Crime Archives - Not Even Past

Road Rage

This article is reposted from Russian History Blog.

This blog post is inspired by petty anger. In this deeply weird and unsettling time, I am, like virtually everyone, staying at home. I am in almost every way lucky—I have a job (though hoo boy do I sometimes wish I had listened to my gut and not said yes to being department chair), I have a comfortable home, our restrictions are not too extreme. I live alone, which on balance right now feels like probably also a lucky thing, though it has its own stresses and sources of sadness. I’ve in particular come to rely on a daily walk to get out into the air, to stretch my legs, to try to turn off from all the stresses of my job right now.

Gatchina Palace (via Flickr)

On these walks, though, I often find myself seething with rage at the pettiest of things—people who do not keep to the right while walking or riding or running. Even in a time of social distancing, my rage feels out of proportion to the offense. But then I remembered a letter of complaint I came across in one of my beloved files of random correspondence from the Gatchina Palace administration [Gatchina Palace was built near St. Petersburg in the 18th century for a favorite of the Russian Empress, Catherine the Great].

To His Excellency, the Director of the Gatchina Palace Administration

Riding yesterday, the 3rd of August [1892], at 9 in the evening, on a bicycle, in the Imperial Priorate Park, I came upon a gentleman unknown to me, driving a white trotter at full speed, who, despite my increasingly ringing my bell, continued to ride on the left side of the road, as a result of which I, at risk of being trampled, was forced to jump down from my bicycle onto the grass; at my comment, made in the most polite form, that one should drive on the right side, the gentleman sitting in the charabanc and driving the horse answered me with unacceptable obscenity. On my way back, about twenty minutes later, I had the misfortune to again come across this same gentleman, continuing as before to drive on the left side of the road; in response to my bell and to my comment that besides the existing rule to drive on the right side, even only politeness demands that one should give way, the gentleman informed me that such a rule does not exist, having added along with this message personally to me insulting expressions so impolite, that repeating them word for word in the present letter I consider impossible; in the end of all of this insulting actions were threatened. Of all of this I immediately gave a report to the duty officer of the Gatchina Police. [Hearing] my description of the characteristics of the horse and the gentleman, the Police officers sitting in the duty room recognized the owner of the horse as Gatchina homeowner Bronislav Liudvigovich Adamovich; in order to definitively establish the identity of the culprit, I gave the Police a detailed description.

Having in mind that a simple monetary penalty such as laying a fine by judicial process will hardly guarantee that the public visiting the Imperial Priorate Park [will not be bothered by] a repetition of such misconduct on the part of the above mentioned gentleman, [misconduct that] violates social morality and order in the Imperial park, and that the insult given by him to me was without any reason on my part, I have the honor to present all above noted to the discretion and resultant decision of Your Excellence, humbly asking that you inform me of what is done about this matter.

Collegiate Secretary

Feodor Feodorovich Rein.

4 August 1892

Someone looked into the matter the day it was sent, and noted down the following report:

Feodor Feodorovich Rein, Collegiate Secretary, works as a Secretary of the Main Military-Sanitary Committee of the Ministry of War. Residence: in the town of Gatchina, on Baggovutovskaia ulitsa, no. 46, the home of engineer Rein.

I have the honor to report … that in the matter of the offenses committed in the Priorate Park by nobleman Bronislav Liudvigovich Adamovich to Collegiate Secretary Fedor Fedorovich Rein, a witness statement by Luga meshchanin Artur Karlov Reikhenberg, residing in the village Bol’shaia Zagvozdka, Gatchina township, explains that it was completely possible for Rein to pass without obstruction along the road on the right side, and beside that it is necessary for all bicyclists to pull over and get off their bicycles when they meet people riding on horses in light of the fact that every horse seeing the unfamiliar sight of a bicycle without fail begins to buck and to shy and in general to sidle, so for Rein to be offended by Adamovich there is no foundation, all the more so because, as Reikhenberg reports, Rein was the first to address Adamovich in rude form, with the comment “you do not know how you should drive, why don’t you keep to the right side,” but all the same from my point of view Adamovich should be given proper warning that he should drive more calmly, and that if there is a second complaint about him driving quickly and not following the general rules of driving, then he will be prohibited from driving in the Priorate Park forever and for reckless driving in general he will face legal liability.

