The Massie Affair

One night in September, a white lady in a long green dress reported that she’d been the victim of a horrific crime. Her story transformed Hawaii—some people were outraged, some were sure she was lying. And then her mother got involved.

Read David Stannard’s book on the Massie case here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/291248/honor-killing-by-david-e-stannard/

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Music: Matthew Noble and Stereodog Productions (Dan Pierson & Peter Manheim). Intro and conclusion: “Guilty” by Richard A. Whiting, Harry Akst, and Gus Kahn, sung by Anna Telfer. 

 

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Is it a same Is it a crime loving you
dear like guy do. If it's a crime, then I'm guilty,
guilty of loving you. Hello, everyone, Welcome to another episode

(00:24):
of Criminal Broad's a true crime and history podcast about
wild women on the wrong side of the law. I'm
Tory Telfer, author of books like Lady Killers and Confident Women,
both of which are about female criminals. And I'm going
to keep this introduction short because today's case is a
really long one, because today's case is a really twisty one,
because today's case is full of lunatics, as so many

(00:47):
of these cases are. We're going to Hawaii today, guys,
and we're going to the nineteen thirties, which normally I
would say, isn't that fun? Isn't it fun to be
in the nineteen thirties? Just think how nice the fashion is.
But not today. That's not what I'm saying today. I
want to cite a source I leaned very heavily on
for this episode. This fantastic book called Well. It's by

(01:08):
David Stannard and it's called Honor Killing, Race Rape, and
Clarence Darrow's Spectacular Last Case. So now I've said too
much already about the episode, let's get into it. I

(01:42):
love a good story about rich women behaving badly, and
there are two rich women at the center of this story,
Thalia Massey and her mother Grace. Well, they were rich ish.
They were the sort of rich people who had an
impeccable pedigree, and they were always in mansions, and they
secretly had no money left. And maybe that's why they

(02:04):
behaved badly, a certain arrogance, a feeling like they had
to maintain appearances at all costs, or maybe it was
something darker. But yes, here today we have the story
of two rich women behaving badly, and there are fun parts.
There's a moment in the story where someone fills a
ship full of flowers. Someone else wears a long, silky

(02:29):
fur trimmed evening gown, which is just delightful. There's a
lot of drinking, some scandalous cheating, a bombshell newspaper interview,
how thrilling. And then there are the racist caricatures, the
unbelievable miscarriages of justice, and a bullet in the heart
of an innocent man. Oh yes, it's all fun and

(02:49):
games and champagne until someone gets hurt. And these rich
women managed to hurt pretty much an entire country. Let's
meet ladies, then, shall we. Grace was a wealthy beauty
who was related to Alexander Graham Bell and the president
of the National Geographic Society. She spent her summers in

(03:11):
a house on eighteen acres with twenty six rooms. She
was a good student and an incorrigible prankster, and she
never got in trouble with a law thanks to her connections.
She was a wealthy white girl who was going to
stop her Once she stole a trolley car with her friends.
Another time, she and her girlfriends held hands and roller

(03:32):
skated down a busy street, stopping traffic. Cute, right. Grace's
wild behavior would get less cute as the years went on,
But for now she was young and beautiful and smart
and bold. She gulfed and played bridge and rode horses,
and did it all with style. Grace would have been
president if she had been a man, said her father.

(03:56):
Grace married the bastard son of Theodore Roosevelt uncle, a
spoiled brat named Granville Roland Fortescue. This gem of a man,
who went by ROLLI got himself expelled from Yale for
firing a gun at his sleeping fraternity brother. Then he
went to UPenn, where he didn't make the football team,
and so he attacked the football coach so badly he

(04:19):
sent the man to the hospital. Classy right. Rolli spent
some time fighting in the Spanish American War, where he
got a tiny bullet wound in his foot and went
home with a purple heart that he was very proud of.
He married Grace in nineteen ten and they had three daughters, Thalia, Marion,
and Helene. During World War One, Rolly decided that he

(04:41):
was going to be a war correspondent. It was the
hip job for rich young men, and so he and
his wife left their girls with friends and went to
Paris to do some serious boots on the ground reporting
aka getting drunk with their friends. They were always drinking,
they were often fighting. Their lives may have looked glamorous

(05:04):
on the outside, but they actually had no money. After
the war, Rollly didn't work, he refused to, and so
they hopped around, staying at their wealthy relatives' mansions and
letting family members pay for the girl's expensive schooling. Their
finances got so bad that Grace had to start teaching
bridge lessons in order for them to survive. She and

(05:25):
Roly would split up, live apart, move back in together, drink, fight,
and do it all over again. The girls grew up
in this unstable environment. Despite the trauma of their parents' marriage,
these girls grew up well educated and much more privileged
than most. Marian went to Oxford, Helene married the heir

(05:46):
to the Reynold's aluminum fortune. But Thalia wasn't so lucky.
She had thyroid problems, which caused her all sorts of grief.
She would gain or lose weight rapidly, and her eyes
started bulging out of her head, which is a side
effect of some forms of hyper thyroidism. She started walking
with her head tilted so she could see better, and

(06:08):
she had to wear glasses, which she hated. Honestly, Even
with the glasses, she could barely see. David Stannard, who
wrote the definitive book on the Massy Affair, thinks that
Thalia may have had Graves disease, which is a disorder
of the immune system that makes your thyroid produce too
many hormones. Her bulging eyes could have been a symptom

(06:29):
of Graves disease as well as other things. Later, she
would have a lot of trouble getting and staying pregnant,
and her personality was getting more and more volatile. Stannard
says both of these things could be side effects of Graves. Anyway,
Thalia dropped out of school due to her health problems
and spent her teenage days driving old cars down country

(06:50):
roads as fast as possible, running naked around her relative's mansions,
and drinking heavily. By the time she was sixteen, she
was estranged from her dad, and then she met a
nice young man. His name was Thomas Hedges Massy, and
he wanted to join the navy. Thalia was technically more

(07:12):
upper class than he was, even though she had no money,
so it was a great match in Thomas's eyes. They
fell in love, and the two of them expressed their
undying affection to each other by pulling pranks. Once they
dressed up as poor people and sold pencils on a
street corner. Another time they stole someone's baby from the

(07:34):
lobby of a movie theater, an actual baby. The parents
freaked out weirdly and the police got involved, which was
just irritating, but Thalia's connections got the case dismissed. Of course,
what was the big deal. It was just a poor
person's baby. Some people are just so uptight. A month later,

(07:56):
the baby thieves were engaged and they got married on
Thanksgiving Day of nineteen twenty seven in Washington, d C.
They moved around for a bit for Tommy's Navy training,
and then in May of nineteen thirty, Tommy got a
Navy assignment to Pearl Harbor in the beautiful territory of Hawaii.

