December 5, 2024 • 53 mins
In 1931, Thalia Massie, a white woman, told Honolulu police that she had been raped by a group of Hawaiian men. Police quickly zeroed in on five young men who'd been involved in a fight earlier that night. But there was a problem: the suspects had ironclad alibis. In the face of a political establishment determined to get convictions for Thalia Massie’s rape, would the truth be a good enough defense?
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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other fun history related tidbits. To sign up, please visit
our website History on Trial podcast dot com. On September twelfth,
(00:31):
nineteen thirty one, Horace Da received a gift that would
turn out to be a curse. It happened like this.
Horace's older sister, Haro had a beautiful light tan model
a Ford, which she'd saved up for for years, and
that night she told Horace he could borrow it. She
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was going to be working and didn't need the car.
As long as Horace promised to be careful, he could
take his friends out in it. Horace was delighted. This
was a rare treat. He put on a white silk
shirt and dark trousers and headed out into the humid
Honolulu night to find his friends. At a speakeasy, he
ran into David Takai and Ben Ahacuelo. The three young
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men had grown up together in Sunday School. A missionary
who'd taught them remembered they'd been mischievous and scrappy. Now
all in their early twenties, they were settling down. Horace
had just spent a year working in Los Angeles, David
was about to do the same, and Ben's girlfriend was pregnant.
But they weren't too old to have fun. On a
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Saturday night, They spent a while at the speakeasy, then
considered where to go next. Ben knew about a luau nearby,
so the crew headed over and gorged themselves on roast
pig and beer. But there weren't many young people at
the luau, so they decided to check out a dance
at Waikiki Park. Horace spent the next two hours driving
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various friends to and from the luau and the dance.
He didn't mind playing chauffeur. Driving Hariyo's car was such
a joy. Eventually, two other childhood friends, Henry Chang and
Joe Cahahavai, joined Horace. At midnight. When the dance ended, Horace, Henry, Joe, David,
and Ben huddled outside Waikiki Park thinking of where to
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go next, their main criteria being free food and beer.
The group decided to go back to the luau once more,
driving down Bartania Street, they ran into a car full
of friends, and the two cars drove side by side
for a while, their occupants chatting. But by the time
the men got to the luau around twelve thirty, the
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party had ended. It was time to call it a night.
Horace dropped David off first, Then as he pulled out
onto Lileha Street, Horace narrowly avoided colliding with another car.
A woman in the other car shouted at Horace to
watch where he was going. Joe shouted back, telling the
driver to get out of his car. Joe was a
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champion boxer and football player and thought he could easily
take the driver, a middle aged white man. But it
was not the driver who got out of the car.
It was the passenger, his irate wife, Agnes Peeples. Agnes,
a formidable Hawaiian woman whose daughter described her as quote
built like a Sherman tank, wasn't afraid of some tipsy
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young men. When Joe stepped towards her, she shoved him.
He swung back, clipping her ear. Agnes grabbed Joe's throat
with one hand and punched him with the other. Horace
Ida groaned, it had been such a nice night, and
now this e and Henry pulled Joe back into the car.
Agnes's husband, Homer, calmed her down and everyone drove off.
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Horace hoped that that was the end of the issue
and dropped Henry and Joe off at their homes. But
two hours later, when Horace was fast asleep in his bed,
someone knocked loudly on the front door of the house
he shared with his sisters and mother. It was the police.
They were taking him in for questioning. This seemed ridiculous
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to Horace. It had only been a brief fight, no
one had really been injured, and anyway, that woman had
hit Joe first, but he agreed to come to police headquarters.
While he waited to be questioned at the station, Horace
must have rude ever accepting Harrio's gift. What a price
to pay for a single night out with his friends.
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But even then, Horace had no idea what truly lay
in store for him. Earlier that night, a young white
woman named Thalia Massey had reported to police that she
had been kidnapped and raped by a group of men
near Waikiki. The police had quickly connected Thalia Massey's attack
with the police report filed by Agnes Peeples about her
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fight with Joe. In both cases, the suspects were a
group of young men in a car. Horace was not
in the police station to answer questions about a road
rage run in. He was there to answer questions about
the assault of Thalia Massi. Horace denied knowing anything about
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this assault. So did David Takai, Ben Ahaquelo, Joe Cahahavai,
and Henry Chang. They had never seen Thalia in their lives,
the young men said at the time she had been attacked.
They had been driving down Bartania Street. People had seen them.
They had alibis. But in the face of a political
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establishment that was determined to get convictions for Thalia Massey's rape,
would the truth be a good enough defense. Welcome to
History on Trial. I'm your host, Mira Hayward. This week
The Territory of Hawaii v. Ben Ahaquelo et al. On
the evening of September twelfth, as Horace Ida gleefully started
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up his sister's ford, Thalia and Tommy Massey got ready
to go out. The Das and the Massis only lived
a few miles apart as the crow Flies, but their
neighborhoods were worlds apart. Horace Da lived in the part
of Honolulu then known as Hell's Half Acre, a teeming,
densely populated slum inhabited by a mix of ethnic groups,
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including Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino immigrants, as well as native Hawaiians.
Tammi and Thalia Massi lived in Manoa Valley, a lush,
lovely neighborhood that climbed up into the mountains northeast of Waikiki.
Manoah had once been a favorite retreat for the Hawaiian
royal family. Now restrictive racial covenants meant that almost all
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Manoa residents were white. Orderly bungalows lined the valley's streets,
filled with Navy men and their wives. Twenty year old
Thalia Massi was not popular in Manoa. She refused to
socialize with other Navy wives, believing them to be beneath her.
After all, Thalia was a Roosevelt. Yes, her father, Rollie Fortescue,
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was the illegitimate child of Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, but Robert
had eventually married Rolli's mother, and the Roosevelts counted Rolly
as one of their own. He had fought in the
Spanish American War with his cousin Teddy, and then worked
as Teddy's aid in the White House. And Thalia's mother, Grace,
came from equally illustrious stock. She was a Belle as
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an Alexander Graham Bell and Belle Telephone later at and
t Falia and her two younger sisters had grown up
on grand estates. It was true that Rolli's drinking and
refusal to work had left the Fortescuez in dire financial straits,
and the Fortescue daughters were notoriously ill behaved. But despite
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all of this, Thalia and her sisters had been instilled
with the belief that their heritage made them superior to others.
So when the other Navy wives invited Thalia to their
teas and luncheons, she declined, and she wasn't shy about
telling them why. Even when she did attend the occasional
dinner party, her behavior was appalling. She would drink heavily,
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tell inappropriate stories, and criticize everything around her, from the
house's decorp to the hostess's dress. Tommy Massew regularly confided
in his friends about how terrible his marriage was. Things
hadn't always been like this. When Tommy had first met
Thalia four years earlier, when she was a sixteen year
old high school student and he was a twenty two
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year old cadet at the Naval Academy, life had been sunny.
Tommy had spent a blissful summer with the fortesc Us
at the Roosevelt estate on Long Island, charming the whole
family with his affable personality. Tommy might not have come
from as well known a family as Thalia's, but the
Massis were a prominent family in Kentucky, and his stable
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career in the Navy meant that he would be able
to provide for thee. When Tommy and Thalia married on
November twenty fourth, nineteen twenty seven, their future had looked bright,
and for a little while all was well. Tommy had
several postings on the East Coast. People who knew the
Massies then said they seemed happy, though there were rumors
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about Thalia being unfaithful. The couple tried to start a family,
but Thalia miscarried. Thalia's health was poor. She had an
untreated thyroid condition which caused weight loss, anxiety, and vision problems.
To compensate for the frequent loss of vision in one
of her eyes. Falia had developed a distinctive gait. She
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walked with her head tilted down into the side, and
Tommy endured some professional setbacks. He dreamed of being a pilot,
but at barely five foot five, he was rejected four
times for being too short. When he finally got a
heighth waiver, he failed the psychological exam, with the examiner
calling him temperamentily not qualified, perhaps due to his quick
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temper and what some Annapolis classmates had called his quote
cynical attitude. But Tommy had accepted the decision and pivoted
his focus to submarines. In May nineteen thirty, he graduated
from the Navy's Submarine School and was assigned to Squadron four,
based at Pearl Harbor. To most people, this posting would
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have been a dream. In the nineteen twenties, a Hawaiian
craze had swept the United States. Hawaiian inspired music played
on the radio, theaters staged moch hula shows, and Hollywood
studios filmed movie after movie on the island's beautiful beaches.
At the same time, as tourists flocked to Hawaii, the
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United States Navy was increasing its presence there, massively expanding
Pearl Harbor. Many of the military men who came to
Awe who at this time, were disturbed by the level
of racial integration on the island, which was comparatively higher
than in the rest of the United States. One need
only talk for five minutes with the average naval officer,
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wrote reporter Lilyan Symes around this time, to realize that
he is straining at the leash to put Hawaii's brown
and yellow peoples in their place. Nonetheless, most sailors still
found Honolulu a lovely place to live, but not Tommy
and Thalia Massey. As Thalia's bad behavior became more outrageous,
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Tommy too began to fall apart. He started drinking heavily.
The couple fought loudly and sometimes violently. When Tommy went
out on sea duty, Thalia would invite other men over.
In the summer of nineteen thirty one, in the latter
stages of pregnancy, Thalia lost the baby and fell into
a depression that manifested itself in increasingly hostile behavior towards Tommy.
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She briefly saw a psychologist, doctor E. Loowel Kelly, but
After Kelly recommended to Tommy that Thalia receives psychae care,
Thalia stopped seeing him. In August, Tommy told Dalia that
he wanted a divorce. Thalia begged him for another chance,
not because she loved him, but because she did not
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want to have to go back and live with her parents.
Tommy relented, but only conditionally. Thalia had three months to
try harder or else he was done. He called it probation.
Thalia promised to do her best. Agreeing to go out
with Tommy and some of his Navy friends on September
twelfth was part of her reform efforts. Thalia hated nights
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out like this, surrounded by drunken Navy officers and their
boring wives, but knowing what was at stake, she slipped
on a long green silk dress and matching jacket. She
pasted a smile on as Tommy's friends and their wives arrived.
After an hour of drinking, the group headed to the Aluwai,
in a Navy haunt in Waikiki. When they arrived between
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nine thirty and ten te pm, Tommy split off to
talk to some of his shipmates. Irritated at his abandonment,
Thalia went upstairs, where she circulated and drank, waiting for
Tommy to come find her. He never did. Around eleven thirty,
Thalia got into a fight with a Navy officer who
wanted her seat. After the man called Thalia alous, she
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slapped him. Tommy was summoned to calm her down. The
couple talked for a little while, then Tommy went back downstairs.
