Ungentlemanly Acts: The Army's Notorious Incest Trial Page 9

  Lillie’s account agreed with her father’s, but it also included the behind-the-scenes machinations of Geddes and herself to contrive their passage together. “What if I tell him I have two passes?” she reported Geddes as saying. Her response: “I would go with you if I could do so.” They made secret arrangements to leave together on March 12, but on the morning of the twelfth her father announced that he had learned of Geddes’s departure on the stage that evening. He asked her if she had known that Geddes was going. She denied it. He then forbade her to go on the same stage as Geddes.

  Around 11 a.m. on March 12, Orleman testified, Geddes told him that if he refused to let Lillie go with him that evening, he would “publish me for having criminal intercourse with my daughter, that I had better make up my mind to let her go, and that he would keep the whole matter secret and say nothing about it to anybody.” On reexamination Orleman emphasized this point: “I thought that the accused had impressed my daughter with the belief that to make this terrible accusation against me was the only means by which the accused could obtain my consent to her going with him.”

  On cross-examination Orleman was asked if it was not generally known and reported as a fact in and about Fort Stockton that his daughter was to take the same stage as Geddes when he went on leave. Orleman staunchly denied it: “It was not known to me until the day he was to go, March 12th, 1879. I heard it from Lt. Quimby, 25th Infantry, on that morning that the accused was to go.”

  Orleman claimed to have asked Lieutenant Henry P. Ritzius to take charge of Lillie on the stage, but the time of their conversation was in dispute. John Michael Gandy, a bookkeeper at the stage agent’s store, confirmed that Orleman had sent a telegram to Lieutenant Ritzius that morning, but there was no answer because Ritzius had already left Fort Davis for Fort Stockton. Orleman said he had spoken with Ritzius about the time of afternoon Stables, 3:30 p.m., but Ritzius testified that he had only arrived at Stockton at four, and that he had been approached by Orleman “within an hour” after his arrival. He agreed to escort Lillie, but Ritzius had come to Stockton to travel with Geddes, so it was understood that Geddes was going too.

  In cross-examination the defense failed to bring out a point that buttressed Geddes’s version of events—namely, that Geddes’s prearranged plans to travel with Ritzius ran counter to an abduction scheme.

  Gandy testified for the prosecution that Orleman had inquired on the twelfth about the fare to Austin. At the time Gandy assumed that Orleman had come for information only, since he did not reserve a seat for his daughter.

  The rest of Gandy’s testimony was actually more valuable to the defense than to the prosecution. He stated that Geddes had paid $84 for fares for himself and Lillie Orleman to San Antonio (the first stop on the way to Austin). Later in the day Gandy received a message that they were not going and sent back the money. On cross-examination he was asked: “When the accused paid you the stage fare of himself and Miss Orleman, did he act as though he was trying to conceal the fact that Miss Orleman was going with him?” He answered, “No sir.”

  Gandy also mentioned in passing a detail that would reverberate: when Orleman sent the telegram to Ritzius at Fort Davis, he charged it because he was “short of funds.” Orleman flatly denied that he had lacked money at the time, but Joseph Friedlander testified that on March 12 at Friedlander’s store Orleman asked Geddes to pay for Lillie’s passage and that Geddes had agreed. Geddes had drawn $84 from Friedlander to pay for the two fares. Lillie’s trunk was subsequently delivered to the store, which was the stage stop for Fort Stockton.

  INTERLUDE

  In the last week of May 1879, Lieutenant John Bigelow, Jr., made the long stage trip from Fort Stockton to San Antonio at the summons of the court. He would spend most of the next three months simply waiting to testify—and confiding to his diary what he observed.

  On May 27 Bigelow met Lillie and her father on their way to a well-known boardinghouse. Later in the day, the proprietor told Bigelow that she had at first agreed to rent them rooms, but then withdrawn the offer when she heard that they were involved in a scandal. She asked Bigelow’s opinion, and he was glad for an opportunity to defend his friends:

  I told her that Miss Orleman was an unfortunate young lady who had been most outrageously slandered and that there were persons in the city who employed every means in their power to make the slander as public as possible.

  Bigelow’s pointed comment could have been a reference to Geddes’s friend, Joe Friedlander, since Bigelow had heard from another officer that Friedlander might have hired a detective to spy on the Orlemans in San Antonio. After his conversation at the boardinghouse, Bigelow went looking for the Orlemans and learned that they had removed to Hord’s Hotel—a decision that displeased him:

  I was in hope that I would be able to dissuade him [Orleman] from going there. Neither he nor Miss Lilly seems to have the delicacy that would prompt them to avoid publicity. They go every evening to Fests Bier Garden. When the Lieut knew of my having arrived here, he wanted Miss Lilly to go with him to call on me at the hotel. She had sense of propriety enough to tell the Lieut that if I wanted to see her, I could call on her and that she was not going to call on me.18

  Although he did not always approve of their actions, Bigelow never questioned his friends’ version of the Geddes matter. Shortly before leaving Fort Stockton he had discovered that Lillie had lied about her relationship with Geddes. But his reaction was to bypass the lying and focus instead on the relationship itself:

  The Chaplain informed me yesterday that Miss Orleman had equivocated in pretending not to have had any correspondence with Maj. Geddes.w She afterwards acknowledged the equivocation. How, as a respectable young woman, she could have engaged in a clandestine correspondence with a man about whom she knew or surmised as much as she did about Maj. Geddes, I cannot understand. She showed herself lacking in moral perception.