(08:32):
By the time the Massies were packing their bags and
heading to Hawaii, Hawaii had been excellently branded in the
eyes of mainland America. It was paradise right, a paradise
full of palm trees, lays, ukuleles. A lot of very
suggestive marketing implied that Hawaii was a place where white

(08:52):
people could go to find a young, newbile, brown skinned lover.
There were songs like when my Hana Lulu Lady does
the Honolulu Dip, and there were advertisements in magazines that
promised white women that if they went to Hawaii they
would find islands full of young men quote clad only
in the briefest of trunks, their fine bodies gleaming like

(09:15):
polished bronze. Actual Hawaiians didn't love this message. One local
matron warned that this sort of come to Hawaii and
find a lover rhetoric could be really dangerous. These women
come from prominent families with lots of money, she wrote,
They come down here and seemed to go crazy for

(09:37):
the time being. As it turned out that local matron
was right, the rhetoric that swirled around Hawaii would go
from cliched sensuality to cliched danger in just over a year.
Here's another important thing to know about Hawaii. Back then,
it was controlled by a tight knit group of very

(09:59):
power full white men. It was an oligarchy and a
blatantly white supremacist one. And I don't mean white supremacist
in a subtle way. I mean these men were appearing
before Congress and talking about the superiority of the white race.
They owned huge sugar and pineapple plantations, and they hired
Native Hawaiians and Asian immigrants to work on them for

(10:20):
wages so low that the US Department of the Interior
said they were quote in the spirit of the slave
And these men would do anything. They'd get involved in politics,
they'd get involved in business, they'd get involved in the
law anything to maintain their white supremacist oligarchy. One of
their powerful white friends once called Hawaii a dictatorship, and

(10:44):
he meant it as a compliment. Thalia and Tommy settled
into an expensive suburb of Honolulu called Manoah Valley. It
was a gorgeous place, with a rainbow in the sky
almost every day. It was almost most exclusively white and
full of Navy people just like them. The Massies liked this,

(11:06):
but unfortunately for the Massies, they arrived in Hawaii right
as the Great Depression was devastating the nation, and this
meant that Hawaii's tourism industry was really suffering. No one
could afford to travel there, including Thalia's friends. She was
only nineteen when they moved there, and suddenly she found
herself alone in this strange place and totally bored. Tommy

(11:28):
expected her to have tea with the other navy officers wives,
and she found this unbearable, so she started drinking and
causing trouble. It didn't take long for Thalia to make
enemies wherever she went. Even the local neighborhood kids thought
she was just awful. She would get plastered and she
would tell people exactly what she thought of them. Once,

(11:51):
when her guests were a half hour late, she locked
the door and wouldn't let them in. She would leave
parties early in a huff. Here's how one of her
friends described her. Missus Massey was not at all liked
and was very unpopular among the navy set. She was
a very peculiar woman and extremely outspoken. If she saw
a woman wearing a dress she did not like, she

(12:13):
would not hesitate to tell her it was a terrible
looking thing. She would hurl all kinds of insults at people,
regardless of who or what they were, and how little
she knew them. She would even criticize the hostess when
she was invited out to dinner, the manner in which
things were served at the table, things inside the house,
and the house itself. Can you imagine throwing a party,

(12:35):
working hard on the menu and cleaning your house until
it sparkles, and then Thalia comes over. She's drunk, and
she just walks right up to you and says that
your house is ugly, your dress is hideous, and the
cheeseplate looks like someone threw up on it. Unbelievable. She
and Tommy were fighting all the time now, and they
didn't bother to hide it. On several occasions, Thalia bit

(12:57):
Tommy's arm in front of their friends. When Tommy was
away for work, Thalia would invite other men over and
have them spend the night. Tommy knew all about this
because everyone in their circles gossiped wildly, and he couldn't
stand it. Once he found Thalia in a car with
another man and he charged after them, punching the man,

(13:18):
slapping Thalia in the face, and dragging her away. Clearly,
this was a failing marriage and Tommy wanted out, but
Thalia was petrified at the thought of divorce, even though
she was deeply unhappy herself. So she tried to improve
by enrolling in a freshman English class at the University
of Hawaii, which she failed. Then she tried an intro

(13:40):
to Spanish class and failed it too. She tried acting,
but she was terrible at it. She tried getting a
job and got hired by actually Advertising Services as a
sales girl. She made one sale in two weeks and
then quit. By the spring of nineteen thirty one, Thalia
was pregnant and it was horrible. She already had one

(14:02):
failed pregnancy, and this pregnancy was no better. She had
preeclampsia and ended up losing the baby. The symptoms of
the preeclampsia didn't leave her afterward. Her body was swollen.
She was deeply depressed. Things had gotten so dark for
her that she went to a psychologist and told him
all about how cold Tommy was to her, how she

(14:24):
didn't love him. The young psychologist was overwhelmed by her problems,
and he told her that she needed psychiatry. She canceled
her next appointment with him and went on with her life.
By the fall of nineteen thirty one, Tommy had started
threatening divorce again. She begged him to stay with her,
and so as a compromise, he put her on a

(14:45):
three month probation, even writing up a contract that specified
how she had to behave She had to change her ways,
he said, otherwise the marriage was over. Falia agreed she
couldn't make a fool of herself at parties if she
never went to parties, and so she shut her doors,
didn't see anyone, and stayed quiet until September twelfth, that is,

