This Day in Crime History (Death of Jeremy Thorpe, Fallen Politico in ‘A Very English Scandal’)

Dec. 4, 2014—Jeremy Thorpe, who lost his chance at becoming a power broker in English politics when his hiring of a hitman to take out his homosexual lover was exposed, died at age 85 of Parkinson’s disease.

Hugh Grant, who played Thorpe in the BBC One miniseries, A Very English Scandal, summed up, with characteristic wit, the difference between how different countries might handle such embarrassing situations, in a December 2018 interview with Michael Schneider of Indiewire:

“If you imagine a Russian plotting a murder it would probably go quite well. Or a Saudi. Or an American. The Mafia do a good job. But [here] it’s English because it’s such a failure!”

English political sex scandals, to elaborate on Grant’s distinction, differ not so much in number as in kind from their American counterparts. American scandals tend to involve someone at the office (Monica Lewinsky) or an affair that shocks a politician’s “base” (e.g., Protestant fundamentalists—at least, before Donald Trump).

In contrast, English sex scandals involve the Establishment closing ranks—even if not necessarily very successfully—behind one of its own. It all comes to naught when really, really wild circumstances come to light.

In the Profumo scandal of 1963, for instance, it involved a Secretary of War sleeping with a call girl who was also intimate with a Soviet military attache—opening up the possibility of state secrets being shared with the Kremlin through pillow talk.

The case of Thorpe revolved around nothing with such high national-security implications, but it was certainly more bizarre and, as Grant implied, seriocomic. 

It not only involved the head of a rising political party employing the services of a contract killer to off a young stable hand-turned-aspiring male model, Norman Scott, whose services the politico had employed for—er, a rather different purpose—but that said killer botched the job—catching up with Scott on a remote country road, all right, but wasting his ammunition on the young man’s dog, a Great Dane named Rinka, only to have his gun jam when he aimed it at Scott.

Four, maybe even three, decades later, after national attitudes had relaxed, Thorpe might have told Scott to do his damnedest with his account of their homosexual relationship. But, though homosexuality had been decriminalized in 1967, it was still considered political kryptonite. 

At a time when he was maneuvering the Liberal Party as a potential junior coalition partner in the government—maybe even enough to win him a Cabinet seat—Thorpe felt he had to squelch the scandal at all costs. With payments to ensure Scott’s silence no longer effective, he allegedly felt stronger measures, like murder, were in order.

But the fall from political grace was sharp. Having become the youngest leader of any British political party in a century when he took over the Liberals in 1967, Thorpe now became the first British Member of Parliament to stand trial for murder. Having tripled the party’s vote count, he was now forced to yield the mantle of Liberal leadership.

In an elemental sense, Thorpe survived his legal ordeal, in no small part due to the judge in the case, who instructed the jury that Scott was "a hysterical, warped personality… a neurotic, spineless creature, addicted to hysteria and self-advertisement"; that the prosecution witnesses were not trustworthy because they could sell their stories to the press; and that the jurors were entitled to consider the entire career of Thorpe. The jury, not surprisingly, acquitted Thorpe. 

The contrast between a patrician defendant and low-class accuser was as stark in the Thorpe case as it was in Profumo’s, but it could not save either man from the loss of power. 

Even after the acquittal, voters turned Thorpe out of office in 1979. He tried tenaciously and repeatedly to win appointment to another position, but it was not to be, and eventually Parkinson’s sapped his energy and will.

Had Thorpe’s career not gone into the ditch, he might have effected a remarkable comeback for a party that, under David Lloyd-George, had been instrumental in the first decades of the 20^th century in paving the way toward British social-welfare legislation, leading the nation through the tumultuous Great War, and affecting the destinies of new nations such as Ireland and Iraq. 

The Liberals, whose crash in the 1920s had coincided with the rise of the more militant Labour Party, would have stood, under Thorpe, as a potential centrist alternative to Labour and the Conservatives. But it all came asunder with Thorpe's fall.