This night was clearly not going as either of the
Massies had hoped. Around one am, Tommy decided to head out.
Salia was nowhere to be found, but since she often
left parties when she was upset, Tommy assumed she'd already
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gone home. He tried calling the house, but no one answered,
so Tommy and a friend drove back to Manoah headed
to a friend's house where they'd heard a party was happening.
When they got there, though, the host was not yet home,
so Tommy and his friend decided to wait. Ten minutes earlier,
at twelve fifty a m. Eustace Bellinger was driving his
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wife and their friends, the Clarks, down Ala Moana Road
to get a late night snack. Suddenly, a woman appeared
in front of the car, alarmed Bellinger pulled over. The woman,
whose face looked swollen, told the Bellingers and Clarks that
her name was Thalia Massey. She said that she'd been
at a party earlier that night, but left around midnight
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to get some air. As she walked down john Ena Roade,
Thalia said some men had grabbed her and pulled her
into a car. They'd beaten her and then abandoned her
in a deserted clearing off of Ala Moana. Missus Clark
immediately suggested that they take Thalia to the police station
or to a hospital, but she said she only wanted
to go home. Just as Thalia got home, the phone rang.
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It was Tommy calling from his friend's house. Thalia picked
up the phone and cried, something awful has happened. Come home.
At one forty seven a m. Honolulu Police received a
call from Tommy Massey requesting assistance. A woman had been assaulted,
he said. Detective John Jardine, in charge of the night shift,
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dispatched two detectives, George Harbottle and William Fortado, to go
to the Massie's home. Police had gone to the house before,
usually responding to noise complaints from neighbors. When the massies fought.
This call out was different. Thalia had not wanted Tommy
to call the police in. When detectives Harbottle and for
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Todo arrived, they found her lying on a couch, crying
and wearing a nightgown. Haltingly, Thalia told the detectives that
four or five Hawaiian men had snatched her off the road,
driven her to a remote spot, and then beat and
raped her. For Toado and Harbottle were shocked. In the
entire history of white settlement in Hawaii more than one
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hundred years, there had never been a recorded case of
a Hawaiian man sexually assaulting a white woman. The detectives
walked Thelia carefully through her account, trying to get more information.
Nothing helpful was forthcoming. Alia said the night was so
dark she could not see the men's faces and doubted
she could identify them. However, when pushed by Fortado, she
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said she was certain that all the men were Hawaiian,
not Chinese or Japanese. She could only describe their car
as being old and dark with a torn cloth top.
She had not seen a license plate. The night had
been dark. She said. She did not mention that her
bad eyesight rendered her nearly blind when she didn't wear
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her glasses, glasses that she had left at home that night.
As Detective Harbottle continued the questioning, detective for Toado called
Detective Jardine to report in Fortato, and Jardine agreed that
Thalia's story reminded them of a case they had caught
earlier that night. At twelve forty five am, Agnes Peeples
had come to police headquarters to report that she'd had
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an altercation with a car full of young men, and
that one of them, a Hawaiian, had assaulted her. Two
incidents involving a group of young Hawaiian men seemed unlikely
to be a coincidence, the detective's thought. As Thalia was
taken to a nearby hospital to be examined, a car
was dispatched to the Ida house. Unlike Salia, Agnes had
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seen a license plate five eight nine eight five, which
the police had been able to trace to the Eda's car.
Horace Ida denied having anything to do with Thalia's rape
and initially refused to name the men he had been
out with, but after hours of relentless interrogation, Horace identified
his friends as the police brought in the other men,
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Joe Cahahavai, Ben Ahaquelo, David Takai and Henry Chang, and
interrogated them. In turn, a problem emerged. The men's accounts
of their night were consistent. Moreover, they could provide the
police with the names of many other people who had
seen or see spoken with them between ten pm and
one am. There was no time for them to have
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committed the attack, which Thalia claimed had happened between midnight
and twelve forty five. The men's strong alibis were not
the only issue. Thalia had repeatedly said that she was
sure that her attackers were all Hawaiian. Joe and Ben
were Hawaiian, and Henry was half Hawaiian and half Chinese,
but Horace Da and David Takai were both Japanese, and
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Haruya DA's car didn't match the description Thalia had given
of an old, dark colored car with a ripped top.
Haruyo's car was only two years old, with a light
hand exterior and a pristine cloth top. But fortunately for
the detectives, Thalia now seemed flexible on details. When John McIntosh,
the chief of detectives, interviewed Thalia, at police headquarters after
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her exam, she now told Captain Macintosh that she had
seen a license plate five eight eight oh five that
was only one digit off from haruyo Eda's plate. Later
at trial, a possible explanation for Thalia's sudden memory was provided.
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Throughout the early morning of September thirteenth, a police dispatcher
had repeatedly broadcast a be on the lookout alert for
a car with license plate five eight eight nine five
which had been involved in an assault on a woman.
The dispatcher was referring to the assault on Agnes Peoples,
but a lay listener would not know that these broadcasts
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had blared from police car radios stationed right outside the
exam room. Thalia Massi was in an exam room with
open windows when Captain McIntosh brought Haryo's car to the
Massie's house around nine am on the thirteenth, identifying it
to Thalia as quote the suspect's car. Thalia said that
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while she couldn't be certain that this was the exact car,
it was quote a car like that, and when Macintosh
brought jo Henry, David and Horace in front of Thalia
later that day, she identified all of them except for
David Takai, as being her assailants. By that time, news
of Thalia's rape was public and causing an enormous uproar.
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No one was angrier than Admiral Yates Sterling, commandant of
the fourteenth Naval District, an outspoken racist and an advocate
for complete military control of Hawaii, Sterling was furious to
hear about the attack. Notably, Sterling had been much less
angry about the two sexual assaults committed by white sailors
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against Hawaiian women in the past five months. There is
no record of the Navy punishing these men after demanding
custody of them from the local police, But now Sterling
called for quote quick action and adequate punishment for these
quote dark skinned criminals. Sterling quickly organized a meeting with
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Honolulu's power brokers, including the mayor, the district attorney, the
Navy's shore patrol commander, and the territorial governor, Lawrence Judd.
The forty four year old jud had been governor for
two years. This was an appointed position. The men who
made the appointment were members of a small white or
Howley elite, the descendants of the white missionaries and planters
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who had wrested power and land away from Native Hawaiians
over the course of the nineteenth century, culminating in the
eighteen ninety three overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, the eighteen
ninety eight annexation of Hawaii, and the establishment of the
United States Territory of Hawaii in nineteen hundred, all despite
strenuous protests by Native Hawaiians. By nineteen thirty one, though
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there was an elected territorial legislature, the true political power
in Hawaii belonged to the sugar cane corporations known as
the Big Five, who appointed governors who would do their bidding.
Governors like Laurence jud But the United States Navy had
all so began to play an increasingly important role in
the territory. Thanks to the Great Depression, revenue from tourism,
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sugar and pineapples was down. The Navy, which planned to
invest millions into Pearl Harbor, offered economic relief, and so
writes historian David Stannard in his book on the Trial,
This first meeting between Sterling and jud Quote set the
tone for all that were to follow. The Admiral was
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used to giving orders the governor was used to taking them.
Before long, a full bore prosecution was underway. Judd and
Sterling had the benefit of a compliant media environment. Two
of Oahu's largest English language newspapers, the Honolulu Advertiser and
the Honolulu Star Bulletin, were closely intertwined with the military
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and business elite's interests. Assisted by the police who readily
provided them with information, these papers began conducting a trial
by press, depicting the case against the five men as watertight.
Behind the scenes, the case was anything but. The timeline
made it almost impossible for the suspects to have committed
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the crime, and though Thalia's story now better fitted the suspects,
the police lacked physical evidence to support this story. When
police investigator's finger printed Haryo DA's car, they found plenty
of prints, but not a single one belonging to Thalia Massey.
And more troublingly, the police were struggling to find proof
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that Thalia had been raped at all. I will mention
here that false reports of rape are very uncommon. The
rate of false reports is difficult to measure since there
are many ways to define false, such as stories that
were proven false, suspected to be false or unable to
be substantiated or to meet the threshold for prosecution. But
the most comprehensive research indicates a rape of false rape
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reports in the United States to be between two and
eight percent. We cannot know what exactly happened to Thalia
Massey that night in nineteen thirty one, but the physical
evidence did not corroborate her story of being beaten and
raped multiple times. At her exam only several hours after
the alleged attack, a doctor and nurse found that the
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only injury Thealia suffered was a facial one. Her jaw
was broken, she had no vaginal abrasions or lacerations, and
no seamen was present. Thalia told the doctor that she
had douched after arriving home, but no seamen was found
on any of the clothes that Thalia wore that night either.
Her clothes were in fact nearly pristine. Besides a few
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drops of blood on the shoulder, likely from Thalia's split lip,
the clothes looked, according to doctor Thomas Mossman, the assistant
City and County physician, like they had just come from
the dry cleaners. Even her shoes were not scuffed. It
was hard to imagine that thealia could have been abducted, beaten,
dragged through the woods, and raped without sustaining a single
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stain or rip or scuff. The lack of physical evidence
was a particular problem for the prosecution because Hawaii had
a law that required corroborating evidence in rape cases. A
victim's testimony alone was not enough, but prosecutors, led by
Assistant City and County Attorney Griffith White, were not deterred
by these obstacles. Driven by increasing pressure from the Navy
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and an outraged public, White was determined to get a conviction,
and when the men's trial began on November sixteenth, nineteen
thirty one, the lengths to which White would go to
get his conviction would be revealed. When ben Ahaquelo's mother, Aggie,
heard that her son had been arrested, she was terrified,
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so she did what any mother would do. She called
a princess. As David's Darren explains, although the ravages of
it introduced disease and consequent political upheaval did much to
change Hawaiian cultural norms following European contact, one characteristic that
endured was the expectation by rulers and rules alike that
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rulers were obliged to care for the common people. So
Princess Abigail Kavana Nakoa, the current leader of Hawaii's deposed
royal family, did not hesitate to answer Aggie Ahaquelo's call.