(15:08):
nineteen thirty one, when she agreed to go out for
the night. She didn't want to, but the contract said
she had to, and so she put on a long
green dress. She put on a long green dress with

(15:35):
a matching jacket trimmed with fur, a jade necklace, alligator
skin pumps, a faux tortoise shell barette in her hair,
and no glasses. She didn't like how they made her look,
and so she grabbed her green brocade handbag and went
to the party. The night was dark, she could hardly
see a thing. Thalia's time at the party was just

(15:57):
as disastrous as you might expect from someone with a
habit of drinking too much and insulting everyone around her.
Two other couples came over to the Massy House and
they pregamed by drinking moonshine, and then they got in
a minor car accident as they drove to the party.
The party was a raucous, huge gathering at a La
Way inn, and once they arrived, Tommy disappeared into the crowd.

(16:19):
Thalia skulked around angrily looking for him. It didn't take
her long to get into trouble. She insulted an officer's wife,
and she stole someone's seat, and she got into a
huge argument with a person whose seat she stole, and
she ended up slapping that man in the face, so
everyone breathed a sigh of relief when Thalia declared that

(16:41):
she'd had enough and left. It was just before midnight.
When she left the party, she walked towards the beach
on a well lit road. Multiple people saw her. She
had that distinctive walk with her head tilted down due
to her bad eyesight, and she had on that line
green dress. She was easy to remember, and most of

(17:04):
these witnesses saw something else. Thalia was being followed. There
was a white man walking after her, a white man
in a dark suit. The eyewitnesses watched Thalia and the
white man walk off into the night, and then something
happened to Thalia. Ninety years later, we can only guess

(17:29):
at what it was, but what she said happened would
change many people's lives. In fact, it would literally change
the course of Hawaiian history. By then, it was almost
one am and a car full of partygoers was driving
down the road when suddenly an apparition appeared before them.
It was a woman in a long green evening gown.

(17:52):
Her mouth was swollen, her cheek was scuffed. It looked
like someone had punched her in the face. She said,
are you white people? They said yes, She said, thank God,
and climbed into their car. In the car, she told
the first version of her story. Five or six Native

(18:12):
Hawaiian men had just dragged her into their car, she said,
where they beat her up. The shocked partygoers took her
straight home. Thalia arrived home before Tommy, who was still
out partying. By the time he got there, his wife
was crying and dressed in her nightgown. She told him

(18:33):
the story, except this time she added a terrible detail.
The men had raped her, she said. Tommy called the police,
and by the time they arrived, Thalia's injuries had mysteriously
gotten worse. Her hair was messed up and her lip
was bleeding. Now she told the police the same story
she told Tommy. The police asked her again and again

(18:54):
if she had seen anything that might help identify the men,
but she said no, She hadn't been able to see
a thing. The night was dark and she wasn't wearing
her glasses. The only thing she could say was that
they had been driving an old car, maybe a black one.
She also insisted that they had been native Hawaiian and
not Asian. The police asked her this because they knew

(19:15):
white people sometimes confused the two, but Thalia repeatedly insisted
that she hadn't seen their faces, and she certainly hadn't
seen their license plate number. Now, the police already had
a group of men in mind. Earlier that night, five
young guys had been in a minor car accident and
had gotten in a fight with a couple driving that
other car. That couple had ended up calling the police

(19:39):
on them. Never mind that those guys were driving a new,
light colored car and that half of them were Asian.
A group of young men riding around causing trouble had
to be the same guys who detacked Thalia, so the
police set about making sure that Thalia identified them. One
policeman took her into a room and interviewed her with

(20:00):
no one else present, and during that interview, Thalia magically
remembered the license plate number of the car involved in
her attack. I think it was five eight eight oh five,
she said. I would not swear to that being correct.
I just caught a fleeting glimpse of it as they
drove away, And what do you know, she was only

(20:22):
one digit away from the license plate number of that
new light colored car. Before long, police had arrested the
five young men, Horace Ida, Benny Akajuelo, Joseph Cajajave, Henry Chang,
and David Takai. These five young men were poor boys

(20:43):
with lightly troubled pasts, sometime in juvenile court, some fighting
on the street, some trouble in school. Two of them,
Ben and Henry, had a darker stain on their record.
They had done time at age eighteen for the gang
rape of a teenage girl. The press went wild with
this when they picked up on that bit of information,

(21:05):
but it wasn't as straightforward as it sounded. The girl
later admitted that the whole thing had been consensual, but
that people had started accusing her of being a slut,
and so she'd accused the boys of rape. The third
member of this group, Joe, was a shy, quiet boxer
who hated white people because a white person had murdered

(21:26):
one of his close family friends and hadn't been punished
for it. These five boys were confused as they were
taken into the station. Why were the officers talking to
them ominously about a white woman? What white woman they'd
been out all night partying in a totally different part
of town, and they had about a bazillion eyewitnesses who'd
seen them. White woman. They had no idea what the

(21:49):
police were going on about. Surely this was all a mistake.

(22:11):
At the hospital, Thalia was given a rape exam. A
nurse examined her and found no evidence that she had
been sexually assaulted. A doctor examined her and came to
the same conclusion, but they didn't say anything publicly. She
was weeping, her jaw was all messed up. Clearly something
had happened to this woman. The police asked Thalia to

(22:34):
look at four of the five boys that they'd arrested,
and she identified two of them, said that she wasn't
sure about one of them, and pointed to the fourth,
David t Kai, and said that he definitely wasn't involved.
This was awkward for the police, since the guys had
been together all night, but they forged ahead with their theory. Regardless,
Thalia was probably mistaken about the whole David thing because

(22:57):
these five men had definitely done it. As they pressed
on with the case, rumors were spreading like wildfire across Honolulu.
Navy officers whispered to each other that Thalia had had
one of her nipples bit almost all the way off,
and her nose and pelvis broken. The case immediately became
a lightning rod for classism and racism. Five poor men