 

This Day in Crime History (Kitty Genovese Murder Sparks Urban Myth)

March 13, 1964—The rape and murder of 28-year-old Queens bar manager Kitty Genovese around 3 in the morning might have become one more crime statistic in a New York becoming full of them, except that nearly two weeks later, The New York Times gave its imprimatur to a story claiming that the stabbing had not only occurred within yards of her Kew Gardens apartment, but within full view of 38 neighbors who did nothing while it occurred. More than 40 years would pass, with the incident entering psychology, sociology, urban-affairs and criminal-justice texts, before it was established that the basic outlines of this paradigmatic tale of mass urban indifference were, fundamentally, mythical.

How inaccurate was the front-page story? One area resident who made it his business to deconstruct the tale has claimed that the article contained six errors in its first two paragraphs.

(Not much has changed over the years, I’m afraid. About 15 years ago, perusing a Times article about my industry, I counted three mistakes in two sentences. To my knowledge, none were ever corrected.)       

The fact that the piece came to be written and the myth perpetrated owes much to a lunch involving the paper’s A.M. Rosenthal and police commissioner Michael Murphy. Even in his current post as metropolitan editor, Rosenthal was exerting enormous, even questionable, influence on The Gray Lady’s coverage—forbidding, for instance, any mentions of Malcolm X, according to colleague Harrison Salisbury. At the end of the decade, he would begin a 17-year reign as executive editor that might be likened to a journalistic tyranny, marked by rages and sycophancy. Successor Max Frankel was given a telling mandate upon taking over: "Make the newsroom a happy place again."

At the March 1964 lunch, Rosenthal quizzed Murphy about why two men had confessed to the same recent murder. Murphy let him in on another unusual “fact”: one of the two confessed killers, 29-year-old computer punch-card operator Winston Moseley, had participated in another crime, attacking Genovese three times, with not one of her neighbors phoning the police over a half hour of stabbing and screaming.

While the Times had mentioned the murder already in a news brief, Rosenthal now assigned it to a reporter who followed the see-no-evil-bystanders approach favored by his boss, best stated in its lead: "For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens." The paper’s longstanding disdain for tabloid-style sensationalizing of crime furnished even more credibility to the astonishing story it covered now.

One has to wonder why Rosenthal was so quick to credit Murphy’s explanation. It amounted to believing not only that not a single person would come to someone’s aid, but that more than three dozen eyewitnesses wide awake in the wee hours of the morning would decide not to alert the authorities to a threat not just to Genovese but also to themselves and everyone else in the neighborhood.

The Times story had several problems, though the errors got lost in the hullabaloo. First, two attacks on Genovese occurred, not three. The fact that there were two at all was because one neighbor, hearing Genovese’s cries outside, yelled at Moseley, frightening the attacker momentarily and giving the victim enough time to slip inside the vestibule, where Moseley came around to pursue her again. Moreover, one quote from a supposed eyewitness-- I didn’t want to get involved”—was anonymous and, therefore, could not be proven.

But only two or three people had a clear view of what was going on and, thus, exemplified the indifference that was the theme of the Times story. One was an assistant superintendent in an apartment building across the way.  Seeing the first attack, he did not call the police but simply went downstairs and took a nap. The second man, a friend and neighbor of Genovese’s who was drunk that night, saw both phases of the attack. He did nothing after the attack outside, largely because a friend he phoned told him not to do so. Then, after the vestibule stabbing occurred right outside his door, he called a neighbor, who urged him to come over—which he did by crawling out his window, across the roof, and down to the apartment, where he called the police—the second person to do so that night. Others who heard the shouting that night thought it was a drunken fight.

Later that year, Rosenthal wrote a book-length account of the case, Thirty-eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case, in which he repeated the basic outlines of the story. By the time he died four decades later, the case had embedded itself into social-science research as the “Genovese Syndrome,” with all kinds of explanations for why the supposed callous indifference to human life had occurred. In the last 10 years, more in-depth studies (including two current books, Kevin Cook’s Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America and Catherine Pelonero’s Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences) have revealed deep problems with the narrative. If you begin to type “Kitty Genovese” in Google, you will now see sizable results not just for “Syndrome” but for “Myth.”

