NOTE: Sources vary on the spelling of Mrs. Gorham’s first name: Opal,” “Okel,” “Okal,” “Oakel.”
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FULL TEXT (Article 1 of 3): FULL TEXT: St. Joseph, Mich.,
Feb. 14. – Two demented mothers who murdered their five children were
questioned further today as authorities sought to learn if even more babies had
died at their hands.
A confession signed by Mrs. Okal Gorham, 25, said the babies
were poisoned or strangled to death by herself and her mother, Mrs. Ethel
Lewis, 57. She could give no reason for the acts but said she and her mother
frequently quarreled over family matters.
The women will be subjected to sanity tests today or
tomorrow and the sheriff will seek to learn if they disposed of children born
to unmarried women in addition to murdering their own.
The sheriff’s office announced that Mrs. Gorham had signed a
confession which related how she and her mother killed four children. the story
was disconnected and and it was impossible to tell the identity of the victims,
Wilbur Cunningham, prosecutor said.
Murder charges have been withdrawn until the sanity tests
are completed.
The murders were revealed when the coroner became suspicious
over the death of the last infant. Mrs. Lewis claimed whooping cough caused the
death but the coroner found finger marks on the child’s throat.
Mrs. Gorham, in one confession said seven babies had been
killed but later changed her story saying only five were murdered. Three of
those were her own and the other two her mother’s she said. One of her babies
she wheeled 12 miles to Eau Claire, Wis., in a baby carriage to commit the
murder, the confession said.
Mrs. Gorham declared her mother placed poison in milk given
to the babies and some were killed in this manner. Others were strangled she
said.
William Lewis, husband of the confessed murderer, said two
of their children died at birth. He and his son-in-law Herbert Gorham, were
questioned but the sheriff’s office inclined to believe they had done nothing
to do with the murders.
A search for graves near the Lewis home was made but none
were found. A more extensive search will be conducted later in connection with
the theory that the two women disposed of illegitimate children in addition to
their own.
[“2 Demented Mothers Slay Five Children.” syndicated (UP),
Feb. 14, 1929, p. 1]
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FULL TEXT (Article 2 of 3): St. Lewis, Mich., Feb. 13 –
Sheriff Eved G. Bryant said tonight that Mrs. Okel Gorham, 23, had confessed
she was present Sunday morning when her mother, Mrs. Ethel Lewis, 49, poisoned
and strangled the infant son of the younger woman, and Mrs.
Gorham had formally charged her mother killed three other grandchildren and
four children of her own.
The young mother, whose home is in Dowagiac, Mich., charged
earlier in the day that her mother had killed five infant children, but in a
signed statement tonight, increased the number to eight.
“Ma put dope in the milk and choked it,” Mrs. Gorham said
when questioned about the death of the boy, Clarence Wesley, 17 months old, who
died Sunday.
“I seen her choke it with her hand.”
She had asserted previously that her mother gave the child
poisoned milk Saturday night
Mrs. Lewis, the sheriff said, admitted placing poison in the
child’s milk, but denied choking the boy or causing the deaths of the seven
other children.
“It’s a lie. They’re all lies,” Mrs. Lewis shouted. “The
girl must be crazy.”
The younger woman asserted in her confession that she also
witnessed the poisoning of another daughter, Isabelle Gorham, but said she was
not a witness to the others.
The children who Mrs. Gorham charges were strangled and not
poisoned by her mother, besides Clarence Wesley and Isabelle, were Louise Jane
Gorham, 18 months old, who died in February 1922, Mary Jane Gorham, 18 months
old, died in November 1926, two twin daughters of the elder woman born of a
former marriage to Henry Ford, a farmer living near Big Rapids, Mich., and two
other infant children of the older woman, whose names she “couldn’t remember.”
All died at the home of Mrs. Lewis at Eau Claire, Mich., and
a former home at Indian Lake, Mich., Mrs. Gorham said.
“She killed them because she didn’t like me to visit her,”
was the only motive for the alleged slayings the younger woman gave.
