Edward O. Heinrich

Arbuckle’s “girlie,” Kate Brennan

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Imagine, if you will, having a little editorial voice in the back of your mind, looking over the first 300 manuscript pages and complaining about the size of my tableau,

“Why are you painting the ‘Creation’ around a clown?”

I will let that question hang there and discuss one of the pleasures of my work, exorcising the devils in the details, which the 300-page trade paperback standard can easily overcome by cutting the problems out the way one might cut out a worm hole in an apple. (I get to oranges below.)

I am currently revising my treatment of the First Arbuckle trial of November–December 1921 and, at this writing, beginning the chapter on the various defense witnesses, including Kate Brennan. There is no photographs of her and I wish there was to do her more justice.

Miss Brennan had originally been slated to testify for the prosecution—and to corroborate the testimony of a fellow chambermaid, Josephine Keza. Both had been assigned to the 12th floor of the St. Francis Hotel on September 5, 1921, and heard what the prosecution alleged were the cries of Virginia Rappe emanating from room 1219 both during and after being alone with “Fatty” Arbuckle. The prosecutors expected Miss Brennan to repeat her initial statement made to Assistant District Attorney Milton U’Ren on September 16. The gist is in her cross-examination from the second trial. “What is a matter with her?” exclaimed. “Is she spifflicated?” (the italicized word 1920s slang for being very drunk).

And I said, “What is it, a booze party? She [Keza] says, “I don’t know.” And I said, “What is it, a booze party? She had got on a glorious one. Who is she anyhow?” She says, “I think it is a movie crowd.” And I said, “Well, is that going on long? We ought to tell the inspectress.” She said, “I think it is a movie crowd,” and with that I saw Mr. Arbuckle and another gentleman come out and ask to be let into 1221, from 1220. I said, “Of course it is a movie bunch, there goes Fatty Arbuckle.”[1]

Eventually, Arbuckle’s lawyers encouraged Brennan to testify for the defense. Incredibly, in her testimony of November 23, Brennan stated that she entered the Arbuckle suite just before 4:00 p.m. and after Rappe had been removed to another hotel room. Then she proceeded to clean the entire suite while the party went on around her. But Arbuckle had her start in 1219. Not only did Brennan change the bedclothes and turn over the mattress on the bed—where Rappe had been found in agony, suffering from a ruptured bladder—the chambermaid also wiped off all the woodwork with a cheesecloth.

The comedian’s lawyers faced a very real problem in that Milton U’Ren had engaged the criminologist Edward O. Heinrich.[2] He had found fingerprints that, based on his comparison, matched those of Arbuckle and Rappe on 1219’s exit door. Given how thoroughly Brennan wiped down the door, those fingerprints should not have been there. The implication, of course, was that Heinrich faked them.

Naturally, I wanted to do a close reading of Brennan’s testimony—and not just dwell on that wonderfully authentic period word “spifflicated.” She had a few interactions with Arbuckle that suggest just how spifflicated he was as his Labor Day party sailed into the late afternoon. But there was one word, three letters long, that made it very hard to parse what he was trying to convey to her when he offered her a drink as she worked in 1219.

Throughout her cross-examination, Brennan revealed snatched of her small talk with the comedian. Obviously, he was very jolly about getting Virgina Rappe well behind him. When Arbuckle stepped into 1219 at one point—“lunged” is the other word she used—he gave the chambermaid a generous tip, adjusted for inflation, and prefaced with “This is for you, little girlie.”

That may sound like an endearment for 1921. Yet it was no less demeaning then as now to say to a woman who was fifty years old, which was hardly the “new thirty.” People often looked older a century ago—and Arbuckle would rub that in as the prosecutor took interest in this largesse.

Q. Now, when you say he tipped you, what did he do?

A. He just gave me two dollars and half.

[. . .]

Q. And did he say anything else to you at that time?

A. Then he went out into room 1220 and he was fooling, dancing up and down there, and he came back and he stood with his shoulder up against the door of 1219, and he had a glass in his hand, and broken ice, it sounded like ice, and a straw, and he said, “With that map, would you have a drink of whiskey?”[3]

“I don’t when I work,” Brennan continued. Now, take a closer look at this other italicized word. It is “mat” in the first trial transcript. Normally, I would accept that, thinking it was short for mattress? After all, Arbuckle’s “punch list,” so to speak, included the wet bed in which Rappe was found after he opened the locked door between 1219 and 1220. And, at his behest (“Girlie, turn that mattress over, will you, please? The last girl that slept on that bed had a weak stomach.”), I thought that Arbuckle may have been impressed by her feat of strength. 

