Jewett’s body, and found that a candle had been placed in the bed next to her, apparently intended to consume the body in fire and destroy the evidence.

One of the other working girls told police that "Frank Rivers" was a pseudonym used for Richard Robinson, and told them where Robinson lived.   Robinson’s cloak and the bloody hatchet were found in the alleyway behind the house, along the departure route suggested by the open door.  Robinson was arrested the next morning, and over the following two days the case erupted into a huge media sensation.   Robinson was put on trial in June, about two months after the murder, and, as I mentioned before, was acquitted.

At this point, as murders will, the story becomes messy and complicated.   "Frank Rivers", it turns out, was a code name used not only by Richard Robinson, but also by William Easy, whose name wasn’t William Easy, either, it was George Marston.  Marston was a co-worker of Robinson’s who was Helen Jewett’s regular Saturday night client; she had a relationship with him that was not unlike her relationship with Robinson, and the two (Robinson and Martson) apparently regarded one another as romantic rivals.

On this particular Saturday night, however, Rosina Townsend had been instructed to admit the Frank Rivers who was not William Easy, so when the man knocked on the door with his cloak up around his face and announced himself as Frank Rivers, Rosina looked to make sure that he was not William Easy, which is to say, not George Marston.   Determining that he was not, she admitted him to the house.

The evidence against Robinson consisted of:

·        the hatchet, which was taken from Robinson’s workplace,

·        the cloak, which was identified as Robinson’s although it actually belonged to another man, and had been given to Robinson as collateral against a debt,

·        the eyewitness identification of Rosina Townsend, who admitted him to the house,

·        the eyewitness identification of the servant/maid, and

·        some business about a "miniature".   A miniature was a small hand-drawn or hand-painted picture, a not-inexpensive treasure in the era before photography.  Jewett’s miniature was seen in Jewett’s room by the maid days before the murder, and was found in the possession of Robinson after the murder, suggesting that he took it with him at the time of the murder.

            Patricia Cohen, the author of the book, believes that the testimony of Townsend, the other working girls and the maid (who was black) was discounted because they were women and persons of low social status, and she shares with us a fair amount of feminist outrage over this injustice.

            Robinson did not testify on his own behalf.   Those who testified on his behalf included

·        the owner of a cigar store, who testified that Robinson was in his store at the time that he was supposed to have been admitted to Townsend’s house, and for some time thereafter,

·        the man with whom Robinson shared a bed in the rooming house (not an unusual practice at that time), who testified that Robinson was in the room and in bed at a normal hour and through the night, and

·        the owner of the store where Robinson worked, who was a relative of Robinson’s, and who testified to his good character despite the evidence that Robinson was stealing from him.

The most important witness was the owner of the cigar store.    He was a well-known businessman, an honest man whose word was given weight, and who was personally acquainted with several members of the jury.   He came forward on his own to insist that Robinson was in his store at the time in question, buying cigars and smoking them, which Robinson had never said that he was.

The cigar-store owner was clearly mistaken about the time—probably an honest mistake—and this annoys Cohen, that this man was given credibility, whereas the women were ignored because they were prostitutes and persons of low character although Robinson was engaged in the same behavior that Jewett was engaged in, merely from the other side; you get the drift.    Robinson’s very good defense attorneys implied that Townsend herself had committed the murder and set the fire in order to collect insurance money, which was a fairly silly argument, but then, that’s something defense attorneys do; they put forward whatever silly argument is helpful to their case and cannot be refuted within the confines of the trial.

It seems to me that the case against Robinson is not all that convincing.   First, despite Ms. Cohen’s objections, a prostitute is by definition a little bit of a con artist, and it seems to me not entirely unreasonable to apply some discount to the testimony of anyone who is a little bit of a con artist.

Second, I can’t see that the testimony of Rosina Townsend or the maid is all that compelling.   Both of them identified Robinson as the man that they saw there on that night, but both of them did so in an odd, backhanded way.   Townsend said that she looked at "Frank Rivers" with his cloak drawn up around his face and determined that he was not William Easy (which is to say, not George Marston)—that is to say, not that she observed who it was, but merely that she determined who it was not.

Later, she delivered champagne to Jewett’s room, and she saw Robinson again; actually the back of his head; he was propped up in bed on his elbow, reading something, with the covers drawn up around him, and she noticed that he had a big bald spot on the back of his head, which she had never noticed before.    That’s a pretty unusual identification, isn’t it—to say that you noticed something that you had never noticed before?   Don’t you ordinarily identify someone by saying that you see the things that you have seen before?

The maid came to tend the fire, and she said the same thing; she noticed this big bald spot on Robinson’s head, which she had never noticed before.

Robinson was 19 years old.  Cohen buys into the "bald spot" theory hook, line and sinker, and attributes Robinson’s bald spots to his hair falling out from the stress of his deceptions and burning the candle at both ends.  By the time he went to trial he had shaved his head and was wearing a wig, which Cohen thinks is done to hide his bald spot, although it was a normal practice at the time for a man who wished to appear to be a person of substance to don a wig (remember, all of the founding fathers wore wigs, and this was 40 years after George Washington left office.)

