The day before the trial was to commence, Lucille notified the Court attachés that she had married another man, one Fred H. Memhard. The Republican-Northwestern announced the marriage in its November 9, 1906 issue and speculated Lucille would honeymoon in the court room.  This new development provided the media yet another topic to cause shock and awe in readers. It played Lucille’s marriage to Memhard to the hilt, as evidenced by the headline from the Albuquerque Evening Citizen on November 22, 1906:   

There was much intrigue and legal wrangling surrounding Lucille’s marriage to Fred Memhard.  Some claims were made that Lucille was not actually married to Memhard, but that was proven to be just a fallacious argument. Some of Fred Memhard family members alleged he was drugged when the marriage took place. That charge was  denounced by Fred himself.

The Republican-Northwestern on November 9, 1906, claimed in a paragraph headed  Wooed While Patient in Hospital, that Lucille’s marriage was “a strange romance that will have its setting in the Criminal court building, a romance stranger than fiction, born out of the tragedy in the Empire hotel and brought to its culmination while Miss McLeod lay hovering between life  and death in a hospital ward.”

That same paper further reported the “marriage of Miss McLeod and Memhard was [a] secret.” That the couple was united by Judge Willis McMahon in Hammond, Indiana on October 27, 1906; and that “it was the desire of the young woman’s family that it be kept quiet until the trial was ended, but Memhard would not hear to the plan no more than he would agree to postpone the wedding until the trial was known. They have known each other for a number of years.”

When the trial opened Fred Memhard was in New York, though he planned to be with Lucille during the entirety of trial.

Go to Part 6!