In certain contemporary reportage, however, Arbuckle is quoted as saying “With that map,” which is corroborated by Brennan during the second trial, when the court reporter had a better ear. “Map,” however, doesn’t quite have much context to work with unless you realize that it’s short for something too, for a common expression, one especially applicable to longtime alcoholics. Arbuckle meant that Brennan’s face resembled “the map of the world,” for its lines and broken blood vessels. 

I have more on Kate Brennan. Like other witnesses, especially those for Arbuckle’s defense, while they might have scored points with the reporters covering the trial (they tended to favor Arbuckle to a man), Brennan may have taken an offer she could not refuse. She had a past that could be used against her. Indeed, her job at the St. Francis Hotel was one in a series of second chances. She had just started in late July 1921, this after just two weeks at the Hillcrest Apartments. Before that she had worked in an industrial laundry, the Key Route Inn in Oakland, the Fairmount Hotel, and so on.

The year before, in 1920, Brennan was still an inmate of the California State Mental Hospital for Women at Stockton and there was at least one incident in her past that would explain her being institutionalized. In 1904, at the age of thirty-three, Miss Brennan had been arrested for desecrating the interior of St. Brigid’s Church in the Russian Hill neighborhood, where she had lived all her life and was a parishioner. On three previous occasions, she had tossed lamp oil at the walls and Stations of the Cross. She had also pushed over flower vases. The pastor, however, with whom she had quarreled, believed she suffered from “dementia” and could not help herself. Then she did something not only outrageous but newsworthy. She took a club to a statue of the Blessed Virgin—but the only breakage she accomplished was the leg she broke when she jumped out of a window while being pursued by the church sexton.

* * *

The next witness for the defense, Lois Harding Lancashire, while a minor one, came forward on her own to say that she was in room 1218 during the course of the party and heard nothing untoward from room 1219. She wrote a letter to the hotel management, incidentally, not to the District Attorney, Instead, Arbuckle’s lawyers enlisted Mrs. Lancashire to take down the other chambermaid, Mrs. Keza, who heard the voice of a man tell a woman to “Shut up!” as she pleaded “O my God!” over and over. The prosecutors wanted to think this was Arbuckle abusing Rappe.

But why would a society woman, ostensibly escorting her daughter to a convent school, want to help Arbuckle and testify at all three trials?

That remains to be seen. But her husband was one of the largest orange growers in Tulare County and the exclusive purveyor of citrus fruit for the St. Francis Hotel, which “only served the finest Unabest oranges.”

This might have something to do with his business and the San Francisco investors who financed his new packing house.

[1] People vs. Arbuckle, Second Trial, “Testimony of Kate Brennan,” 1438.

[2] E. O. Heinrich subject of Kate Winkler Dawson’s American Sherlock (Putnam, 2020), which is the only book about one of the witnesses who testified at all three Arbuckle trials. I have reached out to her . . .

[3] People vs. Arbuckle, First Trial, “Testimony of Kate Brennan,” 1159ff.

Developing a few latent impressions: another note on E. O. Heinrich’s testimony

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“The American Sherlock takes the stand,” published here last August, is still quite informative about the pioneer criminologist Edward O. Heinrich. This new note simply shares some first impressions after reading his testimony in the transcripts of People vs. Arbuckle. These show how the science of dactyloscopy—of taking and identifying fingerprints—contributed to the prosecution of Roscoe Arbuckle for causing the death of Virginia Rappe. They also invite a long-overdue reinvestigation.

Heinrich obviously relished the opportunity to explain what fingerprints were, that the pattern of ridges in the form of loops and whorls on fingers and palms were unique to every person from cradle to grave. He explained how fingerprints were lifted from a surface and compared to those taken from a living or dead subject. Heinrich even lectured the jurors on the history of fingerprints. He also described how fingerprints were developed using aluminum powder and the tedious process of using different kinds of microscopes, enlarging photographs, and performing mathematical computations to rule out any doubt. Ultimately, the process came down to probability and points of similarity. Ten or more points were considered a match, based on Scotland Yard’s standard adopted by the identification bureaus of virtually every American police department.

Heinrich also described his work in various police departments, his summer session lectures at the University of California-Berkeley, his memberships in applicable professional organizations, and so on. He provided a list of books by fingerprint “authorities.” But, like many criminologists in the early twentieth century, fingerprint analysis was not his specialization. More often than not, these early practitioners were called upon to analyze handwriting samples. Nevertheless, for Heinrich, a proper criminologist had to make the jump from examining the downstroke of a lowercase f, say, and the hypnotic whorl in a fingertip.