(23:22):
of color had attacked a high society white woman. People
started using the l word lynch. The admiral of the
navy charged over to the governor of Hawaii and demanded
that he prosecute these guys immediately. Later, the governor would
regret how quickly everyone acted from this beginning were to

(23:44):
come blasted careers, ruined lives, tragedy and death, he would say.
From the beginning too, the police and the prosecution were
trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
They interviewed all five of these young men separate, and
their stories were absolutely consistent. They had party hopped all night,

(24:05):
so they had been seen at many different locations by
many different people. They would have had absolutely no time
to get across town after midnight and assault Thalia. It
just wasn't physically possible. But never mind that. Because this
wasn't the first time police had fit a square peg
into a round hole, they had plenty of tricks up
their sleeve, like they made sure their stenographer only wrote

(24:27):
down the parts of the interview that made the boys
look guilty. Thalia was a great help too. After she
saw the boys in person, she was able to magically
remember lots of details about what they looked like. Sure,
there was no physical evidence linking the men to Thalia,
no fingerprints of Thalia's in the boy's car, no blood
or seamen stains on any of their clothes, no markings

(24:49):
on Thalia's clothes or shoes. But that didn't stop headlines
like this one gang assaults young wife. That story described
a white woman of refinement and culture being assaulted by fiends.
Anyone who read that newspaper would have come away with
the L word on the brain. Thankfully, for the boys,

(25:13):
Hawaii's very own princess, Princess Kawana Nakoa, quickly learned about
the case and she got the boys two fantastic lawyers,
and these lawyers found the boys so consistent in their
stories that they took on the case convinced the boys
were innocent. This move made Hawaii's powerful white men nervous.

(25:33):
They really kind of needed these boys to be convicted,
not because they thought they were guilty. Many of these
men actually thought they were innocent. But because of the esthetics,
tourism was already down in Hawaii. And if word got
around that Hawaii wasn't a place where bronzed boys sensuously
rubbed massage oil over rich white women, but where rich

(25:54):
white women got assaulted by Hawaiian men who then walked free,
well nobody would come to the islands then, And so
these powerful men held an emergency meeting. They decided they
were going to raise money to help the prosecutor. They
were going to silence the press from saying anything unfavorable
to them, and they were going to win this thing.

(26:33):
A month before the trial started, a wealthy woman arrived
in Hawaii. She was well dressed and ready for everybody
to pay attention to her. This woman was none other
than Grace Fortescue, Thalia's mother. She'd sent a press release
to Honolulu's finest newspapers ahead of time so that everybody

(26:53):
would be ready to greet her. She brought along her daughter, Helene,
and she was ready to lunch at country clubs, learn
how to dance the hula, and make sure her daughter's
rapists never saw the light of day again. Now Grace was,
to put it mildly, outrageously racist. She used horrible slurs

(27:16):
to describe Hawaiian people, and she would call the police
if she saw anyone in her neighborhood who wasn't white.
Early on in her visit, Thalia whispered to her that
she hadn't had her period since the night of the attack,
and so Grace took her to the hospital, where the
doctors determined that Thalia wasn't pregnant. There at the hospital,
Thalia was being treated by Hawaiian nurses, and Grace freaked out,

(27:40):
screaming that only white nurses were allowed to treat her
precious daughter. Now that Grace was here, the trial could start.
Of course. It started on November sixteenth in front of
an extremely diverse jury, which was frustrating for people like Grace,
who wanted the jury to be all white. Unfortunately, for Grace,
Hawaii had laws about those sorts of things, and you

(28:03):
couldn't have a single race jury. It just wasn't allowed,
and so the trial proceeded to be frank It was
an appalling mess. Policemen were clearly lying on the witness
stand the scent of planted evidence hung heavily in the air.
The prosecutor overused the term lust sodden beasts, which was

(28:24):
his favorite way to refer to the defendants, and Thalia's
testimony had changed a lot since the first statements she
gave the police. Now she was saying that it hadn't
been very dark at all that night, and so she
could see everybody quite clearly. She said that she had
heard them use each other's names and nicknames, and she
even described their outfits in suspicious detail. She also changed

(28:47):
her timing. She said that she left the party earlier
than she had said before, which gave the boys more
time to drive across town and assault her. And finally,
Thalia dropped a bombshell on the witness stand. She said
that the rape had resulted in a pregnancy and that
she'd had to get an abortion. This was a blatant lie,

(29:09):
but a lot of people believed it. Now, the prosecution's
case was damaged by all the people who testified that
they'd seen Thalia walking down the street in her green
evening gown that night, followed by a white man. These
witnesses implied that whatever happened to Thalia, it was something
very different than the narrative she was spinning. Now, in

(29:31):
order to try and discredit all those witnesses, the prosecutor
basically pulled a bunny out of a hat. At the
very last minute, after the defense had begun its closing statements,
the prosecutor produced a new witness who said that he
was the man in the dark suit and that the
woman in the green dress was his wife. In fact,
as the prosecutor concluded, there may have been as many

(29:54):
as four women in long green evening dresses walking along
the road that night. The defense closed by reiterating that
the five men on trial simply had no time to assault. Failure.
Rape was one of the worst crimes imaginable, one of
the boy's lawyers thundered, But as he said, there is

(30:15):
a worst crime, one more heinous, and that is sending
innocent men to the penitentiary. He told the jurors that
they would never have another night's peaceful sleep if they
found these five men guilty. He roared, if you convict them,
you have got to have no conscience, you have got
to have no soul, You have got to be cowardly.

(30:36):
The jurors deliberated for more than ninety seven hours, a
record for Hawaii. They simply couldn't agree. Finally, they declared
that they were deadlocked. It was a hung jury, and
the trial was declared a mistrial. Everyone would have to
do the whole thing all over again on the mainland.

