Trouble in Paradise: The Massie Case Quiz

Answer: She was the wife of a naval officer.

Thalia Fortescue, a distant relative of both Theodore Roosevelt and Alexander Graham Bell, was 16 when she married recent Naval Academy graduate Thomas Massie. Theirs was not a match made in heaven. Thalia was a fledgling alcoholic who had behaved strangely ever since her dreams of acting were blighted by Graves' disease. Tommie, meanwhile, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder a decade later; his medical report from St. Elizabeth's Hospital delicately opined that this untreated illness could have "been responsible for many of his difficulties in the past."

Not even Tommie's 1930 assignment to a submarine squadron in Hawaii -- even then regarded by mainlanders as a paradise on Earth -- would bring them happiness.

Answer: She had been walking along the side of the road when they drove up behind her.

Angry with Tommie for leaving her at the party, Thalia had gone for fresh air. It was on John Ena Road, she said, that she was abducted. About forty-five minutes later, she flagged down a car on the Ala Moana Road, a short distance away, told the occupants she had been kidnapped and beaten, and begged them to drive her home.

It wasn't until her husband joined her there that she told anyone she had been raped. Soon their home was full of police officers, and a tragic chain of events was in motion.

Answer: Joseph Kahahawai had been in a fight that night.

Apart from the usual Saturday-night drunk-and-disorderlies, the only other call the Honolulu Police had received that night was an assault complaint from one Agnes Peeples. At about 12:35 a.m., she had been a passenger in a car that narrowly missed colliding with another car. Furious, she got out of her car, Joseph Kahahawai got out of the other car, she shoved him, and there was a brief fight, after which she went directly to the police station and provided them with the license plate number of Horace Ida's sister's car. He'd been driving his friends around that night.

When the Massie call came in, the police thought it unlikely that there would have been two separate cars full of young men making trouble on a Saturday night. They traced the license plate number and brought in Ida and his friends.

Answer: Police analysts accidentally contaminated the DNA evidence with samples from the suspects.

The Honolulu Police Department's missteps were due partly to inexperience; it was a quiet city, with the night shift primarily occupied with collecting drunks. The excitement of two assault cases in one night appears to have been what led Detective Cecil Rickard to blurt out the suspects' license plate number in the hearing of Thalia Massie and her friends. It was only after this that she was able to give police any number at all; earlier in the night, she'd said it was too dark to see the license plate.

But the Chief of Police was also anxious to close the case, which was politically embarrassing, and this pressure led to trouble. The line-up was poorly done, and the search for tire track evidence -- after police had driven the car to visit the crime scene -- looked so much like planting evidence that the police photographer, Samuel Lau, refused on the spot to take part. If DNA analysis had existed in 1931, it would probably have been treated just as carelessly.

Answer: A hung jury

The jury spent 97 hours deliberating, but never got anywhere near unanimous agreement on a verdict: a 7-5 split was the best they could do. Hawaiian law required a racially mixed jury, and people unhappy with the mistrial (mainly whites, like the Massies) blamed the jury's diversity -- even though the jurors later said that the vote had not split along ethnic lines at all. Admiral Yates Stirling, who commanded the U.S. fleet in Hawaii, sent alarmist cables to Washington, wildly exaggerating Honolulu's crime rate and reiterating his longstanding argument that constitutional protections ought to be suspended in the islands. Mainland newspapers, taking their information from sensational Honolulu tabloids and wires like Stirling's, went into a frenzy; the U.S. Congress began to consider the notion of imposing martial law.

Answer: Thalia's husband, her mother, and two sailors

The murderous foursome consisted of Thalia's husband, Tommie Massie, a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy's submarine corps; her mother, Grace Hubbard Bell Fortescue, a socialite and cousin of Alexander Graham Bell; and two enlisted sailors, Fireman First Class Edward J. Lord and Machinists' Mate Albert O. Jones. Jones knew the Massies because he had been assigned to protect Thalia after the rape trial, while Tommie was at sea; Lord was a friend of Jones.

When they kidnapped Joe Kahahawai, Tommie Massie drove him to Grace Fortescue's rented house; a short time later, the young man was shot with Jones's gun.

Answer: They showed him a faked police summons.

To call this document a forgery would greatly overstate Grace Fortescue's ability. Handwritten on plain white paper, the heading misspelled the word "territorial," and the space at the bottom was filled with an incongruous newspaper clipping, which was affixed with the seal from Tommie Massie's Chemical Warfare School diploma. "Life Is a Mysterious and Exciting Affair," the clipping read, "and Anything Can Be a Thrill if You Know How to Look for It and What to Do With Opportunity When It Comes."

When Joe Kahahawai emerged from a meeting with his probation officer on the morning of January 8, 1932, his murderers showed him the summons only briefly before encouraging him to enter the car at gunpoint. His cousin, Eddie Uli'i, stood stunned for a moment before realizing he had just witnessed a kidnapping.

Answer: Clarence Darrow

Clarence Darrow had earned a special reputation for defending people disadvantaged by institutional bigotry. For example, Ossian Sweet, one of his more famous clients, was a black doctor who killed a man in 1926 as he was defending his Detroit home and family from an angry white mob. It may have looked like a fairly simple case of self-defense, but, in the racial climate of the time, his acquittal for murder was a tremendous achievement for Darrow. And in the 1925 Scopes monkey trial, Darrow failed to win acquittal for his client -- a Tennessee schoolteacher accused of explaining evolution to his students -- but he struck a major public relations blow for freedom of inquiry.

So it surprised his friends that, in the twilight of his career, a man like Darrow would agree to defend the members of a lynch mob. His motivation appears to have been simple: the 1929 stock market crash had destroyed his retirement hopes, and Grace Fortescue's friends were able to come up with a staggering $40,000 for his fee. (Remember, these were 1932 dollars!)

Answer: The governor commuted their ten-year prison sentence to one hour.

The commutation, which took place immediately after the sentencing, was planned as a media event: the four convicted killers spent their hour in custody talking to reporters around the governor's mansion. The atmosphere was joyful: newspapers in Honolulu and around the country had celebrated the killing in frankly racist terms as a honorable defense of "white womanhood." In fact, Governor Lawrence Judd had been under considerable pressure to pardon the killers entirely; he resisted, saying that "[b]y their verdict the jury has built a monument upon which it is inscribed that lynch law will not be tolerated in Hawaii, and for the public good I propose to do nothing which would in any way tear down or destroy that monument."

He apparently did not believe that a total absence of punishment defaced that edifice. Tommie Massie, an officer in the U.S. Navy, did not even face losing his commission for conduct unbecoming.

Answer: The Pinkertons

For months, a squad of Pinkerton detectives prowled Honolulu. They pored through police reports, re-interviewed witnesses, and re-traced the steps of the principals with stopwatches. At the end, they concluded that the original defendants in the rape trial were innocent; among other things, there were numerous witnesses placing them far from the crime scene that night, and there wasn't nearly enough time for them to have gotten there and carried out the attack. Kelley dropped all charges against Ahakuelo, Chang, Ida and Takai a few months later; it was too late to help poor Joe Kahahawai.

So what happened to Thalia Massie on the night of September 12, 1931? No one seems to know, though there has been much speculation. Someone hurt her: her jaw was broken. Was it the unknown white man who was seen walking with her that night? Was it her husband, who came home drunk shortly after she did? We'll never know: Thalia Massie died 30 years later, without telling.