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Season Five: Electric Baby Trial image

Season Five: Electric Baby Trial

S5 E70 · True Crime XS
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In Today’s Episode, we talk with author James’ website is www.jamesovermyer.com about his most recent book, The Electrocution of Baby Lawrence.

You can buy it here:

Amazon.com Bookshop.org Rowman & Littlefield Barnesandnoble.com

This podcast was made possible by www.labrottiecreations.com Check out their merchandise and specifically their fun pop pet art custom pieces made from photos of your very own pets. Use the promo code CRIMEXS for 20% off a fun, brightly colored, happy piece of art of your own pet at their site.

Music in this episode was licensed for True Crime XS by slip.fm. The song is “No Scars”.

You can reach us at our website truecrimexs.com and you can leave us a voice message at 252-365-5593. Find us most anywhere with @truecrimexs

Thanks for listening. Please like and subscribe if you want to hear more and you can come over to patreon.com/truecrimexs and check out what we’ve got going on there if you’d like to donate to fund future True Crime XS road trip investigations and FOIA requests. We also have some merchandise up at Teepublic http://tee.pub/lic/mZUXW1MOYxM

Sources:

www.namus.gov

www.thecharleyproject.com

www.newspapers.com

Findlaw.com

Various News Sources Mentioned by Name

https://zencastr.com/?via=truecrimexs

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Transcript

Content Advisory

00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.

Introducing Jim Obermeyer

00:00:49
Speaker
This is True Crime XS
00:00:57
Speaker
So today's visitor is an author named Jim Obermeyer. Now Jim is a veteran criminal courts journalist and legal administrator. He has taken his courthouse experience and he has combined that with a longstanding passion for baseball history to author books in both genres. Uh, his latest book is the book that we're going to be talking about

The Electrocution Case

00:01:22
Speaker
tonight. It's called the electrocution of baby Lawrence.
00:01:26
Speaker
and it revives a notorious murder case from the 1940s. It stayed in the headlines. It gripped newspaper readers from coast to coast. It was truly a national story. It's the account of the death of a six month old, highly disabled baby that could have been an accident. It could have been a murder or potentially it could have been a mercy killing.

Obermeyer's Journalism Journey

00:01:49
Speaker
By day, ah Jim was a reporter for the Berkshire Eagle up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
00:01:56
Speaker
and Later on, he was an administrator for the district attorney's office there, as well as for the New York State Office of Court Administration, which is in Albany. His lifelong interest in baseball included the Negro Leagues, which were the black major leagues that existed prior to Major League integration in 1947. He wrote biography of Ethel Manley,
00:02:21
Speaker
who was one of the owners of the Newark Eagles, and it was called Queen of the Negro Leagues. She is one of 37 black baseball figures, and the only woman from any baseball background elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. I believe that's still true. Isn't it, Jim? Yes. His other works include, am I saying it right when I say Come Posey of the Homestead Grays? Yes. Come Posey was the use was the owner of the Homestead Grays, yes.
00:02:48
Speaker
And that's another prominent Negro league baseball team. He was a basketball star in his youth and he was one of only two people that were elected to two American professional sports halls of fame. um And then you also wrote the black ball on the boardwalk, right? Yes. So that's a history of the black Atlantic city back, Iraq giants team.
00:03:11
Speaker
So there would have been for the 1920s. I think you've also contributed to or written in shades of glory, which would have been a history of black baseball in America. And you were an editor or are an editor of black ball, which is a scholarly journal of black baseball history. Correct. All right. So this case that you have, first of all, it's a great book. I loved it. Meg, did you have any thoughts on the book?
00:03:38
Speaker
I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the way that it was very factually captivating. I felt like I was experiencing the trial as it was happening.

Crafting the Book

00:03:50
Speaker
And I really enjoyed that level of detail when we talk about cases. That is one of my favorite things. like I love following trials. So I have to ask, how did you get wind of this case to start out? Well, I was i went to work for the Berkshire Eagle in 1972 as a bureau chief and an outlying bureau in Berkshire County. and But I really wanted to be the police and criminal courts reporter. I had done that before, working my way through college by chasing ambulances and then going to class. And when the opening came up in 1974, I grabbed it, or they grabbed me or whatever.
00:04:37
Speaker
courthouse The courthouse, the way courthouse cases proceed, it's not law and order on television where things go bang, bang, bang. There's a lot of downtime. You sit around the judges in chambers talking to the attorneys. The judge is probably working on some other case that hasn't got anything to do with us. And so you sit around. And the old timers, and at that point the court officers were mostly guys who'd been around for years, bailiffs really, and some of the lawyers you know would come through and they'd talk about famous so famous cases in Berkshire County. Not that there were all that many of them. It was a small county. And they called talked about the Noxon case. No, that's interesting. So I looked it up and it was interesting.
00:05:31
Speaker
And eventually I started to pick away at it, do a little research. Well, it had been a big enough case in its day, 1944, that the local library, the Berkshire Athenaeum, the historical section, even had, someone had made a card file of every local newspaper article about the case. Three and a half by, three to by five cards.
00:05:59
Speaker
So that was a good start. So I'm slowly assembling my information and doing my regular job and then getting married and raising family. And so this thing sort of cruised along under the surface, writing those other books. But in the process, I got acquainted with one of the daughters of the trial judge, Abraham Penanski.
00:06:29
Speaker
She'd been a reporter for the Boston Globe. She understood the relevance and the value of of documents. And she had the judges um copy of the entire trial transcript in a box in a closet in her house. And she was not going to just toss it out, but she would dearly love to give it away to someone to give it a better home. Well, that was me.
00:06:58
Speaker
Well, that's like a roadmap that becomes like ah a journey to take at that point. Yeah. Well, she lived in a, I'm at the far end of the state, almost to the New York line, and she lived in a suburb of Boston. So on that day it was a road journey. ah The district attorney, Charles Alberti had a son, Charles Jr., who became a lawyer like his dad and became a judge like his dad.
00:07:24
Speaker
And when he became a judge, he had to be a full-time judge and close his law practice. So he sold it to a friend of mine who had been a public defender and then worked in the DEA's office with me and was my, our lawyer too, top it off, not that we gave him much business, but he's fascinated by the case. And he comes to me one day and says, you know, I bought everything, I bought everything that Charlie Alberti had, had up for sale, including this box of documents in the basement ah the of the building that looked like they came, his father's stuff from an auction trial. He says, I don't think I can give it to you, but you can copy anything you want. So zoom, zoom, zoom. With the copier, i had I had memos, I had
00:08:20
Speaker
affidavits that Alberti had signed, motions and and his affidavits and affidavits of other people involving motions. And there were a lot of motions in this case before and after, I can tell you. um So now I've got all this stuff and I start to write, but it's we'll get into it. this This is a case with a lot of aspects. this is not And it just kept coming out like a court reporter hacked trial story and I knew there was more to it than that. You had the you had the fact you had the the the victim was a six-month-old boy with Down syndrome and you had politics involved and you had class divides involved at a time in Massachusetts when that was a big deal. So it was a struggle. I kept putting it down and I wrote the other books and we moved to Arizona and I brought everything in a bunch of boxes and I looked at those boxes in my closet in my office one day and said,
00:09:17
Speaker
you got to write this book. ah So I did. How many, like, if you had to ballpark it, how many pages do you think you accumulated in the research for this book? Well, the, uh, the, the case mistrial partway through and was tried again to completion. So that the the combined transcript is about 2000 double space eight by 11 pages right there. I've got,
00:09:47
Speaker
and I've got two bankers' boxes full of files, stuff that I mostly so newspaper stories, but some other things too, some letters from people that I corresponded with, a few