The princess listened to Aggie's story and then said that
she would contact one of her friends, the accomplished attorney
William H. Heen, to see if he could help. William
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Heen was prominent in Hawaii's legal and political circles. Half
Chinese and half Hawaiian, the forty eight year old Heen
had worked as a prosecutor, a defense attorney, and a judge.
He was currently balancing his law practice with his duties
as a senator in the territorial legislature. Keen agreed to
look into the case for Princess Kavana and Nakoa. Aware
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of the racial aspects of the case, he decided to
recruit a white attorney to assist him. Bill Pittman was
the perfect fit. An excellent atonejourney, the Mississippi born Pittman
was passionately anti racist. He also happened to be a
descendant of Francis Scott Key, who was decidedly more racist,
as we saw in episode three of History on Trial.
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Heen and Pittman wanted to be sure that they had
a solid case, so they conducted vigorous interrogations of the defendants.
At the end, the lawyers were convinced that the men
were innocent and decided to represent them. They divided up
the defendants, with William Heen representing Ben Ahaquello and Henry Chang,
and Bill Pittman representing Horace da and Joe Cahahavai. Robert
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Murakami later joined the defense as well, representing David Takai.
Hawaii's Howley Elite were disturbed by the news that such
formidable lawyers had signed on. They began to question whether
Griffith White was the right man to lead the prosecution.
After all, the forty one year old had only four
years experience as a lawyer. But White insisted he could
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handle the case, and the prosecution also had to reason
to hope that the judge would be sympathetic to their cause.
Judge Alva E. Steedman, thirty seven, had married into one
of the Big five Sugarcane families right before the trial.
Steedman announced that this would be his last trial, as
he would be accepting a job with his wife's family company.
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The defense worried that Steadman, about to leave the bench,
would be less concerned with impartiality than he would be
with satisfying the Big Five and the Navy. Their fears
seemed to be confirmed. As the trial began. Steadman denied
nearly all of the defense's motions. Most critically, he denied
their motion to get a bill of particulars, which would
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enumerate exactly what crimes each defendant was charged with. This
ruling was a particular blow to David Takai. Thalia Massey
had always denied that he was one of her attackers,
and Takai had no idea what he was even on
trial for. At ten thirty am on November eighteenth, Griffith
White delivered a brief opening statement, focusing on the heinousness
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of the crime. Then he called Thalia Massey to the stand.
Thalia was dressed conservatively and spoke softly. Her testimony was emotional.
When she began describing the attack, she broke into tears,
prompting Judge Stadman to call the recess. Her testimony was
also thorough and precise. She provided detailed descriptions of her assailants,
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who she now said had referred to each other by
name during her assault. She described seeing the license plate
and the car, both of which she had initially claimed
not to have seen, and these weren't the only changes
to her story. Thalia now said that she might have
left the alloway in as early as eleven thirty five
p m. The most moving part of her testimony came
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when Thalia spoke of discovering a month after the alleged
assault that she was pregnant. In truth, Thalia had only
suspected she was pregnant when she went to the hospital
and had a dilation and curetage performed. No evidence of
pregnant she was discovered, but that fact never emerged at trial,
and the horror of her ordeal moved many in the
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court room. On cross William Heen gently but insistently pushed
Thalia on the details of her attack and on the timeline.
When he asked about the discrepancies between her testimony and
her initial report to the police, such as the ethnicity
of her assailants or the description of the car, Thalia
claimed she couldn't remember what she'd said when with Thalia's
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testimony entered. Griffith White now worked to introduce corroberative evidence.
He called Thalia's personal physician, doctor John Porter, to describe
the injuries to Thalia's face. Then he presented a series
of police officers. The first police witness was Detective John C. Clooney.
Clooney had been one of Horace DA's arresting officers. Shortly
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after bringing Horace in, Clooney said Boris told him that
quote one of the boys in his cars struck Missus Peeples,
but as far as the striking of this white woman,
he said he didn't know anything about it at the time.
White asked Clooney, had you mentioned to him that a
white woman had been struck? I had not. Clooney said
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the implication was clear. The only way that Horace DA
could have known about the attack on Thalia at this
point was if he had committed it. William Heen was shocked.
He had never heard any mention of this exchange on cross.
He asked Clooney if he had written a report that night.
Clooney said he had, but that he didn't have the
report on him, so the detective was excused to fetch
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the report In the meantime, White called his next police witness,
officer Claude Benton. Benon had conducted a search of the
crime scene in the early hours of September thirteenth, shortly
after the assault was reported. At the scene, Benton had
found several items that Thalia Massey identified as hers, including
a pocket mirror and a pack of cigarettes. But Benon
(31:59):
had also found something much more important. He now revealed
on the stand tire tracks three good Rich Silverton Chords
and one good Year all Weather. Benton explained, with the
Goodyear tire on the left rear. These were, of course
the same tires as those on Haruo DA's car. Benon
(32:21):
had even taken Horace Da in his sister's car to
the crime scene to compare the tracks. White clarified when
the comparison visit had happened Sunday morning, he asked, Benon said, yes,
William Heen knew how damaging this testimony sounded, but he
thought he might be able to undermine it. His first
step was asking for Benton's written report. Keen received it
(32:45):
right before he began his cross examination of Benton that
afternoon and had to quickly scan it. Then he began
questioning Benton. After reviewing the tire evidence, Heen asked Benon
what exactly he had found at the crime scene. Benon
walked through the event, recalling the brands of the cigarettes found,
the various matchboxes, and the pocket mirror. It was clear
(33:06):
that he was a detail oriented, methodical officer, unlikely to
miss things or make mistakes. Having established this, Heen dropped
the hammer. Now, mister Betton, why didn't you include the
tire marks in your written statement? Keen read Benton's report
aloud in court. There was no mention of the tire tracks.
(33:29):
Benen could only offer vague explanations, saying that he didn't
realize the tire tracks mattered until he knew about harya
IA's car. On redirect, Griffith White tried to clean things
up by asking more questions about the visit Betton had
made to the crime scene with Horace da It had
only been a few hours after his first inspection of
the scene been confirmed. This redirect didn't add much to
(33:51):
Beton's damage credibility, and worse was still to come, but
for now, Officer Bennon was dismissed and Detective Clue Pony
returned he told the court that he was unable to
find his report. This would become a pattern. The defense
would ask for a police report, only to be told
it was missing. However, in this case, Keen could still
(34:12):
question Clooney about the contents of his report. He asked
Clooney if he had recorded Horace DA's reference to a
white woman anywhere. Clooney said he had not. When he
asked why, Clooney admitted it was because quote, I was
instructed to keep it under cover. Who had instructed him
to do this? Griffith White, the prosecutor, Clooney said. Clooney
(34:36):
also admitted that he had only remembered the alleged exchange
five weeks after Horace Edo was first brought in. Clooney's
suspicious recollection of this exchange aside, this story was much
less damaging than it sounded. When Clooney had brought Horace
to the police station, he had briefly left Horace alone
while he searched for Captain Macintosh. Police officer Cecil Rickard
(34:58):
would later admit, months after the trial ended, that he
had approached Horas during this period and asked him about
the assault. So Horace had a legitimate reason to know
that the victim was a white woman. After White introduced
a few more police witnesses who had helped administer Thalia's
identification of the suspects, Keen asked for Officer Benton to
(35:19):
be recalled to the stand. His questions this time around
focused on Benton's visit to the scene with Horace da
White had made a point of having Benton emphasized that
his visit had been on Sunday morning, only hours after
his first visit, the implication being that the only way
the tire tracks could have gotten there was during the
commission of the crime. But he now asked, hadn't this
(35:44):
second visit actually happened on Monday morning? Yes, Beton admitted.
Not only had Betton omitted the supposedly crucial tire marks
from his report, he had now also been caught lying
on the stand. The prosecution's other main police witness, Captain
John McIntosh, proved to be no more helpful than Benten
(36:07):
or Clooney had been. As Chief of Detectives, McIntosh had
supervised the investigation almost from the beginning. A veteran of
colonial police forces in South Africa and New Zealand and
a former sugarcane plantation overseer McIntosh had been brought onto
the police force, in his own words, quote by the
business interests and the politicians. McIntosh provided little new evidence
(36:30):
during his direct examination. His cross, however, was illuminating. Under
questioning by Heen, McIntosh admitted that Thalia's fingerprints had not
been found in her ruyo Eda's car, that no seamen
had been found on Thalia's clothing or on the defendant's clothing,
and that there were a number of discrepancies between the
story that Thalia had first told and the one that
(36:52):
she had told on the stand. White's only other witnesses
were a few police officers who had helped administer Thalia's
identification of the defendants, none of whom had much to add.
After three days and twelve witnesses, White rested the prosecution case.
White's case was flimsy at best, but as we've seen
(37:12):
so often, what is happening outside the courtroom can have
an enormous impact on a jury's decision. Though Judge Deadman
instructed jurors to avoid reading press coverage of the trial,
it would be difficult for them to avoid it entirely.
Many papers put the case on the front page of
every issue, and often their reporting was highly biased towards
(37:33):
the prosecution. The Honolulu Advertiser, for example, titled a story
on Heen's cross examination of Benton quote, defense fails to
shake officer's story at trial. Not every newspaper was so biased.
George Wright, a reporter who managed the English language section
of the Japanese language newspaper Hawaii Hochi, for example, had
(37:53):
been questioning the predominant narrative of the case from the start.
As David Stanner describes, quote, two completely different accounts of
what happened to Thalia Massey on Saturday night, September twelfth
made their way through the homes and streets and workplaces
of Honolulu, which, rendition, people believed dependent in large part
on the newspapers they read, and what they read was
(38:16):
a consequence of who and what those people were. The
split in opinion that now was emerging cut right down
the middle. Howley's on one side, almost everyone else on
the other. Even if most of the jurors were not
white themselves, all of them depended on the how the
elite for their livelihoods, and they were aware of how
(38:37):
badly their bosses wanted a conviction. As Ben Ahacuello later noted,
quote all the big guys in town, the guys working
for the big firms, came and sat in court and
stared at the jury. What they were saying with their
eyes was that if this doesn't come out right, you're
going to get fired. So despite the seeming weakness of
(38:58):
the prosecution's case, the defects still had a battle ahead
of them. Fortunately they came prepared to fight. On the
afternoon of Monday, November twenty third, nineteen thirty one, William
Heen delivered the defense's opening statement. His argument was simple,
(39:19):
these defendants could not have committed this crime. To prove
this argument, the defense presented dozens of witnesses who testified
to the whereabouts the defendants on the night in question.
