Five Labels, Two Boxtops, One Thin Dime

The Strange Case of Mrs. Alice Faulkner

William Gillette as Holmes

In 1899, Sherlock Holmes came to the stage. The American actor / writer William Gillette, with Arthur Conan Doyle as his active collaborator, sampled a few Holmes stories — most notably “A Scandal in Bohemia” — and cobbled together the artful collage that became The Strange Case of Miss Alice Faulkner. (They had to rewrite it after the first draft was lost in the Baldwin Hotel Fire in San Francisco, November 23, 1898.)

Alice F. — she’s the stage evolution of the opera singer Irene Adler in “Scandal in Bohemia” — has in her possession incriminating letters written to her sister (deceased, alas) by an aristocrat whose impending high society marriage and aversion to bad publicity make him eminently blackmailable. Alice is being preyed upon by those who wish to profit from her family unhappiness. They are in league, what’s more, with Holmes’s arch-nemesis, criminal mastermind James Moriarty. Suspense ensues.

The Strange Case had a long first run in New York, toured nationally, entered the popular rep; I imagine it remains a go-to staple for community or dinner theatres. It was widely adapted, including by Orson Welles in a snappy 1938 version for The Mercury Theatre on the Air. Of course, movies and TV eventually followed suit. That I am writing this in Vancouver, on Saturday, January 7, 2023, has nothing to do with how, this very weekend, the Baker Street Irregulars (BSI), a literary society active since 1934, its members allied through their nerdy devotion to all things Sherlock, is holding their annual confab in New York. The timing of this report, if that’s what it is, is entirely coincidental; likewise unplanned and unforeseen is that yesterday, for the first time since the advent of the pandemic, the BSI once again welcomed guests to the William Gillette Luncheon, a highlight of this gathering since 1948. That so informed and surely discerning a group would memorialize an actor with so marquee an occasion speaks volumes to how highly Gillette — whose portrayals of Holmes made the detective a living, breathing, pipe-smoking presence — is still regarded by the Baker Street cognoscenti more than 80 years after his death in 1937.

It’s a bit odd — odd to me, at least — that William Gillette, to whom I’ve never paid anything like attention, and of whom I knew nothing other than that he was a turn-of-the-last-century theatre stalwart and that Holmes had been his bread and butter — should have inveigled his way into my meditations yesterday, just when, a few time-zones to the east, the members of the BSI were making themselves comfortable at Connolly’s Pub at the luncheon that bears his name. As the attendees were trying to remember which meal option they’d selected back in October when conference registration had taken place — Stuffed Sole, Chicken Marsala, or Pasta Primavera — I found my way, at least peripherally, into Gillette’s life and times via the person of Alice Faulkner: not the titular Miss Alice Faulkner of his 1899 stage adaptation, but the equally put-upon, flesh-and-blood Mrs. Alice Faulkner who, for a short and puzzling time in 1898, in Madison County, Indiana, vanished from the rape trial in which she was the plaintiff. Or was she?

On August 11, 1898, in the Logansport Pharos Tribune:

It’s a story as terrible as it is usual, and it hardly needs saying that the relatively recent protective protocol of shielding the names of victims of sexual assault, which is what this was, was unthought of in Indiana, or anywhere else, in 1898, when salaciousness was mother’s milk to reporters and their readers: the more gruesome the story, the more lurid the details, the better. Suicides, mishaps on train tracks, accidental poisonings, purposeful poisonings, clothing set alight by lanterns, children who freeze in snowbanks, farmhands whose brains are spilled when they’re kicked in the head by a mule: all lovingly, minutely described. By way of example, here’s a terribly sad sampling pertaining to yet another Alice Faulkner — this one in Paterson, New Jersey — from the Christmas Day edition of the Indianapolis Journal, 1892.