(30:59):
White America were shocked. They had thought for sure that
these lust sodden beasts would have been convicted in Honolulu.
Grace fumed these pathetic prosecutors and pitiful policemen were worthless.
The law had failed her daughter. Now Grace was going

(31:21):
to have to become the law. As the prosecutor started
gearing up for a second trial, Grace and Tommy and

(31:44):
the powerful white businessmen who ran Hawaii were getting nervous.
Unless someone could dig up new evidence, the boys were
probably going to go free at this second trial. They
needed something fresh, something compelling, something like a confession. In
the meantime, all the racial fear and hatred that had

(32:04):
been sparked by the trial was being fanned into an
even bigger flame. One of Grace's friends, a journalist, started
publishing editorials about how Hawaii was drowning under a crime wave,
which was completely untrue. As a matter of fact, there
had never been a case in the entire history of
Hawaii of a Native Hawaiian man raping a white woman,

(32:26):
though there had been plenty of cases of white men
raping Native Hawaiian women, and unsurprisingly, these men usually got
away with it. In these editorials written by Grace's friend,
the journalists shrieked that women ran the risk of being
assaulted and foully raped by gangs of lust mad youths,
foul slimy creatures crawling through the streets and attacking the

(32:49):
innocent and defenseless. This sort of inflammatory rhetoric really got
the Navy men going, and they started flirting with the
idea of a mass murder. A group of them marched
into downtown Honolulu with containers of aviation fuel, apparently threatening
to burn the place down. Another sailor drove a car

(33:09):
full of mounted machine guns into town, and another group
of Navy men even kidnapped one of the defendants, Horace Ida,
and beat him with their belts, demanding a confession. He
pretended to faint and they finally left him alone. Among
this hysteria, many white women in Hawaii started arming themselves,

(33:32):
and Grace was no exception. She was proud of her gun,
and she felt like a real badass carrying it around.
The guy who helped her get it was a raging
alcoholic named Deacon Jones, who was actually hired to work
as Thalia's bodyguard since the publicity from the trial had
been so overwhelming. Deacon didn't care for Thalia. He once
declared that she had the personality of the bottom of

(33:54):
your big toe, but he loved Grace, a wonderful woman.
He called her a tough old gal. The two of
them played bridge together and Deacon told Grace a provocative secret.
He had been one of the men who'd kidnapped Horace
Ida a week earlier. Huh, Grace said, kidnapping, you say

(34:17):
what a thought. She and Tommy, her son in law,
started scheming. They liked this kidnapping idea. What better way
to get a confession out of those lust sodden beasts.
They decided to kidnap Joseph Kahahavei, the gentle boxer. Tommy
heard through the grapevine that Joe was the most likely

(34:39):
to confess, and it's also worth noting that Joe was
the biggest and the most dark skinned of the boys.
Newspapers in those days were full of incredibly racist caricatures
that showed huge, dark skinned men attacking skinny white women
in skimpy clothes. And we know that Grace believed in
the these caricatures wholeheartedly. Was that why she chose to

(35:03):
target Joe? Maybe there were four people involved in this
plot by now Grace, Tommy, Deacon Jones, who is wasted
all the time, and a friend of Deacon's named Edward Lord.
Grace decided that in order to get Joe into their car,
they needed a fake piece of paperwork to make them

(35:23):
look more legit, so she forged a police summons, writing
territorial Police Major Ross commanding Summons to appear Cahaha Joe.
The resulting piece of paper looked like an art project
by an ambitious first grader. Grace's handwriting was uneven and sloppy.
She misspelled the word territorial, She pasted on a random

(35:47):
gold seal from one of Tommy's diplomas, and best of all,
she cut out a nonsensical bit of text from a
newspaper and just glued it onto the paper. Here's what
that text said. Life is a mysterious and exciting affair
and if anything can be a thrill, You know how
to look for it and what to do with opportunity

(36:07):
when it comes. You know the same wording that cops
always put on their official paperwork. On January eighth, nineteen
thirty two, Joe kahaha Ai left home for the last time.
He had to report to the courtroom every morning at
eight a m. As he waited for the next trial.
He had just turned twenty two. His father had been

(36:30):
encouraging him to try and turn his life around, and
Joe was trying. He really was, so he dressed nicely
for his visit to the courthouse. He wore clothes that
his mom had mended and washed and pressed the night before.
His cousin went with him. Grace watched the two young
men walk into the courthouse. She had a photo of

(36:52):
Joe in her purse so she could be sure it
was him. After a while, the boys emerged and Grace
signaled while to Deacon Jones, that's him. In a flash,
Deacon was at Joe's side, waving the fake summons and
more subtly holding a gun. He pushed Joe into the
car and the car peeled off Before Joe's cousin could

(37:14):
do anything but there was one major red flag. The
summons was allegedly from Major Ross, but Joe's cousin saw
that the car was driving in the opposite direction from
Major Ross's office. Something wasn't right. He ran back inside
the courthouse to report a kidnapping. The car with Joe

(37:34):
in it screeched into Grace's driveway and pulled into the
garage and everyone went inside. Meanwhile, thanks to Joe's cousin,
the police were already looking for Grace and her men.
One policeman was just hanging out listening to the police
scanner when he heard an announcement, look for a Buick
sedan with a middle aged white woman inside it. That

(37:56):
policeman then looked up to see a Buick sedan with
a middle aged white woman inside it. This sedan had shades,
and one of the shades was pulled all the way down,
even though it was morning. Suspicious, He and his partner
took off after the buick, which was heading for a blowhole,
the sort of place where you could throw something into
the water and it would get sucked back into the

(38:18):
ocean forever. They could see Grace watching them in her
rear view mirror, which made them even more suspicious. They
passed her car and the cop told his partner to
check the back seat. In the back seat, they saw
quote something white wrapped in a bundle. They pulled the
buick over, approached with guns drawn, and took a closer

(38:40):
look at the back seat. There was something long and
heavy lying there, wrapped in a soaking wet bed sheet
stained with blood. There was a human leg sticking out
of the sheet. Everyone in the car was placed under arrest.
Someone took a photo of Grace during the case, and

(39:01):
she grinned at the camera, looking pleased with herself. Despite
her grin, Grace was shocked when she was actually charged

(39:23):
with first degree murder. Hello, She'd just killed a rapist.
Why was everyone so stressed? Okay, so the cops had
searched her house and found blood everywhere and a gun
hidden in a basket of eggs. So what, We had
not broken the law, she said later. We were trying
to aid the law. At least, the Navy was on

(39:45):
her side. Right after she was charged with first degree murder,
an admiral from the Navy burst into the room and
hugged her. My heart went out to this brave mother,
he said later. I read in her strong face that
she was undefeated and would fight for justice to the end.

