Women Who Kill Men: California Courts, Gender, and the Press

2. Good Riddance: Justifiable Homicides of Enemy Deviants

CHAPTER TWO Good Riddance Justifiable Homicides of Enemy Deviants California’s nineteenth century featured several cases in which women, like Katie Cook, found themselves driven to rid their households, if not civilization, of enemy deviants. In 1901, for example, Clara A. Wellman shot her husband through the heart with a rifle, ending three years of terror. Clara Wellman, like Katie Cook, terminated a community terrorist, this time in the San Jacinto Mountains in California ’s inland empire. Clara had married Frank P. Wellman, a quarter century her senior, at age thirteen. Frank worked as a rancher and “was a decent fellow when sober.”1 By the time she was nineteen and the mother of three-year-old Mary, Clara had endured endless physical abuse from her drunken husband. Clara desperately wanted a separation, but Frank ultimately refused and threatened to kill her, their child, Clara’s family, and anyone else who got in his way. In this ranch community tucked away in the San Jacinto Mountains, Frank Wellman had earned an unsavory reputation . “He terrorized the mountain ranchers and their families by riding by and firing a revolver viciously at their homes.”2 56 G O O D R I D DA N C E Frank, like T. J. “Tom” Cook, was an enemy deviant in the community. He was considered “a very immoral man,” whose presence in Orange County threatened the safety of every woman. Cook’s attorney skillfully painted the portrait of the “depravity of the murdered man . . . while the misery of the trusting wife [was] pathetic.”3 So too Frank Wellman “had been a desperado for years in the locality.” Worse yet, he “had been abusing the baby all the morning, choking it until it grew black in the face.” According to Clara, when the baby started to cry, “he started to come in, at the same time calling the baby the vilest of names, threatening again to shoot my —— head off and baby’s also.” Reacting to the threat, Clara “ran into the room where the rifle was”; she recalled, “When I saw him trying to get his knife out of his belt . . . I grabbed up the .22 rifle lying on the bed, and pointed it at him, pulled the trigger.”4 Clara’s aim proved true. Frank L. Trimmin, a neighbor, corroborated Clara Wellman ’s tale of woe. The sheriff and the coroner from Riverside County arrived at the scene, formed a coroner’s jury, held a hearing, and declared that Clara had shot Frank in selfdefense . The Los Angeles Times concluded, “Public opinion exonerates Mrs. Wellman of all blame in view of the dead man’s past character. Mrs. Wellman is a fine shot with a rifle, having handled firearms all her married life.”5 In 1910 Angela Maria De Vita cut down Abele Bove, a boarder in the De Vita home, in defense of her husband and family. After braving long-term harassment and threats of death to her family, De Vita drew a .38 caliber revolver and fired five holes into Bove’s body. “He got what he deserved,” she told the desk officer in the police station.6 In jail De Vita displayed confidence, assured of “acquittal in her trial in Superior G O O D R I D DA N C E 57 Court,” a procedural necessity because of her confession.7 At her trial the prosecution brought “little evidence,” and the press declared that De Vita’s attorney would invoke the “higher law.”8 With De Vita on the stand, a story of terror and intimidation emerged. “Deputy District Attorney Keys paid but little attention to her cross-examination.” The press observed, “The strength of the testimony tending to free the woman was so strong” that the prosecution made no effort “to exculpate Bove in any way.”9 The jury took only three minutes to deliver a verdict of not guilty. De Vita clearly stepped out of a Victorian female role into a male role, using deadly force to protect her family. A 1913 Los Angeles coroner’s jury found Lea Delmon’s killing of her husband justifiable because he had tried to sell her into prostitution. “Without hesitation the jurors vindicated Mrs. Lea Delmon, whose tragic story was reenacted before a sordid crowd that thronged in the undertaking parlor where the inquest was held.” The press concluded, “The...