Bernice
Zalimas was tried and convicted for the murder of her husband. The conviction
was regarded as an extraordinary event in Chicago, where it was almost impossible
to get a jury to convict an attractive woman of murder.
On
appeal the conviction was overturned and prosecutors chose to try her a second
time. This time she was acquitted due to the extraordinary actions of her
attorney. See:
On
appeal the conviction was overturned and prosecutors chose to try her a second
time. This time she was acquitted due to the extraordinary actions of her
attorney.
For
another case of extraordinary chivalry that save a woman accused of murder, see
the legendary Beulah Annan case:
***
PHOTO
CAPTION (Article 1 of 4): The doctor's certificate held the death of Dominick
Zalimas, 38, of Chicago, was due to natural causes. But friends insisted upon
an autopsy, and the funeral was halted and the post-mortem examination made. It
revealed a heavy dose of poison, evidently placed in his food, had killed him.
His wife, Mrs. Bernice Zalimas, 23, was arrested for his murder. She protests
her innocence.
[“Held
for Husband’s Death,” syndicated, The Manitowac Herald-News (Dec. 5, 1924, p.
6]
***
FULL TEXT (Article 2 of 4): Chicago, May 11. – The notion
that Cook county can produce no beauty-proof juries has been exploded with the
sentencing to 14 years in the penitentiary of Mrs. Bernice Zalimas, “the lady
with the classic profile and the rose-bud mouth.”
When Mrs. Zalimas appeared in court for trial last week,
charged with poisoning her husband, it was apparent that her defense would be
the same as that which has proven so successful for “lady killers” in the past.
She was in the mode. She had engaged a dressmaker as well as an attorney.
On one side was Mrs. Zalimas and her beauty set off with a
complete change of costume daily. On the other side was the prosecutor with a
logical sequence of facts. He showed that Bernice had quarreled with her
husband; that he had threatened to divorce her for intimacy with another man;
that she had threatened to poison him; that she had purchased poison; that her
husband had died and that poison was the cause of his death. Motive,
opportunity and the fact that crime had been committed were the pillars of the
state’s case.
The jury found Mrs. Zalimas guilty in 45 minutes and she was
sent back to her boudoir in the county jail, the first murderess in years whose
beauty had meant nothing to 11 good men and true.
[“Beauty Fails To Save Woman On Trial For Killing,”
syndicated (United News) The Evening Independent (St. Petersburg, Fl.), May 11,
1925, p. 12]
***
FULL TEXT (Article 3 of 4): Chicago, May 23. – You seriously
wonder whether there can really be a soul stirring in the depths of Mrs.
Zalimas here.
That is the impression you get after talking to her in the
jail, where she is being held preparatory to going to the penitentiary for 14
years for slaying her husband by poison.
Plump, blond and suave, she is the last of the season’s
“arsenic widows” who for one reason or another sought to rid themselves of
husbands without due process of law.
Bernice, in her gingham jail garb, is rather mad at the way
the law has treated her.
She had rather expected to go free and join the female band
of 32 who have killed and escaped during the past five years. Instead she finds
herself as No. 14 in the coterie which has been convicted.
They found a pound of arsenic in the loft of the Zalimas
home shortly after Dominick, the husband, died.
Bernice was at his bedside when the end came and wept many
tears.
There was another man for possible motive and some insurance
and money in a strongbox, the State claimed in evidence at the trial.
Bernice affected bewilderment over the charges and shook her
strawberry locks to perplex the jurors.
They were scarcely influenced. Instead of the pleaded rope
they gave her half a normal lifetime behind bar and key.
If a man had done what Bernice has been found guilty of
doing the case would be of but little interest.
But Bernice is interesting because she typifies the order of
the day.
When they found her guilty she pretended a few hysterics and
then settled back into the shell from which she has since failed to emerge.
In jail she laughs and is voluble in sing-song denials of
guilt.
The husband whose life was taken by the arsenic paste
intended for rats, never seems to cross her memory.
She thinks, rather of the crowds and smart dresses she wore
last year and the society which accepted her, much after fashion of receiving a
gladiator or court fool into its midst, because Bernice provided pleasure.
She cannot distinguish that her ambition to become a part of
the city’s circles of culture, wealth and refinement was doomed to failure.