Research and Challenges

00:09:59
Speaker
of them.
00:10:00
Speaker
an interview try Transcripts of interviews with a couple of key people, particularly Judge Alberti's son, who gave me a long interview in his retirement after being a judge.
00:10:16
Speaker
I know, it' was a lot of it's a lot of stuff, it's still there. Well, I'll tell you what, it shows in the writing. So ah like you mentioned, there's a lot of interesting factors to this story. And I will say this, as far as your writing style, it definitely shows how much practice you got with the other books as you were putting all this together. It has almost a Dickensian feel, like Charles Dickens style.
00:10:40
Speaker
um The setting is almost a character here. like It's such an interesting like old American setting. It almost feels like it's Victorian or like something out of like this like amazing old ah Renaissance novel.
00:10:58
Speaker
and it's taking place and in Massachusetts. Like you said, there's a mistrial. So it takes place over this period of time. It's like everything is frozen for about seven years and you kind of can see it all. Did you personally have a favorite element of this case? I can um i kept coming back. I mean, the case itself, of course, is it's fascinating. There's a lot of scientific evidence, medical evidence, um It's an electrocution case, you know, that's not terribly, completely easy to prove. Not like a smoking gun, smoking wire, but it's a little different. I became fascinated with it by the major people involved. And in fact, for better or for worse, early in the book, I stopped the timeline and I just give us, give my little biographies of these guys because they're so fascinating. I mean, if this was a novel,
00:11:57
Speaker
The hero would be Charles Alverde, the district attorney, who came to America as a first generation immigrant from Sicily at age 12. His father died, his mother raised, but she's probably worthy of a book in and of herself. She raised five kids, made sure they all went to school, sent them off to work to support the family. Charlie delivered newspapers with his brother, John,
00:12:27
Speaker
And he did all of these things and and finished high school at Pittsfield High School, decided he wanted to go to college. Well, the family has barely got two quarters to run rubbpeed together. He goes up to Williams College, which is an elite, I'd say, liberal arts school, small liberal arts school north of Pittsfield, up in the very corner of Massachusetts.
00:12:53
Speaker
This is the family story anyway. It's been told to me and to some other people, hung around the main building and the Dean of the college spotted them and said, so who are you? He says, well, my name is Charles L. Berry. I'm from Pittsfield. I'd really like to go to your college, but I don't have any money. And the Dean says, well, if you can pass the entrance exam, we'll find you a scholarship. So he passed the e entrance exam. He's a student at Williams.
00:13:23
Speaker
He still got to support himself and send money home because now he's not delivering papers and doing odd jobs. So you see a bunch of bunch of different jobs. He he he he manages the dry cleaners and he does you he's a waiter, but his big moneymaker is in those days, Williams would give their students a room, but it wouldn't give them any furniture but you didn't get any furniture. You had to buy your own furniture.
00:13:52
Speaker
So Charlie would buy these suites of student furniture from graduating seniors, store them over the summer, and sell them at a markup to freshmen in the fall. And he made, by his account, about two grand, some of which he sent home and some of which he kept because the next step was to go to Harvard Law School. And he got in.
00:14:19
Speaker
any Completed his degree came back to Pittsfield the first Italian American lawyer in Pittsfield and he handled cases and Got in a got in a business with two partners where they catered to new immigrants with helped them with real estate and other problems and Helped them buy steamship tickets so they could bring the rest of the family over and he also got into politics he was the city attorney for a while, then he decided he he wanted to succeed on his own. So he ran for district attorney in 1942. And Berkshire County at the time was was twinned up with a much larger county, Hamden County, where Springfield Mass is located.
00:15:17
Speaker
and That was the district attorney's district, prosecutorial district. So he Berkshire County is the little part of the district. Springfield is full of many more voters. They're also full of a lot of Democrats and Charlie was a Republican. So as his son told me, I got in a car with him every weekend and we went down to pick to picnics and knocking on doors and clamp bakes and everything you can think of.
00:15:47
Speaker
but he made himself known to the people around Springfield. They held the election and he won by less than 1%. He was the district attorney. This was the first murder case. And as far as I can tell, the only murder case he ever tried. And it was, he was thorough at it. And so he's,
00:16:11
Speaker
He's the guy who didn't let this case slide. This case could have been written off and originally what the night of the death was essentially written off as a mercy killing. And between Alberti and and John L. Sullivan, a great name for a police chief, the police chief of Pittsfield, they resuscitated the case the next day and brought murder charges against John Noxon.
00:16:39
Speaker
most prominent lawyer, one of the most prominent lawyers in Pittsfield and saw the case all the way through.
00:16:46
Speaker
It's interesting, I wondered how you had backgrounded these characters to make them so robust and have so much depth and now you've given us kind of a window into how you did that. You also pointed out like there's a lot of really interesting first in this case like in terms of Pittsfield the area itself and then kind of like for the nation with um this young child dying and it being written off as a mercy killing, and then it coming back and being essentially ah a capital case in some regards.

