The title comes from Moriarty’s (John Huston) boast to Sherlock Holmes (Roger Moore) in the 1976 TV movie Sherlock Holmes in New York. It’s an ambitious boast; unless someone commits the crime of the century on Dec. 31, 1999 (or 1899, or 2099), their crime can be, and usually are, surpassed. Harry Thaw shooting Stanford White in 1906 was dubbed the crime of the century (scandal, sex and a wild trial). By the time 2000 rolled around, it was an obscure footnote.
Crimes live on in infamy for many reasons besides the horror of the event. Movies, for example: the White shooting begat The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, became a misogynist plot thread in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and then in the stage musical based on it. With others it’s that they were a game-changer in terms of the law. Here are two books about two crimes whose impact lingered after the events — and I found both books to be interesting reads, too.
Cannibalism and the Common Law: The Story of the Tragic Last Voyage of the Mignonette and the Strange Legal 
Proceedings to Which It Gave Rise by A.W. Brian Simpson recounts how in 1884, Captain Thomas Dudley and two crewmen were rescued from a lifeboat after the wreck of the yacht Mignonette, which they’d been transporting to Australia. Recounting their ordeal, they freely admitted they’d engaged in “the custom of the sea,” killing and eating the fourth member of the crew.
They didn’t see it as the crime of the century or any sort of crime at all; neither did most people in England. As Simpson shows, it happened a lot in the 19th century and the British saw it matter-of-factly. Tough situations, tough choices; under the “doctrine of necessity,” the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the one. The only issue in Dudley’s case was that in some accounts of events — the men retold their story several times, not always consistently — the three men had simply carved up the weakest of the four, instead of casting lots to pick the doomed one.
Another factor in the lack of prosecution was that for much of the century, British law didn’t apply to merchant shipping. What happened in the Atlantic stayed in the Atlantic, to be dealt with by the captain, the ship owner or the insurer. By 1884, that had changed, and the government was ready to assert itself. The legal system wasn’t so much bothered by the cannibalism as by the doctrine of necessity itself. A 19th century version of the trolley problem, the argument it was okay to kill to survive, even if it wasn’t in self defense, held potential for serious abuse.
A few years earlier the government had tried to discredit the doctrine by trying the crew of the Euxine for cannibalism. The British imperial bureaucracy had gummed up the works — depositions were in one place, the men were in another, the government wanted them tried in England and the colonies didn’t see much point in shipping them — but with the Mignonette, they had another shot. Dudley and his crew, to their surprise, were charged with murder and sort-of found guilty — the legal process was very dubious as the goal was to kick the case up to a court that could issue a universally binding decision. Everyone agreed that once that was done, the men should be pardoned — the goal was to establish a legal principle, not to punish them. The Home Office, however, wasn’t cool with this; wouldn’t a slap on the rest just reaffirm the doctrine of necessity? In the end, the three men wound up getting six months in jail, then they left and resumed their lives.
This is surprisingly lacking in drama as Simpson approaches this as a legal historian covering a landmark case, not a true-crime writer. I did, however, find the book fascinating as he covers 19th century recreational yachting, multiple earlier cases of cannibalism at sea, some on land (I learned more about American anthropophage Alf Packer than I ever did before), the complexities of the British legal system and the horrifying number of shipwrecks. I can appreciate why Titanic being supposedly unsinkable was such a big deal.
If you like more drama with your true crime, David E. Stannard’s Honor Killing: How the Infamous Massie Affair Transformed Hawai’i provides it in spades. The 1931 case was infamous front page news in its day, later inspiring several books and one TV movie, the 1986 roman a clef Blood and Orchids. Unlike the Dudley case, some of the facts are much murkier.
In 1931, Lt. Thomas Massie and his wife, Thalia, were stationed at Pearl Harbor. The marriage was rocky, with booze and bad behavior on both sides. One night Thalia left a party they were attending, then turned up several hours later, beaten up and, she said, raped. The attackers, she said, had been five Hawaii natives. By coincidence, the police had already had word of a gang of five native and Asian young men getting into trouble so the cops arrested them. They obviously weren’t five natives; even more decisive, they had airtight alibis. However Thalia’s eyewitness account rapidly changed as she learned about the men, the car they drove, etc. That left the cops with a white woman accusing five men of color of raping her; in 1931, it was unthinkable they not prosecute. 
Hawai’i, however, was not the Deep South; the jury found the men innocent. An outraged Lt. Massie joined forces with Thalia’s mother to kidnap one of the defendants after they were released — Massie hired some sailors to help — and then force a confession. Things went wrong, one of the sailors killed the man and Massie and Thalia’s mom were busted with the body in the back seat. In a short while, they were on trial for murder. This, far more than the rape, was what turned the Massie affair into a cause celebre. In the opinions of millions of bigots across America, it was an “honor killing” — Massie had avenged his wife’s virtue and deserved to be celebrated for his heroism! The commander at Pearl Harbor, another Southerner, began hinting he’d put the entire territory under martial law if justice, as he saw it, was not served.
The end result was that while Lt. Massie was found guilty, his sentence was commuted to one hour of jail time. Honor was satisfied. Stannard does a good job on the backstories and post-stories of everyone involved, the racism that shaped both trials and the legal strategies (the Massies hired Clarence Darrow to lead their defense team). It’s annoying, however, that he treats Thalia Massie as if she were a MacGuffin, unimportant in herself. While the accused men were clearly innocent, something violent happened to Mrs. Massie; I don’t require Stannard find out what but he shows almost no interest in the question. Has anyone put in work on finding out? Are there theories to discuss? As there’s no definitive answer Stannard’s lack of interest is not a dealbreaker, but it is annoying.