Such evidence wasn’t new to American courts in 1921. Police departments, federal and state governments, even businesses were collecting and keeping fingerprint files. But to the layperson, the science behind them was almost as controversial as natural selection. To criminal defense lawyers and defendants, circumstantial fingerprint evidence was hard to overcome if jurors found it convincing.

Heinrich—and the assistant district attorney who was his handler, Milton U’Ren—had to convince juries that he had been long at work on his own methodology and that fingerprints were hardly a sideline for him. He was presented as a professor, even though he his real title was lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley. He reeled off everything he had done professionally, including taking the fingerprints of enemy aliens during the First World War. He also conducted many experiments, including the application and detection of fake fingerprints. But Heinrich’s work on identifying the faded latent fingerprints of Roscoe Arbuckle and Virginia Rappe on a hotel door was his first real test as an expert witness. The defense quickly apprehended this and that he was mostly self-taught. They pulled out all the stops to discredit not only his findings but his person as well.

During the first trial, Arbuckle’s chief counsel, Gavin McNab, tried to convince the jury that the fingerprints were “spooks,” inferring that criminologists who dealt in fingerprints were as phony as Victorian spiritualists. McNab and his colleagues also never missed a chance to note that Heinrich wasn’t a tenured professor, forcing him to admit that he was only a lecturer at Berkeley.

The defense lawyers scored points with the press for their entertaining cross-examinations, which turned Heinrich into an “egghead”—his pattern baldness made him look the part. But after the first trial ended in a hung jury, in part due to Heinrich’s thoroughness in revealing that room 1219 had not been thoroughly cleaned and wiped down, new tactics were adopted in the second trial.

Arbuckle’s longtime personal lawyer, Milton Cohen, took over grilling Heinrich. He was better prepared. He had pored over the literature and cleverly cherrypicked paragraphs to assert that Heinrich had violated protocols and standards in taking fingerprints, photographing them, and developing them using aluminum powder. The most heinous thing that Heinrich and the prosecution did was not handing over the hotel room door to the police and storing it in the property (i.e., evidence) room. This line of attack, however, only revealed that the district attorneys didn’t trust the police, that some members of the department, even the chief, were cooperating with Arbuckle’s lawyers. (Heinrich also disclosed that he had been followed in the St. Francis Hotel.)

Other avenues of attack included the way that Heinrich glibly introduced his assistant and secretary, Salome Boyle, a senior at Berkeley, to the St. Francis deskman. Heinrich called her “my Watson,” implying that he was some sort of Sherlock Holmes. But Heinrich wasn’t being vain but rather self-deprecatory, indeed, self-conscious of his own appearance and what he looked like in the company of a young woman. Cohen also tried to bait Heinrich with an insinuations that wasn’t reported in the newspapers: the seeming impropriety of a professor locking himself away with a coed in a hotel bedroom well into the night, leaving the jurors to think she couldn’t just be there to hold his flashlight.

Heinrich attempting to deflect misspeaking about Miss Boyle at the third Arbuckle trial. (Courtesy of the San Francisco Public Library)

The alleged “struggle” between Arbuckle and Rappe, entirely based on circumstantial evidence, was an important theme in the unsuccessful prosecution of the comedian. Most books about the Arbuckle case place little credence in Heinrich’s work. But, given today’s sophisticated scanning technology and computer analysis, perhaps a latter-day criminologist might stress test Heinrich’s results. It would provide a puzzle piece that certainly would force one to take every version of events apart and start over again.

The American Sherlock takes the stand

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The criminologist Edward Oscar Heinrich (1881–1953) was an expert witness enlisted by the prosecution for People vs. Arbuckle. He was pitted against Roscoe Arbuckle’s chief counsel, Gavin McNab, and rebuttal witnesses, all rival experts drawn, for the most part, from Los Angeles.

The following passage is from our working draft, a narrative that covers Heinrich’s first appearance on the stand in November 1921.

Repainting Room 1219

Heinrich also discussed in a previous blog entry about the way to properly “see” room 1219 of the St. Francis Hotel on September 5, 1921.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” in which Sherlock Holmes solves a murder by using his magnifying glass to compare the wax impression of a thumb to a thumb stain on a wall, was inspired by a real crime. A decade earlier, in 1892, a young Argentinian woman murdered her two children so that her boyfriend would marry her. Instead, she became the first person convicted of a capital offense based on a finger print, a single bloody thumb mark left on a wall. But this revolutionary way of solving crimes had begun even earlier, when, ironically, two Indian civil servants needed a way to identify people of color in criminal cases for the British Raj because “they all look alike.” This became the Henry system of finger print classification that was adopted by Scotland Yard and subsequently by police departments in the United States during the first decade of the twentieth century.