Character Exploration

00:17:19
Speaker
um The story stands alone, but you got to have all this information about a couple of the characters. How did you approach the rest of the characters in digging into their life? Was it the observations of of who you could get a hold of? Or like how did you approach ah particularly the defendant here
00:17:39
Speaker
And why did you decide to balance them so equally against each other in terms of the story? Because I found them, I found they all had outstanding attributes, both professional and personal. I mean, Noxon even had professional attributes personally, we can talk about later, not such a great guy. But this was the only case in which the DA, the lead,
00:18:08
Speaker
defense attorney, the judge, and the defendant. We're all graduates of the Harvard Law School, only murder case. We're graduates of the Harvard Law School. Well, Judge Penanski, I told about his his daughter giving me the transcript. Her sister, who had grown up to become a social worker, and they told me a lot about her their dad, who was second generation American, the second Jewish judge to be appointed to the Superior Court in Massachusetts.
00:18:38
Speaker
finished his, he was Harvard Law and undergrad. He did his undergrad in three years and then he went to law school. ah And he was following in the footsteps of his father. He became a leader in the not-for-profit public benefit situation in in Boston. he was He was on the boards of libraries and hospitals and he was the president of the Hebrew Free Loan Society He was at his funeral his funeral, the streets outside of the temple, where he's synagogue, where his funeral was being held, or clogged with like 3,000 people who came to get to the funeral but couldn't get in. So that's Abe Penanski was pretty well known. His family was very helpful, even at the point of writing the book, lent me photos and
00:19:32
Speaker
One of them had a copy of the notebook his father, their father kept during the trial or their grandfather in this case kept during the trial. And he scanned the whole thing, 90 some pages, send it to me. Joey Lee was the chief defense attorney. He was a former governor of the state, two term governor of the state and a good lawyer. He's, so it's funny to find out about him. He's, he's, you can crack open several books and find out about Joseph Buell Ely, who was a very, very wealthy man. He had a very wealthy guy whose first ancestor in America came to the country in 1600s and was in fact one of the founders of the city in the town of Hartford, Connecticut. So you've got Blue Blood Ely, you've got Blue Blood John Noxon, whose family came to Long Island
00:20:31
Speaker
not too long after Elie's, Nathan Elie, landed in Hartford. And you've got and you've got first generation Charlie Alberti, and you've got John Sullivan, who's a classic Irish cop, second generation Irishman. So you've got this ethnic divide, which was in fact being becoming very prominent in Pittsfield and in Massachusetts, European immigrants were becoming very important economically and very important politically. So you've you've got to a little trace of that in this trial too. And i can't I can't say that that affected the outcome of the trial, but clearly um there's not a lot of friendship.

1940s Societal Views

00:21:23
Speaker
between us on the tutorial and defense side. sometimes Sometimes attorneys have known each other for years and they get along well, even though it's on our opposite sides. You could not catch that at all from the transcript. In the book, you could see some of the early, I don't want to call them stereotypes, but they kind of are like stereotypical Massachusetts divides. um in the In the politics, with this having like so much to do with all these affluent people and these like early
00:21:56
Speaker
you know, things that the you know now, like this was kind of a foundational time for a lot of interesting, ah like later ah conflict. And we've also, you know, it's a different time for the death penalty. It's a very different time for the developmentally disabled and people with all sorts of disorders, let alone Down syndrome. Was there anything in this story that like, when you read it, it just like shocked you?
00:22:24
Speaker
It was very hard to get my head around the whole business of Down syndrome. I mean, I was perfectly aware it existed, but but the the way the kids were disregarded in those days, and this in fact who was a major, getting over that was a major roadblock to tying this whole thing together.
00:22:45
Speaker
but Down syndrome, chill well, they weren't even called Down syndrome, they were called Mughaloids. and Even the medical experts who testified were, yeah, diagnosed him as Mongolism. he's um and And in the regular vernacular, not only were they called Mongolians, but they were called Mongolian idiots because they didn't have full mental faculties.
00:23:13
Speaker
it's um and And scientific studies at the time said, you know Our statistics show that a ah Mongolian child isn't going to live past his or her middle teens. They're never going to be able to economically or, you know, amount to anything. And there were basically three options. You could keep the child at home and almost no one was advised to do that. You could find what we would now call maybe a group home for them.
00:23:51
Speaker
or you could put them in an institution. Well, the institution in Massachusetts was the Belchertown State School, which had been founded and called in the 19th century and called the, originally called the School for the Feeble-Minded, which give you kind of an idea of how it saw its mission. And it wasn't a very nice place. And it wasn't denoxins, certainly level of place.
00:24:21
Speaker
They were strongly advised not to keep the child at home because they had a 15-year-old son who was away in prep school at the time, but of course he was coming home. And keeping giving a mongoloid baby around the house, child around the house, the the expert medical expert said was a sure path to family disruption.
00:24:51
Speaker
So that's, it's extremely sad. Yeah. It's kind of, it kind of puts in a weird way. It kind of puts the option of murder on

Accident or Foul Play?