(40:06):
Since Grace was a rich white woman whose daughter's lies
had almost sent five in Ascent men to prison for
the rest of their lives, but who was counting. Grace
didn't have to stay in the discussing old jail, which
was for poor people. She got to stay on a ship,
the lovely uss Alton, where she was put in the
penthouse suite, which had a great view of Hawaii through

(40:29):
the porthole. Newspapers quickly picked up on the fact that
Joe Kahai had been found dead, and they started to
brand the incident an honor killing. In other words, these
newspapers implied Grace and her men had done a really
good thing. People who agreed with this started sending Grace

(40:49):
and her co conspirator's flowers, so many flowers that the
massive ship where they were staying literally couldn't hold them
all as Grace lounged in her fields of roses. The
four surviving accused men, Henry, David, Horace, and Ben were
thrown back into jail for their own protection so that

(41:10):
no one would kidnap and kill them, and they were
told that if they wanted food, their families would have
to bring it. Meanwhile, Grace was eating from Hawaii's finest restaurants. Joe,
the handsome, young dead boxer, was laid out in state
in a dark suit and a lay of fragile yellow flowers.

(41:32):
Thousands of people came by to mourn him. His four
co defendants made their way up to his coffin, sobbing
as they said goodbye to the friend of their youth.
Who among them could have known that the night of
September twelfth, the night when they were just driving around
looking for a party with good beer, would have led

(41:54):
to this. Everyone was stressing as Grace's t loomed, though
Grace herself played it cool. She was being tried along
with Tommy and Edward. Lord Deacon Jones was tried separately
since he had been at her house, not in the
car when she and Tommy and Edward were arrested. She
was surprised when a grand jury indicted her. She had

(42:17):
definitely expected to just walk free, but when she was indicted,
she dressed up and walked confidently into the courtroom to
hear the charges against her. Those silly, silly charges. Everything
would get strained out in the trial. She was sure
of it. After all, she had the best defense lawyer
in the world on her side. Yes, her lawyer was

(42:39):
none other than the famous Clarence Darrow, the defense lawyer
for Leopold and Loebe and the Scopes monkey trial. Everyone
who knew Clarence was really weirded out that he had
decided to represent Grace because he'd made a name for
himself representing the poor and the downtrodden. He was vocal
about the rights of black Americans, and he insisted that

(43:00):
he spoke for the poor, for the week, for the weary,
for that long line of men who, in darkness and
despair have borne the labors of the human race. So
why in the world was he defending this spoiled heiress
who'd been found with a body in her car. Well,
Clarence Darrow was retired and totally broke. He'd lost all

(43:20):
his money when the stock market crashed, so he charged
Grace an exorbitant fee forty thousand dollars, and she got
her rich friends to pay for it. Clarence knew that
this was going to be a challenging case. After all,
his client was acting like a lunatic. She gave an
infuriating interview to The New York Times, where she smiled

(43:41):
innocently and said things like, I have slept better since
Friday the eighth, the day of the murder. Then for
a long time. My mind is at peace, I am satisfied,
and I am not worrying. Yes, it was going to
be a challenge for Clarence to defend this poorly behaved,
rich woman, but he was up for it. The trial

(44:02):
started on April eleventh. The jury was mostly white, seven
white people, three Chinese Hawaiians, and two Native Hawaiians. The
courtroom was mostly white. Wealthy white women settled down in
seats that had been saved for them by their maids.
As one journalist wrote, high society dames arrive in silks
and satins, unruffled by exposure to the night elements, and

(44:25):
slip into the places that have been secured for them
by accommodating servants who have endured the hardships in order
that my lady might enjoy her beauty sleep and still
be assured of an opportunity to sate her morbid curiosity.
As she listens with twitching lips to the sordid story
of a tragedy. The story was indeed sordid and tragic.

(44:47):
The prosecutor made a strong case that this had been
a premeditated, cold blooded murder. He brought Joe's mother up
to the stand to identify Joe's bloody clothing, and emotion
rippled through the courtroom. The defendants are guilty, the prosecutor thundered.
It is a plain and obvious fact. They not only
admit it, they proclaim it. Clarence Darrow didn't dispute this. Obviously,

(45:14):
the defendants were guilty. Grace had admitted to the murder
in the New York Times. For God's sake, No, he
had a different plan. He brought Tommy to the stand.
A very well rehearsed Tommy, and Tommy told a dramatic
story about how much his wife had been suffering. Tommy
said that Thalia would wake in the middle of the
night screaming, don't let him get me, don't let him

(45:37):
get me, and would then say, cahaave. And so, of
course Tommy had to kidnap and murder Joe cahave. Wouldn't
any husband do the exact same thing? According to Tommy,
they kidnapped Joe and threatened to torture him unless he confess,
And at that Joe blurted out, yes, we done it

(45:58):
at that Tommy, and didn't remember anything until he found
himself getting arrested. Yes. Clarence Darrow was going for the
insanity defense. He argued that Tommy had blacked out and
killed Joe just like any red blooded American husband would,
and Grace had masterminded the whole thing just like any

(46:20):
red blooded American mother would. In fact, Clarence thundered, Grace
was pretty much the ideal mother. When she participated in
the kidnapping and murder. She quote acted as every mother acts.
Everything else is forgotten in the emotion that carries her
back to the time when her child was a little

(46:40):
baby in her arms, which she bore and loved. It
was dramatic stuff, but the prosecutor could be dramatic too.
Wearing a blood red bow tie, he stood up for
closing statements and called Tommy Massey a conceited, vain, egotistical
individual who had been lying about everything and trying to

(47:01):
quote hide behind the skirts of his mother in law.
Three able men and a cold, calculating woman let that
man bleed to death in front of them. Inch by inch,
he roared, They let him die. They dragged him into
the bathroom like a dog and let him die most powerfully.

