Ungentlemanly Acts: The Army's Notorious Incest Trial Page 7

  His desire to manipulate circumstances for the purpose of advancement also appears early on. In 1867 five officers of the Sixth Cavalry wrote a letter protesting Clous’s attempt to transfer back into the Sixth, which he had left in order to gain a promotion to captain in the Thirty-eighth Infantry. The letter complained that “[i]f he should succeed in getting back to this regiment by the proposed arrangement, he would not only rank all the Lieutenants who formerly ranked him, but would set them all back some two or three years in promotion.”2

  Clous wasn’t allowed to transfer back in, but neither was he deterred from further efforts at self-aggrandizement. In 1881 he wrote to the Adjutant General to say that his name should appear on the list of Captains of Infantry above that of Captain DeWitt Clinton Poole. According to Clous’s reckoning, he had served four years, one month, and twenty-three days to Poole’s four years, one month, and twenty-one days. Evidently he had counted his own time of service too generously, and his petition was rejected. Similarly, his 1898 attempt to get the Medal of Honor for an Indian engagement in 1872 was turned down.3

  Clous was prominent on the enemies list of Captain George Armes, an officer whose diary of his army career was eventually published as a book, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer. An easily offended and trouble-prone man, Armes was the object of numerous courts-martial and was finally expelled from the army.4 His description of life in the Tenth is full of contemptuous evaluations of his numerous enemies and elaborate accounts of his many difficulties with the military judicial system. This clear propensity to not get along with his colleagues did not mean, of course, that he was invariably mistaken in his judgments.

  “In regard to the Dutchman,” Armes wrote, using his favorite epithet for Clous and one often applied to Germans, “he has always had the ‘cheek’ of a brass band and has succeeded in gulling many and making them believe that he is an individual of some importance.” The patrician Armes had instinctively disliked Clous from the first, responding negatively to his obvious ambition. Armes’s diary entry for May 11, 1869, at Fort Dodge, Kansas, records that Major Page visited, bringing “a Dutch Captain by the name of Clous with him … who seems to have cheek enough to take him anywhere.” Their paths crossed again when both men were transferred to Texas, where Clous became a judge advocate and Armes was frequently brought up on charges, circumstances under which his dislike of Clous could only deepen.5

  Clous’s opponent in the Geddes court-martial was defense counsel George Washington Paschal, a local boy whose family was among the early residents of San Antonio. Three years before, he had returned from law school in Washington, D.C., to form a law partnership with John Mason. At the age of thirty-one, he was at the beginning of his career. After his baptism by fire in the Geddes case, he would become well known for his work in military trials and his knowledge of military law.

  What happened on the first day of the trial was representative of much that followed. All defendants in court-martial proceedings have a right to challenge members of the court, and unless a challenge appears to be completely frivolous, it is usually upheld. Geddes objected to a member of his court, Captain J. H. Patterson, as prejudiced against him, and Patterson’s response to this accusation was less than reassuring. Scuttlebutt was already circulating, Patterson recounted, that a medical report had shown “such a thing [incest] could not have been possible. If such medical testimony is introduced, and if such line of defense be adopted, the charge of incest could not be sustained in the face of the medical experts. I believe that to be so, and I may have expressed myself so.” Patterson remained a member of the court, an indication of how future defense requests would be treated.

  The trial would be studded with rejected defense objections and other kinds of setbacks for Captain Geddes. Applications for defense witnesses had to be approved by the judge advocate, but he consistently turned down the proposed defense witnesses as “not material to the ends of justice.” Usually he got his way. The court’s interventions also tended to be in the interest of the prosecution.

  Beyond the central matter of whether or not a father and daughter had committed incest, defense and prosecution testimony differed substantially on a number of relevant points. Literature was invoked by both sides to assess Geddes’s character and his relationship with Lillie Orleman. The judge advocate told the court that he expected to show that “the accused furnished the daughter of the witness highly sensational novels improper for young girls to read and that the same were discovered by the father and by him returned to the accused.” Geddes promptly objected that the only way of judging if the novels were improper would be for the court to admit them into evidence and judge for itself. His objection was not sustained.

