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| Alfred Morrison (The Evening World. April 6, 1900) |
A sneak thief stole an overcoat from
Alfred Morrison’s back porch Thursday evening. When he went to bed that night,
he fell asleep with a big cavalry revolver under his pillow.
His younger daughter, Josephine, slept in
the bed with him. His wife and youngest child slept in a smaller bed on the
other side of the room.
Alfred Morrison woke up at 2:30 a.m.,
standing beside his wife’s bed, holding his pistol. “Run for a doctor, quick,”
she screamed, “you’ve hit me.”
Much like Walter Mitty, Morrison was an
excitable guy who lived in a vague, dreamlike state. For example, that night,
he pictured himself fighting off a hoard of burglars, not his wife.
“It was all a terrible dream,” said Morrison. “I thought there was a burglar standing over my wife, killing her. I did not know that she was hurt until I heard her scream, and then I awoke with the smoking pistol in my hand.”
When he realized what he’d done, Morrison
ran across the street to get Dr. Shipman and farther down the road to fetch
Doctors Ferris and Jones.
Mrs Alfred Morrison. (The Evening World. January 6, 1900)
By the time the doctors arrived, Alida Morrison had just moments to live. She made a dying declaration to Coroner Banning that her husband wasn’t to blame. It was all an accident.
When the coroner left, Morrison asked if
he was under arrest.
“I don’t know,” said the coroner. “If you
are under arrest, you are in my custody, and I hereby dismiss you.”
That seemed to end the matter. The
coroner’s jury later acquitted him of any wrongdoing.
That would have been the end, too,
except The Evening World printed Morrison’s picture alongside
one of their stories. A few days later, Lillian Gordon told a reporter that
Alfred Morrison was her husband, only—his name was not Morrison. It was
Frederick Gordon.
Morrison confessed.
He’d been married to both women. He
married Lillian Gordon eighteen years ago, when she was just
eighteen. Lillian told reporters they married in Jersey City on November
5, 1882. She knew his real name was Morrison when they married, but was okay
with going by Gordon.
Before they married, Fred Gordon passed
himself off as a well-to-do silk salesman, but he was mostly a worthless bum.
Fred loafed around the first several years they were married. He smoked like a
chimney—even when they had no money.
Sometime around 1888, he began traveling
around giving French lessons. They hadn’t lived together full-time since then.
Fred usually stopped by to see her once a week and then only for a half-hour at
the most.
The last time she’d seen him was just
before Christmas. “Remember, Fred,” I said to him, “if you are deceiving
me—murder will out.”
Lillian Gordon (The Evening World. April 6, 1900)
Despite the shock of learning her husband was a bigamist, Lillian didn’t think Fred intentionally killed his wife.
“I believe he shot her in a dream,” said
Lillian Gordon. Fred was a somnambulist. Years ago, when they first married,
she woke up several times with him holding a chair over her head. At first, she
was scared, but then she realized he was asleep.
“I thought you were a black devil there in
bed,” he said when she woke him. “I was going to kill you.”
Fred told reporters he’d been married to
his second wife for eight years. He never loved his first wife. “Living with
her was Hell! Hell! Hell! No wonder I am crazy.”
When he started making money, he tried to
buy her off, but she wouldn’t set him free. “She is mean and cunning.”
Now that people knew he was a bigamist,
Fred’s biggest worry was that people would think he deliberately murdered his
wife.
He didn’t.
“I killed her in a nightmare. A burglar
stole my overcoat, and I had on my mind so much that I dreamed of burglars and
accidentally shot my darling wife.”
Later, it came out that this wasn’t the
first time Morrison took a potshot at a burglar in his sleep. Elias Raymond
said Morrison fired a bullet into the wall several years ago while shooting at
imaginary robbers. The next morning, he didn’t remember a thing.
Grace O’Neil, Alida Morrison’s niece,
recalled a similar incident. One time when she spent the night there, Alfred
Morrison sat up in his bed—revolver in hand—screaming, “Where’s those burglars?
I must kill them.”
Even after he learned Gordon had two
wives, Coroner Banning stood by his initial ruling. “I am satisfied Morrison
shot his wife in a somnambulistic state as the verdict said,” quipped Banning.
“The man acted to me like a dope fiend, but when I asked him about it, he said
his condition was the result of excessive cigarette smoking.”
Crazy might have been a better word to
describe Gordon’s strange behavior. His aunt, Amelia Gordon, said he always
acted a little crazy. “The only thing I can hope,” said Mrs. Gordon, “is that
my nephew will die within twenty-four hours. He is bound to die from softening
of the brain, and I only hope his death will be speedy.”
In the interim, the New York
Tribune reported that “Morrison raves like a madman.” He walked “the
floor, pulling his hair and acting like a lunatic. He shook like a leaf and was
several times compelled to hold on to something to keep from falling.” He kept
repeating that he was crazy, that his father and mother died from softening of
the brain, and that he would, too.
Having two wives made it worse.
Neither one would divorce him. His first
wife demanded money to leave him, then wouldn’t take it when he offered. His
second wife—he called her “my darling wife”—wouldn’t release him either.
When he made money, he tried to buy his
first wife off, but she was too “cunning” for that. To explain what he thought
of her, Gordon told the Tribune reporter he gave his “darling
wife” a piano for Christmas. He gave his first wife fifty cents. That’s how
little he thought of her.
While all the hullabaloo about Alfred
Morrison being a bigamist was going on, his dead wife’s sister, Mrs. Henry
Ihlenberger, pressed the police to charge Morrison with murder. Then, just as
suddenly, she reconsidered. Her dead sister, Alida, came to her in a dream and
begged her not to prosecute Alfred Morrison.
The police didn’t pay any attention to
Alida Morrison’s dream directive. They arrested Alfred Morrison on January 12
and charged him with first-degree murder.
Police Chief Foley said they had some interesting
evidence against him.
A neighbor, Adeline Wells, saw a large
black powder mark on Alida Morrison’s nightgown the night of the murder. Police
took that as evidence Alida Morrison was shot at close range, not while lying
in bed as Morrison testified.
Another neighbor, Lizzie Subitzky, said
Alida Morrison kept a revolver close to protect her from her husband. He “had
threatened to kill her because she was not a tidy housekeeper and was careless
at times in her personal appearance.”
None of it made any difference. On April
18, 1900, a jury acquitted Alfred Morrison and found him not guilty of
murder.
The Mount Vernon “Dream Killer” was free.
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