I’m not going to try to spin this out too much—of course, there’s plenty of stuff to say about these figures and who they might be, or of the fact that Mr. Rein was a thoroughly modern man on his bicycle in 1892. Perhaps I’ll come back to them in another post at some point. But I copied this all out because I thought it was sort of funny, and I loved the resonance of the idea of bicyclists and drivers at odds over road usage, because that’s still such a present part of urban discourse.

Image of a bicycle from B. Kaul’fus, Kratkoe rukovodstvo k izucheniiu ezdy na velocipede i obrashcheiiu svelosipedami fabric Adamants Opelia v Riussel’sgeime (Kiev, 1893)

Now, though, I’m struck by the anger. The anger that seemed to motivate Rein—if Reikhenberg was right and he really did have enough space, his action to jump down into the grass feels like a bit of a conscious display of being inconvenienced for the sake of show, rather than anything real—the anger he received in return—although Reikhenberg reported that Rein was the first person to be rude, his reported statement (which, I should note, used the proper vy, not the familiar and potentially offensive ty) hardly seems to be enough to cause someone to respond with obscenity.

In 1892 Gatchina was a bustling place, with Alexander III often in residence (though probably not in August) and its two railway lines making it an increasingly desirable suburban residence for people who worked in St. Petersburg. The park might simply have been busier than normal with summer dacha residents, making the whole exercise of bicycling or driving more frustrating. I suppose one could also make a case that the quickness to anger on the part of these men reflects the internal opposition they might have felt about their own status as modern men—one a nobleman (probably a Polish nobleman) with a fancy horse, one with cutting edge bicycle—in an anti-modern system, an anti-modern system that could not be ignored at that time and in that place because it was centered on the palace next to the park.

And then I think about my own petty anger, and wonder about which of the many background worries we all face right now that is manifesting itself in those feelings of rage.Sources:
RGIA [Russian State Historical Archive) f. 491, op. 3, d. 386, ll. 311-312ob.

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Satan’s Playground: Mobsters and Movie Stars at America’s Greatest Gaming Resort, By Paul J. Vanderwood (2009)

By Diego A. Godoy

For Tijuanenses, the sight of the Agua Caliente entertainment complex conjures up images of two distinct things. The first: dogs. The Tijuana racetrack is home to nearly 700 galgos, Spanish greyhounds that race almost daily. Adjacent to the track is the multi-use Estadio Caliente, the home turf of Club Tijuana Xoloitzcuintles de Caliente, currently situated in the top-flight of Mexican professional soccer. The Xolos take their name from the sacred Aztec canine—a hairless, netherworldly little breed, albeit a quite congenial one. The second: Jorge Hank Rhon, Tijuana’s Trumpian ex-mayor (2004-2007). Born to a father with one foot firmly planted in politics and the other in business, Hank leveraged his family’s name to facilitate his acquisition of the Agua Caliente grounds in 1985 and subsequently founded Grupo Caliente, Mexico’s largest gambling company. He rapidly developed a penchant for snorting cocaine (inspiring one local columnist to dub him the “Abominable Snowman”), exotic animal trading, sporting a ridiculous mane, and fraternizing with associates of the Arellano-Felix Cartel. In time, credible accusations of money laundering, arms- and drug-trafficking, and homicide were levied against Hank and his partners, with one U.S. intelligence report asserting that his family represented “a significant criminal threat to the United States.”

But Agua Caliente’s unsavory history predates Hank’s tenure by several decades. In Satan’s Playground, Paul Vanderwood (UT History Ph.D., 1970), puts Jazz Age Tijuana on full display through the prism of the legendary tourist center. Founded in 1928, Agua Caliente was designed in an incoherent fusion of Old War styles and featured palatial amenities mimicking those of European vacation spots like Deauville and Monte Carlo. While most northern Mexican establishments attracted a heterogeneous clientele seeking respite from the puritanism of Prohibition-era America, Agua Caliente catered to a subset of moneyed elites who thirsted for the most upscale diversions. A year after its opening, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times toured the casino’s Salón de oro (Gold Room) where it was rumored that gamblers could only wager with gold chips, and later surmised that “there isn’t another place on the continent, outside of a U.S. mint, where you can see so much money piled up before your eyes at one time.” (Sept 8, 1929). The resort’s iconic racetrack, the site of several industry firsts, was graced by the presence of the finest thoroughbreds, most notably the fabled Seabiscuit. If betting on horse racing was insufficiently thrilling, one could place money on the bare-knuckled boxer most favored to remain vertical. And for those aching after a long night of carousing, several Turkish baths were available to sweat away what ailed them.

