Reviews

The Murder of Dr. Chapman: The Legendary Trials of Lucretia Chapman and Her Lover by Linda Wolfe

kikiandarrowsfishshelf's review

4.0

Disclaimer: ARC from Open Road Media and Netgalley.

The phrase “Trial of the Century” seems to be currently overused. There have been several trials of the century. The 24 hour news cycle and multiple cable news networks make sure of this. It’s hard to keep up with what the trial of the week is, and it is almost like a flavor of the month.


But it’s hardly a new phenomenon. Case in point, this book.

Dr. Chapman lived and died when the country was young. He cured stutters, mostly because he had one. He married a woman that was younger than him, but perhaps slightly too old for the marriage market. The two had a family and ran a school. It seems that the wife did most of the work. One day, sometime after the arrival of a foreigner at the school, Dr. Chapman died.

Of poison, it was later discovered.

It also didn’t look so good when the widow married the foreigner shortly after the good doctor’s death.

But was he a good doctor? Was she a murderess? Did she get off?

Those are the questions that Linda Wolfe tries to answer in her book about the case. It should be noted that the book, while focusing on the case, is really biographies of Chapman and Lucreita as well as Lino, the foreigner, who claims to know a Bonaparte and someone called Casanova. It also is a brief portrait of a marriage as well as society struggling to make sense of crime and need to discover if there was a crime at all.

Wolfe’s book is really about Lucreita more than any as well as how media, even in its infantile stage, can be used to manipulate reactions and even make the guilty seem innocent. It is impossible to know for sure what really happen, though Wolfe does a good job at investigating and giving possible motives. Both Chapmans come across as flawed and the disintegration of the marriage is seen as a fairly as possible. In discussing guilt, Wolfe takes hands off approach. It is almost as if she is conducting a case for the defense, and in many ways, while the conclusion where Wolfe lies out her opinion doesn’t come as a shock or a surprise, Wolfe does keep the emotional description and editorializing to a minimal almost non-existent level.

Perhaps the most interesting and important part of the book is the trial itself. It drew much attention and like today, the participants, one in particular, was able to use media to their advantage or to suffer at the hands of it. Despite what is claimed, the media does determine or get the viewer/reader to determine guilt or innocence in cases. This is done though commentary, reporting of facts, and photos. We saw it most recently with the case in Ferguson. This time it was the police who were trying to use the media by releasing the video of the young man, Brown, robbing a store. How does that excuse shooting him when he was unarmed? Especially when the cop didn’t even know about it? Or even in cases where most people can agree. Take George Zimmerman, he should be in jail, but did the media really need to always use the picture of him in what looked like an orange prison suit or the picture of him with the nose damage (it depended upon which outlet you were watching)? The media even does it to itself as with the case of Lara Logan and the picture of her used after her attack. It was from an awards ceremony.

If we watch trials or reports on trials, the media (or someone using the media) crafts the narrative for us. The viewer determines guilt or innocence far before the jury and usually with the aid of the media. Wolfe shows that this hardly a new trend by showcasing how print was used during the trial and what the effects of such actions where. Needless to say, it is also a double standard in action with a woman being condemned, in part, for not being womanly enough. This means she is guilty or not worth helping. She has it coming to her. Much of what Mrs. Chapman goes though will be familiar to those who know about Constance Wilde’s life. Not much changed in the time between the two women or even between them and today.

The Murder of Dr. Chapman is mostly a mystery. But the murder isn’t really the mystery. It’s the disturbing question of why so little has changed.