(47:21):
The prosecutor declared that Grace wasn't the only mother in
the courtroom. There was another mother there, he said, and
he looked directly at Joe's mom. Grace was sure they'd
get off, obviously. She was the most sympathetic and beautiful
and classy and well bred mother of all time. So

(47:45):
she was shocked when the jury came back and found
them guilty guilty of manslaughter with a recommendation of leniency.
Thalia wailed, but Grace didn't shed a tear when she
heard the verdict. I expected it, she told reporters, which
was a total lie. But Grace knew that it was

(48:07):
important to never let them see you sweat. Immediately, the
governor of Hawaii started getting a lot of pressure to
make this nasty little verdict go away. The defendants were

(48:31):
going to get sentenced to ten years of hard labor
if he didn't do anything. Obviously, a sentence like that
simply wouldn't do for someone like Grace. Even Congress got involved,
sending the governor a petition which he took as nothing
more than a thinly veiled threat. The KKK got involved too,

(48:51):
sending the prosecutor a letter saying that they were going
to kill him. And rumor has it that President Hoover
himself called the governor of Hawaii and told him to
make the problem go away. Grace and Tommy and the
whole crew showed up to their sentencing, and they were
given those ten years of hard labor. But everyone watching

(49:14):
was confused because Grace and Tommy and everyone else were smiling.
Why weren't these murderers weeping and gnashing their teeth. They
were smiling because someone had told them what was about
to happen. Right after their sentencing, the governor held a
press conference and declared that he was going to commute

(49:36):
their sentences from ten years of hard labor to one hour,
which would be served in his office, which was in
a palace. By the time the press conference was over,
they had already quote unquote served forty minutes of their sentence,
so they had a mere twenty minutes left, which they

(49:58):
filled by taking foes and giving interviews and congratulating each other.
It was a scene right out of any dictatorship. The
blatant untouchability of the privileged few, never mind that a
young man was rotting underground. Who cared about people like
that when there were people like Grace around. Admittedly, everyone

(50:25):
in Hawaii who wasn't a corrupt oligarch or a white
supremacist naval officer found the situation appalling. Even the governor
hated it. He later admitted that he felt guilty about
the whole thing and had wanted to quote scrub his
hands afterward, but his guilt changed nothing. Grace and Tommy
and Thalia were already very busy skipping town. Thalia was

(50:49):
supposed to stay in Hawaii and testify again at the
retrial of the four remaining boys that she had accused
of rape, but she didn't want to do that. After all,
it seemed pretty likely that a retrial wouldn't go her way,
especially now that her mom had killed one of the defendants,
and so she and her husband and her mother literally
snuck onto a ship and got the hell out of there.

(51:12):
Of course, in Hawaii, the case against Horace, David, Henry,
and Ben was still very much alive. Authorities decided to
bring in the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The best detectives
in the world to figure out what exactly had happened
on that night of September twelfth. The Pinkerton detectives retraced
steps and dug up new leads, and interviewed people across

(51:35):
the country. Their almost three hundred page report concluded that quote,
it is impossible to escape the conviction that the kidnapping
and assault was not caused by those accused. The report
also said damningly, we have found nothing in the record
of this case, nor have we, through our own efforts,

(51:55):
been able to find what, in our estimation, would be
sufficient corroboration of the statements of missus Massey to establish
the occurrence of rape upon her. These two sentences were bombshells.
They destroyed Thalia's entire case, but most people never heard

(52:17):
those sentences. The oligarchs who ran Hawaii made sure that
the unpleasant report was suppressed. After all, you couldn't have
people realizing that the whole messy trial and the murder
of Joseph Kahahai had been for nothing, right, It wouldn't
be a good look. Still, the charges against the four

(52:39):
living men were dropped. As on the mainland, Thalia lied
to the press saying that she had been forced to
leave the island, and that there were new eyewitnesses who
could prove that she wasn't lying, and so on and
so forth. But the world was moving on from Thalia
and from her mother and from their antics. For a while,

(53:00):
Thalia and Grace and Tommy had been very famous. Photographers
followed them around the ship, and journalists wrote about their
every move, But history moved on fast. There was the
kidnapping of the Lindberg baby to write about, the flight
and disappearance of Amelia Earhart, and Thalia and Tommy returned

(53:20):
to their old ways of drunkenness and dissatisfaction. Eventually, it
was time for the thing Thalia had dreaded for so long, divorce.
Six weeks after she divorced from Tommy, she slashed her
wrists and tried to jump off the deck of a
cruise ship. She recovered, but it wasn't pretty. She drank heavily,

(53:42):
and she kept getting dragged into court for things like
public drunkenness or drunk driving. Once she guzzled wine for
five hours and then beat her pregnant landlady so badly
that the woman sued her. It had been good to
be Thalia Massey in the court room, maybe, but it
was no longer good to be Thalia Massy. On July second,

(54:06):
nineteen sixty three, she swallowed a handful of barbituates and
ended her life. Tommy remarried twice. Eventually, he started having
what looked like an extended mental breakdown. He was raving
in public, hearing music in his head and saying that
he could will himself to die. He was diagnosed as

(54:27):
manic depressive psychosis manic type and discharged from the Navy.
He lived a long life on his disability pension, and
he died at eighty one on the fifty fifth anniversary
of Joe's murder. Had Tommy really been the one to
put a bullet in Joe's body though, No, that was

(54:48):
just a story that Clarence Darrow had cooked up for
the courtroom, figuring that the jury might find Tommy a
sympathetic figure, you know, the vengeful husband. But the person
who really killed Joe was de Jones, the alcoholic deacon.
Gave an interview about it in the early nineteen sixties.
He said that what had happened was Tommy had been