After an informative tour d’horizon of Baja California’s modern sociopolitical and economic history, Vanderwood proceeds to explain how Agua Caliente came to be. He traces the resort’s origins to the military man-cum-Governor of Baja California, Abelardo Rodríguez, who, along with 3 snake oil salesmen from the U.S., collectively dubbed the Border Barons, endeavored to capitalize on the dry laws and gaming restrictions imposed on the major metropolises of southern California. In 1927, having convinced his overseers in Mexico City of Agua Caliente’s economic potential, Rodríguez obtained a development deal, purchased a large plot of land near a natural hot springs (thus the name “Agua Caliente”) from its unwary owner, and used taxpayer money to construct and outfit the enterprise.

Born of a crime, Agua Caliente remained a magnet for illicit activities until its premature closing in 1937. The book’s chapters are studded with concise accounts detailing onsite murders, fixed games, and abductions, such as the 1932 kidnapping of Zeke Caress, commissioner of the racetrack and degenerate gambler, by Chicago’s Sheldon Gang. Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel, both resort regulars, also make cameos. Siegel was so taken by Agua Caliente that he cited it as his inspiration for Las Vegas’ pioneering Flamingo Club, although the visionary behind it was actually Billy Wilkerson, an L.A.-based nightclub owner and founder of The Hollywood Reporter.

One crime in particular takes center stage in Vanderwood’s treatment of the topic. In 1929, two gunmen with possible mob ties assaulted a car transporting revenues from the resort to a San Diego bank, resulting in the death of the courier and accompanying guard. With the aid of judicial files, newspaper reports, and detective magazines, the author stalked the perpetrators across southern California where they were summarily captured and prosecuted. Using cases like the Dike Robbery, as this one came to be known, Vanderwood discusses the rise of organized crime on the West Coast and the press’ unblinking eye. “Have established East Coast and Midwestern syndicates infiltrated California and Baja? Are Tijuana and Agua Caliente to blame?” Questions like these preoccupied a simultaneously frightened and fascinated news media. Several articles on the botched heist focused on the thieves’ use of Thompson submachine guns. Some fixated on the details of the criminal performance while others loudly anticipated today’s debates. In the wake of Chicago’s St. Valentine’s Day Massacre four months before, mainstream opinion-makers doubled down on their stance that firearms of such devastating power should never be permitted in civilian hands. Unsurprisingly, the specter of violent, “professional” crime did not sully the resort’s image. On the contrary, the gangland presence fueled Agua Caliente’s allure. The Border Barons, often the victims of threats and extortion attempts, embraced the notoriety.

The majority of the recognizable faces populating the complex, however, did not belong to gangsters. Agua Caliente absorbed waves of Hollywood royalty in its heyday. On a weeknight, the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Clark Gable, and Bing Crosby could be sighted sipping Sazeracs while wagering their fortunes. At least one young talent was discovered there—Margarita Cansino, a lounge dancer who later achieved stardom under the stage name “Rita Hayworth.” But far more numerous were the would-be actors and actresses desperate to quit their day jobs, the call girls looking for a career change or a more distinguished client list, and the producers hunting for the next big cash cow or casting couch conquest.

As far as President Lázaro Cárdenas was concerned, establishments like Agua Caliente absolutely merited the epithet “Satan’s Playground.” In July 1935, a year and a half after the repeal of Prohibition, he ordered the region’s casinos closed, and two years later decreed that the rest of the Agua Caliente estate be expropriated and turned into an industrial trade school. Labor arbiters denied severance packages to the laid off workers of Tijuana’s largest employer. The Border Barons, on the other hand, fared much better and emerged from this ordeal with their robust bank balances intact.