In 1910, the first American criminal case to be decided solely on the basis of finger print evidence occurred when Thomas Jennings, an African American, was convicted for the murder of a white homeowner during a botched burglary attempt. For the next ten years, police departments in the United States further perfected their methods of finger print identification—dactyloscopy—and the routine taking of finger prints from criminal suspects and crime scenes.

By 1920, finger print evidence became as much a sensation as DNA evidence is today in solving seemingly unsolvable crimes, especially when there was no other witnesses than the alleged perpetrator, as in the case of Roscoe Arbuckle. Proving that he had fatally injured Virginia Rappe provided a challenging test of the scientific method and the District Attorney of San Francisco took advantage of what was then the epicenter of modern criminology and forensics just across the bay at the University of California in Berkeley.

The first Chief of Police of Berkeley, California, August Vollmer, was already known around the world for his progressive innovations in creating one of the first modern police forces in the country. He had also encouraged the University of California to establish the first program in criminology in the United States, where Brady’s expert witness, Edward O. Heinrich, was hired as the first lecturer in 1919.

Known as “Oscar” to his friends and students, Heinrich started out as a self-trained pharmacist in his native Tacoma, Washington. With nothing but a high school diploma, he earned a degree in chemistry at Berkeley as a special student in 1908.

edward_o_heinrich_portraits_photo_1

Edward O. Heinrich, ca. 1919 (Carnegie Library, Denver)

Over the next decade, Heinrich worked as a chemist in Tacoma, a police chief in Alameda, California, and as the city manager of Boulder, Colorado. He returned to Berkeley in 1919 at the invitation of Chief Vollmer to take over the laboratory of the late Theodore Kitka, a handwriting expert and authority on inks and ink stains. Kitka, obsessed with freeing Tom Mooney from prison for the 1917 Preparedness Day bombing, had made important strides in the science of finger print analysis—and Heinrich continued this work.

For Kitka, Heinrich, and other handwriting experts, going from the loops of and downstrokes of a subject’s handwriting to the loops, whorls, and tent arches of finger print analysis was a logical progression. Both disciplines required a practiced eye, patience, an inquiring mind—and a good microscope. In his advertisements in San Francisco’s legal newspaper, The Record, he billed himself as a “Legal Chemist and Microscopist.”

Heinrich’s work had made news when William Hightower was arrested for the kidnapping and murder of a Catholic priest in August 1921. He had shown the court how the word “tuberculosis,” stenciled on Hightower’s tent to ward away the curious from his campsite, was obviously the work of a cake decorator—and matched the lettering of a ransom letter for the dead priest. Although Hightower was a drifter, he was also an itinerant baker. As further proof, Heinrich employed soil analysis, forensic geology, and the microscopic examination of rope and tent fibers as well as nicks on Hightower’s pocketknife.

While Heinrich was still involved in the Hightower case, he was already at work in the Arbuckle suite and had two doors from 1219—the one that connected to the hotel corridor and the one innermost door of the two that connected to room 1220—removed and taken to his Berkeley lab. In a matter of days, between September 17 and 21, he had a general idea that a crime had been committed in the room based on enlargements of finger prints of Arbuckle and Rappe taken by the San Francisco Police.

That the Arbuckle case was Heinrich’s first as a finger print expert wasn’t lost on the defense team but he had to be taken seriously in another way, given that high-profile cases involving finger print evidence were being lost by criminal defense lawyers. Juries that had an ear for the Cross of Gold oratory of the 1890s were now being swayed by science in the courtroom. Nevertheless, a William Jennings Bryan could still beat evolution at the Scopes Monkey Trial—and McNab could be said to have had it easier than his fellow Democrat did in 1925. Milton U’Ren, relying on finger prints alone, was no Clarence Darrow in 1921—and Heinrich was no Darwin. The scientist from Berkeley resembled a solemn-looking young man with a high-forehead and lock of hair falling over it. He spoke in a quiet and reasoned voice, as though to a room full of students rather than jurors already growing bored with the trial, already making up their minds.