She does not know that she was smiled on not as an equal,
but as a superb animal.
She only knows that she should say “It is horrible. I did
not do it.”
Kipling once wrote about the rag and the bone and the hank
of hair – the woman who did not and could not care.
He should have been Bernice, the well-groomed animal, trying
to catch a glimpse of her reflected self in the window of a jail – thinking of
such things in the midst of dramatic trouble.
[“Beauty in Toils Forgets of Murder,” The Providence News
(R.I.), May 28, 1925, p. 3]
***
►Why the Lawyer Ate Poison to
Save His Lovely Client
►The Desperate and Dramatic
Gesture that Startled the Court Room and Won His Case When Every Other
Expedient Had Failed
***
FULL
TEXT: (Article 4 of 4): Freedom, happiness, beautiful gowns, gaiety, luxury and possible romance—
Or
fifteen years of hard labor in the penitentiary, coarse clothing, coarse food,
sodden drudgery scrubbing floors by days, and hideous, .endless nights locked
up alone in an. iron cell.
Mrs.
Bernice Zalimas, beautiful blonde cloak model, sat trembling a few weeks ago in
a Chicago courtroom, wondering which of these two alternatives would be her
fate.
She
had already been once convicted of poisoning her husband, but had protested her
complete innocence to the last, and had persuaded her attorney, Eugene McGarry
that she really was being made the martyr to another woman’s jealousy.
His
faith in her had caused him to move heaven and earth for a new trial—and at
last he had obtained it.
But
now the second trial seemed on the verge of going against her, as the first
had.
The
State had ruled up circumstantial evidence that seemed overwhelming, and the
prosecuting attorney had depicted her as a beautiful fiend, a cruel,
calculating, deliberate murderess, who deserved neither pity nor mercy.
The
faces of the jurymen were hard and cold. After the death of her husband, an
autopsy had revealed traces of arsenic in his stomach. The State contended that
she had killed him by putting a poisonous cleaning powder, containing arsenic,
in his food.
The
defense insisted that Dominic Zalimas had died from natural causes, and that
tin arsenic found in his stomach was nothing more than the traces of a medicine
he had been taking of his own volition, pills containing small quantities of
arsenic, frequently prescribed as a tonic.
But
the case seemed to be going against her. Vainly Attorney McGarry argued that
the amount
of arsenic discovered in Zalimas’ body could not have killed anybody.
To
convince the jury, he took up a little bottle containing the pills which the
defense contended had been found in the vest pocket of the dead man, and said
that he proposed to swallow some of them then and there, as proof of his
sincerity in saying they were not dangerous.
Harold
Levy, Assistant State’s Attorney, leaped to his feet and stopped him. “That’s
no good,”
he cried, appealing to both judge and jury. “We do not contend that those pills
killed him, or could hurt anybody. We contend that he was poisoned by this box
of powder. We have it here, and we know it is a deadly poison. Let Mr. McGarry
eat some of that, if he dares!”
The
prosecuting lawyer had no idea that Attorney McGarry would “take” the dare. It
was just his way of clinching an argument. But McGarry’s “Irish” was up, as the
saying goes. In addition, lie had absolute faith in the innocence of his
beautiful client.
And
in addition to that, he had been making a careful scientific study of the
affects of arsenic.
He
had learned that it was a deadly poison, but that it did not kill except when
taken in a larger quantity than even the prosecution alleged Mrs. Zalimas had
put in her husband’s food.
“Why
don’t you eat some of the powder that killed him?” taunted the lawyer for the
State. McGarry glanced at his fair client, who was sobbing.
He
looked at the jury, and saw from their faces that they felt the prosecution had
scored a point.
His
offer to take the pills from the bottle had been a boomerang that the
prosecution had cleverly turned against him.
Suddenly,
before the judge or bailiffs could stop him, he seized the paper box of powder
from the table, poured out a large spoonful into the palm of his hand, and
gulped it down!
The
judge had risen in his seat with astonishment. The prosecution was
thunderstruck. Some of the jurors laughed hysterically – and others turned
pale.
Mrs.