00:25:02
Speaker
the table. Like that's going to be a better way to know to to solve family dysfunction, you know? And it was it was an interesting point in the trial. I don't know exactly what the word I'm looking for there is.
00:25:15
Speaker
It's it like, it becomes a characteristic how they, they treat this child. And I had to remind myself several times. This was a six month old baby. Yeah. So I had a couple of experiences in my own life and this story was actually the very first time that I was able to draw a link and I had no idea that
00:25:43
Speaker
children who we now consider to have Down syndrome were so disregarded just 60 years ago.
00:25:56
Speaker
and it Like it was like a puzzle coming together and I was like, I'm so glad that I got to understand that because some of the most fascinating things that I have found are from the early Supreme Court, from medical experts, from and and it was because they didn't know any better, right? They were literally just going off of what they knew at the time.
00:26:21
Speaker
There is nothing about a child with Down syndrome that lends towards any of the characteristics that some of the medical experts at this time were talking about then. And I had never put the two together. And if we don't know that, and no but you know because now it doesn't come up. And when it does come up, people don't know.
00:26:45
Speaker
Like i I had no idea that it was such a stigma. And so I learned that from this and it finally filled in like a little piece of the puzzle I was missing because I had no idea it was an issue. And I feel like that's the, you know, cause history repeats itself if you don't learn the first time. And so with a variety of things, I feel like that that is ah very beneficial to our society to Keep it in mind, I guess would be the best way to put it. I have a question. I don't know if you did this on purpose or not, but ah electricity becomes a theme in this. ah did two Was that orchestrated? like Did you plan that? no one No one really knows for sure, but they said at the time, this is the first case in Massachusetts, a murder case where electricity was the murder weapon. Well, who knows if that's true.
00:27:42
Speaker
But at least there probably hadn't been very many. Not in terms of murder. Like at that point, and most the most electricity cases were accidental deaths. They were accidental deaths, yeah yeah. Well, of course, that was ah that was John Noxon's theory of the case. It was in a household accident. But six months old babies, they're not mobile, really. No. That was part of the problem.
00:28:10
Speaker
um I feel like electricity would not be the friendliest weapon as far as what somebody would use, right? No. well the case i mean So electricity was the means of death, accidental or deliberate. general Pittsfield at the time was a General Electric town before the factories there shut down, employed The town had 50, I don't know, maybe 55,000 people living in it, and GE had, during World War II, had reached almost 12,000 employees. not Not all of them came from Pittsfield, but you can see what a driver it was in the local economy. Knox, a new practice, civil law, was was outside counsel to GE and other electric companies, manufacturing companies.
00:29:07
Speaker
And if you were convicted... He's going to the electric chair. I mean, right all about electricity. Right. Yeah. and Like it was so fascinating. I mean, i I read it and then after reading the book, I came back to it and I was like, ah he did this, he set this all up so that we were thinking about the electricity of it all ah like the whole time. And I found that to be such an interesting theme and arc for the story.
00:29:38
Speaker
You know, we, we've covered, we covered lots of court cases. We do talk to authors occasionally, but like most, the truth is most books don't keep our attention in a way that like, we really want to tell people about it. This one did for a number of reasons. And I don't want to give away anything here as in terms of, I want people to read this book. ah In fact, I really, I was telling Meg this and it pops in my head.
00:30:05
Speaker
when I've read a really good book, I want to see a limited series like with all of this playing out because it's such an awesome setting. And it is like a really well told story with all these sort of ah intricate elevated society folks having to battle out a murder case. And like you don't see that in the court a lot. um and And I think it would just be absolutely fascinating. But do you think that like your personal opinion,
00:30:34
Speaker
Do you think that John Noxon is a murderer?