Shortly after the Tuesday afternoon session convened, the bailiffs moved two oblong objects, covered with sheets, from behind Judge Louderback’s desk. Spectators gaped at them, including the jury as they filed in and took their seats in the jury box. An easel was set up to display enlarged photographs and placards. Matthew Brady himself, for the first and only time, conducted the examination after Heinrich was sworn in. But reporters barely noticed the rare appearance as the chief prosecutor ceded the floor to the man who had made it possible to visualize what happened in room 1219 on the afternoon of September 5.

Heinrich described himself as a “consulting criminologist,” according to Oscar Fernbach, “declaiming to the jury his many accomplishments like some Pied Piper of Hamelin.” But what Heinrich had learned from room 1219 was extensive and as yet unknown to everyone save the prosecutors. They wouldn’t see the hundreds of notes and equations for probability distribution that Heinrich had made. He had also identified many of the hairs found in room 1219. Under the microscope, he could tell which ones came from men and women, which had been “barbered” or pulled out by the root.

He had pored over her clothes in the evidence room and his lab in Oakland. The “sport suit,” as he called her green outfit, had been torn in various ways. The left arm of her green coat had been torn at the seam for a distance of five inches. The cuff links had been torn out of their cuffs, one of which hung by a few threads. The right sleeve of her shirtwaist had been ripped to the elbow from the back. The white silk underpants of Rappe’s “teddy bear” had been torn down the left side. In his final notes, Heinrich had no opinion about the clothes that Rappe wore into room 1219.

Heinrich had found some stains on the double bed’s quilted pad. Most of these he described these as “seminal in character” but had passed through the hotel’s laundry. When he turned the quilt over, however, he found a fresh blood stain one-quarter of an inch in diameter and near it a semen stain about three-fourths of an inch long and almost as wide. But he decided that these couldn’t be attached to the case even though he suspected a maid had just turned the mattress pad over.

One of the doors that Heinrich had brought from the hotel to his laboratory and to the courtroom was the outer door from room 1220 to 1219. He had found the impressions left by Maude Delmont’s shoes. He found scuffs from their toes but, more importantly, the impressions left by the nails and center screws of her French heels. After he conducted his own test with the shoes, strapping them to wooden handles so that they could be pounded like hammers in doors that were, like those of Arbuckle’s suite, either oak or birch. These tests revealed that Maude Delmont had kicked the door as she had said.

By Thursday, September 22, as the preliminary investigation got underway, Heinrich met with Brady, U’Ren, and Golden at the Hall of Justice. He had provisionally identified Rappe’s and Arbuckle’s finger prints on 1219’s bathroom door as well as the door leading into the corridor. Heinrich photographed Delmont’s heel marks on the door between 1220 and 1219 and collected hair samples and bobby pins. Semen stains were found on the comedian’s mattress. But Heinrich deemed them too old. U’Ren agreed to leave them out of the case. Lastly, Heinrich found nothing to suggest Delmont’s claim that Arbuckle had ripped off Rappe’s clothes, a hypothesis that the prosecutors let go.

As a criminologist, Heinrich risked being imprinted by the suppositions of the men who would pay for his meticulous list of expenses and his fee. It was a matter of ethics and academic discipline. Given the prints he had taken from the bathroom door and the inside of 1219’s room door and the hair he had found on the floor, Heinrich wrote in his notes as early as September 17, that

the action under investigation in this case may be interpreted as an opening of the [bathroom] door from without by a push of the man’s hand and an increase of the opening by the shoving aside of the door by the woman running out toward the hallway door; the woman at the time standing at the end of a rug adjusting clothing from which hairs dropped.

As the trial date approached in November, the evidence and testimony would be mostly limited to the prints on the hallway door. The conjectured image of Rappe escaping from the bathroom and making her way to leave room 1219 via the hallway, of turning to face Arbuckle, frantically straightening out her clothes and brushing herself off, wouldn’t find its way into testimony—at least not yet.

As Heinrich unveiled one of the hotel doors, he moved like a photographer positioning it “so that it catches the light at the right angle,” reported Walter Vogdes of the Examiner.

Visible on the door was a brilliant coat of aluminum dust spattered over one of the upper panels. He pointed out two hand prints, one on top of the other. Then, using a series of photographs and diagrams, he explained to the court what he believed these indicated.

First Heinrich revealed where Rappe’s palm had been pressed against the door. Superimposed, as though the fingers were interlaced, were the fingertips of Arbuckle’s hand. Heinrich had also made drawings that methodically, mathematically identified the owner of each set of prints.