  The Orleman-Geddes quarters also came in for detailed examination because of Geddes’s claim that he had heard the Orlemans’ sexual activity and intelligible speech through the wall separating his rooms from the Orlemans’.

  Key events received repeated scrutiny. The trip to Fort Davis that the principals had made together in February of 1879 was a locus of dispute, as well as March 2, when Geddes claimed to have both seen and heard the Orlemans engaged in “criminal intimacy,” and March 12, when the projected departure of Geddes and Lillie Orleman brought things to a head.

  LILLIE ORLEMAN

  Lillie Orleman was the first prosecution witness. She testified that she had met Andrew Geddes at a post dance or hop where he had squeezed her hand meaningfully. Their acquaintance developed. He came to her father’s quarters almost every day in the afternoon when her father was at Stables.q He told her that he was unhappy, that he had not lived with his wife for many years, had never loved her or anyone as he loved Lillie: “He wished I was his, and that I must be his.”

  After the first day of the trial, the defense complained that Lillie had testified with her back to Geddes in violation of Article 6 of the Constitution that requires that the accuser confront the accused. Judge Advocate Clous told Paschal that he misinterpreted the meaning of confront, and the court overruled the defense objection.

  Paschal had cited a standard reference, Stephen Vincent Benet’s Treatise on Military Law and the Practice of Courts-Martial, to support his objection. As Benet describes the positioning of the various parties in the courtroom, the defendant and his counsel are “on the right hand of the judge advocate, and the witness is seated near the judge advocate, and usually on his left.”6 In other words, in an ordinary court-martial proceeding a witness would not testify as Lillie Orleman did, with her back to the accused. This arrangement was undoubtedly contrived to spare her embarrassment.

  On March 2, Lillie testified, Geddes came to the Orlemans’ quarters as usual while her father was at Stables: “He attempted to take liberties with me several times, and also make propositions to me. He asked me to sit on his lap and would kiss and hug me.”

  Q: Please state to the Court the nature of the liberties he attempted to take?

  A: He began first by trying to force his hand down the neck of my dress which was rather low. I then pushed his hand away, he then got down on his knees and begged and implored me to allow him to kiss my breast. He also attempted to put his hand under my clothes. He was so rude that it took all my strength to repel him.

  Yet Lillie had continued to see Geddes alone. On another occasion, she testified, he asked to wash and also comb her hair and see her undressed. By her own admission, Lillie had not repulsed the captain entirely: “Believing Captain Geddes to be a gentleman I inferred from all his actions that he would get a divorce and make me his wife.”

  Of the night when Geddes had supposedly surprised the father and daughter in “criminal incest,” Lillie testified that she went to bed between nine and ten and slept until morning: the outside shutters and the bedroom window were closed and the curtains drawn. Before this, her father had come into the bedroom and spoken harshly of finding Geddes in their quarters, warning Lillie not to let it happen again on pain of being turned out of the house. She noted that
it was only possible to hear “dim sound” from Geddes’s adjacent room.

  Lillie further testified that when Geddes came over the next day, he asked her to sit on his lap—which she did—and said that he had heard everything the night before. He said he would tell Fort Stockton’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Blunt, “‘that your father is not treating you right’”:

  I was terrified and afraid that my relations towards Captain Geddes would become known to my father, and I told him that he was right and that my father had treated me cruelly and meanly, which was really not so. I told him that to enlist his sympathy in order to take me home. I then asked him not to tell Colonel Blunt as he had before said he would.

  According to Lillie’s account of the March 3 meeting, Geddes appeared to love her and she returned his love. Further, in her version of the story, the relationship had to be concealed from her father, who had begun to suspect it. Most significant, Lillie said that when Geddes accused her father of not “treating her right,” she agreed for the purpose of winning Geddes’s sympathy so that he would take her to her Austin home and renounce his plan of exposing Orleman to the commanding officer of Fort Stockton. She testified that when Geddes characterized her father as “not treating her right,” she took it as a reference to her father’s having reprimanded her for her relationship with Geddes.