Jury's Influence

00:30:39
Speaker
Well, I mean, I sat through, I don't know how many trials, murder and otherwise covering them. And I don't, I ever tried to second guess a jury. I mean, they're up there in that room and they, they, they may see things the way different from the way we're seeing them hanging around a courtroom doing our jobs, but there's one There's one thing. And I think that Lawrence's pediatrician was called to the house. He saw the baby dead. He called the local medical medical examiner, Albert England, who came over. And they bought John Knox's story that it was an accidental electrocution because the the lad got his arm entangled in a defective
00:31:30
Speaker
extension cord. Well, John was trying to repair a radio and this is 1944. Radio is about half the size of a VW Beetle. So you would need a light, you would need to get you know down and look inside and all of that. but And they went away and they were convinced and they went away. And England, I don't know if you stayed up all night feeling guilty or whatever, but he flagged Chief Sullivan down the next morning downtown, told him the story and Sullivan went out to the house and was a little suspicious and there was some sparring with Noxon and Sullivan wasn't at all happy that Noxon had thrown the extension cord in the house incinerator and Noxon said, it was defective, I didn't want anybody in the family near it and my wife would be very upset so I burned
00:32:25
Speaker
Cause hey, it was an accident, right? So Sullivan goes to the funeral home and a body, you know, they talk about the take prime time in a homicide investigation is the first 24 hours before people get their stories straight and evidence disappears or goes astray. Well, almost all of that 24 hours had gone by before the police even had a notion of what was going on. And the body had been taken away from the scene to the funeral home.
00:32:57
Speaker
So Sullivan goes to the funeral home and he sees what the jury eventually saw by way of evidentiary photos. The boy has got a burn. He's got burns on both arms, but he's got a burn on his left forearm that is two inches long, an inch and three-quarter wide. The state pathologist testified it was about an eighth of an inch deep. He described getting a good getting a good line in, I guess, before anybody could stop him. He described the skin as looking cooked. And there's no way that could have come from a contact with three or four minutes that Noxon was out of the room, carelessly, as he put it, with an extension cord that had a couple of breaks in it, insulation breaks that were an inch wide or less.
00:33:56
Speaker
And I think the jury saw those photos and i said they said the same thing that John Sullivan and Charles Alberti said, this is not possibly an accidental death.
00:34:12
Speaker
you want you know the this The defense had, ah in a private capacity, their chief medical witness was was Milton Halpern, who at that time was the deputy chief medical examiner of the city of New York, later became, famously became the chief medical examiner. And Halpern testified, and Halpern wrote his memoirs later and and years later, and he thought Noxon was innocent, but he said another in another chapter, he said something, you know, sometimes when juries are bombarded with all of this medical and scientific evidence from both sides, they disregarded
00:34:51
Speaker
because they can't figure out which side is to true side and they seize upon other things. And I think the jury saw that photo of little Lawrence's left forearm and said, this cannot be an accident. And the only option left was murder, manslaughter for reasons. There had been a case, a recent Supreme Judicial Court case that Overturn a manslaughter conviction and when Judge Pananski read through it that the case was only about a month old. He said look this is The fact pattern is the same and manslaughter is not an appropriate Possible verdict for the jury. So it's murder first or murder second. So and the jury said well i'll murder first Yeah, now Would you believe that?
00:35:47
Speaker
having read your book, I think it's possible that he was innocent. And I don't question the jury's outcome either because like you said, they sit through the trial and they make the best decision they can based on the information that's put before them. i I was absolutely fascinated that you put a picture of the jury walking to the court. And that's not how I pictured them to be at all. But it made a lot of sense to me. And so I don't question the jury's verdict and the work that they put into the case. But I wondered
00:36:37
Speaker
if If I think about it, this little area, which I know that they were sort of new in their career, I don't know how far into his career the district attorney was, but I know that this was his first murder trial, right? And I wondered, because a lot of times in life when you're doing very important work, you end up almost being over-trained,
00:37:05
Speaker
And I wouldn't want to second-guess their professional opinions, but there was a little bit to it to me and the way that you told the story.

Noxon's Motives and Character

00:37:20
Speaker
It didn't make me think that ah John Noxon wasn't capable of killing his son, but it made me think that he probably really loved his wife.
00:37:34
Speaker
and with the, even with the alternatives the way they were for society's view of children that had Down down syndrome at the time, like he had alternatives available to him besides killing the child or mercy, putting the child out of his misery, mercy killing, whatever you would like to call it. And it seemed to me like he really loved his wife and his wife really loved him. And it's possible
00:38:05
Speaker
it could have been an accident. And again, I wouldn't question the jury's decision, but the picture that the jury sort of, your impression was that they kind of locked onto that as far as like that couldn't possibly accidentally have happened.
00:38:28
Speaker
and In my experience, babies can do all kinds of things that are completely unexplainable. I didn't see the picture, so I don't really know. But have you has that have you considered that at all? Well, there's I tried to be as even-handed as possible. in fact i tried to In writing a book, I tried to think of you know in writing a jacket copy and PR copy, other there ways to