The attempted rape of our Alice Faulkner by Jack Armstrong and Fred Wermer in Anderson, Indiana, in August of 1898, was reported not just in the Logansport Pharos Tribune, but in the Indianapolis News, the Muncie Morning News, the Huntington Weekly Herald, the Elwood Daily Record and the Elwood Free Press. Elwood — birthplace of the great oboist Ray Still, a town with a population of 310 in 1870 and, because of a gas boom, 12,950 in 1900; a town that once upon a time supported two newspapers and a town, what’s more, that enforced practices of racial exclusion until well into the 20th century — seems to have been, or to have become, Alice Faulkner’s home seat. It was there she died, in 1936, age 72. Her obituary in the Indianapolis Times, February 26, makes for melancholy reading.

Before she became a Faulkner, Alice was a Collis; nephew Don, who came too late, would have been her brother Frank’s son. Discreetly, her obituary never touches on all the local, historical excitement occasioned when her assault case went to trial in September of ‘98; excitement that was less the product of the scurrilous charge itself, than of how Alice took a break from giving her testimony, left the Anderson courthouse, and simply disappeared. She pulled off this vanishing act in concert with her sister, Bertha Collis. Born in 1876, twelve years Alice’s junior, Bertha was the principal witness to the assault, and her presence was just as pivotal to the prosecution. But they were nowhere to be found. They’d gone to ground. Somehow, someone had interrupted the relentless, timely flow of Justice.

What happened was simple and shocking. Someone in the camp of the accused had paid Alice and Bertha to simply walk away. The case could not proceed. The accused were fined and released.

The court had questions. A search was launched. It took no time at all the track down Bertha and Alice.

But, as we’ve seen, it didn’t go hard with the two men. One of the frustrations, and occasional joys, of trying to sort through a story via the historical record is that it’s so untidy. There are blanks, e.g. the article alluded to above, the backstory to the one I’ve reproduced, which refers to “yesterday’s [Elwood] Record;” that would have been the paper for September 22, 1898, but its AWOL from the archive. Who knows why? Also, the reporting itself, while admirable in so many ways, is also subject to error, or alteration without explanation. The man who starts out as Jack Armstrong becomes John Armstrong, and Fred Wermer becomes Fred Werthner becomes Fred Wenthner. Then, there’s the deepening mystery of the assault victim herself, identified in the Elwood papers, as we’ve seen, as Mrs. Alice Faulkner, but in the Indianapolis Journal as “Mrs. Alice Forkner.”

Here, Bertha Collis becomes Callis and we also have “Fred Wertner” to add to the list of possibilities; this brief squib, also from September 23, but from the Indianapolis News gives a fifth variant, “Werther.”

And here, in the Indianapolis Journal, September 24, 1898, Alice Forkner is tracked down and locked up.

So — who was it? Faulkner or Forkner? Either is possible. It takes no digging at all to determine that at that time and in those parts, there was a Mrs. Alice Forkner who was an active citizen, as well as a Miss Alice Forkner; it’s not clear to me if they were kin. I believe the Forkners were a mercantile family in Indiana’s Madison County. What settles the matter in Alice Faulkner’s favour, if one can use such a term for so dubious a turn of events, is the witnessing presence of Bertha Collis, later Bertha Wilhelm, later Bertha Skinnet, who never a sister to Miss or Mrs. Alice Forkner. What the Forkner ladies thought when they picked up the paper and saw themselves named not only as assault victims but as escape artists, I can’t imagine. The story peters out, all the principals got on with their lives. Their names turn up over the succeeding years in the society columns as they travel around Madison County, visiting friends, as they entertain at card parties, as they play the fortune teller at a church social. The character who intrigues me most, the one I think might actually be, well, her own kind of Moriarty, is Mrs. Armstrong, the wife of John, the accused rapist, who paid Alice Faulkner and Bertha Collis ten bucks to take a hike. Mrs. Armstrong sounds like a piece of work. And if Mrs. Armstrong is who I think she is, she’s the main attraction in a sad and gothic family tale of deception and misappropriation of identity that’s jaw-droopingly bizarre. That’s the story I’m here to tell. Next time. Thanks for reading, BR