by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Though recent reports suggested that, after a few days in jail, with no alcohol, decent food and a chance to exercise, Norman Selby, famed as former boxing champion Kid McCoy and accused of the 13 August 1924 killing of his lover Theresa Weinstein Moers (Mors, due to a recent name change by her ex-husband, Albert)), was in a more stable mood. The Los Angeles Express of the 19th, however, under a big headline of “KID M’COY GOES CRAZY; JAILORS CALL FOR HELP,” reported that the office of Los Angeles County District Attorney Asa Keyes was contacted over the prisoner’s purported attack of a “brain storm.”
It was stated that McCoy took to placing pieces of cardboard and paper to the walls of his cell as rat traps, while his communications “were rambling and at times incoherent” and it was felt that “he might become violently insane.” Meanwhile, the grand jury investigation was nearing completion and it was believed that a first-degree murder charge was imminent. After three days of psychological examination, Keyes, without releasing reports, announced that McCoy was determined to be sane on the day Mors was slain.
Added to the investigation was a belief that $5,000 in jewelry were taken from Theresa’s body after her death, while the revelation that there were over $80,000 in life insurance policies on her, payable to her ex-husband, was deemed significant, though how exactly was not explained nor was further detail provided about the missing jewelry. It was also decided by a probate judge that Albert would be administrator of Theresa’s estate, consisting of about $33,000, some 80% of it being her half-interest in the Mors antique store.
The Los Angeles Record, also of the 19th, offered a different version of McCoy’s behavior in the lockup as it was remarked that three “alienists,” or psychiatrists, were headed there because of reports that, when asked what he was doing with the paper, as well as some cutlery placed in unusual locations, the prisoner answered, “I just thought I’d stump Mors and another guy outside my cell window” and was preparing to keep both out, otherwise “I’ll kill ’em both.”
McCoy then added,
Tress [Theresa] was with me here for about an hour last night. She looked just as beautiful as ever. She said she wasn’t going to let me stay here much longer. You know, you can’t separate true love. They can put me behind the bars but they can’t separate Tress and I. We’re together in spirit, anyway. I can’t understand, though, how she fell for a skunk like Mors. Tress is such a beautiful girl.
When daylight came, McCoy put everything away and remarked that Albert wouldn’t show during that part of the day because “like all cowards, he’s afraid of the light.” Jailers, though, we’re sure it was all an act and Keyes remarked “I’m afraid Mr. Selby’s sensational attempt to ‘go crazy’ comes too late,” while letting the media have access to a simple statement from two of the doctors who examined the prisoner and who “find him not insane at this time.”
A Record columnist, Jack Jungmeyer, reviewed McCoy’s love life, summarized as “treat ’em rough—gently” as the prisoner was accounted “one of the remarkable battlers and courtiers of his generation.” Yet, whatever formula he’d employed with his eight wives and other companions,” something failed “while he was clandestinely wooing the sumptuous wife of Albert Mors during the husband’s absence.”
The writer asserted that “the man with a soporific in his first and treacle on his lips” possessed such power that he “appealed, with canny intuition, to the primitive in women” and was a veritable “Cro-Magnon with the manner of a modern clubman.” The gist was that,
He made every woman who came under his spell believe that to the world he was hard and fearsome while to her he would continue to be tender, considerate, protective, but always boldly masculine. He could spar as deftly with words, or jolt, when needed, as he did with the fists which ring champions respected.
Jungmeyer, though, observed that, while McCoy spoke of his true love for Mors with great passion, he did the same for Julia Woodruff, who he married on three occasions, while his eighth spouse, Dagmar Dalgren, who made a scene at the Nottingham (now Richmond) Apartments as she drunkenly kicked in a glass door and rolled potted plants down the stairs as she yelled that she was his spouse, remarked, much in the vein mentioned earlier in this post, “Norman is the most lovable man in the world” and that there was “something about him no woman can resist.”
There was a brief reference to Selby’s aging mother, Mary, who was in poor health and an object of deep concern while he sat in jail. Whatever the result of the grand jury investigation, an indictment, trial and punishment, the summary judgment of the prisoner’s romantic career, to Jungmeyer, was:
Challenge, ecstacy [sic], trouble, tragedy—their name was woman for Kid McCoy. From fistic and occasional romantic defeat he always rose smiling, ready for more, utilizing failure to plan triumph—from all but his ninth “real love.”
A national sensation in 1924 was the Chicago murder of young Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, whose August plea of guilty, offered by their famed attorney, Clarence Darrow, led to life sentences for the pair. McCoy contacted Loeb by telegram and called him “a young upstart,” which led the latter to reply that “I certainly haven’t been mellowed by eight matrimonial experiences.”