Wallace Lewis, Eau Claire junk dealer, husband of Mrs.
Lewis, and Herbert Gorham, were held, but denied knowledge of the alleged
slayings.
Formal charges against the two women probably will be
withheld, authorities said, pending a mental examination.
Investigation began Tuesday, when county officials were
requested by the undertaker who conducted the funeral of the child who died
Sunday to look into the case. Marks on the body, he said, led him to believe
the child had been choked. Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gorham was arrested and the
daughter’s charges followed.
Mrs. Lewis, authorities said, at first denied any knowledge
of the deaths. Then, they said, she broke down, and at one point in the
questioning said, “I didn’t know it would cause all this trouble.”
Mrs. Lewis was divorced from Ford about ten years ago, the
marriage to Lewis following. Three children, born while she was married to
Ford, now are living. Gorham is 61 years old.
[“Deaths Of Eight Children Laid To Mother By Woman – Four
Tots Of Each Slain, She Admits – ‘Didn’t Like Me To Visit Her,’ Daughter’s
Explanation.” syndicated (AP), The Galveston Daily News (Tx.), Feb. 14, 1929,
p. 1]
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FULL TEXT (Article 3 of 3): St. Joseph, Mich., March 9. –
Mrs. Oakel Gorham, 25, and her mother, Mrs. Ethel Lewis, 49, accused of
murdering one infant and suspected of killing six others, are mental deficients
and should be sent to state institution for the rest of their lives, a sanity
commission of two physicians reported to the Berrien county Circuit Court
today.
The physicians were Drs. Roy A. Morter, acting
superintendent of Kalamazoo State
Hospital for the Insane, and C. N. Sowers of Benton Harbor. The two women
killed seven of their own babies, according to Mrs. Gorham’s confession.
YOUNGER HELD INSANE.
The younger woman is actually insane, suffers from delusions
and is of the imbecile type, according to the report. Mrs. Lewis was found
sane, but weak mentally with the mind of a six-year-old child, and of the
imbecile type.
Berrien county authorities who have specifically charged the
pair with murdering Clarence Wesley Gorham, five-months-old child son of Mrs.
Gorham, on Feb. 10, are expected to approve the alienists’ recommendations.
STORIES DISCONNECTED.
Investigation of several mysterious baby deaths in the two
families disclosed a squalid story of unwanted children born in poverty with
their parents unable to care for them. Mrs. Gorham confessed the two women had
killed seven of their children but her stories were disjointed and varied.
Prof. William A. Roemer, of Notre Dame University, after an
informal examination of the two women reported that they were sane although of
low mentalities.
The women’s husbands, Herbert Gorham, 61, and Wallace Lewis,
59, were arrested with their wives on
Feb. 12, but released after it was shown they had no connection with the baby
murders.
[“Want Slayers Sent To Asylum – Women Baby Killers
Defective, Doctors Report.” Syndicated (UP), The Pittsburgh Press (Pa.), Mar.
10, 1929, p. 6]
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[1938-4/3/20]
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FULL TEXT: WHEN the news first was broadcast recently that a
daughter in St. Joseph, Mich., had accused her mother of putting to death seven
or more babies born to them, humanity-wise persons who read the early
dispatches lifted their eyebrows and predicted that time would show their home
to have been just another "baby farm," where children were taken to
board and, possibly, to be disposed of.
Editors, in fact, suggested as much, and psychologists and
physicians predicted such would be found to be the case.
As the days went by. however, and the background of the
murder charges placed against Mrs. Ethel Lewis and her daughter, Okel, became
more clear, it was seen that this case was more unusual than that. The
"baby-farm" theory gave way to skepticism, and skepticism in turn was
succeeded by reluctant credulity.
"Baby-farms" had been discovered he-fore, where
children of other mothers had been disposed of for a price. Infanticide is no
unknown crime, particularly in densely populated sections or the country. And
the mass murderer, although rare, is a well-authenticated species.
