Murdering Holiness: The Trials of Franz Creffield and George Mitchell (review)

This well-researched volume recounts the sanguinary career of a new religious sect in an opening region of the United States. After immigrating from Germany, Creffield joined the Salvation Army. Soon, however, the Army's brand of Christianity was not enough for him. He gathered a small cohort of adepts in Corvalis, Oregon, who looked to him as a prophet. In 1904, Creffield was convicted of committing adultery with a married member of his sect. At about the same time, local officials successfully used a charge of religious delusion to place several of the group's female members into mental institutions. When Creffield, now styling himself "Joshua," was released from prison in 1906, he reconnected with the members of his group who had not lost faith. At this point, a story of religious marginality became a tale of front-page judicial complexity.

Mitchell was the brother of two of Creffield's circle, the married woman with whom he acknowledged committing adultery and an unmarried younger sister, Esther. Deeply disturbed by the ruin that he saw Creffield bringing upon his family and acting, as he later told the court, upon instructions from God, Mitchell stalked Creffield from Oregon to Washington, eventually gunned him down in broad daylight in Seattle. Mitchell was immediately brought to trial. His lawyers pled temporary insanity, but mostly as a way of invoking "the unwritten law," the extralegal but widely recognized right of a male family member to kill the seducer of female kin. The Seattle jury was sympathetic to either or both of these approaches, and after a trial that galvanized great local interest, it acquitted Mitchell.

Complications abounded, however. Only days before, another spectacular murder took place in Seattle. In this case, however, the perpetrator's insanity plea focused attention on "the insanity dodge," and turned some supporters of Mitchell into supporters of his prosecutors. Nor was the Creffield affair by any means finished. Two days after Mitchell's acquittal, his sister Esther used a weapon provided by Creffield's widow to shoot her brother in full public view. Through devious legal maneuverings, the two women were not brought to trial, but institutionalized for insanity. Both women later committed suicide by ingesting strychnine.

The authors' diligence in tracking details of this tangled story through the newspapers of Oregon and Washington, and a wide range of legal records is exemplary. They are at their best in dealing with the actions of judges, lawyers, insanity commissions, and juries. Their treatment of religious history and the history of the northwest suffers slightly by comparison. For example, they use the work of Anderson to suggest that members of holiness sects were from deprived lower classes, when later research by scholars like Wacker indicated that they were recruited more broadly from middle as well as lower classes.¹ The authors also turn from reliance on meticulous documentation to conventions of modern gender theory to explain the authorities' treatment of "deluded" female religious fanatics. The book as a whole, however, is a fine example of legal research expanded expertly into a model of interdisciplinary microhistory.