The Los Angeles Times of that day returned to Iva Martin’s claims of seeing two men run from the Nottingham Apartments after Theresa’s killing and reported that, despite her inability to positively identify Albert Mors as the heavy-set man she saw crawling by her window and then leaning for several minutes against the building before disappearing, she contacted detective Herman Cline to say she’d decided it was him. Cline and officers working the case, though, believed that the figure she saw was McCoy, while Albert again denied that he was at the building and disclaimed any reason for being there.
As for the mysterious actor who supposedly rode with McCoy to Hollywood in the early morning hours and heard the driver confess to killing Theresa, the names Rick Somers and Dick Summers were given, but no one could be found to match a description and police officials decided that the story was a hoax. The paper also briefly remarked on the possibility of a national drive to raise funds for McCoy’s defense, with attorney Edward L. Davin said to have received a telegram from retired boxing great Jim Corbett that he, another famed pugilist, Jim Jeffries and Los Angeles restauranteur Jim Morley were a committee for such an effort.
Another new bit of news was that McCoy’s attorney, Davin, was the judge who introduced the retired pugilist to Theresa Mors, while Albert was in New York City on business, while the lawyer and jurist accompanies McCoy to the Mors residence with Albert present. This, Albert said, was before he learned of the affair developing between his wife and McCoy and he added that, because the lease to the Hollywood house was in Theresa’s name, McCoy was angling to get Albert out of the dwelling so they could occupy it.
Despite prior comments about the motive for the murder, Albert told a Times reporter while he was having lunch in downtown,
I do not believe that McCoy killed my wife because she was going to leave him but I do believe that he slew her in a fit of drunken rage when she learned that she was going to force him to sign a statement waiving all claims to her property before the marriage. McCoy intended to marry Mrs. Mors because he thought that he would gain control of her fortune. She was a business woman and had no intention of allowing him to do so and therefore he killed her.
Mors also revealed that he was not home when McCoy showed up there looking for him after Theresa’s slaying because “I had received just the day before a letter of warning from an old servant of ours,” this a Black woman identified only as Sallie and who worked as a cook, “that she felt something was going to happen.”
Professing puzzlement over the changed behavior of Theresa, whom Albert said he knew for 17 years, including nine in marriage, as he reiterated, as before, that “she was always a good and loving wife until she met McCoy,” he offered the hope that other women might learn a lesson from what happened to Theresa “and may draw back from men like McCoy before it is too late.” He added that his sufferings would not be understood except for those who’d been through a similar fate and made these notable remarks:
My wife is dead. My idol had clay feet. My business has been ruined and my home broken up. I have nothing left but memories of many, many happy days that I spent with my wife before McCoy came into our lives. All that I want to do now is to forget it all and to be left alone . . .
I do not blame Mrs. Mors. I blame the age in which we live. Divorce, scandal and slime is what we seem to live on nowadays. Divorce in the eyes of our up-to-date women in [is] only an adventure and they talk of it as such.
In its number of the 20th, the Express noted that McCoy’s sister, Jennie Selby Thomas, who’d previously denied the fact, returned the jewelry that was reported missing from Theresa’s remains. After the accused killer gave the $5,000 worth of valuables to Thomas, she deposited them with her lawyers, who then turned them over to a D.A. office investigator. This development, the paper commented, “materially strengthened” the prosecution’s case and the article added that arraignment proceedings took place with McCoy merely stating “I did not” when asked if he assaulted and killed Theresa.
The second indictment concerned the shooting spree at the antique shop, so there were eight counts in all, including the murder of Theresa, four of attempted murder of the persons shot or shot at at the shop and three of robbery and McCoy was transferred to the county jail, where he did not have the luxury of a private cell as before, while awaiting trial.
Following the prisoner’s “brain storm,” his counsel, Davin and Ralph D. Knickerbocker, brought in a psychiatrist who spent an hour-and-a-half in the prisoner’s cell and was to soon issue a report, while other “alienists” were expected to examine McCoy. Meanwhile, the third of the prosecution’s examiners, while adjudging the defendant to be sane, was paraphrased as suggesting “he was suffering from the effect of acute alcoholism” when Theresa was killed and at the antique shop.
With respect to friends of McCoy rushing to support him in his defense, the Express reported that William J. Fallon, a noted New York City lawyer who was best known for his work on the 1919 Black Sox baseball scandal involving fixed World Series games, was asked to help with representing McCoy. Then there was an astounding claim from Dalgren, who insisted that she was outside the Nottingham apartment the night of the killing and saw McCoy leave and Theresa put out the lights. Shortly afterward, a heavy-set man went in the unit, after which an argument burst forth, Mors screamed and a shot fired, with Dalgren stating that she ran from the building. Naturally, this sounded plainly like an attempt to help her former husband of whom she spoke so fondly!