  Above the line at the end of this passage Bigelow wrote “female delicacy,” without crossing out “moral perception.”

  Bigelow had had a friendly relationship with Lieutenant Orleman and his daughter, often riding with Lillie in the vicinity of the post. But his partisanship in the Geddes trial was not merely a matter of friendship for the Orlemans. Geddes’s past behavior as a womanizer, and especially his attempt to seduce the young girl Candelaria Garza, had condemned Geddes in Bigelow’s eyes. In his diary Bigelow refers to Geddes as a villain and a fiend who must have used “his devilish arts with such success as to have blinded her [Lillie] to the danger of his company.” In Bigelow’s judgment Lillie had behaved imprudently, but she was still”this guiltless girl,” whose happiness had been destroyed by a man who should be”kicked out of the army.“19

  Bigelow’s distaste for Geddes was so strong that it overrode the rules of military protocol. On the streets of San Antonio Bigelow gave no acknowledgment of acquaintance when he saw Geddes. A fellow officer had to remind him that Geddes’s “rank entitled him to a military salute.”20

  Bigelow had appeared briefly at the beginning of the trial to present the diagrams he had made of the Geddes-Orleman quarters, but he was told by Judge Advocate Clous that he would be called again during rebuttal testimony. As the trial dragged on through the hottest months of the year, Bigelow began to question the Army’s custom of keeping witnesses like himself in idleness. He wrote with some exasperation, “Since I have been away from my company, which I left over a month ago, I have not done two good days work for the government.”21

  Instead, he developed his own routine. After breakfast every morning he went to the nearby army headquarters building to get his mail. While out, he attended to whatever shopping or other business he needed to do, then came back to his room in the Menger Hotel.x He usually got back at 10:30 and read until 1 or 2 p.m., dinnertime. After dinner, like breakfast a meal taken at the hotel, he went back to headquarters to check for mail, and read in his room for the rest of the afternoon.

  At about 6 oclock I fix up a little
and then wander aimlessly forth from the hotel, alternately thinking of deciding upon someone to call on, and hoping to meet with something or somebody of interest in the course of my walk. I usually stay out until 8 oclock and then go to supper. Supper over, I am again at a loss what to do with myself. Generally if I have no engagement, I make one or two calls during the evening.

  With a lively mind and much time on his hands, Bigelow read through Shakespeare’s plays but bogged down in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly, finally telling his diary, “I got so sick of Scott’s Waverly that I decided to-day upon exchanging it for another book. I have now J. G. Holland’s Lessons in Life, which I like much better.” His main diversion, however, was one that would have attracted an unattached young man anywhere: the calls that he made were often upon eligible young women, well-brought-up middle-class girls who were by definition virgins.22

  VIRGINITY

  The prosecution’s most valuable witness was the doctor who had examined Lillie Orleman to determine whether or not she was a virgin. Although the court had a strong aversion to hearing anything about incest, it showed an excessive and prurient interest in virginity. Obviously, Lillie Orleman’s virginity was a central issue in the case because Geddes had accused her father of having criminal intercourse with her. But more than that, “purity” was the totemic ideal of the nineteenth-century American woman, a condition resting upon lack of sexual experience in the unmarried and sexual fidelity in the married. Widely proclaimed to be woman’s chief virtue, purity implied a separation from the male sphere and its multitudinous activities.23 “In women’s fiction,” literary critic Nina Baym writes, “it was so taken for granted that it was ignored.”24

  The idea of an absolute distinction between the pure and the sexually experienced woman, a dividing line that was emphatically inscribed on the genitalia, was a natural medical corollary of cultural beliefs about virginity. The physical evidence was intended to be the unshakable cornerstone of prosecution testimony about Lillie Orleman. As one of the officers sitting in judgment on Andrew Geddes had remarked before hearing any evidence whatsoever, if Lillie were found to be a virgin, Geddes would unquestionably be guilty. Although the court devoted a great deal of attention to the question of virginity, it never considered whether sexual activities short of full intercourse would constitute “criminal intimacy” between a father and a daughter.

  But as the trial progressed, with doctor after doctor taking the stand to expatiate on virginity, the line between the sexually pure and impure became increasingly blurred rather than more sharply delineated. Soon, the purported subject, Lillie Orleman, was left behind. Only one doctor had examined her genitalia; the others spoke generally.

  Almost six weeks into the trial, at what would turn out to be the halfway point, M. K. Taylor, an army assistant surgeon and a practicing physician for twenty-eight years, began testimony for the prosecution. To the question “What experience have you had in the examination of the sexual organs of females?” he answered carefully, if not very precisely, “I have had considerable experience professionally [my emphasis).” Dr. Taylor had examined Lillie not once, but three times—an odd circumstance in and of itself if, as he intended to convey, the state of her virginity was such an open-and-shut matter.