As Heinrich spoke, a rival handwriting expert, Chauncey McGovern, and Ignatius McCarthy, a former investigator for the Department of Labor, looked on from the defense counsel’s table. They were not only there to observe and take notes for when they took the stand, but as supernumeraries for McNab’s theater of incredulity.

McGovern and McCarthy expressed their disagreement with Heinrich’s findings. They made faces for the jurors to see. They rolled their eyes and shook their heads. Arbuckle, too, got in on the act. In a courtroom caricature, a cartoonist for the San Francisco Call depicted the comedian studying his hand in mock skepticism. Heinrich is also depicted, engrossed by his own demonstration, working away with a drawing on a large sheet of paper.

Sitting next to the cartoonist, the reporter Edgar T. Gleeson jotted down the notes that later described Heinrich stepping from exhibit to exhibit, pointing out the various differences in the curves, broken contacts, lifelines, and ridges of the prints made by Rappe’s palms and fingers and then compared them to Arbuckle’s. With his eyes “peering, hands clasped, and brow rising and falling,” Gleeson compared Heinrich to “a man from Mars” and a “human thinking machine” on par with “Professor Craig Kennedy,” the popular pulp novel scientist detective.

In the end, Heinrich told the court that his evidence suggested the possibility of a struggle between Rappe and Arbuckle, that the comedian had the young actress pinned to the door leading out to the corridor. This theory neatly fit the voices that Josephine Keza heard, of a woman begging as though for her life as much as her virtue, and the cruel voice of the man’s telling her to shut up. Thus, with a ring of circumstantial evidence closing around the defendant, Matthew Brady handed Heinrich over to Gavin McNab for cross-examination.

The defense counsel didn’t take long to get to a simple question.

“If that door had been wiped would not these finger prints have been obliterated?”

“Surely,” answered Heinrich.

“They can be rubbed out, can’t they?” McNab continued. “Otherwise, in a long period of time, I suppose they would protrude into the room. They don’t have to be taken off with an axe, do they?”

Despite McNab’s sarcasm, Heinrich gave him a proper answer. He said the finger prints could be rubbed off. But he had proved to himself—and likely colleagues as well to stress-test his opinion—that prints he found on the door were Arbuckle’s and Rappe’s. He explained that there were thirteen points of identification in the prints of the dead girl’s fingers and seventeen in those of the defendant. The chances of her finger prints being duplicated by another woman were 393,000 to 1. The chance of any man having the same points as Arbuckle were 3,300,00 to 1.

The urodynamics of the Arbuckle case

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Consideration and respect for the female is all but universal in the sexual relationships of the animals
below man; it is only at the furthest remove from the “brutes” among civilized men that sexual
“brutality” is at all common.

—Havelock Ellis

Bladder rupture, the most consequential event leading to the death of Virginia Rappe, is a rare occurrence when cystitis is the cause. Other variables are needed and cystitis is a wide and generic term. In cases of interstitial cystitis (IC), a type of bladder pain syndrome (BPS), the cause is still unknown. But for a rupture to occur there must be urine retention and bladder distention as well as reduced bladder capacity due to unknown etiology, and so on.[1]

When it happens, the rupture occurs at the vault or the junction of the superior and posterior walls—i.e., the site of Rappe’s injury. The defense in the Arbuckle trials hoped to convince the jury that hers was a rare case, an exotic bladder wall disease or a spontaneous rupture, that happened by chance on September 5, 1921, at a party given by Roscoe Arbuckle and his friends at the St. Francis Hotel. The defense didn’t need to be too exacting about how likely one of those scenarios was — they merely needed to introduce doubt about the theory that Roscoe Arbuckle contributed to the rupture. They also implied that Rappe was sexually promiscuous at an early age and had been pregnant in her early teens, subtly characterizing her as a “fallen woman,” and their client had simply happened upon her in his bedroom after the rupture had occurred due to natural causes. 

Arbuckle’s lawyers found physicians in San Francisco for authority and physicians in Chicago who would state for the record that they treated or may have treated Virginia Rappe between 1908 and 1914. Truly exotic conditions, such as tuberculous cystitis weren’t mentioned during the three trials. Because it was never mentioned in the trial transcripts or newspaper coverage, they almost certainly didn’t know that Rappe’s mother, Mabel Rappé[2], had died of tuberculous lymphadenitis (also known as tuberculous adenitis or by the traditional names scrofula and the “king’s evil”). Having mentioned such a thing would have either strengthened the defense’s argument or further confused jury members who were tasked with distilling a variety of anatomical descriptions and medical conditions in their effort to find the truth.

