To begin at the beginning of this story, click here to go to Part 1.

Part Nine: It ain’t over ’til it over

The Day Book, Chicago, IL, LAST EDITION, of December 22, 1916, lead with the headline:

TRIBUNE LOSES IN LIBEL SUIT ––– RAKED WOMAN’S PAST ––– MURDER MYSTERY FIGURES

Facts supporting the headline were that Fred H. Memhard and his wife Lucille McLeod-Memhard, formerly of Chicago, existed Judge Slosser’s courtroom that day as winners of a libel suit against the Chicago Tribune.

The trial resolved a law suit filed by the Memhards against the Tribune, who were than living in Kentucky, for the libelous and slanderous claims made about Lucille McLeod-Memhard in its March 6, 1916 issue. The disparaging remarks were the context of a story about “a will left by a distant relative” of Lucille. The Tribunewrote she “shot and killed Nieman [sic] in 1905 and was repudiated by her relatives.” In addition, the Tribunecharacterized Lucille as “a bad woman, a daughter of the relights, a vampire and a murderess.”

The Day Book seems to sling mud at the Tribune as well when it stressed that four consecutive days of legal wrangling took place, with the lawyers for the Tribune putting on witnesses to prove its claims about Mrs. Memhard. The Day Book portrayed the case and its outcome as the Tribune being in the center of its territory, “where it swings a newspaper club of wide and brutal power.” But that “the two strangers from Kentucky (the Memhards had relocated) were able to beat the Tribune, prove it a falsifier and show that in Cook County it’s not exactly true that it’s harder to convict a newspaper than a woman of a crime.”

What seems like an attempt to represent the Memhards as a normal family and further embarrass the Tribune, The Day Book detailed that “a boy was born to them. He stands higher than his mother’s knee and is learning to talk. His mother and father are proud of the way he could say the family name.”

Though the Memhard’s existed the courtroom as victors, the jury’s verdict was to award the plaintiff “$1 damages after four hours of deliberation.”  Sources reported a majority of the jurors, on its first ballot, were in favor of assessing the Tribune $10,000. There is no report why that award was reduced to a final disposition of one dollar.

Postscript

It is only fitting that this saga end with a copy of William T. Niemann, Jr. “Certificate of Death.”

The cause of death states Niemann died as a result of “Shock and hemorrhage due to a bullet wound of the head said bullet fired from a revolved held in the hand of one Lucille McLeod . . . “ That determination, one can argue, conflicts with the evidence.

 

Readers are invited to post their thoughts and opinions on the “trials and tribulations” (pun intended) of Lucile McLeod-Memhard.