(55:09):
interviewing Joe, and Joe just didn't seem scared enough for
Deacon's taste, And when Joe had the audacity to lean
forward in his seat, Deacon just shot him. He called
him the black bastard. I had no use for him,
he said. Joe's four friends were free, but their lives

(55:34):
were changed forever. As David Stannard wrote, the stigma never
left them. It haunted their marriages. Their children returned home
from school to ask if the stories being told about
their fathers on the playgrounds were true. Some of Joe's
family members changed their last names to distance themselves from
the whole terrible mess. Today, after both trials, on the

(55:59):
Pinkerton National Detective Agency report, and a lot of great
research by historians, it is crystal clear that none of
those boys had anything to do with Thalia Massey. They
had never seen her before they were dragged into the
police station. Their trial was a travesty, and everybody knew it,
even the people who were screaming for their conviction. Yes,

(56:21):
they were absolutely innocent, but that leaves us with one
nagging question. What happened to Thalia on the night of
September twelfth. Clearly something happened. At the bare minimum, someone
hit her in the face. Who was the white man
in the dark suit who followed her. There had been

(56:44):
one white man at the party wearing a dark suit.
He stood out in the crowd of Navy men in
their white uniforms. Did Thalia offend him? Was he one
of Thalia's lovers? Did they get in a fight? Maybe
he wasn't anyone from the party. Maybe Thalia had arranged
to meet another lover later. Or maybe he was just

(57:04):
a random psychopath, the kind of stalker who would follow
a woman down a dark street and bash her in
the head. And then why did Thalia's injuries get worse
before the police arrived. Her mouth was bleeding by then,
but it hadn't been bleeding when the car full of
partygoers picked her up. Did Tommy figure out one of

(57:26):
her secrets and hit her across the face? Did she
feel like she had to tell the story of five
Hawaiian men assaulting her in order to justify her behavior
to Tommy? Was she covering for someone else? Was she
just feeling melodramatic and figured that you could say whatever
you wanted about Hawaiian men and nothing would come of it.

(57:46):
And did she regret for the rest of her life,
her very public lie. No matter what actually happened to
Thalia that night, she couldn't have guessed what she had
unleashed by telling the story. She told the violence, the anger,
the racism that would bubble over into a lynching masterminded

(58:08):
by her own mother and husband. Those two trials and
the death of Joe Kahahavai changed Hawaii forever. For decades,
Joe's relatives didn't talk about what had happened. It was
too painful. But believe it or not, Thalia also unleashed
something positive on Hawaii. Six months after she fled the island,

(58:32):
it was election day. Over ninety percent of voters turned
up at the polls. During the trial, Republican politicians had
been the ones who made sure that Grace and her
co conspirators would walk free, and these voters were sick
of that, so they turned to the Democrats. They voted
a wave of Democrats into office, and this eventually led

(58:54):
to a progressive transformation. Today, Hawaii has no death penalty,
st gun control, one of the highest minimum wages in
the country. It was the first state to ratify the
Equal Rights Amendment, and so on and so forth. Hawaii
still has its problems, plenty of them. But after Thalia
and Grace and Tommy left, the islanders picked up the

(59:18):
pieces and made a better life for themselves. You know
who else made a better life for herself, Grace. As
her daughter spiraled, Grace thrived, She got a big inheritance
from her dad, and so she was finally officially rich.

(59:38):
She bought herself a home in the Bahamas and another
place in Palm Beach. You might think that she'd try
to forget about Hawaii forever, given that she was tried
for murder there and all, but no, she was still
obsessed with Hawaii. She designed her Palm Beach mansion to
look like a Hawaiian villa, and she called it Ale Home.

(01:00:00):
She started water skiing at seventy five, parasailing at eighty seven,
and she lived until ninety five, happy as a clam.
You might be thinking this is horrifically unfair that woman
completely got away with it, and in a way she did.

(01:00:21):
She did get away with it. But history always has
the final say, and in the eyes of history, Grace
is not a glamorous heiress with her hair toussled by
the sea breeze and her elegant cheek bones, just slightly
tanned from the beach, and her reputation as the world's

(01:00:42):
best mother. She is a racist and a killer and
that is her legacy. Not very classy at all. That's all, folks,

(01:01:17):
and thank you so much for listening to that tale.
I have a pop quiz for you all. Who is
most irritating Grace, Grace, Fortescue or pam Up from two
episodes ago. Let me know. Email me Criminal Brods at
gmail dot com, or send me a message on Instagram

(01:01:40):
Instagram dot com slash criminal Broads, where you can catch
photos from today's case, photos of all the main players,
the victims, etc. Clarence Darrow's iconic face. Although we're not happy,
We're not. We're proud of him for some of the
work he did. We're very proud of him for much
of the work he did, but we're not proud of
him for taking on this case. I'm no defense lawyer,

(01:02:01):
you all know that, but I just want to take
him by the shoulders and be like Clarence, I know
you need the money, and I feel you. And forty
thousand dollars is a lot of money, especially in nineteen
thirty two. But your client just gave an interview in
the New York Times saying that she's proud of murdering someone.
You really want to take on a case like that.
You want that woman to be your client. You want

(01:02:22):
this to be the last case you ever tried in
the courtroom. Oh, Clarence, Clarence, Clarence, That's what i'd tell him. Anyway,
Where was I Instagram? If you want to see his face?
I think that's all I have for you today. Guys,
I'll see you next week for a case that is
we're gonna do a tone shift. Well, you're still going

(01:02:44):
to be infuriated. I have many things in it, so
I can't promise you won't be infuriated. I can't promise
you sad things won't happen. But it's gonna be a
tonal shift from this. We're gonna get away from these
stories of rich people behaving horrifically and go to yeah,
people being abused by the system, have fun. Right, Okay,

(01:03:05):
I'll see you back here for next week and I
can't wait. Have a good run until then. Bye. Maybe
I'm wrong, Maybe I'm wrong loving ud like I do.
If it's a crime, then I'm guilty, guilty of loving you.