But this case, in which mothers were accused not of killing
one child, but a series of children over a period of years, and those children
all their own this case seems to have no parallel, either in the annals of
crime or the case-books of Insanity. There is nothing else just like it.
It Is too soon to say positively, or even to form a settled
opinion that Mrs. Lewis is guilty of the horrible crimes that her daughter
accuses her of, and it is too soon to decide whether that young wife
deliberately aided her mother in the commission of them. The evidence is not all
in yet, and none of It has been presented to a Jury.
But whether the charges prove true or not, the hypothetical
case they present to students of human conduct and Its variations is worthy of
some study. The motives behind wholesale infanticide ought to be as rare as the
crime itself seems to be.
To begin with, both women have been pronounced morons by Dr.
A. L. West, of St. Joseph, who examined each a day or so after they were brought
to the Berrien county jail. It was the doctor's guess that each would he found
to have the mentality of an eight-year-old child, that is, to be in that
borderland degree of Intelligence that lies between Imbeciles, the obviously
feeble-minded, the helpless idiots, and normal mental capacities.
This average mental ty is estimated at about 11 years of age
from 11 to 14 years. The person with the eight-year-old brain can get along
very well in this world, and thousands and thousands of them do. They are not
nearly as rate, nor nearly as dumb, as the layman would suppose.
That much settled, the question arises whether these women
were sane or insane. If sane, the crime falls into the category of wholesale
murder and because of its unusual motive will stand out as the only recorded
example of successive Infanticide.
If insane, the case Is still among the most unusual on
record. Almost nothing is known today of the forms of insanity that affect
feeble-minded persons. Too often the feeble-minded and the insane are lumped
together, whereas they should be widely separated. A feebleminded person is a
person whose brain did not mature, while an Insane person Is one whose brain
became diseased or malformed. To be both insane and feeble-minded Is extremely
unusual.
But even If sane at the beginning, might not these two women
have been succumbing to insanity that arose alter the commission of the first
of the alleged crimes? Indeed, does not the spectacle of one such crime
following after another, more and more rapidly, suggest this very theorv? Listen
to L. C. Douthwalte, a Canadian biographer, whose book on this subject has just
been published by Henry Holt ft Co. Pays Mr. Douthwaite:
"In essence, all crime is prostituted egotism, and always
there have been those to whom even the sanctity of human life has become
subservient to their own desires. As one by ono each barrier la thrust aside,
so progressively the egotism becomes inflated until the point is reached when
no obstacle towards complete gratification is recognized as inseparable.
"The difference between the petty thief and the
murderer is only the difference in the dimensions of their self-absorption.
"It Is not Inevitable that the thief begets the
murderer, but once the mind and conscience is schooled to cross the line which
shields good repute from the prisoner's dock, the lesser crime assimilated, the
greater looms less outrageous and impossible.
"Even when the criminal becomes thus transformed into
the murderer this same law of progression continues to operate. Willi murder,
as with so much of lesser moment, it is the first step that counts. The frame
of mind evolved where the slayer looks not forward to a possibility, but
backward upon an accomplished act that has rendered his own life forfeit, is
one which is able to contemplate a further killing with less revulsion."
In the light of this, does it not appear significant that
Okel Gorham accuses her mother of having first slain twins born to Mrs. Lewis
13 years ago, when Okel was a small girl? Independent evidence shows that Okel
told this story at least four years ago, and apparently for 15 years she has
been able "to look backward upon an accomplished act" and, of course,
during those years, was growing less and less revolted by the idea. Whether
Mrs. Lewis actually killed those children, or whether Okel only thought she did
what twisted concepts, what abnormal Ideas may have been the result of this
15-year-old, but unforgettable memory.
"The four primary motives of murder are fear, revenue,
gain and lust." Mr. Douthwalte goes on to say, "though in the case of
the. mass murderer the first two operate but rarely. Wholesale homicide Is
perpetrated either from impulses of sex or of acquisition."
