The Case That Had Everything

SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAS HAPPENED by Peter Van Slingerland-328 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

The wife of U.S. Navy Lieut. Thomas Massie had left the party early, alone. Later, Massie went looking for her at the home of a friend, but she was not there. Massie then phoned his own house, and his wife answered. In a voice so distorted by anguish that it was scarcely recognizable, Thalia Massie cried: "Come home at once! Something terrible has happened!"

Thus began, on a September night in

Honolulu in 1931, a train of events that was to lead to murder and the crass mishandling of justice. As a crime story, the Massie case had everything; it was one of those lurid combinations of violence and unreason that not only command horrified attention at the time they happen but make for compelling reading when reconstructed later. Peter Van Slingerland, a freelance journalist, retells the case with the crisp assurance of a good crime reporter. He claims to have done even more--more than the authorities were able to do at the time. He identifies the man who killed "to avenge a woman's honor."

"Five Boys." Thalia Massie, a moody and introspective woman of 20, had grown up, like her husband, in the starched proprieties of the Old South. Whether her honor needed avenging was a question that was never satisfactorily answered. On that September night, as Thalia Massie was making her solitary way home afoot, she was attacked by five "Hawaiian boys," brutally beaten and--so she claimed--raped. Her body bore evidence of the beating (a jaw broken in two places), but none of sexual assault.

Honolulu police rounded up five suspects, and although Thalia at first doubted that she could recognize her attackers, she soon identified all five. In fact, the author notes, her memory improved steadily as the time approached for the trial. Even so, the prosecution's case was weak. The suspects' alibis pretty much ruled them out as Thalia's assailants, and after 97 hours of deliberation, the jury pronounced itself unable to agree on a verdict.

The Deputies. This necessitated a retrial. But Tommie Massie and Honolulu's entire Navy Establishment were indignant. Egged on by his wife's mother, Grace Fortescue, a woman of good connections and considerable gentility, the lieutenant decided to speed up the clock of the law. Two Navy enlisted men, Albert Jones and Edward Lord, were "deputized" as his assistants. One of the defendants, Joe Kahahawai, an amateur boxer, was enticed to Mrs. Fortescue's rented home with a phony police summons and shot to death. Mrs. Fortescue, Massie and one of the Navy ratings were caught hauling Kahahawai's body away for disposal.

The Hearst papers promptly dubbed Kahahawai's murder "the honor slaying"; New York Daily News Publisher Joseph Medill Patterson sent Grace Fortescue a cable that summed up the prevailing public sentiment: ADMIRATION AND SYMPATHY. In this highly charged atmosphere, the "honor slayers" faced trial for second-degree murder, confidently hired the great Clarence Darrow to defend them.

Darrow put Lieut. Massie on the stand to testify that he had leveled a loaded pistol at Kahahawai and had then blacked out. A defense psychiatrist explained that, at the moment, the lieutenant was "chemically" insane. To nearly everyone's consternation, the jury found Massie, Mrs. Fortescue and their two helpers guilty of manslaughter. Under territorial law, that gave the judge no option but to sentence them to ten years. But a wave of public outrage had overwhelmed the White House on Massie's behalf. Hawaii's Territorial Governor Lawrence Judd got his orders from President Hoover himself: Find some way to keep the four out of prison. With considerable relief, Judd commuted the sentences to one hour.

"Damn Right." The original rape case was never retried. In 1934, the Massies were divorced, and each married again. After two suicide attempts and stays in several sanatoriums, Thalia died in 1963 of an overdose of barbiturates.

Tommie Massie left the Navy and vanished into civilian respectability--which is where Van Slingerland found one of the lieutenant's "deputies," Albert Jones. According to the author, Jones at last set the record straight on Joe Kahahawai's murder:

Q [Van Slingerland]: And then?

A [Jones]: I shot him.

Q: You shot him?

A: You're God damn right I did.

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