00:39:01
Speaker
talk about this in a public relations or or a catchy way that don't show how it comes out. sure And then I think, oh, well, there's a table of contents in the front. Never mind. This is too much spy work. ah But yeah, there is, well, i you know I think that the look at the burn turned John Sullivan from a somewhat suspicious but not hell-bent character from somebody who stormed back to the house from the funeral home, and all of a sudden it's clear he's got a murder case. He says, John, not john i john knoxon I think you killed your son. I think you murdered your son. He's just he just like flipping a switch. But the defense, you know, defense witnesses come and go. They get hired, theres you the professional witnesses, the expert witnesses,
00:40:02
Speaker
They get hired, they do their testimony, they leave. And that is generally, you've last you've seen of them. Halpern devoted a whole chapter of this case years later, like 30 years later to the Noxon case. And he still swears that Noxon was innocent. Noxon was railroaded. He was, Halpern was a,
00:40:29
Speaker
A total New York City guy, public public schools, City College of New York, Medical College of New York, worked for the New York Hospital, worked for the city medicals. I don't know if you ever, if you took a vacation, he must have crossed the city line at some point, but he's a New York City guy. And he thought these people from Massachusetts were just barely out of the Salem witch hunt era. They were railroading John Knox. And this is late, I mean, he didn't have to do this. He had tons. of This guy had tons of famous cases to write about, and he devoted a whole chapter to this case. His co-expert witness, one of them was a guy named Dr. Charles Lund, who was on a Harvard Medical fact School faculty, and he was a burn expert. He'd started a burn trial at Boston City Hospital just during World War II at the request of the military, I think, so they could treat burns better.
00:41:28
Speaker
And smack in the middle of his work is the Coconut Grove fire, a nightclub with blocked exits and flammable this and flammable that that caught fire and killed hundreds of people and burned hundreds of more. And all of a sudden, Boston City is inundated with like 300 burn victims. Well, Dr. Lund, needless to say, had plenty of work for his study.
00:41:57
Speaker
So he testifies and he basically buys the the accidental thing. And he's bitter about it later on. He doesn't walk away. there's There are bills filed in the legislature to make it more, to relax the rules of
00:42:25
Speaker
of the defense getting access to evidence, which were very strict in Massachusetts at the time. And Lund testifies in favor of these bills. And he says, I think this, this if this trial, if this case had been tried in Boston, he'd have walked out of Fremen. In other words, you people up in the hills there, you know. um So there were,
00:42:52
Speaker
There were people who insisted years later. I mean, and not crackpots by any means that Noxon was innocent. There's also the thing, he filed for a new trial. i mean everybody Everybody's convicted files for a new trial, at least in a capital murder case. But one of the reasons was They had evidence, affidavits, and the report that had been done by a social worker for the state when there was a through the obligatory sanity investigation going on before trial, which of course showed that Noxon was perfectly sane. But the report was damning. He had a terrible, he was bull he was a bully, he was arrogant. He also had extramarital affairs and he poached on young women and young men.
00:43:44
Speaker
These are things people are telling her around town. And I'm sorry to say that it's a great, her report is five pages long. It's a great example of what people will say when they are granted anonymity. But yeah yeah they also came, the defense also came up with a railroad conductor who rode the trains between Boston and Albany and you know chatted people, chatty guy, no question about it.
00:44:11
Speaker
And he talked to them about the case. What do you think about this case? And they're telling him all this stuff about John, terrible stuff about John Knox. And a lot of which substantiates, well, there's a rumor substantiate another rumor. Anyway, it matches what the social worker had been told. And the defense says, look, we're not saying any of this is true naturally, but that's what people are saying. And so our trial our client couldn't get a fair trial.
00:44:39
Speaker
And of course, Alberti said, well, if this is so bad, why didn't you ask for ah change a change of venue to another county? Well, they hadn't. And the judge denied the motion. But there's this whole undercurrent about not sure it was very successful. If you needed a lawyer for a real estate or a corporate matter or whatever, and you you had enough money, you needed them bad enough, you'd probably hire them. But apparently nobody liked them very much.
00:45:10
Speaker
Um, so there's that, that whole issue was the jury, what is the jury poisoned? I mean, the judge kind of throws up his hands at this and says, they all were, were examined by me. They all took an oath. They all were examined by me on the voir dire to become jurors. And they all said they didn't have any. Extent, uh, preexisting prejudices toward him or anybody else in their contact with anybody else in the case.
00:45:40
Speaker
What can I do? Well, that's a good question. One of the things that um you touched just briefly on was the fact that it was an all-male jury and bringing up the stigma associated with having a baby that had Down syndrome and sort of what happened with the child. and I don't feel like any of those outcomes were good. And they were all in conflict with what it appeared the noxins were attempting to do. right They weren't going to send their baby to a hospital. And they they weren't looking for alternatives at that point. do you think So my my thought was, I wonder yeah how much the jury's own confirmation bias
00:46:32
Speaker
played into, or maybe their potential confirmation bias played into their decision, having put themselves in his place and thinking, well, I would probably have done that. And then I wonder how much, I wonder what difference having a woman or women on the jury would have made.