Here is where the St. Joseph case separates Itself from the
examples cited in Mr. Douthwaite's book. Neither sex nor gain, fear nor revenge
animates these slayings, if the evidence so far obtained can be believed.
Instead, both mothers seem to have been subject to a curious lack of emotional
control, a kind of fitful hysteria Induced at times by the Incessant demands
that every infant makes. In short, neither woman could stand the babies'
crying, and. If eventually the deaths be proved to have occurred as Okel Gorham
states, acted in a sort of frenzy of impatience to stop their wailings.
This motive is not unknown in cases of infanticide, that Is,
in cases where mothers have smothered, or choked, or otherwise mistreated
children so they died. But cases of this kind on the wholesale scale have not
before been recorded. Hence the interesting conclusion of Mr. Douthwaite's
analysis of the motive behind mass murder becomes important:
"But can it be denied that behind these two Impulses
(sex and greed), which, however perverted to obsession, are yet only the highly
magnified desires common to us all, there was some other and malignant urge
more terribly compelling still; a maturation of the seed of sadism engendered
by the first killing, and which, the bonds of repression once burst, thereafter
rioted at will? Murder grows by what it feeds upon?"
This, to Mr. Douthwaite, is the horrible truth that lies
behind the rare phenomenon of the mass murderer.
And is this, perhaps, the explanation of the dreadful roll
of infant death that was unfolded the other day at St. Joseph? Time perhaps
will tell. The facts known today are mute.
Summing it up, these facts are as follows:
Okel Gorham, as a little girl, believed that her mother had
put to death the baby twins one day while she was at school, and buried them
beneath a tree behind the barn.
Ten years later, as a young wife, when her second baby was
born, she believed this and told the story to the midwife who attended her.
A week later, the midwife says she saw Okel choke and
mistreat this baby, in a fit of impatience at its crying, so cruelly that it
died.
Then the sinister toll of baby deaths began. In the four
years that have followed, three other children of Mrs. Gorham and two or three
born to her mother, succumbed under circumstances that authorities today are
trying to clear up.
Two of them died at Indian Lake, near Dowagiac, a few days
apart from each other and shortly afterwards the house was destroyed by fire.
One was the daughter of Mrs. Gorham and
the other a baby born to her mother.
Another child of Mrs. Gorham's died while the family was
visiting Mrs. Lewis at Eau Claire. A baby born to Mrs. Lewis died in Saunders,
Ind., and its father buried it in the back yard.
Still another child was born to Mrs. Lewis, and this one
cannot be located. The sixth Gorham child (two are still living) died at the
grandmother's house in Eau Claire, and It was this death that finally prompted
official investigation. The deputies of Sheriff Fred G. Bryant, of St. Joseph,
with Chief of Police Oscar Burch. of Dowagiac, questioned Mrs. Gorham, and
obtained from her the startling charges that her mother had deliberately put to
death these children, by poisoning, by suffocation, and by strangling them.
Remember, the woman that told the story had for 15 years
believed her mother capable of such crimes, and had condoned them. What twist
of mentality might not such belief produce?
And remember, the woman that, told the story herself stands
accused of mistreating her own child so that It died, and of mistreating it in
this manner before any of the other deaths took place.
Deputies searching that house at Eau Claire did find a
poison that could have been used. This poison was aconite, which Mrs. Lewis
explained she used herself for her heart. Aconite is so used, sparingly, for
cardiac treatment.
Curiously enough, it seems to be true that criminal
poisoners have always been women. Rene Charpentier, in his "Degenerescence
Mentale et Hysterie," published in Paris in 1906 makes a clinical and
medico-legal study of celebrated poisoners from those of the days of fable and
antiquity (Hecate, Circe, Medea, Semiramis, Parysatig and Cleopatra) down to Mme.
Lafarge, Marie Jeanneret, Rachel Galtie, the poisoner of Saint-Clar and Mme.
Massot, and, in passing, Livia, Lucusta, Agrlppina, Lucrezia Borgia, Marquise de
Brinvilliers, Marie Bosse, la Voisin, la Vigoreaux, la Kilaster and others.