Tuberculous lymphadenitis is the most common form of the tuberculosis infection that appears outside the lungs, which presents as a swellings and ulcerations in neck from infected lymph glands. Virginia Rappe, as an adolescent, would have been exposed to TB. The third most common is genitourinary tuberculosis, which is often misdiagnosed as a urinary tract infection (UTI) or cystitis. both acute and chronic.

The physicians who examined Rappe’s bladder shortly after her death and later, preserved in formaldehyde for weeks, didn’t see the tell-tale ulceration caused by bladder TB. They only observed what appeared to be a mild form of acute cystitis and that Rappe’s bladder was smaller than a normal human female’s bladder. And, anatomically speaking the tear in her bladder, no wider than a penny, was where it would occur if the rupture was due to a distended bladder.

As one contemporary medical text put it, “Rupture of the bladder usually results from severe crushing accidents”—and this is what Arbuckle’s prosecutors saw as the crime for which they originally wanted Arbuckle tried for murder, not manslaughter. All 264 pounds of him was the murder weapon. He had forced himself on her without her consent and caused her bladder to pop like a balloon.

Occasionally, in the diseased bladder, the pressure of retained urine may cause rupture; rarely this occurs during labor. The initial symptoms are usually as if something gave way inside. If the bladder has been greatly distended, there may be a momentary feeling of relief. Pain in the whole abdominal cavity results. Shock is added, the patient is prostrated and unable to walk. Treatment by surgical means is imperative.[3]

The term “distended bladder” was rarely used by the Arbuckle’s lawyers and prosecutors—even though Rappe, having been locked out of one bathroom in Arbuckle’s three-room suite, had been observed hurriedly walking to the vacant bathroom in Arbuckle’s bedroom—room 1219. The word “urine” also seems to have been studiously avoided during the trials—as if a matter of decorum or to avoid confusion with one of Arbuckle’s prosecutors who bore the homophonic surname of U’Ren. But urine is the bodily fluid on which the Arbuckle case sets sail, so to speak. 

Once Rappe disappeared into 1219, Arbuckle followed and closed and locked the door.

In our narrative, we have to accept that the amount of time Rappe and Arbuckle were alone in 1219 is, well, fluid. Arbuckle’s lawyers pared the time down to ten minutes. The prosecution stretched it to as long as forty-five. If one accepts that Virginia Rappe went to 1219 to pee, she was unsuccessful in accomplishing that.

In Arbuckle’s “Good Samaritan” testimony of the first and third trials, he explained that he didn’t seek help for Rappe because she had only vomited, despite the lack of any reported evidence of this other bodily fluid in the room. In his testimony he also never mentions any sexual activity.

But it is implied by the prosecution that Arbuckle assaulted Rappe, that she resisted, and that his weight caused her bladder to rupture. And for that to happen, her bladder had to be nearly full.

Without saying it explicitly, the prosecution’s intention was to show that Arbuckle didn’t give Rappe a chance to use the bathroom—and if he did—nothing came out of her—or not enough. To the prosecution, any surplus of unaccounted-for time was left to the juror’s imagination. The prosecution made no inference that Rappe did anything with Arbuckle that was consensual. They only saw a clumsy rape attempt and a coverup.

In our narrative, we see the possibility for consensual sex, but also non-consensual, and something in between that we will call “business,” for which Rappe expected a quid pro quo in the form of a career boost, a source of income to replace what she lost after her breakup with the comedy director Henry Lehrman. (That he himself had nudged her in the direction of Arbuckle as a benefactor was discussed in the film colony if not in court.) And this brings us to the most indelicate question from the Arbuckle case that, if discussed openly in the lost trial transcripts, never made the family newspapers: Can the weight of a man during intercourse cause his willing or unwilling partner’s bladder to rupture?

One intrepid medical journal gave this question at least a terse but intriguing answer. The Urologic and Cutaneous Review 26, no. 4 (1922) featured a short piece that reacts to the outcome of first trial’s hung jury of ten to two for acquittal.

Bladder Injuries from Coitus

In a recent California manslaughter case, one of the issues raised was whether bladder rupture could result from a force applied external to the abdomen during coitus. At the first trial, the jury disagreed; a hysterical jurywoman [i.e., Mrs. Helen Hubbard] insisting despite every argument on a verdict of guilty. The bladder is so protected by the abdomen that rupture from any but extreme violence producing concussional effects is doubtful and the bladder must also be unhealthy. Concussional effects of this type would produce extreme discolorations. These were not present in this case. The question is a different one where injuries of the bladder by coitus within the vagina occur.* Cases of this type have been repeatedly reported. The evidence against internal violence was so great that external violence was insisted on by the prosecution. (p. 252)

*Medical Standard.