Impact of an All-Male Jury

00:46:59
Speaker
Well, that's a really good question.
00:47:01
Speaker
and one of the One of the archaic measures of Massachusetts jurisprudence at that time was there women were not allowed to serve on juries. And many states and they the territory of Alaska, dozens of states had women on juries. Massachusetts was dragging its feet. Yeah, it's a good its really good question. Had there been one or more women on the jury, what would they have thought?
00:47:31
Speaker
The men were older during the war. The jury pool was probably average age in the fifties, maybe a little older because the young guys were all, not a all, but a lot of them were in the military. They weren't available.
00:47:53
Speaker
It's interesting because none of the jurors, the judge, you know, gives the obligatory thing when he bids the jury goodbye. Look, I can't tell you not to talk to the press or the public, but you really shouldn't. And apparently none of them ever did. I cannot find anything. But they left behind some evidence of their feelings. And the deputy sheriffs and, you know, my right my my experience was deputy sheriffs can never keep their mouth shut for very long.
00:48:28
Speaker
who Mine too. It moved up the ballots that they'd used and they made four ballots. on On the first one, it was nine for first degree murder, two for second and one for one person who abstained for some reason. And they keep balloting and it moves and moves and moves till finally on the fourth ballot. They're all in favor.
00:48:57
Speaker
It's 11 to one for a while. And finally, it's 12 to nothing, first degree murder. But the only options, nobody voted for not guilty. Now manslaughter is out. That would have been a good escape hatch, but it's not available. No one voted on any of these ballots for second degree murder. Oh, no, I'm sorry. Yeah, it was 10 for first. The first ballot was 10 for first.
00:49:25
Speaker
Nine for first, two for second, and one abstention. No one ever voted for not guilty. No one in that panel thought he was not guilty. They spent five hours wrestling over the the degree of murder. How long was the trial? Well, the first trial collapsed. Right.
00:49:46
Speaker
Partly through a second trial started very end of May and the verdict came back I think on the 6th of July.
00:49:57
Speaker
So it lasted a while. it was ah For for berkshire from Berkshire County or for Massachusetts, it was a pretty long trial. Right. and It was a very short deliberation. oh they they Nobody expected this. The sheriff was making arrangements for the jurors to go to dinner.
00:50:15
Speaker
They were all sequestered at a local hotel. and those That was the way things were done in those days. And the jurors make arrangements for the for the deputies to take them to dinner, and they come back and say, yeah, we have a verdict. Not knowing they were passing up a free meal. I know, right? And like so with all due respect to all of them, there's no way that they thought that they just needed to decide which degree, right?
00:50:46
Speaker
Well, it could happen. Yeah. ah Well, in Massachusetts then and now the defendant is indicted for murder and the degree is up to the jury, which is different, different to put it mildly, but that's the way it is. And and they, they, you know, is there premeditation? Is it extreme cruelty? Is there premeditation? If there isn't, but you know that even for an instant,
00:51:17
Speaker
The defendant intended to murder the other person, then it's still murder at second degree. And they came back and asked that question. What's the difference? whats Tell us again, judge, what's the difference between first and second? At this point, the defense knew they were screwed. But yeah. sure right and they go And the judge explains, reads his part of the charge again and out they go. and then for dinner time they're back with first degree And I guess because it was you know a longer trial, a very short deliberation, it does make me wonder if perhaps it just never even occurred to them that it could have been an accident. Well, and then they were told it could have they were told extensively it could have been an accident. That was John Noxon's testimony. That was Dr. Halpern and Dr. Lunn supported that.
00:52:13
Speaker
as did other defense witnesses, to almost too numerous to mention. to It sounded to me like, and maybe you um have seen some more information further than what was in the book, but to me it sounded like he was very busy at work as far as, it's referred several times at like the trials taking place in the same courthouse where he had been the very day that his son died.
00:52:41
Speaker
making a case, right? And it seemed to me like of all the sort of nuances of what occurred here, he wouldn't have picked that day.
00:52:57
Speaker
yeah i don't know I don't know why that stuck out to me. but he had too good He had two good arguments there in addition to getting entangled in the court. They had part-time, it was during the war, they had a a couple who who lived in, well, they weren't servants this quarter, there was an apartment over the three-car garage, so, you know, they they lived well. But the husband went to work for GE, a defenseing good defense industry job, and the wife left, and they hired an elderly lady to be a housekeeper, but she was only there a few days a week.
00:53:35
Speaker
And Lachman's argument was, why would I do this when the housekeeper was there? why didn't i do it on If I could do it any day I wanted, why didn't I do it when she wasn't there? And he said, yeah, i'd been working i was I was tired. I'd argued a case ah in the Supreme Court the day before, and then I argued and i we had a testimony in a civil case that very day, and I was was really tired. And why would I do it on a day when all I wanted to do was rest after two straight days in court and the housekeeper was there? Well, that's a good argument. Good argument.
00:54:25
Speaker
Okay, i don't want to I promise the audience there's a lot more to this book and you should read it, but I want i want to slide from the book for a second.

