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| Nellie Higgs (Chicago Tribune. September 22, 1914) |
Nellie Higgs shot her lover in 1914
The Sacramento Star summed the case up
best, saying, “Nellie Higgs is on trial for the murder of the man she hated—after
ruining the life of the man she loved.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot since that night
when something here at my heart snapped, and I shot William Willis, the man who
ruined my life,” said Nellie Higgs. “I was never given much to thinking before.
I was the innocent kind of girl who never knew good from bad. They [her
parents?] brought me up that way.”
She married a 28-year-old man when she was
17. Then she met her neighbor, William Willis. They were all friends—his wife
and children and her husband.
“He paid me lots of attention, and I suppose
I rather liked it, [because], so few men had ever noticed me. I didn’t know any
better. I let him go on giving me presents and being nice to me.”
When her husband learned she was “making
love” to Willis, he divorced her and took her little boy away.
“That night last May, something went wrong
in my head, and I killed Willis,” said Nellie. “The wrong he did me was a
thousand times greater than murder, but the world does not think that way, [so]
I am branded as a murderess.”
After taking a roller coaster ride through
hell, Nellie had some advice for other young girls: “The world is hard on
women. Men are still harder on us. They try to teach us to be devils and then
condemn us because we are not angels.
“A girl will think there’s something better
in the world than baking bread and washing dishes—and she may go out looking
for it.
Nellie Higgs (Chicago Tribune. September 26, 1914)
“The girl who knows the ways of the world can guard herself against the world’s temptations.”
To start at the beginning. Nellie Higgs
boarded the Seminole Limited at the Twelfth Street Station and shot William
Willis, an Illinois Central conductor, as he was collecting fares.
Michael Glassberg, another passenger, sat
just behind Nellie. He told detectives she did not say a word to Willis when he
took her ticket. When the conductor turned his back, Nellie pulled the revolver
from her purse and fired. As he turned around, she shot him again in the chest.
But Willis was not finished yet. He reached out and grabbed Nellie as she ran away. They both fell face down in the aisle.
Nellie’s case first went to court in
mid-July, but she had reservations about the judge.
“Do you want a trial in this court?” asked
Judge McDonald.
“No,” answered Nellie. “I want a change of
venue.”
“Did you ever see me before, or do you know me?”
“Are you the Judge McDonald, all the
prisoners in the county jail are afraid of?”
The question drew a laugh in the courtroom,
but Judge McDonald granted her a change of venue. Nellie’s attorney apologized
for his client’s request, but everyone knew it was Charles Erbstein’s decision.
He was the top criminal lawyer in Cook County, and he needed a judge
sympathetic to his client.
Nellie’s trial opened on September 22, 1914,
with Judge Kersten presiding.
Willis’s widow testified Nellie “laughed in
her face” and “threatened to steal her husband away.” Nellie repeatedly told
her Willis wanted a divorce so he could marry her, but just the opposite was
true. Willis found Nellie “annoying” and did everything he could to keep her
away.
Nellie took the stand on September 26. She
said Willis “forced himself into her life” and had “broken up her home” life
and marriage.
Her husband introduced her to Willis in
1911. They were members of the same Masonic Lodge. He told her to take Willis’s
train whenever she went into the city to treat her nervous condition.
Not long after that, Willis hinted her
husband was not attending their lodge meetings—he was out on the town living it
up with other women. When she confronted her husband, he got mad and left home.
Willis kept planting accusations that her
husband was seeing other women and edging her on. One day, Willis put his arm
around her and kissed her. She pushed him away. That got her to think Willis
“was the cause of it all.” Her husband had done nothing.
Willis followed her into her house in December 1912 and attacked her.
“I don’t remember anything after that,” said
Nellie. “When I woke up, Mr. Willis was holding my hand. He said: You are a
married woman. I have not done you any harm.”
She did not believe him and said she would
tell her husband. That only made Willis more upset. “If you don’t keep your
mouth shut,” he bellowed, “I’ll kill you.”
Willis was suicidal and kept trying to drag
her down with him. What could she do?
One day, Willis pushed his way into her house and handed her a bottle of carbolic acid. He said her ex-husband would likely kill them both. “This is the best way out of it,” he told her, “if you take some now.”
She refused to drink it.
Willis returned the next day and dropped a
pistol in her lap. “I’ve got two guns,” he said. “When I say fire, we’ll pull
the trigger and get it at the same time.”
The day she killed him was a blur. Nellie
got on the train to Kankakee and sat up front so she would be the first person
off. Willis took her ticket, then began to curse and call her names.
She remembered nothing after that.
Nellie’s lawyer, Charles Erbstein, called
two alienists to describe her mental state on the day of the shooting. Dr.
James Kiernan explained Nellie suffered from transitory frenzy, or transitore
furore as the Italians call it. Dr. Harriet Alexander, a neurologist, seconded
that opinion.
State’s Attorney Stephen Malato produced Dr.
William Krohn to counter their testimony. Dr. Krohn said Nellie was sane and
could easily distinguish between right and wrong because she remembered what
happened before and after the shooting. “If she were insane at the time the
pistol was discharged, she would have no recollection of those things.”
He did not believe she suffered from a
transitory frenzy.
On the morning of September 30, the
courtroom looked at the pale defendant and asked themselves—wild canary or
vampire?
A wild canary (sometimes considered a good
omen) flew into the courtroom and held up proceedings for nearly an hour as
bailiffs chased it down. Defense Attorney Charles Erbstein took it as a good
sign and decided his case was “as good as won.”
In his closing arguments, he suggested his
client was a weak woman who fell into the trap set for her by a man. The
prosecutor, Stephen Malato, had a different take on it and described Nellie as
“a vampire who laughed and laughed as she lured her victim to death and ruin.”
Erbstein did his best to wash away the taint
of the vampire. “Look at her face, gentlemen. Has she the face of a vampire?
Has she anything but sorrow, anything but desolation, anything but the sign of
a wrecked future on her face?”
Nellie responded with perfectly timed tears
as if the entire scene were orchestrated to wring the most sympathy from the
jury.
The performance
worked. The jury deliberated for less than forty-five minutes before acquitting
Nellie Higgs of all charges. It was the seventeenth acquittal of a woman for
murder in Cook County in the last few years.
After the trial,
Malato reinforced his previous statements that it was impossible to convict a
woman of murder in Cook County. “Any woman can kill at her pleasure,” he told
reporters. “She can go into court after killing, shed a few tears, and cast a
few wistful glances at the jury, and she will be acquitted.”
William Willis’s widow was unsure what to think. All she could say was: “There is no just God. I can’t see how twelve men with common sense could turn that woman loose on society.”
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