These witnesses, who had either spoken to or seen the defendants,
could account for almost every minute of the men's movements
between ten pm and one am. What was more, the
(39:43):
defense also had witnesses who had likely seen Thalea that
night at the very time she claimed she had been abducted.
George and Maimie Goas had attended the dance at Waikiki Park,
then walked down john Ina Road for a late night
stack at five, ten minutes after midnight, they saw a
white woman in a green dress who appeared drunk walk
(40:05):
past them. Like Thalia, this woman had a distinctive gait.
She walked with her head tilted down and to the side.
A white man in a dark suit walked several paces
behind her. Alice Aramaki, who worked in a barber shop
on john Ena Rooade, saw what looked like the same
man and woman a little further down the road a
(40:26):
few minutes later. The goas and Aramaki also testified that
they had provided this information to both the police and
Griffith White as soon as they learned of the attack
on Thalia. They had provided sworn statements, but the prosecution
and the police never investigated further. He now followed the
thread of police incompetence, recalling Captain John Macintosh to the stand.
(40:51):
Though he had already succeeded in seriously undermining Officer Benton's
testimony about the tire tracks, Keen had one last blow
to deliver. He asked Macintosh whether he had gone to
the scene of the crime after Officer Benten first examined it.
Macintosh tried to evade the question, but when Heen would
not relent, he admitted, quote, after I left Massey's home,
(41:14):
I went down to the premises with Eda's car. Did
you drive the DA car into these premises? Keen asked,
I did not. Macintosh replied, but then continued, Sato drove
the car in there. Henri Satto was the patrolman who
had driven Macintosh to the scene. Those tire marks that
(41:35):
the prosecution had made so much of they had been
made by the police. Keen also asked Macintosh about two witnesses,
Tatsumi Matsumoto and Robert Vieira. Matsumoto and via were in
the car that Horace had pulled alongside on Bartania Street
around twelve fifteen a m. On the thirteenth. Police had
(41:56):
spoken to both men early in the investigation. Keen wanted
to know how the police had learned of Matsumoto and Vieira.
Macintosh said that Griffith White had told police to question
the men. So William Heen called Prosecutor Griffith White to
the stand. White was an unhelpful witness. He acknowledged that
he must have heard about Matsumoto and Vieira from one
(42:18):
of the defendants, but claimed that he couldn't remember which one,
but what White actually said didn't matter so much. It
was the principle of it. White was admitting on the
stand that from the very beginning of the investigation he
had been aware of numerous witnesses whose sworn testimony made
it very unlikely that the defendants could have committed the crime,
(42:41):
and yet he had still continued with the prosecution. If
White thought that having to testify in a trial he
was prosecuting was rock bottom, there was still lower to sink.
While cross examining Joe Cahabai, one of the defendants, White
asked Joe about what Horace Eat was wearing on September twelfth.
(43:02):
Failia had claimed to recognize a leather jacket when identifying Horace.
When Joe denied that Horace had worn this jacket, White
brought a transcript of Joe's statement, in which Joe had
apparently said that Horace had worn the jacket. Do you
remember saying that? White asked, smugly, that is what you
put in there? Joe shot back, flustered, White said, not
(43:26):
what I put in here and tried to change the subject.
William Heen was only too happy to return to this
exchange during his redirect. After confirming with Joe that Horace
had not been wearing a leather jacket, Keen asked, how
did you happen to say to mister White that he
did well? Joe said, he put it in the statement,
and then after I signed the statement, I scratched it out.
(43:49):
Keen turned to White and asked to see his copy
of Joe's interview. White, caught in his own net, handed
over the paper, admitting, quote, it is scratched out. Another
example of White tampering with the defendant statements soon emerged,
thanks once again to White himself. Defended, David Takai testified
(44:10):
that he was the one to tell White about seeing
Matsumoto on cross White asked, quote, why didn't you put
in the fact that you saw Matsumoto's car in the
written statement? I told you this matter, David replied, then
you told her the stenographer not to put it down.
Another brilliant own goal by Griffith White. By now, Keen
(44:30):
had clearly shown prosecutorial and police misconduct, but he also
wanted to show that many police officers involved with the
case would back up the defense's account. Not all of
these police witnesses were enthusiastic about testifying for the defense,
but they were forthright. After Captain Macintosh had taken over
the case, he had replaced all the non white detectives
(44:52):
with white officers. Those replaced included the four detectives who
had responded to the initial call out to the Massy house.
All four of these men testified to Thalia's original statement
in which she said she could not see any faces
or any details of the car, and Detective Lucciano Machado
revealed that Thalia had been unsure of her identifications when
(45:14):
ben Ahacuello was brought in front of her. Thalia had
only confirmed he was one of her assailants after Captain
Macintosh whispered to her that he was. After a week
of testimony from fifty two witnesses, the defense was satisfied
that they had proven not only that the defendants could
not have committed the crime, but that the police and
the prosecutor had lied and manufactured evidence. Given this, Griffith
(45:40):
White would need to appeal to emotion, not evidence in
his closing argument, delivered on the morning of December first,
and emotion White could do this is one of the
worst cases we have ever had. He began describing how
Thalia Massey, a quote, young inexperienced girl, had just been
(46:01):
taking a walk when quote she was assaulted by beasts.
Would the jury further victimize Thalia by rejecting her testimony
and labeling her a quote unmitigated liar. He knew they
would not. They would quote be men, he insisted, and
they would consider what they would want done if their
(46:24):
wives were harmed. You would want to go down and
shoot the men, White said, to avenge not just Thalia,
but Tommy Massey too. They must find the defendants guilty.
All three defense lawyers gave closing arguments. Robert Murakami, representing
David Takai, focused on the defendant's alibis, saying that in
(46:47):
the face of the timeline quote, I doubt that the
prosecuting attorney, as a reasonable man, can honestly believe that
these are the men. In his closing Bill Pittman was
less generous towards the prosecute. This entire case, Pittman stated,
is a frame up. A prosecutor's job was to seek truth,
(47:08):
not a conviction that any costs. He continued and though
he thought rape was a terrible crime, Pittman thought that
there was quote a worse crime, one more heinous, and
that is sending innocent men to the penitentiary. Pittman concluded,
by exhorting the jurors not to commit this crime. You
(47:28):
cannot if you are honest and upright men, convict these men.
I know these men are innocent, and I know this
jury will not swerve from its duty of acquitting them.
William Heen gave the final defense closing, he combined Murakami
and Pittman's approaches, walking through all the evidence that proved
(47:49):
his clients were innocent and incapable of committing the crime.
The only crimes that this trial had proven, Keen said,
were those committed by the police officers like Officer Ben,
who had perjured themselves. They had only done so, Heen believed,
because of quote the public clamor to crucify the defendants
on a cross of prejudice and sentiment. He pointed out
(48:12):
that other police officers had resisted this pressure and testified honestly.
Wasn't their word worth as much as anyone else's? Or?
He asked, quote, are we to disregard the testimony? Of
these witnesses simply because they are Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese or Portuguese.
He concluded by asking the jurors to be quote honest
(48:35):
and courageous in reaching your verdict and return a verdict
of not guilty. Griffith White came out swinging in his rebuttal.
If anyone has been crucified, he said, it is this
lovely girl who crucified herself to protect other women of Honolulu.
White briefly addressed the evidence again, calling the officers who
(48:56):
testified for the defense quote traders and said that Off
Benton's testimony quote still stands unchallenged. But for his final
message to the jury, he fell back on emotional appeals.
What we call upon you, the gentlemen of the jury,
for White said, is to vindicate Hawaii, to show that
(49:16):
you will protect your women, stand together for a true verdict,
and thus justify your manhood. The jury received the case
around nine pm on Wednesday, December second. People thought it
would be a quick deliberation, but for very different reasons.
Many navymen and other Howleys thought that the prosecution had
(49:38):
it in the bag. Many others thought acquittal would be immediate.
Both groups were wrong. The jury deliberated for nearly one
hundred hours. Tempers got so heated that several jurors got
into a physical fight. William Heen called for a mistrial.
Judge Steadman admonished the jurors. Eventually, they claimed they could
(50:01):
not reach a verdict. Stedman told them to keep trying,
but finally, at ten p m. On Sunday, December sixth,
nineteen thirty one, he accepted that the jury was deadlocked.
In the case of the Territory of Hawaii v. Ben
Ahacuello at Al, Judge Deadman declared a mistrial. Chaos irrupted
(50:28):
at the news of the mistrial. Some people were thrilled
with the outcome, others were furious. Admiral Yates Sterling called
the result quote a stupid miscarriage of justice which could
have been avoided if the territorial government had shown more
inclination to sympathize with my insistence upon the necessity of
(50:48):
the conviction. The defendants, he concluded, were not men who
should have been given the benefit of a reasonable doubt.
Grace fordescue Thalia's mother, vehemently agreed. She had traveled to
Hawaii shortly before the trial and had been horrified by
what she saw as immoral racial integration. She had made
(51:09):
a habit of calling the police on her Hawaiian neighbors
and had requested that only white nurses treat thelia. The mistrial,
in grace Fordescue's mind, was yet another symptom of the
dangerous erosion of white supremacy in the territory. She could
not bear the thought of a second trial ending without conviction.
If the legal system could not guarantee her the outcome
(51:31):
she wanted, she thought she'd just have to take matters
into her own hands, and so grace Fordescue bought a
gun and she began to plot to find out what
happens next. Join me next week for part two of
the Massy Case. Thank you for listening to History on Trial.
(51:53):
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating
or review. It can help new listeners find the show.
To see images the people and places in this episode,
check out our instagram at History on Trial. My main
sources for this episode were David E. Stannard's book on
Our Killing, Race, Rape and Clarence Darrow's Spectacular Last Case,
(52:14):
and the trial transcripts published by the University of Minnesota's
Clarence Sterow Digital Collection. For a full bibliography, as well
as a transcript of this episode with citations, please visit
our website History on Trial podcast dot com. History on
Trial is written and hosted by me Mira Hayward. The
show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising
(52:37):
producer Trevor Young and executive producers Dana Schwartz, Alexander Williams,
Matt Frederick, and Mira Hayward. Learn more about the show
at History on Trial podcast dot com and follow us
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(53:00):
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Listener Discretion advised. Hello listeners, I'm starting a newsletter which
will contain episode bonus content, reading and podcast recommendations, and
other fun history related tidbits. To sign up, please visit
our website History on Trial podcast dot com. On September twelfth,
(00:31):
nineteen thirty one, Horace Da received a gift that would
turn out to be a curse. It happened like this.