Zalimas, whose bend had been bent forward in her hands, screamed and seemed to
be about to faint, when she realized what had happened. McGarry, after
swallowing the poison, stood with beads of perspiration breaking out on his
forehead, and said, quietly:
“I am
sorry I had to do that. This powder was intended for cleaning purposes. I think
it is possible
that it may make me very sick, but I insisted to you, gentlemen of the jury,
that it would not produce death. I sincerely believe that. And there was no
other way to prove to you that I had the courage of my convictions.”
The
attorneys for the prosecution, pale and startled, but busily whispering, were
soon on their feet, claiming that Mr. McGarry’s gesture was “improper
pleading,” but the judge let matters proceed.
And McGarry, after drinking half a glass of water, took his
stand before the jury, and began
his final argument to save his client. It was a long, impassioned plea. He
became so eloquent that judge, jury and spectators almost forgot that they were
listening to a man who had just voluntarily taken poison, and who stood before
them even with the poison working in his veins.
At
the end of about twenty minutes, in the midst of a long, emotional sentence,
the lawyer’s
knees suddenly sagged and his face turned deadly pale. He clutched at the
railing of the jury box, to prevent himself from falling to the floor.
The
courtroom was in a hubbub of excitement. Physicians rushed forward. “He’s going
to die,” exclaimed a juror. “It’s horrible.”
The
doctors were all for stopping the proceedings and carrying the attorney into an
anteroom and using a stomach pump on him immediately to save his life. But he
was still able to speak, and forbade it.
“My
client’s future is at stake,” he said. “I still insist that I was right, and I
insist on going on. I do not feel any pain. I think I collapsed merely from
nervousness and exhaustion.”
The
whole thing was so unusual, and so much hung in the balance, that the judge
still allowed matters to proceed. A man who had taken such a dramatic risk to
prove himself right, should have the privilege of going through with it if he
could.
McGarry
recovered his self-possession presently, and began the continuation of his
final plea. When it was over, he refused to leave the courtroom, for fear it
would give the prosecution a chance to suggest that he had rid himself of the
poison with an emetic. He sat through it to the bitter end.
“I am
certainly not comfortable,” he said, “but I am sure that it won’t kill me.”
The
judge’s charge was brief, and the jury’s deliberation was even briefer. In a
very, short time they were back in the courtroom with a unanimous verdict of
“not guilty!”
Mrs.
Zalimas broke down completely from joy.
“I
owe my life and freedom to you,” she cried, and covered the lawyer’s hand with
kisses. It was one of the most dramatic moments that had ever occurred in a
modern courtroom.
McGarry
didn’t wait for many congratulations.
Accompanied
by two physicians, he hurried from the courthouse – and what they did afterward
was nobody’s business.
The
sensational acquittal was the culmination of one of the most dramatic criminal
cases the Middle West has known in years.
The
beautiful defendant had known the shame and misery of actual imprisonment, for
following her conviction in the first trial, she was locked up for weeks in the
Cook County jail. She had escaped being sent immediately to the penitentiary
and hard labor, because of the appeal which was pending.
“I
knew God would take care of me,” she exclaimed in her cell, on the night when
news was brought to her that a new trial had been granted, and that she would
be temporarily released on heavy bail.
“I
knew that this would happen, for I am innocent, and I felt the Lord would hear
my “prayers. I shall be so happy to be out of prison,” she continued at that
time, “but I shall be sorry just the same to leave the babies.”
“What
babies?” the reporters demanded, “We didn’t know you had any babies.”
The
jail matron explained that Mrs. Zalimas had assumed the role of foster-mother
to two little babies whose mothers were in the same jail, and ill. One of the
babies was three months old, and the other only five weeks.
That
the action of Attorney McGarry was unparalleled in dramatic courage, is
conceded by his fellow members of the bar. He himself is inclined to make light
of it, declaring that he had made a careful study of the effects of arsenic,
and was convinced that no matter how ill the poison made him, he was in no
actual danger of succumbing. Had he become violently ill, as in apparent
danger, the court would have insisted on an emetic or stomach pump, and the
demonstration would have injured rather helped his fair client, but he took
that chance.
[“Why the Lawyer Ate Poison to Save His Lovely Client – The
Desperate and Dramatic Gesture that Startled the Court Room and Won His Case
When Every Other Expedient Had Failed.” The Salt Lake Tribune (Ut.), Jun. 13,
1926, p. 2]
***
***