Two key questions:  how well did Townsend know Robinson, and how dark was the house?    We don’t know.   Cohen says that of course Townsend knew Robinson, he was at the house all the time, but this doesn’t seem to be necessarily true.   Jewett had lived in this house only three months, and Robinson and Jewett were pretty much on the outs through most of that period.   There were 11 women who lived in the house, and each of those had a large number of clients.  Townsend did not know Robinson’s real name; he said that he was "Frank Rivers", and she accepted that although she knew that another man also used the name Frank Rivers.

Robinson and Jewett’s letters used code names for everybody they knew.   They did this because their relationship was somewhat illicit, and—one suspects—because it made them feel like conspirators to use code names.   She sent letters to Robinson at work.   If a letter fell into someone else’s hands—which no doubt happened—it did not identify either her or him by name.   Anyway, the point is that if there were two men using the code name "Frank Rivers", there may very well have been six, and other young men who were involved with Helen Jewett and her co-workers could very probably have been aware of the name.

We don’t know how dark the house was and how clearly Townsend could have seen the man who entered, but remember, this was before electricity; after it got dark, a house was dark.    Whoever committed the murder apparently carried a lamp which normally stayed upstairs downstairs with him, which strongly suggests that the house was very dark, and he was afraid of falling down the stairs in the dark.    It also suggests that he didn’t know the layout of the house all that well, which is relevant to Robinson’s defense, for if Robinson had been a frequent visitor to the house as Cohen assumes, then he would have known the layout of the house better, and would have been less likely to go banging on Rosina Townsend’s door, asking how to get out.

Cohen puts substantial weight on the miniature.    Lovers in this era would exchange their miniature portraits.  (Thomas Jefferson in one of his letters, written when he was a college student, writes about spending the night before Christmas in a cheap hotel, because the college dormitory was closed and it was too far from his home for him to return for the Christmas break.   When he went to bed he left his wallet on the nightstand beside him, and his watch and the locket with his girl friends’ miniature in a bowl on the nightstand.   When he awoke on Christmas morning he found that someone had stolen his wallet, and that it had rained during the night and a drip from the ceiling had filled up the bowl, ruining his watch and the miniature.)   Robinson and Jewett had exchanged miniatures, and when they had fights they would return the portraits, and then they would give them back and promise that they could be kept forever, etc.   Robinson had Jewett’s miniature after her death, although the maid had seen it in her room just days earlier.

But this, to me, seems like nothing, since a woman in Jewett’s position—carrying on make-believe romances with a string of men—might very probably have had several copies of the miniature made, when a normal woman would only have had one.

The hatchet did come from Robinson’s place of work, yes, and it was his cloak, yes, but why were these items left in the street or alleyway behind the house?  Robinson was an intelligent man, and the murder was obviously pre-planned, witness the bringing of the hatchet.   Wouldn’t Robinson have known that leaving his cloak near the scene of the crime could help to convict him?

            Cohen believes that Robinson set the fire expecting that it would consume the house and kill everybody in the building, thus allowing the murder to go undetected, but a) this was very far from happening, and b) it doesn’t really seem like a reasonable expectation.  And c) it directs us back to the issue before:  If Robinson expected the fire to destroy the evidence, why did he carry the cloak and hatchet outside the house, and drop them there?    For that matter, why would he drop his cloak anyway?    It was a cold, wet night.  I can understand leaving your coat inside the house, in your rush to get away, but why wear it out of the house, on a cold, wet night, and drop it in the street?   Doesn’t that at least suggest the possibility that Robinson was being framed? 

            There were several other men who worked at the store where Robinson worked, lived in the rooming house where he lived, and were also involved with Helen Jewett or her co-workers.  Those men would have had the same access that he did to the hatchet, and might very easily have taken his cloak.

            Cohen gives Robinson a motive for the murder by insisting that Robinson was involved in covert activities—theft and possibly other unknown criminal activities—and that Jewett was threatening to expose him.  The letters are full of elliptical references to clandestine activities, but Cohen at times seems to be reading things into the letters that simply aren’t there, at worst, or which aren’t necessarily there at least.

            It may sound as if I am saying that Robinson was innocent, which I am not; I am saying that he was acquitted and that I understand why.   At the time of Robinson’s trial the public was divided about his guilt.    After his trial some letters came out that he had written while in jail, letters which reflected very badly upon his character, and which caused almost everyone to conclude that he had been guilty after all.    Perhaps he was.

            Not long before her death, Helen Jewett had seen the play Norman Leslie and had read the book of the same name, which was a fictionalization of a famous New York City murder from 36 years before, a case that I wrote about at length in Popular Crime.   In that case the accused murderer, Levi Weeks, was also acquitted although he was also certainly guilty.  He left town after the murder, moved to Natchez, Mississippi, became a well-known architect, and died at the age of 43.   Robinson’s fate was similar; he moved to Nacodoches, Texas, about 200 miles from Natchez; Natchez and Nacodoches are both just off the Louisiana border, on opposite sides of the state.   He adopted the name "Parmalee", which was his mother’s name, had a very good and successful career as a rancher, saloon keeper, and the clerk of the local court.   He died in Ohio at the age of 38, attempting to make a trip back east.