  In their court-martial testimony Orleman, Lillie, and Geddes all agreed that Geddes told Lillie on March 3 that her father was not treating her right and that Geddes based his accusation on what he had discovered the night before. They disagreed about what Geddes had meant when he said that Lillie’s father was not “treating her right.”

  Lillie noted that she could not have told Geddes, as he had alleged, that her father had begun abusing her at the age of thirteen since she had been in a convent until she was fifteen. But she admitted that she had seen her family at holidays during the convent years.

  Regarding the week that followed the scene of March 3, Lillie stated that she and Geddes were seemingly in harmony. They corresponded, and she gave him her thimble and gold cross. They made plans to leave Fort Stockton together: he wanted her to go to his home with him; she said she had to go to her own home in Austin.

  Then, on March 12, Lillie’s father told her at breakfast that Geddes had accused him of being too intimate with her; that Geddes professed to have discovered this at their bedroom window where he had stood listening: “I then asked my father what Captain Geddes meant by accusing him of being too intimate with me—he replied that he did not know and would demand an explanation from Captain Geddes.”

  Lillie said that her father first went to Geddes’s room, then both men came over to the Orleman quarters and confronted Lillie together. Geddes said, “‘Miss Lillie, you know that your father is not treating you right.‘” As she told the court, “Captain Geddes sitting opposite me terrified me with his looks under which I felt guilty and I answered him, ‘Captain, you should not ask me such questions. You know all.’”

  Geddes asked Lillie if she was going to leave in the stage with him that evening, and she said yes. Then, Lillie continued, he told her father, “‘Orleman, if you will consent to let your daughter go down in the stage this evening I will keep the whole matter a secret.’ My father then answered, ‘Seeing what conspiracy exists between you and my daughter, she can do in the future what she pleases.”’ But he also vowed not to let the matter rest.

  In what would be only one of many flagrant errors made in trial procedure, Lillie was then allowed to give hearsay testimony—to enter what was actually third-hand gossip into the trial record. The defense objected, but, as was usually the case, was overruled. Lillie’s hearsay evidence was that “a lady” had told her that “her husband had seen Mrs. Hart in Captain Geddes’s arms on the sofa in her [Mrs. Hart’s] parlor.” This lady also told Lillie that Captain Geddes had been seen with Mrs. McLaughlen “after Tattoo, to run up the back steps of the Hospital.” Both Mrs. Hart and Mrs. McLaughlen were the wives of officers stationed at Fort Stockton.7 More than that, Mrs. McLaughlen’s husband was then commander of the post.

  Lillie testified that when she asked Geddes about the two women, he told her that Mrs. Hart was not a lady: “In regard to Mrs. McLaughlen he denied having done any such thing.” The court would not allow the defense to ask the identity of the gossiping lady.r

  Queried about her feelings toward Geddes, Lillie responded, “Whenever I was in Captain Geddes’s presence I was completely mesmerized and consequently he could make me say and do as he pleased.” About her father, she stated, “My father has always treated me very kindly and tried to make me as happy and content in his circumstances, having to support such a large family as ours.”

  When Paschal cross-examined her, Lillie denied all of his suggestions—that she had told Geddes she had the experience of a woman of forty, that she had a great secret, that she would never be happy. She did admit to telling Geddes that if she was unhappy, it “was a matter concerning only herself.” Paschal did not press her on what she might have meant by this: had he done so, a member of the court probably would have objected, as happened on other occasions when the questioning became aggressive or personal. Lillie also denied that she had solicited Geddes’s visits or encouraged his expressions of love, although she did say that she had “kissed him in return.” The defense was able to establish that Geddes’s visits to the Orleman quarters were not confined to the times Lillie had described, that is, when her father was absent. In fact, he often visited when her father was there.