In its coverage that day, the Los Angeles Record ran a blaring banner headline of “GIVE UP MORS JEWELS!” It reported the jewelry taken from Theresa’s body after death were worth $12,000, while it paraphrased Detective Captain Cline as having declared that “the recovery of the missing valuables [is] one of the strongest links of evidence yet forged in the case against McCoy.” The pearl ring, diamond brooch and diamond-studded watch were worn by his ex-wife, Albert told authorities and, moreover, he added that he saw “Mrs. Thomas wearing the jewelry after Mrs. Mors was killed.”
The Leopold-Loeb case was brought up again on the 21st, when the Express reported that the defendant’s counsel denied that they “would not use the . . . tactics of permitting Kid McCoy to plead guilty . . . and then make a fight for clemency, with insanity as a basis.” Davin and Knickerbocker were planning several client conferences to chart a course for a defense, but, the paper reiterated, “definite departure from the Loeb-Leopold methods has been definitely announced.”
Meanwhile, federal treasury agents were still investigating claims that the Morses imported jewels from Europe through New York City without paying required duties and, while a full list of those items were finally received, it was determined that the jewelry returned by Jennie Selby Thomas was not part of that inventory.
Once more, the Record‘s columnist Don Ryan took to a lengthy meditation on the matter with his “Oedipus Rex McCoy: Psychoanalyzing the Kid,” which began with, “the forthcoming trial . . . will be another battle of the alienists,” assuming that a defense fund arranged by Corbett, Jeffries and others was of sufficient amounts “to tempt those high-salaried scientists” who were expert witnesses “in every big murder trial of recent years,” dating back to the notorious case, nearly two decades prior, in which Harry Thaw was acquitted by reason of insanity for the murder of architect Stanford White.
Ryan remarked, though, that such successes tended to be reserved for the rich, who could afford the battery of psychiatrists, while, if a defendant “was poor and friendless justice took its regular course and the unfortunate accused was usually hanged.” He observed that, since the Thaw case, there were diametrically opposed views among the experts on the validity of insanity defenses, leading Ryan to note,
It is now usual to comment that anybody can be proved insane if necessary—and profitable. And there is truth in the remark. Everyone is touched by some neurosis or other. The absolutely normal, sane person is non-existent. He is only an abstraction, a measuring rod by which to determine the degrees of bias possessed by the rest of us.
When it come to psychoanalysis, the journalist propounded, its advent meant that understanding insanity became “more complicated and more puzzling than before” and he asserted that “where there was one loophole of insanity . . . there are a dozen now.” He felt that it was the sole defense of Leopold and Loeb employed by Darrow. Competent defense attorneys and enough money to hire the best alienists meant that “Norman Selby has a good chance to escape conviction on a murder charge.”
With McCoy laying cardboard and paper mousetraps and claiming that the ghost of Theresa was with him in his cell and, Ryan wrote that it was just as obvious defense psychiatrists would deem the defendant insane as those hired by Keyes felt otherwise. To the writer, psychoanalysis, a relatively new field, was becoming more prevalent in these court jousts about insanity and he continued,
One of the best cards for the defense to play is the Oedipus complex. It will be easy to prove that the Kid has one. Harder to prove that it makes him mentally irresponsible. Psychoanalysts have established, however, that this particular complex is frequently the basis for psycho-neuroses and many perversions.
Ryan reviewed the fundamentals of Sigmund Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex and, given how clearly affected Selby was with the illness of his mother, Mary, it is noteworthy to read the columnist’s remark that, in those instances of murder committed by those with the complex, “the victim was killed because she failed to measure up to the ideal . . . of the slayer’s mother.”
The fundamental issue was that “the murderer is entirely without knowledge of the underlying motive of his crime” and of “the maternal image that dominates his unconscious mind,” even as that ideal is not reflective of the real mother now or when that image was imprinted upon the mind of the infant and entered the unconscious.
Whether the defense, aided by the likes of Corbett and Jeffries, would seek psychoanalysis for the trial was an open question, but Ryan believed that “all that is required to establish the fact that the ex-prize fighter accused of murder is a victim of an insufficiently sublimated limbo . . . a nervous insanity caused by the Oedipus complex, is to analyze his dreams” as “expressions of the unconscious mind” providing “infallible clues to the psychic state.”
To this point, the column concluded,
Kid M’Coy has every symptom of the Oedipus complex. His life has been one long pursuit of this phantom ideal mate—whom he never found. Eight times married, three times to the same woman, he vainly sought this non-existent creature of his dreams. When he held in his arms the most beautiful and the most accomplished women of two continents, this great lover unconsciously longed for yet another woman who was unattainable.
How Theresa Weinstein Moers (Mors) fit into this conception, however, was not explored by Ryan, who was a dancer, experimental novelist, World War I veteran and actor and title writer in film. As to exploration, we’ll return tomorrow with part eight, taking us further into the trial preliminaries as August moved toward its close.