It is a shame that a deeper investigation into the last 30 years of Agua Caliente’s history, featuring Hank and company at the helm, will not be possible until these parties have long expired. But Vanderwood’s book makes for an exceptional first installment. Satan’s Playground offers more than a good story about a lurid vacation spot in a permissive border city. Figuring prominently are analyses of the evolution of transnational organized crime, border politics, capitalism, and the booms and busts of Tijuana’s vice-tourism industry. Anyone drawn to these topics will find plenty of stimulating material. Those with only a passing interest will nonetheless encounter a riveting read in this enviably written blend of social history and “true crime.”

In Defense of the Crime Story

By Diego A. Godoy

Judicial records usually provide the empirical grist underpinning historical studies of crime, but journalism is the lifeblood of the field. The efforts of reporters, editors, photographers and illustrators have allowed researchers to resurrect bygone crimes, often in forensic detail. In the more recent Latin American past, for instance, the intrepid sleuthing of journalists—whose “narco libros” populate the Spanish-language shelves of book retailers—has spared academics from treading on paths far more perilous than graduate school could have ever prepared them for. Their revelations pertaining to the inner-workings of criminal syndicates and their state cohorts have deepened our information trove, making it possible for researchers to formulate more comprehensive analyses of the underworld.

It would be unwise, however, to pigeonhole the crime story as a mere chronicle of events, as recourse when police or judicial files are sanitized or inaccessible (as can often be the case in Latin America), or as an aid for imbuing one’s work with the narrative thrust facilitated by the beat reporter’s proclivity for anecdote and imagery. Rather than treating the crime story strictly as a source detailing the particulars of an incident, one would do well to recognize its potential to elucidate a broader range of phenomena, too.

Carlos Monsiváis author of Mexican Postcards (via wikipedia)

Excessively graphic, littered with inaccuracies, and saturated with classist and racist and other biases, Latin American crime papers were once considered little more than pulp trash, and thus beneath serious scholarly engagement. Thankfully, this prejudice seems to be receding. In recent years, a handful of Latin Americanist intellectuals have demonstrated how a rigorous analysis of these sources can yield highly original insights.

Readers could always count on the late Carlos Monsiváis for incisive takes on Mexican life including crime related affairs. In his essay collection on modern culture, Mexican Postcards, Monsiváis asserts that the content and presentation of crime news was profoundly altered after the Revolution (1910-1920). His survey of notas rojas (lit. “red notes/news”)—a popular variety of tabloid showcasing the violence occasioned by robberies, accidents, and crimes of passion—leads him to the conclusion that the press’ crime coverage required a substantial makeover to pique interest and sell papers in the post-revolutionary era. After a decade of storied military feats and charismatic protagonists, standard crime reporting proved forgettable. Striving to provoke visceral reactions and satiate morbid curiosities, nota roja journalists settled on the perfect sensationalist formula: obscenely gory visuals—think severed heads and flayed corpses—plus brief, melodramatic narration devoid of commentary, and crude, often facetious, captions. By the 1960s, entire newspapers adhered to this style, and some even sold in the United States, including ¡Alarma!, the genre’s quintessential publication. Today, many tabloid journalists still bank on the blood of butchered spouses, but they have also mixed drug trafficking stories into their repertoires.

The consolidation of the Mexican drug trade in the 1970s provided an opportunity for certain segments of the press to traffic in a distinct variety of crime story. In the media coverage of the narcotics business, Monsiváis discovered a cult of celebrity built on illusory images of criminality. Rather than minor thievery rings or homicidally jealous lovers, the protagonists of these stories were a different class of criminal who were accorded “the notoriety once reserved for politicians, sports personalities, and film stars.” Their exploits and life stories were related in prose that was reminiscent of early modern picaresque tales. Often, the most unsavory aspects of the criminal experience were omitted, or at least obfuscated by the glamour conferred by power and fortune.