  About the evening of March 2, Lillie testified that Geddes once again visited while her father was at Stables. When he got up to leave, Lillie detained him by asking him to stay until her father returned. But when Lieutenant Orleman arrived, he found the door locked, “which,” Lillie related, “had been accidently done by me without my knowledge.” Her father was angry, assuming that the door had been intentionally locked to enable an assignation.

  One of the events on which the prosecution and defense offered wildly different accounts was a trip between Fort Stockton and Fort Davis that the Orlemans, Geddes, and Joseph Friedlander took on February 21, 1879. Friedlander, the Fort Stockton postmaster and a local merchant, was a bachelor of thirty-eight and Geddes’s close friend. Fort Davis was seventy miles southwest of Fort Stockton, a long day’s journey: the party left around 6 a.m. in an army ambulance, a horse-drawn carriage, and arrived at 8 p.m. Only a few months before, in the fall of 1878, the road between the two forts had been considered unsafe for small parties because of recent Indian activity.8

  What happened during the trip was disputed. Each side accused the other of impropriety within the confines of the vehicle in which the father and daughter faced the officer and his friend, with Lillie sitting directly across from Geddes. This seating arrangement was material to the accusations made. According to Lillie’s version of the trip Geddes pressed her legs between his under cover of an army cape.

  Beginning with the ambulance ride, Paschal’s cross-examination was designed to elicit Lillie’s feelings toward Geddes. He drew from her the admission that she did not protest her knees being pressed between Geddes’s—nor did she mind.

  Q: You have stated the accused would ask you to sit on his lap and kiss and hug you. Now please state if you would comply with these requests upon the part of the accused.

  A: Sometimes.

  Paschal also asked upon what basis Lillie believed Geddes to be a gentleman. She replied: “I cannot say. I believed that he was a gentleman. I never consented to any of his ungentlemanly acts or propositions so that I never gave them a serious consideration or thought.” This confusing answer suggests that Lillie wanted to believe that Geddes was a gentleman as opposed to a sexual predator so that she could pin romantic hopes on him, but to do so she had to ignore or acquiesce to some of his behavior.

  Paschal’s line of questioning next turned to the explosive subject of Lillie’s life with her father in the cramped
officers’ quarters that they shared, the other half of the one-story house where Geddes lived. He established that the two slept in the same room, without any screen between their beds, but the next defense question was disallowed: “Did your father and yourself dress and undress in the presence of each other?” This was clearly a pertinent question: when the Judge Advocate General later reviewed the court-martial, he expressed surprise that the objection to it had been sustained.

  The defense now raised the most powerful evidence against the Orlemans, the letters Lillie had written to Geddes and instructed him to burn. From the first letter, Paschal quoted to her the passage “never let on to my father by your words or actions that I have given you the secret of my life” and asked her to explain what “the secret of my life” referred to. She replied that it was her infatuation with Geddes and their plan to leave Fort Stockton together.

  When Paschal asked Lillie what she meant by writing “I could not help telling you all,” Lillie replied that she meant “the conversation I had with Captain Geddes on the third of March, 1879,” instead of giving an explanation of what all referred to. As for what it was Lillie asked Geddes not to tell Colonel Blunt, she said: “I had told him that my father had treated me cruelly and meanly—this was really not so, but I said it to enlist his sympathy, to take me home as I was afraid that my relations with Captain Geddes would become known to my father.”

  When pressed about her statement that if they knew, people would shun her father and honor Geddes, Lillie replied, “I meant the manner in which my father had spoken to me that night and that if the people knew of such conduct that they would shun him while they would honor Captain Geddes for trying to take my part.” Yet in admonishing his daughter to break off a relationship with a married man of dubious reputation, Orleman was only doing what most people of the time would not only approve but expect. That he might be “shunned” for even a heated chastisement under the circumstances, or Geddes “honored” for rescuing her from a fatherly lecture, seems implausible.