The Lonergcm Case

Against the windows of Manhattan's Criminal Courts Building the bulletlike drops of the first spring rains beat and splashed with homicidal violence. The crowd of cops, dicks, court attendants, learned counsel, plain loafers and plain prurient goons who infest such scenes beat against the court's doors. Behind the doors was beginning one of the most sensational murder trials in Manhattan's legal history. Justice, as men understand it, was being meted out to Wayne Lonergan, handsome, six-foot, crop-headed Royal Canadian Air Force aircraftman charged with murdering his socialite wife last October.

The trial was also a clinical study of unusual interest to doctors and psychiatrists. For it was obvious last week that Defense Attorney Edward V. Broderick would make some plea of insanity involving homosexuality. Again & again he asked discomfited would-be jurors: "Would you be prejudiced, one way or another, against psychiatric or psychological testimony?" The defense would apparently try to prove: 1) that Lonergan was too unstable to commit premeditated murder; or 2) temporary insanity.

The defense also hired Dr. Thomas Stanislaus Cusack, top-notch Brooklyn neuropsychiatrist, who interviewed the patient for an hour and a half last week, emerged to announce: "I have not as yet formulated any opinion." Homosexuality? The avid public, aided by an eager press, did not share Dr. Cusack's clinical restraint. Headlines billed Lonergan as a homosexual who seemed utterly unmoved by his wife's murder.

There was already testimony about his perversion: Assistant District Attorney Jacob Grumet testified that Lonergan confessed (this unsigned confession is now repudiated by the defendant and his lawyers) to homosexual relations, both before and after his marriage. One of the men involved is said to have been William Burton, Lonergan's wife's father. (Broderick has referred to a boy corespondent in Mrs. Burton's 1926 divorce action.) Grumet also quoted Lonergan as saying that he derived "a certain amount" of satisfaction from his married life but that his separation from his wife was the result of "mutual boredom."

All this fits the classic definition of a homosexual: "One who prefers his own but may accept the opposite sex." To most people Lonergan does not look like a homosexual. Contrary to popular legend, homosexuals are not necessarily physically abnormal, though sometimes a glandular disturbance is involved. As a rule, homosexuals are made, not born. Psychologists W. Norwood East and W. H. Herbert list seduction in childhood as the commonest precipitating cause. Other causes: 1) a tendency to varied and primitive sexual outlets; 2) an inherited tendency. From Lonergan's repudiated confession to the police he would seem to fall into the varied and primitive sexual outlet group.

Psychopathic Personality? The de fense may also try to prove that Lonergan is a psychopathic personality -- and hence perhaps even legally insane. One Manhattan psychiatrist claims that this is shown by Lonergan's "financial promiscuity, sexual promiscuity, emotional shallowness." Typical example of his emotional shallowness : after his wife's death Lonergan went back to the apartment to leave a toy elephant for his son. He was unstable, seldom held a job for long. One of his few recorded jobs was chair pushing at the New York World's Fair. Example of his psychopathic unscrupulousness: his marriage to Heiress (about $6,000,000) Patricia Burton, especially if the rumor about Lonergan and Burton is true. Lonergan eloped with his wife against her mother's wishes.

Irresistible Impulse? Psychiatric treatment sometimes "cures" homosexuality especially when it is not congenital. Psychopaths rarely improve under any treatment. A psychopath is, by definition, a person who is usually unable to resist impulses. The defense may try to prove that Patricia Lonergan led a lively life herself, that since Lonergan is a psychopath, his impulse to kill her was irresistible. In the U.S. 24 States do not allow an irresistible impulse as a defense, 18 do. Five, including New York, allow it only if the impulse "be so strong as to ob literate the notion of right or wrong." Insanity? Another point which the defense has taken pains to verify: Lonergan's mother was in an Ontario mental hospital three different times. Broderick may try to prove hereditary insanity.

Judge James Garrett Wallace, who is sitting on the case, is a strictly no-nonsense man whose favorite saying is "get on with the trial." And District Attorney Frank Hogan, who directs the prosecution, has kept it mild so far. Testimony so far has been dull, and the only humorous sally of the first few days was macabre:

Defense Attorney Broderick asked the medical examiner: "Did you remove the calvarium [Patricia Lonergan's] by sawing from the superior orbital regions to the inferior occipital regions?"

Dr. Halpern: "Did I take off the top of her head with a saw?"

Broderick: "Yes."

But the pressure of the public against the courtroom doors became so great by the end of the week that Judge Wallace decided to bar all except newspaper men (and a few newspaper women). Even the press expects to hear a minimum of juicy details. Said the New York Times's Meyer Berger: "Judge Wallace has restrained unnecessary journeys into the morals phase of the case."

Not all the psychotics were in the courtroom. As the Lonergan trial got under way-Novelist James Thomas Farrell (The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, TIME, Feb. 19, 1934) was having trouble with the Manhattan police. His publisher (Vanguard Press) was visited by four different parties of cops who professed to see a connection between Wayne Lonergan and Studs Lonigan. Later a cop from a prowl car tried shyly to buy a copy of the novel from a First Avenue bookshop. It was out of stock.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.