Monsiváis meditates on the case of Rafael Caro Quintero, co-founder of the defunct Guadalajara Cartel. Many tabloids aided in the cultivation of Caro Quintero’s “social bandit” image, despite his being motivated by personal gain. His archetypal rags-to-riches story and supposed beneficence to the Sinaloan backwater from which he emerged were artfully tapped by writers. Seldom did these outlets delve into his organization’s brutal exploitation of poor poppy-farming communities, the effects of their sticky brown product in U.S. cities, or his elbow rubbing with members of Jalisco’s business elite.

Those familiar with the history of the Mexican drug trade will recall that Caro Quintero’s ascendancy was short-lived. On April 4, 1985, he was arrested for his involvement in the prolonged torture and murder of DEA Agent Enrique Camarena. Mexican television broadcast the moment when Caro Quintero and associates were escorted into Interpol’s Mexico City headquarters. Hordes of people tailed the group and shouted “Caro, reveal the corrupt!” “Unmask them all, Caro!” “Names, Caro, names!” Monsiváis likens this scene to that of a revolutionary hero riding into the main plaza of a town, being greeted by a hopeful peasantry awaiting the dissolution of an unjust government. Images of the purported social bandit and anticipated whistleblower beamed across the country.

Rafeal Quintero identification picture (via FBI)

Comparable transformations in crime coverage occurred in Buenos Aires during the interwar period. In While the City Sleeps: A History of Pistoleros, Policemen, and the Crime Beat in Buenos Aires Before Perón, historian Lila Caimari lays the shift in crime reporting at the feet of an array of factors related to “modernity,” namely, technological advances and the importation of U.S. tabloid journalism and Hollywood cinema. This onslaught of variables coalesced to generate what she dubs the new “languages of crime.”

Caimari recounts how in the late 19th century the Buenos Aires press wrote about crime in “natural-scientificist” language that borrowed terminology from medicine, criminal anthropology, and psychiatry. Taking cues from English and French journalists, Argentine reporters played detective by attempting to decipher the cause of a perpetrator’s criminality. But toward the 1930’s, these European influences could no longer compete with the flashier of American tabloids. Argentine editors, cognizant of the public’s insatiable appetite for detective novels and U.S. gangster cinema, quickly adopted a highly stylized, entertainment-driven approach.

The most prominent national media outlets spearheaded what the author calls the “cinematization of crime reporting” by deploying a vibrant assortment of visual and verbal tools. Popular newspapers La Razón, Última Hora, Crítica, and the illustrated Caras y Caretas employed melodramatic language, references to films, theatricalized reconstructions, photographic staging, and comic strips to accompany their narration. Stories were chosen for their similarity to contemporary U.S. criminal practices and featured a new protagonist: the pistolero (lit. “gunman”)—a Capone-esque gangster with the latest technological resources at his disposal. The elements of the criminal performance—weapons, automobiles, attire, and argot—became the main focus for writers, illustrators, and photographers. In stark contrast to the previous century, the question underlying press accounts of the criminal was no longer why he committed his crime, but how. And much like in Mexico, many publications contributed to the legends that shrouded criminals’ careers. Ahora’s stories on the train and bank robber David Segundo Peralta, a.k.a. “Mate Cosido,” were part of a trend in which certain outlets gave organized crime figures the matinee idol treatment.

Following a string of kidnappings—most notably the 1932 abduction and slaying of Abel Ayerza, the son of an affluent family, by Sicilian-Argentine Mafioso Juan Galiffi, a.k.a. “Chicho Grande”—journalists shifted their attention to these protracted dramas. Now, the victims’ families became the main protagonists, and their visible agony instigated a renewed debate over the proper administration of justice. Both the public and media voiced their desire for more stringent laws, heightened police presence on the streets, and the reinstatement of capital punishment.

A few decades later, back in Mexico, an analogous phenomenon transpired as the nota roja assumed the role of bastion of the public sphere. In his latest book, A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico, Pablo Piccato (UT History Ph.D., 1997), explores civil society’s efforts to mend the ruptured nexus between crime, truth, and justice that emerged during the post-revolutionary era. The inefficiency and corruption of the authorities, coupled with the wiliness of certain criminals, often made it impossible for truth and justice to prevail. Consequently, citizens sought the facts of a case and proper application of the law by engaging in debates in both courtrooms and the press. Jury trials, in which ordinary people attended proceedings to discuss the full gamut of criminal behavior and settle on truths, were a novelty in the country’s legal history. But after their abolition in 1929, the nota roja took over as civil society’s primary marketplace of ideas for crime-related issues.