Horace's older sister, Haro had a beautiful light tan model
a Ford, which she'd saved up for for years, and
that night she told Horace he could borrow it. She
(00:52):
was going to be working and didn't need the car.
As long as Horace promised to be careful, he could
take his friends out in it. Horace was delighted. This
was a rare treat. He put on a white silk
shirt and dark trousers and headed out into the humid
Honolulu night to find his friends. At a speakeasy, he
ran into David Takai and Ben Ahacuelo. The three young
(01:16):
men had grown up together in Sunday School. A missionary
who'd taught them remembered they'd been mischievous and scrappy. Now
all in their early twenties, they were settling down. Horace
had just spent a year working in Los Angeles, David
was about to do the same, and Ben's girlfriend was pregnant.
But they weren't too old to have fun. On a
(01:38):
Saturday night, They spent a while at the speakeasy, then
considered where to go next. Ben knew about a luau nearby,
so the crew headed over and gorged themselves on roast
pig and beer. But there weren't many young people at
the luau, so they decided to check out a dance
at Waikiki Park. Horace spent the next two hours driving
(01:58):
various friends to and from the luau and the dance.
He didn't mind playing chauffeur. Driving Hariyo's car was such
a joy. Eventually, two other childhood friends, Henry Chang and
Joe Cahahavai, joined Horace. At midnight. When the dance ended, Horace, Henry, Joe, David,
and Ben huddled outside Waikiki Park thinking of where to
(02:21):
go next, their main criteria being free food and beer.
The group decided to go back to the luau once more,
driving down Bartania Street, they ran into a car full
of friends, and the two cars drove side by side
for a while, their occupants chatting. But by the time
the men got to the luau around twelve thirty, the
(02:42):
party had ended. It was time to call it a night.
Horace dropped David off first, Then as he pulled out
onto Lileha Street, Horace narrowly avoided colliding with another car.
A woman in the other car shouted at Horace to
watch where he was going. Joe shouted back, telling the
driver to get out of his car. Joe was a
(03:04):
champion boxer and football player and thought he could easily
take the driver, a middle aged white man. But it
was not the driver who got out of the car.
It was the passenger, his irate wife, Agnes Peeples. Agnes,
a formidable Hawaiian woman whose daughter described her as quote
built like a Sherman tank, wasn't afraid of some tipsy
(03:25):
young men. When Joe stepped towards her, she shoved him.
He swung back, clipping her ear. Agnes grabbed Joe's throat
with one hand and punched him with the other. Horace
Ida groaned, it had been such a nice night, and
now this e and Henry pulled Joe back into the car.
Agnes's husband, Homer, calmed her down and everyone drove off.
(03:49):
Horace hoped that that was the end of the issue
and dropped Henry and Joe off at their homes. But
two hours later, when Horace was fast asleep in his bed,
someone knocked loudly on the front door of the house
he shared with his sisters and mother. It was the police.
They were taking him in for questioning. This seemed ridiculous
(04:10):
to Horace. It had only been a brief fight, no
one had really been injured, and anyway, that woman had
hit Joe first, but he agreed to come to police headquarters.
While he waited to be questioned at the station, Horace
must have rude ever accepting Harrio's gift. What a price
to pay for a single night out with his friends.
(04:30):
But even then, Horace had no idea what truly lay
in store for him. Earlier that night, a young white
woman named Thalia Massey had reported to police that she
had been kidnapped and raped by a group of men
near Waikiki. The police had quickly connected Thalia Massey's attack
with the police report filed by Agnes Peeples about her
(04:51):
fight with Joe. In both cases, the suspects were a
group of young men in a car. Horace was not
in the police station to answer questions about a road
rage run in. He was there to answer questions about
the assault of Thalia Massi. Horace denied knowing anything about
(05:11):
this assault. So did David Takai, Ben Ahaquelo, Joe Cahahavai,
and Henry Chang. They had never seen Thalia in their lives,
the young men said at the time she had been attacked.
They had been driving down Bartania Street. People had seen them.
They had alibis. But in the face of a political
(05:32):
establishment that was determined to get convictions for Thalia Massey's rape,
would the truth be a good enough defense. Welcome to
History on Trial. I'm your host, Mira Hayward. This week
The Territory of Hawaii v. Ben Ahaquelo et al. On
the evening of September twelfth, as Horace Ida gleefully started
(05:55):
up his sister's ford, Thalia and Tommy Massey got ready
to go out. The Das and the Massis only lived
a few miles apart as the crow Flies, but their
neighborhoods were worlds apart. Horace Da lived in the part
of Honolulu then known as Hell's Half Acre, a teeming,
densely populated slum inhabited by a mix of ethnic groups,
(06:19):
including Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino immigrants, as well as native Hawaiians.
Tammi and Thalia Massi lived in Manoa Valley, a lush,
lovely neighborhood that climbed up into the mountains northeast of Waikiki.
Manoah had once been a favorite retreat for the Hawaiian
royal family. Now restrictive racial covenants meant that almost all
(06:42):
Manoa residents were white. Orderly bungalows lined the valley's streets,
filled with Navy men and their wives. Twenty year old
Thalia Massi was not popular in Manoa. She refused to
socialize with other Navy wives, believing them to be beneath her.
After all, Thalia was a Roosevelt. Yes, her father, Rollie Fortescue,
(07:06):
was the illegitimate child of Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, but Robert
had eventually married Rolli's mother, and the Roosevelts counted Rolly
as one of their own. He had fought in the
Spanish American War with his cousin Teddy, and then worked
as Teddy's aid in the White House. And Thalia's mother, Grace,
came from equally illustrious stock. She was a Belle as
(07:29):
an Alexander Graham Bell and Belle Telephone later at and
t Falia and her two younger sisters had grown up
on grand estates. It was true that Rolli's drinking and
refusal to work had left the Fortescuez in dire financial straits,
and the Fortescue daughters were notoriously ill behaved. But despite
(07:50):
all of this, Thalia and her sisters had been instilled
with the belief that their heritage made them superior to others.
So when the other Navy wives invited Thalia to their
teas and luncheons, she declined, and she wasn't shy about
telling them why. Even when she did attend the occasional
dinner party, her behavior was appalling. She would drink heavily,
(08:14):
tell inappropriate stories, and criticize everything around her, from the
house's decorp to the hostess's dress. Tommy Massew regularly confided
in his friends about how terrible his marriage was. Things
hadn't always been like this. When Tommy had first met
Thalia four years earlier, when she was a sixteen year
old high school student and he was a twenty two
(08:35):
year old cadet at the Naval Academy, life had been sunny.
Tommy had spent a blissful summer with the fortesc Us
at the Roosevelt estate on Long Island, charming the whole
family with his affable personality. Tommy might not have come
from as well known a family as Thalia's, but the
Massis were a prominent family in Kentucky, and his stable
(08:56):
career in the Navy meant that he would be able
to provide for thee. When Tommy and Thalia married on
November twenty fourth, nineteen twenty seven, their future had looked bright,
and for a little while all was well. Tommy had
several postings on the East Coast. People who knew the
Massies then said they seemed happy, though there were rumors
(09:19):
about Thalia being unfaithful. The couple tried to start a family,
but Thalia miscarried. Thalia's health was poor. She had an
untreated thyroid condition which caused weight loss, anxiety, and vision problems.
To compensate for the frequent loss of vision in one
of her eyes. Falia had developed a distinctive gait. She
(09:39):
walked with her head tilted down into the side, and
Tommy endured some professional setbacks. He dreamed of being a pilot,
but at barely five foot five, he was rejected four
times for being too short. When he finally got a
heighth waiver, he failed the psychological exam, with the examiner
calling him temperamentily not qualified, perhaps due to his quick
(10:02):
temper and what some Annapolis classmates had called his quote
cynical attitude. But Tommy had accepted the decision and pivoted
his focus to submarines. In May nineteen thirty, he graduated
from the Navy's Submarine School and was assigned to Squadron four,
based at Pearl Harbor. To most people, this posting would
(10:23):
have been a dream. In the nineteen twenties, a Hawaiian
craze had swept the United States. Hawaiian inspired music played
on the radio, theaters staged moch hula shows, and Hollywood
studios filmed movie after movie on the island's beautiful beaches.
At the same time, as tourists flocked to Hawaii, the
(10:44):
United States Navy was increasing its presence there, massively expanding
Pearl Harbor. Many of the military men who came to
Awe who at this time, were disturbed by the level
of racial integration on the island, which was comparatively higher
than in the rest of the United States. One need
only talk for five minutes with the average naval officer,
(11:04):
wrote reporter Lilyan Symes around this time, to realize that
he is straining at the leash to put Hawaii's brown
and yellow peoples in their place. Nonetheless, most sailors still
found Honolulu a lovely place to live, but not Tommy
and Thalia Massey. As Thalia's bad behavior became more outrageous,
(11:28):
Tommy too began to fall apart. He started drinking heavily.
The couple fought loudly and sometimes violently. When Tommy went
out on sea duty, Thalia would invite other men over.
In the summer of nineteen thirty one, in the latter
stages of pregnancy, Thalia lost the baby and fell into
a depression that manifested itself in increasingly hostile behavior towards Tommy.
(11:53):
She briefly saw a psychologist, doctor E. Loowel Kelly, but
After Kelly recommended to Tommy that Thalia receives psychae care,
Thalia stopped seeing him. In August, Tommy told Dalia that
he wanted a divorce. Thalia begged him for another chance,
not because she loved him, but because she did not
(12:13):
want to have to go back and live with her parents.
Tommy relented, but only conditionally. Thalia had three months to
try harder or else he was done. He called it probation.
Thalia promised to do her best. Agreeing to go out
with Tommy and some of his Navy friends on September
twelfth was part of her reform efforts. Thalia hated nights
(12:36):
out like this, surrounded by drunken Navy officers and their
boring wives, but knowing what was at stake, she slipped
on a long green silk dress and matching jacket. She
pasted a smile on as Tommy's friends and their wives arrived.
After an hour of drinking, the group headed to the Aluwai,
in a Navy haunt in Waikiki. When they arrived between
(12:59):
nine thirty and ten te pm, Tommy split off to
talk to some of his shipmates. Irritated at his abandonment,
Thalia went upstairs, where she circulated and drank, waiting for
Tommy to come find her. He never did. Around eleven thirty,
Thalia got into a fight with a Navy officer who
wanted her seat. After the man called Thalia alous, she
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slapped him. Tommy was summoned to calm her down. The
couple talked for a little while, then Tommy went back downstairs.