Where does this intriguing brief take us? What is the author saying?

He (or possibly she) sees the human urinary bladder as well protected by bone and surrounding tissue inside the pelvic cavity or arch. But this protection is lost when the organ overdistended. Furthermore, the author only considers “extreme violence,” which would result in extreme abdominal bruising (ecchymosis) if we are reading this correctly. But he seems to only consider the bruises to Rappe’s arm, not those found on her midriff, thighs, and calves. This is probably because the trial testimony didn’t put emphasis on the other discolorations.

Without a solid reference to the Medical Standard, we can’t investigate what is meant by “injuries of the bladder by coitus.”[4] We can only guess what is meant by the “evidence against internal violence.” (There is, indeed, a wealth of veterinary literature from this period about bladder ruptures in female livestock due to coitus that could lend itself to the human act.) The newspaper and extant court reportage are silent on any kind of sex acts performed on Rappe beyond Arbuckle allegedly slipping ice into her vagina to, as he put it, restore her to consciousness. The prosecution only focused on a rape attempt that they discreetly referred to as an “assault,” and used pioneering fingerprint evidence taken by Edward O. Heinrich to show that a struggle occurred as Rappe presumably tried to exit room 1219 through the hallway door.

While the author of the note acknowledges a body of evidence that supports the possibility that coitus can injure a bladder, the meaning of “internal violence” is left to the imagination and left out of the Arbuckle–Rappe paradigm. What he alludes to, however, isn’t the “honeymoon night” of normal, human coitus in 1921, that is, the ventral–ventral or “missionary” position with the requisite gentle massage that leads to, at least, the male climax. Hence, we must look elsewhere for a source of “internal violence” or a combination of external and internal violence or force or pressure. 

Rappe’s escort to the Arbuckle party, Maude Delmont, as well as another attendee, said that the party got “rough.” That is to say, some men began to force themselves on women. These men were inebriated and partially clad to facilitate sexual activity. The pornography of the day, if it accurately reflects the norms of the era, rarely shows a man completely undressed. They are even shown in their shoes, stockings, and garters as though they were off to work.

Arbuckle, given his size and assuming his intention was to have a discreet “quickie” without interruption, probably would have favored a dorsal–ventral position or, in other words, doggy-style. If he was considerate to Rappe—whether consensual or submissive to her host, a “good fellow” to use Delmont’s term—such a route would have been tolerable, a small mercy.

But haste and other factors must be considered, especially in regard to Arbuckle. He had been drinking. We know from his wife, Minta Durfee, that he suffered from periodic impotence, erectile dysfunction. Any kind of erection only had a certain duration. Courtship, “spooning,” and foreplay were out of the question given the need for immediate gratification. Thus, Rappe needed something to hang onto to brace herself for intercourse from behind, whether normally or Venus aversa. There was the pedestal sink in the bathroom and possibly the toilet bowl. Two brass beds were in room 1219—with sturdy brass rails to catch any fall as well as provide a bolster. The beds themselves had either bedsprings or box springs, which would have lacked the firmness of modern mattresses and were, of course, noisy. Given the presence of the revelers in room 1220 and the atmosphere of “merrymaking,” the rhythmic report of bedsprings would have invited unwanted interruptions to privacy and the concentration that Arbuckle might have needed. But, again, this presupposes that Arbuckle’s purpose for entering the room was something other than what he described under oath. 

The “concussional effects” spoken of above—the pounding, the crush on Rappe and the hard surface underneath her—could have come with sexual climax or the urgency to revive a flagging erection or, given the obstruction of Arbuckle’s paunch, to find and keep inside his “mate” for the duration.

Let’s not laugh at the double entendre here. This could be the real tragedy that Arbuckle’s defense and prosecution had to dance around, that the motion picture industry of 1921 surely didn’t want getting out of room 1219 alive, that had to be put behind them at any cost.

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[1] See, for example, Philip M. Hanno et al. (eds.), Interstitial Cystitis (London: Springer Verlag, 1990).

[2] Her 1905 death certificate reveals that she used this spelling.

[3] “Bladder, Diseases of,” Encyclopedia Americana (New York: Encyclopedia American Corporation, 1923), IV:50. Save for treatment, this article agrees with the medical literature of the early twentieth century and to this day.

[4] The Hathi Digital Library has an almost complete run of the Medical Standard, but we have yet to find what article is cited here.