Unlike Mexico’s leading newspapers, many of which counted on government subsidies to stay afloat, tabloids like ¡Alarma! and Detectives were free to lay bare the collusion between state officials and underworld figures. For readers, these publications came to represent unparalleled sources of important information. Many even made a habit of writing in to opine on a variety of topics, from how police should go about their job, the likely motives of serial killers, and most commonly, to suggest the rectification of heinous crimes via extrajudicial methods. Columnists generally concurred with the latter point, arguing that since capital punishment was no longer an option (it was abolished for civil cases in 1937), jailers should be given carte blanche to dispose of those convicted of the most despicable crimes. Torture, lynching, or a quick and easy bullet to the brain were all deemed fitting punishments. Some favored the so-called ley fuga, or law of flight, a Porfirian-era extrajudicial punishment that empowered police to shoot fleeing prisoners. In practice, however, the police themselves would often set the prisoner free in order to apply the penalty.

At the heart of Piccato’s study is what he describes as “criminal literacy.” Rooted in lessons from both notas rojas and fictional narratives, criminally literacy refers to specific knowledge that was essential to safely navigate the dangers of contemporary Mexico City. It comprised an eclectic mix of information, such as knowing which neighborhoods to avoid, the standard ruses of thieves and con artists, and the potential perils of nightlife. All of this was certainly helpful in staving off victimization, but it undoubtedly reinforced anachronistic ideas about the perceived differences between good, lawful citizens and bad, unlawful ones.

These and a small number of other authors have been wise to treat the crime story with greater seriousness. Consequential narratives about certain types of crimes, malefactors and victims, whether accurate or not, are disseminated through newspapers, magazines, radio and television broadcasts, and even literary works. Unsurprisingly, popular perceptions (as opposed to reality) offer an important indicator of the public’s knowledge. And frankly, sometimes what people believed is more interesting than what actually occurred. Cultural histories of crime writing or criminal archetypes as fostered by the languages of mass communication constitute an alluring new research frontier—a sort of history of popular criminological thought—that have the potential to flourish alongside the more traditional scientific and legal historiographies.

Books Discussed:

Carlos Monsivais. Mexican Postcards. Translated and Introduced by John Kraniauskas (1997)

Lila Caimari. While the City Sleeps: A History of Pistoleros, Policemen, and the Crime Beat in Buenos Aires Before Perón (2016)

Pablo Piccato. A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico (2017)

Ordinary Yet Infamous: Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso

The discovery of a headless, limbless, racially ambiguous human torso near a pond outside of Philadelphia in 1887, horrified area residents and confounded local authorities. From what they could tell, a brutal homicide had taken place. At a minimum, the victim had been viciously dismembered. Based on the circumstances, it also seemed like the kind of case to go unsolved. Yet in an era lacking sophisticated forensic methods, the investigators from Bucks County and those from Philadelphia managed to identify two suspects: Hannah Mary Tabbs, a black southern migrant, and George Wilson, a young mulatto that Tabbs implicated shortly after her arrest. The ensuing trial would last months, itself something of a record given that most criminal hearings wrapped up in a week or so. The crime and its adjudication also took center stage in presses from Pennsylvania to Illinois to Missouri.

Examining the torso to determine its race. “The quadroon’s comparison," “Coon Chops,” National Police Gazette, March 5, 1887. — Examining the torso to determine its race. “The quadroon’s comparison,” “Coon Chops,” National Police Gazette, March 5, 1887.

The nature of the case allowed otherwise taboo subjects such as illicit sex, adultery, and domestic violence in the black community to become fodder for mainstream public discourses on race, gender, and crime. At the same time, the mixed race of the victim and one of his assailants, George Wilson, would further inflame public anxieties about shifting notions of race and power in the Post-Reconstruction era, especially in regard to miscegenation and passing. The investigation itself and the treatment of the African Americans involved also afford a rare window onto early bigoted police practices such as racial profiling and issues of police brutality as well as sketching a nuanced portrait of intraracial violence. The murder and its investigation shed rare light on the legal responses to urban violence and show how those responses fundamentally contributed to crime in the black community.