He shows that a certain number of these criminals are
hysterical degenerates and that there exists a manifest relation between the
mentality of these unbalanced people and the psychology of the crime of
poisoning.
Poison is the weapon chosen by the hysterical person who has
the desire to kill. Outside of the neuropathic symptoms which are usually
grouped under the name of hysteria, one notices, in fact, among the criminals
the presence of psychic facts Independent of hysteria and bearing chiefly upon
the affective and moral sphere.
In the St. Joseph case the two women have been pronounced
feeble-minded, a fact which itself plus the additional theory that they must
also be in some degree insane puts the case in an unusual light. Dr. Henry H.
Goddard in his study of feeble-mindedness (McMillan. 1914) makes the
distinction clear.
"Neurologically, Insanity results from a brain that is
diseased," he says, "while in the case of feeble-mindedness the brain
has never attained normal development. A dwarf never grows to normal stature
but a man of normal stature may be reduced to the height of the dwarf by an
accident which cuts six inches from his legs or by disease which shortens him
at the hip-joint, or which curves his spine so that he can no longer stand up
straight.
"A feebleminded person is a person with a dwarf brain,
not necessarily in size, it is true, but in function; while an insane person is
one with a diseased brain. Functionally, the two conditions may approach each
other so nearly that, to the inexperienced at least, they are difficult to
distinguish." But the difference can be accurately determined by the
scientist. Dr. Goddard says, going on to discuss the cases of those persons
found to be feeble-mind and insane.
"The brain that has been arrested in development thus
causing feeble-mindedness may later become diseased, and so we have insanity in
a feeble-minded person. These cases are somewhat difficult to recognize, but
usually they show sooner or later such positive signs of insanity that all
doubt la removed. (Which, of course, has not happened In the St. Joseph case.)
The peculiarities of insanity in the feeble-minded is a chapter in the story of
feeble mindedness that Is not yet written."
At another point Dr. Goddard says:
"Not only is there no close relationship between insanity
and feeble-mindedness, but the conviction has grown since the beginning of our
study of the problem that these two types of abnormal mentality belong at the
opposite ends of the physical scale.
"Once the hereditary character of feeble-mindedness Is
recognized one can hardly keep from thinking of a feebleminded person as
belonging to a strain that has not yet developed to the higher levels of
intelligence. In other words we come to the view of a more primitive form of
humanity, a vigorous animal organism of low intellect but strong physique the
wild man of today."
Citing instances of great strength, health, digestion, etc.,
Dr. Goddard says; "Wounds seem to heal many times where in normal people
they would give much trouble. There is apparently more or less resistance to
certain diseases. There is dullness to pain. These with other facts have given
the impression that we are dealing with a primitive, crude, coarse form of the
human organism; not as a "reversion" but a primitive strain that has
remained much a in the savage condition.
This opens up an entirely different vista of motives for
infanticide in the Gorham-Lewis case. Among savages the practice has been found
quite usual, and has been laid to four reasons.
1. Sheer, thoughtless brutality: In some parts of Africa
lion-traps have been baited with children and the Moxos of South America kill
or abandon them apparently without reason. Other tribes have been known to eat
children.
2. The struggle for existence: One small Polynesian Islands
custom permitted families to bring up only a limited number of their off
spring. In many lands Infanticide done on the part of the parent was regarded
as a meritorious act. as a precaution against famine, and in the interest of
the tribe.
In other instances infanticide has been laid to (3)
religious observance, as the feeding of children to the god Moloch, and (4)
social custom, as in Sparta, where weekly or deformed children were killed by
order of the state – a practice still observed among t the Eskimo and the Kamehadales.
[James M. Haswell, “Michigan’s Baby Slaying Case Lacks
Parallel – Strange Charges Against Mother By Offspring Confounds Science,” The
Detroit Free Press (Mi.), Mar. 3, 1929, Feature Section, p. 7]
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[1938-4/3/20]
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