From Baseball to True Crime

00:54:34
Speaker
I just want to ask some questions about that about you, if that's okay. so First of all, um you write a lot about hard facts and statistics basically baseball and you cover a lot of history in baseball. What was it like moving over to true crime and covering true crime this way? Well, I covered true crime before I wrote any, oh, he's been a baseball fan and sports fan, but I covered the courts before I wrote any of the baseball books. So it's just,
00:55:12
Speaker
the way this The way the court system runs, it's you know it's it's fascinating. A lot of it is boring. A lot of it is trivial. Well, you know and a lot of surprises happened. Like I've been recovering one case as a sordid family homicide. Daughter was killed and the the police detectives state police detectives who I admired greatly, a couple of them were friends of mine.
00:55:39
Speaker
and ah decided that one of the sons had murdered the girl. The son was defended by a really outstanding trial lawyer who later became a Superior Court judge himself. you know And it was a well-put case that, you know, others someone else could have done it, someone else could have done it. And we're all sitting around there saying, yeah, he did it, he did it. And the jury was out a relatively short period of time and they acquitted him.
00:56:12
Speaker
And I called up the foreman. These are the days when you knew who was on, not only did you know who was on the jury, but you published the names in the newspaper. Those were the good old days, I'll tell you. I called up the foreman and I said, what did you think? And he says, well, I don't want to say too much, but you know, it was clear that somebody else did it. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Do you think they had a person? They have the opinion that counts and we don't.
00:56:43
Speaker
they were just They were just told that somebody else did it. Oh, so they just ran with it. I didn't know if they had a specific person in their mind. um yeah Well, the the I don't remember that much about the case now. It was a long time ago. and and But yes, Bill Simons, the the attorney, defense attorney, leaned reputationally and evidentiary on, on I think, the father or the stepfather. so It's a long time ago.
00:57:12
Speaker
I remember how it was clear the jury was not buying the prosecution's case one bit. Was it a brother and a sister? Yeah.
00:57:23
Speaker
Was it a brother killed his sister? Supposedly. Okay, yeah, I wouldn't have bought that case either. Well, I was going to say I wouldn't have bought that case either, but again, having been on a jury and gone to jury duty, it's very concerning to me. It's concerning because I realize i realize i just it was an experience and I realize that that element of the whole judicial system is yeah our perspective on it or perhaps our hopes and dreams of what it would be may not always line up.
00:58:10
Speaker
know And a lot of things can influence a jury that probably shouldn't, even to the extent that like they're just really ready to go home. And they do take an oath, and that's what the judge can do about it, is give them an oath, right? well And I find it very fascinating, though. That's ah that's it's interesting. It's also, you're right, it is interesting that you used to be able to you know, call up the jury foreman. I mean, now you would never be able to figure it out. It was the only verdict I ever thought it was worth doing. Because otherwise the guilties were obvious and the not guilties are obvious. and this was sure yeah yeah but Most trials are not like, they're not rocket science. You kind of know. no um ah So following up with like what I was asking there, I think I know the answer to this, but
00:59:09
Speaker
Do you have a case, because you talked about this one from the perspective of kind of carrying it around and trying to figure out what to do with it. Do you have a case that you haven't yet done that with, that you kind of hold close to your heart and like you know so much about it, but you haven't yet written about it? No, this was the one. That's what I thought. I figured that would be the case. I liked this thing all the way across the country. What can I say? Literally liked it across the country in cardboard boxes.
00:59:37
Speaker
So its in terms of writing for you, like like what's kind of next? I don't have anything current. I'm doing some back to baseball, some baseball editing, baseball articles. I have a presentation to make at a conference out here in Phoenix in March. I don't know, you know, every time I've written four books and every time I'm done with a book,
01:00:06
Speaker
It's a lot of work and I'm saying, I'm never gonna write another book. And then something comes along. So I wait and see. Yeah, that's a good approach. That's a really good approach. ah Do you find like modern true crime cases or crime cases in general, do you read about them at all? Like, do you find that interesting? Or is it like too much going on in the world with the 24 hour news cycle? um No, I read about them. In fact,
01:00:36
Speaker
I guess because I've been cranked into the Noxon case, but my wife is ah is a co-conspirator here, that 1990s TV series Homicide is back on TV. Yes, it's on Peacock. Yes. We are watching. We are toward the end of and season six with season seven to go, and I liked it so much.
01:00:59
Speaker
I tracked down a the paperback of the original book, David Simon's Homicide, A Year on the Killing Streets. It's 600 pages long. yep It is great. and I'm assuming it. i'm almost to the end We're almost to the end of The TV show, we're almost to the end of the book. I don't know what we're gonna do next. Frank Pimilton was one of the greatest characters on television, yeah um played by the el late Andre Brower. It's an amazing, if somebody's looking for something to dive into over the holiday break, it's on Peacock, it's totally worth it. Absolutely. um Do you have any pets?
01:01:38
Speaker
We have a cat, Terrence. All right. ah Any unusual hobbies, like things that you do that people would be surprised by? I'm out here where the weather is warm and the sun shines most days than not. I walk a lot. I hike a lot. I walk a lot. That's my exercise. I'm trying to do as much volunteer work as I can. I'm one of the people at the Red Cross when you come in, they sign you in. and
01:02:10
Speaker
send you off to the people who draw the blood and and we make sure you get your juice and cookies afterwards. And I work for the community food bank. And a particular job is fun. We're out in a rural area west of Tucson and we have what's called mobile distribution where you people line up in their cars and somebody interviews them and checks them off what their eligible for and writes the code on the windshield and they come down the line by our stations. We give them bread or vegetables or frozen shrimp or whatever that whatever the food bank has put in the truck that day. So I do things like that. That's still really cool work to be doing. Yeah. It's fun. it's particularly the Particularly the picture rocks.
01:03:03
Speaker
Friday morning distribution, because there's a group of us who've been on it so long. we Not only do we know so ah know each other very well, but we know most of the people who come down the line in their cars, too. How you doing? How you doing? Yeah, that's a good community to be a part of, though. like That's a very interesting way to to spend time. ah Probably the most important question.
01:03:25
Speaker
yes What is the best way for people to support you in your work? I'm going to, I'm going to put your website in our show notes so that people can click and go there. I'm going to put a direct link to how to purchase your book in there. But like, what's the best thing that they can do to show you support and, uh, in a way that maximizes it, not just going to Amazon or whatever, unless that's what you want. Buy the book, read the book and leave a review. I, it's, you know,
01:03:54
Speaker
authors have to shield for themselves these days. so but It's a hustle, isn't it? It's a hustle. it's a nice Also, and know if you don't want to buy the book, I'm not offended. Check it out of your local library. this The book has shown up in about 100 that I can find so far. It's one of those things you do to amuse yourself. How about 170 libraries, including a lot of high high-level college libraries and a lot of college law libraries. I figure somebody somebody appreciates this, in the profession, appreciates this story. That's fantastic. And they take the students to do it.
01:04:32
Speaker
And i knew I know with our interview, like we didn't really bury the lead, but we maintained there's still plenty to learn from

Engaging Storytelling

01:04:41
Speaker
reading the book. There's a whole other part of the story. Yeah, there really is. But I wanted to compliment you on, I feel like all of your and your effort was totally worth it. You did factually lay out what happened, and you leave room for the reader to draw their own conclusions from the facts. Yeah.
01:05:02
Speaker
And i I appreciate that so much because it it puts you back in a time and space and you get to experience, which this case is an awful case either way, whether it was an accident or whether he killed his son, you know, a six month old baby died. And so that's not the great experience, but going kind of through the ins and outs of everything that happened in a way that you just know the information and you're You lead the reader to draw their own conclusions however they interpret the facts. I think i really have a big appreciation for that and I really enjoyed reading your book.
01:05:41
Speaker
Well, thank you. I did as well. I love i love smart books. and and this was It had all the hallmark elements of things that are just amazing for me. It had a deep, dark setting in America. And it was it had this whole courtroom drama going on that i I really appreciate as well. I'm so glad that you wrote it. I'm so glad that you were able to come on and share not just a book, but also a little bit about yourself. This has been fantastic for me.
01:06:13
Speaker
Meg, anything else for Jim? you're The type of work you did on this book is exactly the kind of thing that I enjoy consuming. I want to contribute to someday. like Because it is, you know, little Lawrence's story should be known. And regardless of what your perspective ends up being, it you learn quite a bit from it. Yeah.
01:06:40
Speaker
Any other stuff for anybody got any questions before I sign us all off and turn this into another session? Thank you so much for joining us, Jim. Thank you for taking an interest.
01:07:09
Speaker
Special consideration was given to True Crime XS by LabratiCreations.com. If you have a moment in your favorite app, please go on and give us a review or a five-star rating. It helps us get noticed in the crowd. This is True Crime XS.
01:08:15
Speaker
Crime XS is brought to you by John and Meg It's written, produced, edited, and posted by John and Meg. You can always support True Crime Access through patreon.com, or if you have a story you'd like them to cover, you can reach them at truecrimeaccess.com. Thank you for joining us.