Equally important is that a wealth of records and press coverage of the case allows for a richer understanding of the life of the infamous Hannah Mary Tabbs, the otherwise ordinary black woman at the heart of the story. What makes Tabbs such a provocative figure is that her life encompassed an extreme combination of the mundane and the extraordinary—a range that more wholly elucidates the complexities of black urban life. In many respects, Tabbs embodied those traits most common to the city’s black southern migrants. Like nearly fifteen percent of the city’s black residents, she migrated from Maryland roughly a decade after the Civil War. In accord with ninety percent of working black women in Philadelphia, she labored as a domestic—first for a Center City attorney and later for wealthy farmers in Eddington, where the torso would be found.

Domestic servant, Willemstad, Curacao. — Domestic servant, Willemstad, Curacao

But Hannah Mary Tabbs also possessed a darker side. She had an adulterous affair with the victim, a man ten years her junior and, at the very least, participated in his murder. The home that she shared with her husband doubled as the scene of the crime. John Tabbs had an airtight alibi. Hannah Mary, however, could not account for her whereabouts and during the investigation, several witnesses would come forward and testify to her long history of violence. In addition to threatening her immediate family members, including her husband, she was reputed to have routinely and “violently insulted inoffensive persons.” The range of victims knew few boundaries, young and old, male and female alike—yet she never attacked whites. Tabbs undoubtedly knew all too well of the inadequacy and injustice of police protection for the black community, as well as the severity of the consequences she would face if she deigned to assault a white citizen.

Yet Hannah Mary’s violence also had practical functions. Black women were especially vulnerable to violent crime and had little recourse with respect to justice. Being an all-around tough customer could serve as its own protection—people in the neighborhood knew that Hannah Mary was not someone to be messed with.

Mary Fields: “…a two-fisted, hard-drinking woman who needed nobody to fight her battles for her. She smoked homemade cigars & carried a six-shooter plus a shotgun.” Source: Wikipedia

These aspects of her life, when taken together with Hannah Mary’s experiences in Philadelphia’s justice system, distinguish her from many of her peers. But where Hannah Mary Tabbs’s life diverges from the “norm” effectively maps the typography of black daily life as well as urban social strife. Her relationships offer an unusual glimpse of domestic violence—one that challenges customary definitions. Tabbs’s skirmishes with the victim, her neighbors, and family members provide a broader view of social tensions and the kinds of violence that occurred within black families.

Her erotic pursuits, too, afford a different understanding of how black women in the nineteenth century navigated sexuality. Most historians interested in black sexuality point to black women dissembling their sexuality in an effort to stave off potential sexual attacks. While certainly true, this phenomenon has made it difficult for historians to get a sense of how African Americans engaged in sexual pleasure. Tabbs’s passionate affair along with how she used violence to safeguard the relationship move us past silence about black women’s desire for sexual gratification at the same that it points to the lengths that some might have had to go to obtain it.

This case, this story, and the black woman at the heart of it forces us to move past binary notions of race, gender, and sexuality but also, too, it resists snap judgments about who exactly is good or evil and calls into question the validity of standard notions of justice.

This piece was adapted from Kali Nicole Gross’s new book: Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America (Oxford University Press, 2016).

For further reading, see:

Anne Butler, Gendered Justice in the American West: Women Prisoners in Men’s Penitentiaries (1997).
A seminal examination of women’s experiences in the penal system in the West in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Butler unearths the unending violence women, particularly women of color, were subjected to in custody. At the same time, it gives voice to figures that rarely speak in history.

Mara Dodge, “Whores and Thieves of the Worst Kind”: A Study of Women, Crime, and Prisons, 1835-2000 (2006).
Dodge provides an exhaustive study of the histories of women incarcerated from the early nineteenth century to the twenty-first. She meticulously examines the gendered treatment of female inmates punished for bad manners, fighting, and lesbian relationships. The book shows how race and gender collided with the criminal justice system.

Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935 (2010).
This work is a rich examination of the experiences and views of black working-class women who found themselves enmeshed in the criminal justice system in early-twentieth-century New York. In addition to exploring the impact of urban and penal reform on those black women, Hicks critically contrasts the racial uplift agendas of both middle-class black and white female reformers.

Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (2015).
Dr. LeFlouria’s riveting work powerfully unearths the experiences of Georgia’s exploited and often overlooked labor force, namely black female convicts. Through painstaking research, she portrays black women as sentient beings (humans who had lives, loves, triumphs, and sorrows) and as prison laborers brutalized by convict leasing.

LaShawn Harris, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (University of Illinois, 2016).
Dr. Harris’s extraordinary book offers an unprecedented account of African American women’s employment outside of the customary realms of domestic service and agricultural work. It is a provocative examination that compels readers to interrogate notions of labor through an intricate, incisive intersectional lens.

Three Hundred Sex Crimes

by Brian Levack

Early in the morning on May 20, 1709, before the trials of offenders commenced, the judges of Scotland’s north circuit court in Perth pardoned some 300 men and women who had been charged with fornication or adultery. After granting these pardons, the court spent most of the day trying a case of incest that resulted in the conviction of John Martin, a 67-year old blacksmith from Dundee, and the acquittal of his half-brother’s 16-year old daughter, Elspeth Martin, for engaging in incestuous sexual intercourse.

Page 1 of the document recording the pardons
(National Archives of Scotland, JC 11/1)

The pardons and the trials of that day marked a turning point in the history of Scottish criminal justice. They brought about the de facto decriminalization of fornication and adultery in the Scottish secular courts while clarifying the Scottish law of incest and challenging prevailing male and clerical attitudes towards rape.

The pardons came about as a result of the passage of a bill of indemnity passed by the British parliament in the previous year. The union of England and Scotland in 1707 had resulted in the establishment of the United Kingdom and the creation of a single parliament for both England and Scotland. In this British parliament the English greatly outnumbered the Scots. On the face of it, the act of indemnity passed by parliament in 1708 had little to do with the prosecution of sex crimes. Its purpose was to pardon people accused of crimes in the wake of a Scottish rebellion against the British monarch, Queen Anne, in that year as a means of reconciling the Scottish population to the established regime. The statute extended a free and general pardon to subjects of the queen who had committed “all manner of treasons, misprisions of treasons, felonies, treasonable or seditious words or libels, misprisions of felony, seditious and unlawful meetings . . . riots, routs, offences, trespasses, entries, wrongs, deceits, [and] misdemeanors.”

Queen Anne in the House of Lords, Peter Tillemans (Wikimedia Commons)

The Members of Parliament (MPs) who passed this bill of indemnity most likely never thought about its application to adultery and fornication, especially since neither of those offenses was a secular crime in England. But 300 Scottish offenders, whose names fill seventeen pages in the records of the court in the National Archives of Scotland, took advantage of this opportunity to avoid the penalties they would have otherwise incurred for these relatively minor sexual offenses. The judges of the court, who agreed that fornication and adultery should not be prosecuted, were happy to grant the pardons. After this trial, there were no more prosecutions in the Scottish secular courts for either offense.

Incest and rape, however, were considered much more serious crimes than fornication or adultery, and they had been specifically excluded from the bill of indemnity. Therefore the trial of John and Elspeth Martin for incest went forward. It is surprising that John was not charged with rape, since the indictment made it clear that he had forced his niece to have sex with him. The court had been reluctant to try him for rape because local magistrates and clergy considered Elspeth just as guilty as John for their sexual intercourse, presuming that she, like all victims of rape, had consented to this sexual act. The reason the court proceeded in this case was that sexual relationship between John and his niece had been incestuous. On that basis John was convicted. During Elspeth’s trial, however, her lawyer emphasized that John had used force against her. This led the jury to recognize that she was a victim of this sexual crime, not its perpetrator, and for that reason she was acquitted. By making the jury understand that rape was a violent crime against women and therefore the most serious of all sex crimes, Elspeth Martin’s lawyer contributed to a significant change in Scottish attitudes toward rape in the eighteenth century.

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