Death For Nothing?

During the last week of May 1933, the West Coast was thrilled by the strange death of pretty, young Allene Lamson. Wife of David A. Lamson, respected and popular sales manager of the Stanford University Press, her naked body was discovered in the blood-spattered bathroom of their small home on the University campus at Palo Alto. Lamson was held for murder.

In September 1933, David Lamson's first trial was concluded at San Jose. The State of California contended that Lamson's motives for killing his wife were his affection for a Sacramento divorcee and his wife's repulsion of his amatory advances, that he wilfully killed her by bashing in the back of her head with an iron pipe. The defense called Dr. Blake Colburn Wilbur, son of Stanford's President Ray Lyman Wilbur and best man at the Lamsons' wedding, to substantiate its contention that Mrs. Lamson killed herself accidentally by falling in the tub, striking her head against a nearby washstand. The jury chose to believe the prosecution, found David Lamson guilty of murder in the first degree.

In October 1934, the California Supreme Court snatched David Lamson back from the shadow of the gallows, granted him a new trial. Declared the Court: "It is true that he may be guilty, but the evidence thereof is no stronger than mere suspicion."

In May 1935, a second jury in San Jose deadlocked on the Lamson case. After listening to evidence for 90 days and arguing about it for four, three jurors held out for acquittal while nine insisted on conviction.

Last November, what was to have been the third Lamson trial fizzled in a mistrial because two names were unaccountably missing from the jury panel.

For the fourth time in three years, David Lamson went to court to fight for his life last week. So rare was a citizen of Santa Clara County who had not made up his mind about Lamson's guilt or innocence that it took 13 days to select twelve good men & true from a panel of 520 veniremen. But there was to be nothing new at the latest trial except the jury. While the selection of jurors was going on, the familiar chief exhibit, a model of the Lamson bathroom, was kept shrouded from view. As it has done twice before, the prosecution was ready to show that blood from a severed artery could not have spurted naturally as far as Mrs. Lamson's did, that, ergo, Mr. Lamson must have sprayed it around while beating his wife with the pipe. There will be the testimony of Dr. Clement Harisse Arnold, who had one of his own arteries opened in the course of his investigation (TIME, April 8), to support this chief technical contention of the State.

Defense will have the word of a onetime visitor in the Lamson house that she herself was dangerously injured in the head by falling in the tub and against the washstand in the same bathroom. Plenty of medical opinion will be offered to refute inquisitive Dr. Arnold. Most valuable of all to the defense, however, will be the benefit of a recent reversal of public opinion against Defendant Lamson. Following Trial No. 1, some Stanford faculty members, some California professional people and Authors Peter B. Kyne and Charles & Kathleen Norris organized a Lamson Defense Committee. In the words of its treasurer, the University of California's famed Professor of Criminology August Vollmer, the Committee has been busy broadcasting its firm belief that the Lamson case is "the most amazing situation that has ever arisen in American jurisprudence -- a man condemned to hang for something that has never happened -- and every bit of circumstantial evidence pointing to his innocence."

Last September, the respectable Manhattan house of Charles Scribner's Sons published Defendant Lamson's We Who Are About to Die, a sensitive report on prison life from the death house at San Quentin, which boomed into the best-selling class last week. In addition to the helpfulness of responsible advocates, a circumstance which may help Defendant Lamson beat the charge against him this time is the fact that the Palo Alto "WIFE MURDER" now excites California's Press considerably less than it did three years ago. One result: whereas Hearst's San Francisco Examiner followed Lamson into the death house in 1933 to point out that he "spent his first Sunday . . . alone and without religion," Hearst magazine supplements last week were carrying installments of We Who Are About to Die.

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