This night was clearly not going as either of the
Massies had hoped. Around one am, Tommy decided to head out.
Salia was nowhere to be found, but since she often
left parties when she was upset, Tommy assumed she'd already
(13:44):
gone home. He tried calling the house, but no one answered,
so Tommy and a friend drove back to Manoah headed
to a friend's house where they'd heard a party was happening.
When they got there, though, the host was not yet home,
so Tommy and his friend decided to wait. Ten minutes earlier,
at twelve fifty a m. Eustace Bellinger was driving his
(14:04):
wife and their friends, the Clarks, down Ala Moana Road
to get a late night snack. Suddenly, a woman appeared
in front of the car, alarmed Bellinger pulled over. The woman,
whose face looked swollen, told the Bellingers and Clarks that
her name was Thalia Massey. She said that she'd been
at a party earlier that night, but left around midnight
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to get some air. As she walked down john Ena Roade,
Thalia said some men had grabbed her and pulled her
into a car. They'd beaten her and then abandoned her
in a deserted clearing off of Ala Moana. Missus Clark
immediately suggested that they take Thalia to the police station
or to a hospital, but she said she only wanted
to go home. Just as Thalia got home, the phone rang.
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It was Tommy calling from his friend's house. Thalia picked
up the phone and cried, something awful has happened. Come home.
At one forty seven a m. Honolulu Police received a
call from Tommy Massey requesting assistance. A woman had been assaulted,
he said. Detective John Jardine, in charge of the night shift,
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dispatched two detectives, George Harbottle and William Fortado, to go
to the Massie's home. Police had gone to the house before,
usually responding to noise complaints from neighbors. When the massies fought.
This call out was different. Thalia had not wanted Tommy
to call the police in. When detectives Harbottle and for
(15:33):
Todo arrived, they found her lying on a couch, crying
and wearing a nightgown. Haltingly, Thalia told the detectives that
four or five Hawaiian men had snatched her off the road,
driven her to a remote spot, and then beat and
raped her. For Toado and Harbottle were shocked. In the
entire history of white settlement in Hawaii more than one
(15:55):
hundred years, there had never been a recorded case of
a Hawaiian man sexually assaulting a white woman. The detectives
walked Thelia carefully through her account, trying to get more information.
Nothing helpful was forthcoming. Alia said the night was so
dark she could not see the men's faces and doubted
she could identify them. However, when pushed by Fortado, she
(16:18):
said she was certain that all the men were Hawaiian,
not Chinese or Japanese. She could only describe their car
as being old and dark with a torn cloth top.
She had not seen a license plate. The night had
been dark. She said. She did not mention that her
bad eyesight rendered her nearly blind when she didn't wear
(16:38):
her glasses, glasses that she had left at home that night.
As Detective Harbottle continued the questioning, detective for Toado called
Detective Jardine to report in Fortato, and Jardine agreed that
Thalia's story reminded them of a case they had caught
earlier that night. At twelve forty five am, Agnes Peeples
had come to police headquarters to report that she'd had
(17:00):
an altercation with a car full of young men, and
that one of them, a Hawaiian, had assaulted her. Two
incidents involving a group of young Hawaiian men seemed unlikely
to be a coincidence, the detective's thought. As Thalia was
taken to a nearby hospital to be examined, a car
was dispatched to the Ida house. Unlike Salia, Agnes had
(17:20):
seen a license plate five eight nine eight five, which
the police had been able to trace to the Eda's car.
Horace Ida denied having anything to do with Thalia's rape
and initially refused to name the men he had been
out with, but after hours of relentless interrogation, Horace identified
his friends as the police brought in the other men,
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Joe Cahahavai, Ben Ahaquelo, David Takai and Henry Chang, and
interrogated them. In turn, a problem emerged. The men's accounts
of their night were consistent. Moreover, they could provide the
police with the names of many other people who had
seen or see spoken with them between ten pm and
one am. There was no time for them to have
(18:04):
committed the attack, which Thalia claimed had happened between midnight
and twelve forty five. The men's strong alibis were not
the only issue. Thalia had repeatedly said that she was
sure that her attackers were all Hawaiian. Joe and Ben
were Hawaiian, and Henry was half Hawaiian and half Chinese,
but Horace Da and David Takai were both Japanese, and
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Haruya DA's car didn't match the description Thalia had given
of an old, dark colored car with a ripped top.
Haruyo's car was only two years old, with a light
hand exterior and a pristine cloth top. But fortunately for
the detectives, Thalia now seemed flexible on details. When John McIntosh,
the chief of detectives, interviewed Thalia, at police headquarters after
(18:50):
her exam, she now told Captain Macintosh that she had
seen a license plate five eight eight oh five that
was only one digit off from haruyo Eda's plate. Later
at trial, a possible explanation for Thalia's sudden memory was provided.
(19:10):
Throughout the early morning of September thirteenth, a police dispatcher
had repeatedly broadcast a be on the lookout alert for
a car with license plate five eight eight nine five
which had been involved in an assault on a woman.
The dispatcher was referring to the assault on Agnes Peoples,
but a lay listener would not know that these broadcasts
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had blared from police car radios stationed right outside the
exam room. Thalia Massi was in an exam room with
open windows when Captain McIntosh brought Haryo's car to the
Massie's house around nine am on the thirteenth, identifying it
to Thalia as quote the suspect's car. Thalia said that
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while she couldn't be certain that this was the exact car,
it was quote a car like that, and when Macintosh
brought jo Henry, David and Horace in front of Thalia
later that day, she identified all of them except for
David Takai, as being her assailants. By that time, news
of Thalia's rape was public and causing an enormous uproar.
(20:16):
No one was angrier than Admiral Yates Sterling, commandant of
the fourteenth Naval District, an outspoken racist and an advocate
for complete military control of Hawaii, Sterling was furious to
hear about the attack. Notably, Sterling had been much less
angry about the two sexual assaults committed by white sailors
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against Hawaiian women in the past five months. There is
no record of the Navy punishing these men after demanding
custody of them from the local police, But now Sterling
called for quote quick action and adequate punishment for these
quote dark skinned criminals. Sterling quickly organized a meeting with
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Honolulu's power brokers, including the mayor, the district attorney, the
Navy's shore patrol commander, and the territorial governor, Lawrence Judd.
The forty four year old jud had been governor for
two years. This was an appointed position. The men who
made the appointment were members of a small white or
Howley elite, the descendants of the white missionaries and planters
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who had wrested power and land away from Native Hawaiians
over the course of the nineteenth century, culminating in the
eighteen ninety three overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, the eighteen
ninety eight annexation of Hawaii, and the establishment of the
United States Territory of Hawaii in nineteen hundred, all despite
strenuous protests by Native Hawaiians. By nineteen thirty one, though
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there was an elected territorial legislature, the true political power
in Hawaii belonged to the sugar cane corporations known as
the Big Five, who appointed governors who would do their bidding.
Governors like Laurence jud But the United States Navy had
all so began to play an increasingly important role in
the territory. Thanks to the Great Depression, revenue from tourism,
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sugar and pineapples was down. The Navy, which planned to
invest millions into Pearl Harbor, offered economic relief, and so
writes historian David Stannard in his book on the Trial,
This first meeting between Sterling and jud Quote set the
tone for all that were to follow. The Admiral was
(22:27):
used to giving orders the governor was used to taking them.
Before long, a full bore prosecution was underway. Judd and
Sterling had the benefit of a compliant media environment. Two
of Oahu's largest English language newspapers, the Honolulu Advertiser and
the Honolulu Star Bulletin, were closely intertwined with the military
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and business elite's interests. Assisted by the police who readily
provided them with information, these papers began conducting a trial
by press, depicting the case against the five men as watertight.
Behind the scenes, the case was anything but. The timeline
made it almost impossible for the suspects to have committed
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the crime, and though Thalia's story now better fitted the suspects,
the police lacked physical evidence to support this story. When
police investigator's finger printed Haryo DA's car, they found plenty
of prints, but not a single one belonging to Thalia Massey.
And more troublingly, the police were struggling to find proof
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that Thalia had been raped at all. I will mention
here that false reports of rape are very uncommon. The
rate of false reports is difficult to measure since there
are many ways to define false, such as stories that
were proven false, suspected to be false or unable to
be substantiated or to meet the threshold for prosecution. But
the most comprehensive research indicates a rape of false rape
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reports in the United States to be between two and
eight percent. We cannot know what exactly happened to Thalia
Massey that night in nineteen thirty one, but the physical
evidence did not corroborate her story of being beaten and
raped multiple times. At her exam only several hours after
the alleged attack, a doctor and nurse found that the
(24:14):
only injury Thealia suffered was a facial one. Her jaw
was broken, she had no vaginal abrasions or lacerations, and
no seamen was present. Thalia told the doctor that she
had douched after arriving home, but no seamen was found
on any of the clothes that Thalia wore that night either.
Her clothes were in fact nearly pristine. Besides a few
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drops of blood on the shoulder, likely from Thalia's split lip,
the clothes looked, according to doctor Thomas Mossman, the assistant
City and County physician, like they had just come from
the dry cleaners. Even her shoes were not scuffed. It
was hard to imagine that thealia could have been abducted, beaten,
dragged through the woods, and raped without sustaining a single
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stain or rip or scuff. The lack of physical evidence
was a particular problem for the prosecution because Hawaii had
a law that required corroborating evidence in rape cases. A
victim's testimony alone was not enough, but prosecutors, led by
Assistant City and County Attorney Griffith White, were not deterred
by these obstacles. Driven by increasing pressure from the Navy
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and an outraged public, White was determined to get a conviction,
and when the men's trial began on November sixteenth, nineteen
thirty one, the lengths to which White would go to
get his conviction would be revealed. When ben Ahaquelo's mother, Aggie,
heard that her son had been arrested, she was terrified,
(25:45):
so she did what any mother would do. She called
a princess. As David's Darren explains, although the ravages of
it introduced disease and consequent political upheaval did much to
change Hawaiian cultural norms following European contact, one characteristic that
endured was the expectation by rulers and rules alike that
(26:08):
rulers were obliged to care for the common people. So
Princess Abigail Kavana Nakoa, the current leader of Hawaii's deposed
royal family, did not hesitate to answer Aggie Ahaquelo's call.
The princess listened to Aggie's story and then said that
she would contact one of her friends, the accomplished attorney
William H. Heen, to see if he could help. William
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Heen was prominent in Hawaii's legal and political circles. Half
Chinese and half Hawaiian, the forty eight year old Heen
had worked as a prosecutor, a defense attorney, and a judge.
He was currently balancing his law practice with his duties
as a senator in the territorial legislature. Keen agreed to
look into the case for Princess Kavana and Nakoa. Aware
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of the racial aspects of the case, he decided to
recruit a white attorney to assist him. Bill Pittman was
the perfect fit. An excellent atonejourney, the Mississippi born Pittman
was passionately anti racist. He also happened to be a
descendant of Francis Scott Key, who was decidedly more racist,
as we saw in episode three of History on Trial.
(27:13):
Heen and Pittman wanted to be sure that they had
a solid case, so they conducted vigorous interrogations of the defendants.
At the end, the lawyers were convinced that the men
were innocent and decided to represent them. They divided up
the defendants, with William Heen representing Ben Ahaquello and Henry Chang,
and Bill Pittman representing Horace da and Joe Cahahavai. Robert
(27:35):
Murakami later joined the defense as well, representing David Takai.
Hawaii's Howley Elite were disturbed by the news that such
formidable lawyers had signed on. They began to question whether
Griffith White was the right man to lead the prosecution.
After all, the forty one year old had only four
years experience as a lawyer. But White insisted he could
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handle the case, and the prosecution also had to reason
to hope that the judge would be sympathetic to their cause.
Judge Alva E. Steedman, thirty seven, had married into one
of the Big five Sugarcane families right before the trial.
Steedman announced that this would be his last trial, as
he would be accepting a job with his wife's family company.
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The defense worried that Steadman, about to leave the bench,
would be less concerned with impartiality than he would be
with satisfying the Big Five and the Navy. Their fears
seemed to be confirmed. As the trial began. Steadman denied
nearly all of the defense's motions. Most critically, he denied
their motion to get a bill of particulars, which would
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enumerate exactly what crimes each defendant was charged with. This
ruling was a particular blow to David Takai. Thalia Massey
had always denied that he was one of her attackers,
and Takai had no idea what he was even on
trial for. At ten thirty am on November eighteenth, Griffith
White delivered a brief opening statement, focusing on the heinousness
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of the crime. Then he called Thalia Massey to the stand.
Thalia was dressed conservatively and spoke softly. Her testimony was emotional.
When she began describing the attack, she broke into tears,
prompting Judge Stadman to call the recess. Her testimony was
also thorough and precise. She provided detailed descriptions of her assailants,
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who she now said had referred to each other by
name during her assault. She described seeing the license plate
and the car, both of which she had initially claimed
not to have seen, and these weren't the only changes
to her story. Thalia now said that she might have
left the alloway in as early as eleven thirty five
p m. The most moving part of her testimony came
(29:45):
when Thalia spoke of discovering a month after the alleged
assault that she was pregnant. In truth, Thalia had only
suspected she was pregnant when she went to the hospital
and had a dilation and curetage performed. No evidence of
pregnant she was discovered, but that fact never emerged at trial,
and the horror of her ordeal moved many in the
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court room. On cross William Heen gently but insistently pushed
Thalia on the details of her attack and on the timeline.
When he asked about the discrepancies between her testimony and
her initial report to the police, such as the ethnicity
of her assailants or the description of the car, Thalia
claimed she couldn't remember what she'd said when with Thalia's
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testimony entered. Griffith White now worked to introduce corroberative evidence.
He called Thalia's personal physician, doctor John Porter, to describe
the injuries to Thalia's face. Then he presented a series
of police officers. The first police witness was Detective John C. Clooney.
Clooney had been one of Horace DA's arresting officers. Shortly
(30:52):
after bringing Horace in, Clooney said Boris told him that
quote one of the boys in his cars struck Missus Peeples,
but as far as the striking of this white woman,
he said he didn't know anything about it at the time.
White asked Clooney, had you mentioned to him that a
white woman had been struck? I had not. Clooney said
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the implication was clear. The only way that Horace DA
could have known about the attack on Thalia at this
point was if he had committed it. William Heen was shocked.
He had never heard any mention of this exchange on cross.
He asked Clooney if he had written a report that night.
Clooney said he had, but that he didn't have the
report on him, so the detective was excused to fetch
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the report In the meantime, White called his next police witness,
officer Claude Benton. Benon had conducted a search of the
crime scene in the early hours of September thirteenth, shortly
after the assault was reported. At the scene, Benton had
found several items that Thalia Massey identified as hers, including
a pocket mirror and a pack of cigarettes. But Benon
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had also found something much more important. He now revealed
on the stand tire tracks three good Rich Silverton Chords
and one good Year all Weather. Benton explained, with the
Goodyear tire on the left rear. These were, of course
the same tires as those on Haruo DA's car. Benon
(32:21):
had even taken Horace Da in his sister's car to
the crime scene to compare the tracks. White clarified when
the comparison visit had happened Sunday morning, he asked, Benon said, yes,
William Heen knew how damaging this testimony sounded, but he
thought he might be able to undermine it. His first
step was asking for Benton's written report. Keen received it
(32:45):
right before he began his cross examination of Benton that
afternoon and had to quickly scan it. Then he began
questioning Benton. After reviewing the tire evidence, Heen asked Benon
what exactly he had found at the crime scene. Benon
walked through the event, recalling the brands of the cigarettes found,
the various matchboxes, and the pocket mirror. It was clear
(33:06):
that he was a detail oriented, methodical officer, unlikely to
miss things or make mistakes. Having established this, Heen dropped
the hammer. Now, mister Betton, why didn't you include the
tire marks in your written statement? Keen read Benton's report
aloud in court. There was no mention of the tire tracks.
(33:29):
Benen could only offer vague explanations, saying that he didn't
realize the tire tracks mattered until he knew about harya
IA's car. On redirect, Griffith White tried to clean things
up by asking more questions about the visit Betton had
made to the crime scene with Horace da It had
only been a few hours after his first inspection of
the scene been confirmed. This redirect didn't add much to
(33:51):
Beton's damage credibility, and worse was still to come, but
for now, Officer Bennon was dismissed and Detective Clue Pony
returned he told the court that he was unable to
find his report. This would become a pattern. The defense
would ask for a police report, only to be told
it was missing. However, in this case, Keen could still
(34:12):
question Clooney about the contents of his report. He asked
Clooney if he had recorded Horace DA's reference to a
white woman anywhere. Clooney said he had not. When he
asked why, Clooney admitted it was because quote, I was
instructed to keep it under cover. Who had instructed him
to do this? Griffith White, the prosecutor, Clooney said. Clooney
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also admitted that he had only remembered the alleged exchange
five weeks after Horace Edo was first brought in. Clooney's
suspicious recollection of this exchange aside, this story was much
less damaging than it sounded. When Clooney had brought Horace
to the police station, he had briefly left Horace alone
while he searched for Captain Macintosh. Police officer Cecil Rickard
(34:58):
would later admit, months after the trial ended, that he
had approached Horas during this period and asked him about
the assault. So Horace had a legitimate reason to know
that the victim was a white woman. After White introduced
a few more police witnesses who had helped administer Thalia's
identification of the suspects, Keen asked for Officer Benton to
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be recalled to the stand. His questions this time around
focused on Benton's visit to the scene with Horace da
White had made a point of having Benton emphasized that
his visit had been on Sunday morning, only hours after
his first visit, the implication being that the only way
the tire tracks could have gotten there was during the
commission of the crime. But he now asked, hadn't this
(35:44):
second visit actually happened on Monday morning? Yes, Beton admitted.
Not only had Betton omitted the supposedly crucial tire marks
from his report, he had now also been caught lying
on the stand. The prosecution's other main police witness, Captain
John McIntosh, proved to be no more helpful than Benten
(36:07):
or Clooney had been. As Chief of Detectives, McIntosh had
supervised the investigation almost from the beginning. A veteran of
colonial police forces in South Africa and New Zealand and
a former sugarcane plantation overseer McIntosh had been brought onto
the police force, in his own words, quote by the
business interests and the politicians. McIntosh provided little new evidence
(36:30):
during his direct examination. His cross, however, was illuminating. Under
questioning by Heen, McIntosh admitted that Thalia's fingerprints had not
been found in her ruyo Eda's car, that no seamen
had been found on Thalia's clothing or on the defendant's clothing,
and that there were a number of discrepancies between the
story that Thalia had first told and the one that
(36:52):
she had told on the stand. White's only other witnesses
were a few police officers who had helped administer Thalia's
identification of the defendants, none of whom had much to add.
After three days and twelve witnesses, White rested the prosecution case.
White's case was flimsy at best, but as we've seen
(37:12):
so often, what is happening outside the courtroom can have
an enormous impact on a jury's decision. Though Judge Deadman
instructed jurors to avoid reading press coverage of the trial,
it would be difficult for them to avoid it entirely.
Many papers put the case on the front page of
every issue, and often their reporting was highly biased towards
(37:33):
the prosecution. The Honolulu Advertiser, for example, titled a story
on Heen's cross examination of Benton quote, defense fails to
shake officer's story at trial. Not every newspaper was so biased.
George Wright, a reporter who managed the English language section
of the Japanese language newspaper Hawaii Hochi, for example, had
(37:53):
been questioning the predominant narrative of the case from the start.
As David Stanner describes, quote, two completely different accounts of
what happened to Thalia Massey on Saturday night, September twelfth
made their way through the homes and streets and workplaces
of Honolulu, which, rendition, people believed dependent in large part
on the newspapers they read, and what they read was
(38:16):
a consequence of who and what those people were. The
split in opinion that now was emerging cut right down
the middle. Howley's on one side, almost everyone else on
the other. Even if most of the jurors were not
white themselves, all of them depended on the how the
elite for their livelihoods, and they were aware of how
(38:37):
badly their bosses wanted a conviction. As Ben Ahacuello later noted,
quote all the big guys in town, the guys working
for the big firms, came and sat in court and
stared at the jury. What they were saying with their
eyes was that if this doesn't come out right, you're
going to get fired. So despite the seeming weakness of
(38:58):
the prosecution's case, the defects still had a battle ahead
of them. Fortunately they came prepared to fight. On the
afternoon of Monday, November twenty third, nineteen thirty one, William
Heen delivered the defense's opening statement. His argument was simple,
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these defendants could not have committed this crime. To prove
this argument, the defense presented dozens of witnesses who testified
to the whereabouts the defendants on the night in question.