According to a Huffington Post article from last November, Moseley—now 78—was denied parole for the 16^th time last year, with his next chance not coming until 2015. 

After stepping down as executive editor of the Times in the mid-‘80s, Rosenthal wrote a column for several years that the paper called “On My Mind” but that the satirical magazine Spy dubbed “Out of My Mind.” However, John Darnton, in his hilarious roman a clef mystery about the paper, Black and White and Dead All Over, used an even more devastating moniker for the pieces by the novel’s counterpart to the real-life character, Max Schwartzbaum: “Under My Thumb.” It’s a useful shorthand not just for the fear he exerted over staffers, but also for his thumbprint over the Genovese case.

This Day in Crime History (Alcatraz, Federal Prisoner of the Desperate, Closes)

March 21, 1963—Alcatraz, the maximum-security federal prison on an island just outside San Francisco, closed after 29 years of housing some of the most vicious criminals in American history, including Al Capone, Alvin Karpis, “Machine Gun” Kelly, Mickey Cohen, and Robert Stroud, the so-called “Bird Man of Alcatraz.”

The island had an interesting history before its time as a federal prison—including as a Union Army prison in the Civil War—as well as afterward. (Its seizure by the American Indian Movement in the Sixties brought renewed focus to the plight of Native Americans.) But it was as an especially severe penal institution which brought it lasting fame.

Its 1934 opening as a U.S. prison was born of the need to contain a generation of hardened criminals who had arisen during the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. The remoteness of Alaska had caused that territory to be considered for awhile, but the availability of Alcatraz led Franklin Roosevelt’s Attorney-General, Homer Cummings, to press for that site instead. 

This did not sit well with local citizens who were terrified by the chance that any of these criminals might bust loose, but the government's Bureau of Prisons had its way.

Running such an institution required considerable organizational ability. The warden of Alcatraz for its first 14 years, James A. Johnston, possessed that in abundance, along with a reputation early in his career for outlawing corporal punishment and separating hardened prisoners from new inmates at San Quentin.

Johnson’s record at Alcatraz was mixed. The emphasis at the prison was the severe limits on privileges for inmates, and the comparatively small number confined to the island (never more than 260) ensured that guards knew each one by name, personally, and could concentrate their full attention on keeping them in line. Moreover, suicides of several of inmates underscored Johnson’s inability to grasp mental illness. 

On the other hand, despite its soul-destroying isolation, many inmates came to feel that, compared with other prisons, they would not be subjected to arbitrary punishment by guards. So long as they obeyed the rules, it was generally felt, they would be left alone. In time, they might be transferred to another facility.

Some decided they couldn’t wait that long to get off “The Rock.” Fourteen separate escape attempts were made by 36 men (including two who tried to get out twice). Their fate didn’t inspire confidence in the remaining:

*23 were caught;

*6 were shot and killed while escaping;

*2 drowned;

* 5 are presumed drowned or missing.

  

By 1963, the cold, choppy waters of San Francisco Bay--which had inhibited the approximately 1,500 criminals from making a break for it--had begun to work against its further use. The complex began to deteriorate under the effects of the saltwater, and was not helped by severe budget cuts. 

Those factors, along with the high cost-per-prisoner of the structure compared with others around the country, persuaded Attorney-General Robert Kennedy to close Alcatraz.

After the last prisoners were transferred out of Alcatraz, the U.S. prison stood vacant for several years, as proposals were entertained for alternative uses (e.g., a West Coast version of the Statue of Liberty, a shopping center/hotel complex). 

Its seizure by the American Indian Movement twice in the Sixties not only brought renewed focus to the plight of Native Americans, but also led the government to consider anew how to make best use of the site.

The island was opened to the public in the fall of 1973 as a National Park Service unit, and since then has become one of the most popular in the entire Park Service, with more than one million visitors every year from around the world. 

That popularity has been assured by Hollywood films that keep alive the fort's memory as a lonesome, terrifying place, including Bird Man of Alcatraz and Escape From Alcatraz. The island is also considered an ecological preserve, home to one of the largest western gull colonies on the northern California coast.

(Photo shows Alcatraz from Pier 39 in San Francisco.)