At the age of forty-six Mary was not some mindless fantasist or even a wretched wife. As a writer, and the womanīack in the loop | 3 who had saved him once before, she felt compelled to be with him.
Ford darrow obituary ca auburn journal trial#
Two weeks earlier Darrow had urged Mary to travel to Chicago to see him, and to bear witness to a new kind of trial that would test the limits of their intelligence and compassion.
The curious case of Leopold and Loeb, the sons of two millionaires, fixated America and reached the world beyond in faraway cities like Paris and London. His words were given a fierce charge by their jolting backdrop: a saga reeking of forbidden sex and murder. Darrow had written to her in a way she could barely believe, intimating how much she still meant to him and that he needed to see her urgently. They had even met occasionally and buried their past feelings in talk of books and politics, as well as gossip about former members of their circle who had known of their illicit love. Their four-year affair had ended in 1912, but in the intervening twelve years, after the pain had ebbed, they had remained friends and exchanged regular letters. She wanted to hear why he had called her. A longing to see Darrow kept her moving toward him. She could have broken down and cried on the sidewalk if she thought too closely about the risk she had taken in traveling from New York to be with Darrow, her former lover. Her face, as plainly intelligent and practical as it appeared, felt on the brink of collapse. She could not pull down a similar mask and ignore the threat her relationship with Darrow now posed to her own marriage. “Darrow,” they yelled, was “ready for the trial of the century.” “Leopold and Loeb,” who had confessed to the senseless murder of a young boy less than a month before, on May 21, faced their likely death sentence with “an eerie calm.” Mary did not share their serenity. Newspaper barkers, pressing hard to sell their final editions, shouted out rival headlines from adjoining street corners. Darrow’s name, and those of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the two nineteen-year-old killers he would defend, echoed around Mary. He would soon enter the courthouse and begin the most infamous murder trial of his long career. Only one cer-Ģ | the la st tria ls of cla rence da rrow tainty remained. The lawyer’s reputation skirted redemption and ruin again as he immersed himself in yet another complicated defense. His fame was enshrined, but Darrow was revered and hated in equal measure. It was Darrow’s knack, and his fate, to be drawn to cases of such drama and dissent that they received saturation coverage across the country. Clarence Darrow was America’s greatest and most controversial criminal lawyer, a battered sixty-seven-year-old defender of the lost and the damned. The dusk framed her own trepidation as she went to meet the man she had loved so long. And the farther she walked the more she lowered her gaze, as if willing herself to become invisible.
Alone in the Loop on a summer evening, Mary Field Parton picked her way through the teeming streets, slipping quietly past the blurred faces and babbling voices. It seeped through the burnt orange and faded red streaks of a sky that softened the stone buildings towering over her. Hellfire Preachers and Biology TeachersĪbout the Author Other Books by Donald McRae Credits Cover Copyright About the PublisherĪrkness spread slowly across a city in tumult. He had just as many friends in both places. You see, Darrow didn’t believe much in either-but he always said he wouldn’t mind ending up in heaven or hell. But he could break your heart, if you were not careful, because he was often more concerned with saving comparative strangers than thinking of those who loved him most. His compassion for the world was breathtaking. THE LAST TRIALS OF CLARENCE DARROW D o n a l d M cR a eĭarrow was the most intriguing yet strangely contradictory man I ever knew.
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