These witnesses, who had either spoken to or seen the defendants,
could account for almost every minute of the men's movements
between ten pm and one am. What was more, the
(39:43):
defense also had witnesses who had likely seen Thalea that
night at the very time she claimed she had been abducted.
George and Maimie Goas had attended the dance at Waikiki Park,
then walked down john Ina Road for a late night
stack at five, ten minutes after midnight, they saw a
white woman in a green dress who appeared drunk walk
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past them. Like Thalia, this woman had a distinctive gait.
She walked with her head tilted down and to the side.
A white man in a dark suit walked several paces
behind her. Alice Aramaki, who worked in a barber shop
on john Ena Rooade, saw what looked like the same
man and woman a little further down the road a
(40:26):
few minutes later. The goas and Aramaki also testified that
they had provided this information to both the police and
Griffith White as soon as they learned of the attack
on Thalia. They had provided sworn statements, but the prosecution
and the police never investigated further. He now followed the
thread of police incompetence, recalling Captain John Macintosh to the stand.
(40:51):
Though he had already succeeded in seriously undermining Officer Benton's
testimony about the tire tracks, Keen had one last blow
to deliver. He asked Macintosh whether he had gone to
the scene of the crime after Officer Benten first examined it.
Macintosh tried to evade the question, but when Heen would
not relent, he admitted, quote, after I left Massey's home,
(41:14):
I went down to the premises with Eda's car. Did
you drive the DA car into these premises? Keen asked,
I did not. Macintosh replied, but then continued, Sato drove
the car in there. Henri Satto was the patrolman who
had driven Macintosh to the scene. Those tire marks that
(41:35):
the prosecution had made so much of they had been
made by the police. Keen also asked Macintosh about two witnesses,
Tatsumi Matsumoto and Robert Vieira. Matsumoto and via were in
the car that Horace had pulled alongside on Bartania Street
around twelve fifteen a m. On the thirteenth. Police had
(41:56):
spoken to both men early in the investigation. Keen wanted
to know how the police had learned of Matsumoto and Vieira.
Macintosh said that Griffith White had told police to question
the men. So William Heen called Prosecutor Griffith White to
the stand. White was an unhelpful witness. He acknowledged that
he must have heard about Matsumoto and Vieira from one
(42:18):
of the defendants, but claimed that he couldn't remember which one,
but what White actually said didn't matter so much. It
was the principle of it. White was admitting on the
stand that from the very beginning of the investigation he
had been aware of numerous witnesses whose sworn testimony made
it very unlikely that the defendants could have committed the crime,
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and yet he had still continued with the prosecution. If
White thought that having to testify in a trial he
was prosecuting was rock bottom, there was still lower to sink.
While cross examining Joe Cahabai, one of the defendants, White
asked Joe about what Horace Eat was wearing on September twelfth.
(43:02):
Failia had claimed to recognize a leather jacket when identifying Horace.
When Joe denied that Horace had worn this jacket, White
brought a transcript of Joe's statement, in which Joe had
apparently said that Horace had worn the jacket. Do you
remember saying that? White asked, smugly, that is what you
put in there? Joe shot back, flustered, White said, not
(43:26):
what I put in here and tried to change the subject.
William Heen was only too happy to return to this
exchange during his redirect. After confirming with Joe that Horace
had not been wearing a leather jacket, Keen asked, how
did you happen to say to mister White that he
did well? Joe said, he put it in the statement,
and then after I signed the statement, I scratched it out.
(43:49):
Keen turned to White and asked to see his copy
of Joe's interview. White, caught in his own net, handed
over the paper, admitting, quote, it is scratched out. Another
example of White tampering with the defendant statements soon emerged,
thanks once again to White himself. Defended, David Takai testified
(44:10):
that he was the one to tell White about seeing
Matsumoto on cross White asked, quote, why didn't you put
in the fact that you saw Matsumoto's car in the
written statement? I told you this matter, David replied, then
you told her the stenographer not to put it down.
Another brilliant own goal by Griffith White. By now, Keen
(44:30):
had clearly shown prosecutorial and police misconduct, but he also
wanted to show that many police officers involved with the
case would back up the defense's account. Not all of
these police witnesses were enthusiastic about testifying for the defense,
but they were forthright. After Captain Macintosh had taken over
the case, he had replaced all the non white detectives
(44:52):
with white officers. Those replaced included the four detectives who
had responded to the initial call out to the Massy house.
All four of these men testified to Thalia's original statement
in which she said she could not see any faces
or any details of the car, and Detective Lucciano Machado
revealed that Thalia had been unsure of her identifications when
(45:14):
ben Ahacuello was brought in front of her. Thalia had
only confirmed he was one of her assailants after Captain
Macintosh whispered to her that he was. After a week
of testimony from fifty two witnesses, the defense was satisfied
that they had proven not only that the defendants could
not have committed the crime, but that the police and
the prosecutor had lied and manufactured evidence. Given this, Griffith
(45:40):
White would need to appeal to emotion, not evidence in
his closing argument, delivered on the morning of December first,
and emotion White could do this is one of the
worst cases we have ever had. He began describing how
Thalia Massey, a quote, young inexperienced girl, had just been
(46:01):
taking a walk when quote she was assaulted by beasts.
Would the jury further victimize Thalia by rejecting her testimony
and labeling her a quote unmitigated liar. He knew they
would not. They would quote be men, he insisted, and
they would consider what they would want done if their
(46:24):
wives were harmed. You would want to go down and
shoot the men, White said, to avenge not just Thalia,
but Tommy Massey too. They must find the defendants guilty.
All three defense lawyers gave closing arguments. Robert Murakami, representing
David Takai, focused on the defendant's alibis, saying that in
(46:47):
the face of the timeline quote, I doubt that the
prosecuting attorney, as a reasonable man, can honestly believe that
these are the men. In his closing Bill Pittman was
less generous towards the prosecute. This entire case, Pittman stated,
is a frame up. A prosecutor's job was to seek truth,
(47:08):
not a conviction that any costs. He continued and though
he thought rape was a terrible crime, Pittman thought that
there was quote a worse crime, one more heinous, and
that is sending innocent men to the penitentiary. Pittman concluded,
by exhorting the jurors not to commit this crime. You
(47:28):
cannot if you are honest and upright men, convict these men.
I know these men are innocent, and I know this
jury will not swerve from its duty of acquitting them.
William Heen gave the final defense closing, he combined Murakami
and Pittman's approaches, walking through all the evidence that proved
(47:49):
his clients were innocent and incapable of committing the crime.
The only crimes that this trial had proven, Keen said,
were those committed by the police officers like Officer Ben,
who had perjured themselves. They had only done so, Heen believed,
because of quote the public clamor to crucify the defendants
on a cross of prejudice and sentiment. He pointed out
(48:12):
that other police officers had resisted this pressure and testified honestly.
Wasn't their word worth as much as anyone else's? Or?
He asked, quote, are we to disregard the testimony? Of
these witnesses simply because they are Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese or Portuguese.
He concluded by asking the jurors to be quote honest
(48:35):
and courageous in reaching your verdict and return a verdict
of not guilty. Griffith White came out swinging in his rebuttal.
If anyone has been crucified, he said, it is this
lovely girl who crucified herself to protect other women of Honolulu.
White briefly addressed the evidence again, calling the officers who
(48:56):
testified for the defense quote traders and said that Off
Benton's testimony quote still stands unchallenged. But for his final
message to the jury, he fell back on emotional appeals.
What we call upon you, the gentlemen of the jury,
for White said, is to vindicate Hawaii, to show that
(49:16):
you will protect your women, stand together for a true verdict,
and thus justify your manhood. The jury received the case
around nine pm on Wednesday, December second. People thought it
would be a quick deliberation, but for very different reasons.
Many navymen and other Howleys thought that the prosecution had
(49:38):
it in the bag. Many others thought acquittal would be immediate.
Both groups were wrong. The jury deliberated for nearly one
hundred hours. Tempers got so heated that several jurors got
into a physical fight. William Heen called for a mistrial.
Judge Steadman admonished the jurors. Eventually, they claimed they could
(50:01):
not reach a verdict. Stedman told them to keep trying,
but finally, at ten p m. On Sunday, December sixth,
nineteen thirty one, he accepted that the jury was deadlocked.
In the case of the Territory of Hawaii v. Ben
Ahacuello at Al, Judge Deadman declared a mistrial. Chaos irrupted
(50:28):
at the news of the mistrial. Some people were thrilled
with the outcome, others were furious. Admiral Yates Sterling called
the result quote a stupid miscarriage of justice which could
have been avoided if the territorial government had shown more
inclination to sympathize with my insistence upon the necessity of
(50:48):
the conviction. The defendants, he concluded, were not men who
should have been given the benefit of a reasonable doubt.
Grace fordescue Thalia's mother, vehemently agreed. She had traveled to
Hawaii shortly before the trial and had been horrified by
what she saw as immoral racial integration. She had made
(51:09):
a habit of calling the police on her Hawaiian neighbors
and had requested that only white nurses treat thelia. The mistrial,
in grace Fordescue's mind, was yet another symptom of the
dangerous erosion of white supremacy in the territory. She could
not bear the thought of a second trial ending without conviction.
If the legal system could not guarantee her the outcome
(51:31):
she wanted, she thought she'd just have to take matters
into her own hands, and so grace Fordescue bought a
gun and she began to plot to find out what
happens next. Join me next week for part two of
the Massy Case. Thank you for listening to History on Trial.
(51:53):
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating
or review. It can help new listeners find the show.
To see images the people and places in this episode,
check out our instagram at History on Trial. My main
sources for this episode were David E. Stannard's book on
Our Killing, Race, Rape and Clarence Darrow's Spectacular Last Case,
(52:14):
and the trial transcripts published by the University of Minnesota's
Clarence Sterow Digital Collection. For a full bibliography, as well
as a transcript of this episode with citations, please visit
our website History on Trial podcast dot com. History on
Trial is written and hosted by me Mira Hayward. The
show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising
(52:37):
producer Trevor Young and executive producers Dana Schwartz, Alexander Williams,
Matt Frederick, and Mira Hayward. Learn more about the show
at History on Trial podcast dot com and follow us
on Instagram at History on Trial and on Twitter at
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Mira Hayward
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