  The first “evidence” Dr. Taylor referred to was “the general appearance of the person.” Presumably, a demure manner, modest attire, and an air of respectability could weigh in favor of virginity. In turning to the more pertinent condition of the genitalia, Taylor was an ideal witness for the prosecution. Lillie was not only as virginal as might be expected for an eighteen-year-old, he testified; the immaturity of her genital organs suggested a twelve- or fourteen-year-old. Although physical descriptions of Lillie indicated that she was fully developed and more likely to be thought older rather than younger, Dr. Taylor found everything pertaining to her virginity to be underdeveloped, including her nipples. He produced a litany of negatives: not only had she never been penetrated; she had not had “incomplete or vulval intercourse”; she had not even masturbated.

  According to Dr. Taylor, these other forms of deviant behavior, like sexual promiscuity, changed the appearance of the genitalia. Lillie, however, “had the same delicate tints to the mucus [sic] membrane that are commonly observed in children or young females.” Such medical observation supported the cultural view that “self-abuse,” as Dr. Taylor called it, and whoring, might well be lumped together under a general heading of illicit and harmful behavior. Furthermore, they would leave physical signs that could distinguish the pure from the polluted.

  The judge advocate had a number of questions about the hymen: Was it found in its “proper place”? What about its “tensity”? Was it hard and resisting or in the opposite condition? Such questions seemed to belabor the point since Dr. Taylor had already testified that the hymen was well enough developed “to show clearly that she never had had sexual intercourse.”

  Yet on cross-examination Dr. Taylor was forced to retreat a bit from his emphatic position. Asked outright if Lillie had ever had sexual intercourse, his “clearly never” became the waffling “I think not, sir, in the full meaning of that term.” When pressed by counsel for the defense to answer yes or no, Taylor refused until instructed to do so by the court. He then produced this belabored reply: “I could not say that she had not had vulval intercourse in a single instance within a year or two because that would leave no trace, but as I understand the question it has reference to a full and complete intercourse, which I emphatically answer ‘no.’”

  The closed door was now slightly ajar. Although Dr. Taylor had no intention of cracking it more than the tiniest bit, a speculative person might have wondered: if only a single instance of vulval intercourse would leave no trace, what about several? What about ten? Actually, the cracking of the door was more than enough to destroy the absolute distinction between purity and experience. As far as this case was concerned, a single instance of vulval intercourse on the part of Orleman and his daughter would have been sufficient to confirm criminal intimacy and validate Geddes’s accusation.

  On July 17 Dr. Taylor would be recalled as a hostile witness for the defense—a necessary strategy since he was the only person who had physically examined Lillie. He was then asked to distinguish between a “complete hymen” and a “perfect hymen,” and between full and partial intercourse. He was also asked to define sexual intercourse, which he did impressionistically, as

  those peculiar instinctive movements which take place between the male and female for the propagation of the species, generally contributing very much to the personal gratification of both parties to the act, temporarily, which gratifications are more easily felt than described.

  Lillie’s breasts also became the subject of defense questions. Even among practicing physicians, gynecological information was not widely disseminated, so it is not surprising that Paschal’s attempt to undermine Dr. Taylor’s testimony on breasts was itself somewhat misguided. He posed the question, “Is it not a fact that the breasts of many widows and mothers may compare with undoubted virgins in size, color, and shape to such an extent that it cannot be told from the breasts whether they are virgins or not?” Taylor replied that if the nipples were included, the answer was “no.” The distinction the defense attorney was groping for was between virgins and married women who had never been pregnant: the breasts of a young widow who had had no pregnancy would have been indistinguishable from those of a young woman without sexual experience.

  After the judge advocate declined to cross-examine, the court asked, irrelevantly, “May not sexual intercourse be incomplete as to penetration and yet be followed by impregnation”? As testimony on virginity proceeded, questions asked by the court sharply increased.

  The defense was attempting to set up Dr. Taylor’s testimony so that it could be assailed by the defense’s own expert witnesses. Dr. George Cupples, described as having “an extensive practice in female diseases,” immediately disputed Taylor’s definitio
n of virginity. When asked to state its “anatomical signs,” he invoked both “the highest authorities” and the “general opinion of the profession” to assert that there were none that could be regarded as conclusive: “In other words, that any one of the signs alone is fallacious.” 25 He was happy to expand upon his iconoclastic views at length, testifying that the clitorises of prostitutes may be of an exaggerated size or abnormally small. No doubt he had the military experience of the court in mind in giving another answer:

  Q: Is it possible for a crescentic shaped hymen to entirely close the orifice of the vagina?

  A: No. It bears absolutely to the vagina the same relation that a wad would with a piece cut out of it, with the bore of a barrell of a gun.

  The judge advocate made a weak effort to cross-examine Cupples by demanding the names of some of the “highest authorities” the doctor had referred to. These being readily provided, he asked no further questions. Not so the court, which was obviously intrigued by the possibilities opened up by this witness’s testimony. Members asked Cupples question after question, including the key question that Paschal had attempted in his cross-examination of Dr. Taylor: