Chapter Seven: On trial for murder
In our own time, the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow. Trials may follow indictments many months and even years later. Many convicts sentenced to death never exhaust their appeals before dying of other causes.
But in 1935, those wheels flew along greased rails. Ray Kunselman found himself on trial for murder in the Washington County Courthouse before the massive mahogany desk of Judge Howard W. Hughes, exactly four weeks after his arrest in a dark and rain-soaked alley in Washington’s West End.
Jury selection began Monday morning, Nov. 18, a frigid day on which the temperature would reach only 27 degrees. By lunchtime Tuesday, 12 jurors had been chosen from a pool of 71. Thirteen of the prospective jurors were dismissed because they expressed disapproval of the death penalty.
Four of the five female jurors were described as housekeepers; the fifth, a widow. Two male jurors were farmers, and the others a clerk, glassworker, laborer, engineer and tobacco salesman.
Earle Forrest, a veteran reporter, covered the trial for the Washington Observer and The Reporter. When Iva Rafferty Horne, the mother of the victim, took the stand, Forrest wrote:
“A frail little woman of 35 years, with a pale, careworn face, she has seen much suffering which has aged her beyond her years. Dressed in plain dark brown, she presented a pathetic picture as she sat there and in a voice scarcely audible, told a story of how she had tried to keep her daughter at home and had finally ordered Ray Kunselman to keep away after he was beating her in the kitchen of their home in Wayne Street.”
The Pittsburgh Press described Mrs. Horne as “poorly dressed in somber clothes, with cheeks sunken,” and that she “chewed gum slyly.”
District Attorney Warren S. Burchinal had been confident of victory for the prosecution going into the trial, but his case for first-degree murder was not so strong. Kunselman, in giving his statement, had lied about the gun he was carrying when he was arrested. Going into the trial, Burchinal assumed he had the murder weapon, but he did not; that gun, as he later learned, was resting on the bottom of the Maumee River in Toledo, Ohio.
Burchinal also could not establish a motive. Throughout the trial, he portrayed the defendant as a ruthless brute, a jealous woman-beater who lacked conscience and compassion. But the testimony of the West Enders called to the stand painted Kunselman as someone not much different than themselves or his victim: impulsive, irresponsible and drunk half the time. He would need to convince the jury that Ray was not typical, and that he had destroyed Dorothy Virginia’s Horne’s innocence before degrading and, eventually, killing her.
Ray’s attorney, Thomas L. Christman, was confident the jury would decide his client’s action amounted to nothing more serious than manslaughter. He pecked away at the credibility of the prosecution witnesses, mostly Ray’s friends, who had all broken the law by assisting the fugitive but would escape charges because of their testimony. Furthermore, there was no evidence presented of premeditation.
On Thursday, Nov. 21, Kunselman, dressed in a light gray three-piece suit, took the stand in his own defense. Courtroom No. 1, cavernous beneath an ornate ceiling, was packed with spectators, as it had been all week. Mary Turner, Ray’s sister, and his father sat directly behind the defense table. “And in another chair just back of the district attorney,” wrote Forrest, “was the figure of a little woman, pale and careworn whose eyes seldom left Kunselman’s face as he told his story. This was Mrs. Iva Horne, mother of the dead girl.”
An air of bravado
In front of this audience, Ray maintained his tough-guy demeanor. As he took the stand, “he swaggered as he walked,” wrote Forrest. “This air of bravado that he evidently did not feel was apparent all through his direct examination, for he was having his ‘day in court.'”
Under questioning from his attorney, Kunselman gave his version of events of June 12, and of the robbery of Walter Jacobs, and his flight from town with Dorothy. He testified that he had tried to get her to leave the car, but she refused. They drove several miles west before Kunselman turned left on what is now Mounts Road, and they continued to argue and hit each other until he stopped the car about a mile from the main highway. Their fighting continued, and then Kunselman picked up the gun that was on the seat between them and fired it into the dashboard. The flash caused Dorothy’s dress to smoke, and he slapped out the fire with his palm.
“Well, I told her I was going to go,” Kunselman testified. “I told her I didn’t know what I was going to do with her; she wanted to go; and she even cried to go along; I told her that I couldn’t take her; I didn’t have no money or gasoline; then we got to chewing the rag there and she reached over and I smacked her, and she was wrestling the gun around and so was I, and she grabbed hold of the gun and I grabbed her hand.”
Christman said, “Go ahead, Ray; tell us what happened from then on.”
“Well, she was moving around, wrestling there, and all I can remember, it seemed like she was trying to open the door with her right hand and I had hold of her hand like that and she had hold of the gun, the butt end, and while we were wrestling there and jerking around, she seemed to lean over a little like that, just as the gun went off, and I heard her go ‘Oh’ and the door came open at the same time and she fell out in the road.
“Well, I wasn’t drunk, what you would say clear drunk, but I had enough to make me crazy and simple or whatever it was … I got out; she fell down beside the car; I got out and jumped down off the running board and I straddled her with my legs and reached in under her, under her breasts and I don’t know about anybody being dead; I thought she was dead and I got my hands under her breast and moved her over onto the bank, if there was a bank there; it was too dark to tell.”
The jurors had heard this same version of events from several of the witnesses; they would get a different version during a withering cross-examination.
Burchinal introduced as evidence two photos of Dorothy found in the defendant’s wallet, with “I love you” written on one of them. From the trial transcript:
Q: And you loved her?
A: Yes.
Q: Loved her dearly?
A: I guess I did … too much.
Q: Crazy about her?
A: Yes, I was.
Q: Jealous about her?
A: No, not exactly that.
Q: But you loved her enough that on every provocation you smacked her, didn’t you?
A: No, I didn’t.
Q: The night or the early morning of the 13th, when you were out along the road with her parked in the car, you were in love with her then, weren’t you?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: But you smacked her time after time, didn’t you?
A: Yes, I did.
Q: That was your way of showing her how much you were in love with her, was it?
A: She never objected.
A question of intent
Burchinal hammered away at the defendant without mercy. His strategy was to create a much different scenario, one in which Kunselman took the victim against her will onto a road he was quite familiar with; that he beat her and punished her; that he intended all along to kill her, and did so deliberately.
In closing arguments, wrote Forrest, “Christman made a gallant fight for the life of the defendant … and made a strong plea that under the evidence, the defendant was guilty of manslaughter only.”
The jury heard Christman conclude: “You don’t have to answer to me; you don’t have to answer to Mr. Burchinal; you have to answer only to God.”
Burchinal, in his closing statement, said, “The body of that poor, defenseless 19-year-old girl is the worst witness against that man who sits there, trying to save his own life by a lie.”
Judge Hughes, in his charge to the jury, gave broad definitions of “malice” and “intent,” and in doing so, he seemed to support the commonwealth’s case: “Where a person uses a deadly weapon without a sufficient cause of provocation, he must be presumed to do it wickedly or from a bad heart, so, he who takes the life of another with a deadly weapon and with a manifest design to use it upon him or upon her, as it was in this case, with sufficient time to deliberate and fully to form the conscious purpose of killing, and without any sufficient reason or cause of extenuation, is guilty of murder in the first degree.”
But the judge gave the jury much more to think about, saying that if they believed that Dorothy’s finger was on the trigger and that her actions led to her own death, than they must find the defendant not guilty.
In conclusion, Hughes instructed the jury that if it should decide on murder in the first degree, it must choose between the death sentence and life in prison.
The jury deliberates
The jury began its deliberations at 12:10 p.m. Friday, Nov. 22. Rumors spread along courthouse hallways that the jury was split in some way.
By 7 p.m., the impasse still had not been broken; dinner was ordered. At some point during the meal, an agreement was reached, and at 8:10 p.m. they sent word that they were ready to return.
The courtroom was nearly empty of spectators, Mary Turner, Kunselman’s sister, being one of the few.
“Members of the jury, have you agreed upon a verdict?” the clerk asked.
“We have,” the jurors responded.
“Who shall speak for you?” the clerk asked.
The foreman, tobacco salesman J.L. Page, indicated he would.
“Look upon the defendant, you that are sworn, and say that he is guilty or not guilty of the felony whereof he stands indicted.”
Page looked into the eyes of Ray Kunselman, standing at the defense table. “We find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree,” he said.
“Kunselman seemed to waiver slightly,” Forrest wrote later.
“And we fix the penalty at life imprisonment,” Page added after a short pause.
The defendant closed his eyes and appeared to be relieved.
It would later be revealed that jurors had decided on a first-degree murder conviction early in the deliberation, but had split, 6-6, on whether Kunselman should die for his crime. Over dinner, mercy won out.
Only two people knew for sure what happened on that lonely stretch of red-dog road in Buffalo Township in the early morning hours of June 13, 1935: One of them was dead, and the other would be confined to a cell with that secret for the rest of his life.
Sheriff’s deputies grasped Kunselman by the arms just above his elbows and led him from the courtroom, his knees buckling slightly, his lower lip trembling, all his West End swagger gone.
Three days later, on Monday, Nov. 23, the murder of Dorothy Horne was no longer front-page news. Another violent crime had not just grabbed the headlines, but also had merited an extra edition of The Reporter. While her 14-year-old son, home from school ill, slept upstairs in their Springfield Avenue home, Pearl Dille, 29, was shot to death downstairs by Lloyd Andrews, 38, who then turned the gun on himself. Other news, too, grabbed readers’ attention: Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia; W&J’s humiliating 55-0 loss to West Virginia University; and Wash High’s 39-6 victory over rival Canonsburg in Saturday football games.
As Kunselman awaited sentencing, Japan continued to penetrate China; Marie, the littlest of the Dionne quintuplets, took her first steps; and President Roosevelt, in a forceful reply to New Deal critics, told a crowd of 90,000 that lavish government spending was over and that the nation could “look forward with assurance to a decreasing deficit.”
On Dec. 7, the day Kunselman left the county jail for his new home at Western State Penitentiary, the Marx Brothers’ movie, “A Night at the Opera,” opened at the State Theater in Washington.
Life went on in the West End, pretty much as it always had, as its inhabitants found other topics to talk about. The passion, the fury and the desperation that led to the tragedy of Ray Kunselman and Dorothy Horne would settle in corners of the memories of those who had known them, later to be lost in time.
Epilogue
The beer gardens, the Swingle Hotel and almost all of the other places into which Ray and Dorothy stepped are gone now. Still, the character of the West End is not so different.
Gone, too, are even the memories of the people most involved in their drama.
James Armour, the patrolman who captured the fugitive in Catfish Alley, would later be promoted to sergeant. He retired from the force after World War II and then worked as a watchman for Harper Feed Mills.
Thomas Chistman, Kunselman’s attorney, would go on to defend Robert Dreamer in another high-profile murder trial held the following spring. Dreamer would become the last person convicted in Washington County to be executed, dying in the electric chair on Feb. 1, 1937, for killing Thelma Young.
Warren Burchinal left the district attorney’s office and returned to private practice. He died in 1967 at the age of 77. In his lifetime, he was not nearly as well-known as his son, Gen. David Burchinal, who went on to command U.S. forces in Europe.
Judge Howard Wingett Hughes, like Burchinal a Washington & Jefferson College graduate, was appointed in 1943 to fill a vacancy on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. On June 20, 1945, while serving as general solicitor for the Pennsylvania Railroad, he stepped out of his residence in Philadelphia’s Warwick Hotel and dropped dead on the sidewalk. He was 53.
Ray Kunselman’s cousin, Grace Livingood, was 11 years old at the time of the trial and has lived in the same house on Fayette Street since she was born.
Of Kunselman’s father, she said, “He was so hurt. He tried so hard to talk to Ray, but Ray just wanted to drink. Uncle Elmer was such a good man.”
After his wife, Etta, died giving birth to their sixth child, Elmer Kunselman had to raise Ray and the other children on his own. “He never said anything bad about anybody, and he never talked about it with anyone. He took it so hard. He was never the same after that,” Mrs. Livingood said.
Iva Horne was later married to Mead McMillen and moved to the Erie area, where she lived to be 98 and died in 1996.
Dorothy Horne was buried in Immaculate Conception Cemetery.
Ray Kunselman was taken to Western Penitentiary on Dec. 8, 1935. According to Joseph Horne, Kunselman wrote to Dorothy’s mother, Iva, about 10 years later, asking her forgiveness and seeking her help in arranging his parole. She refused. In January 1954, he was transferred to Rockview State Penitentiary in Bellefonte, where he died in 1955.
Ray Kunselman is buried in Washington Cemetery in the family plot beside his sister, Ellen, and his father – the two people who never gave up believing that what had occurred that early morning of June 13, 1935, was not murder, but rather a tragic collision of souls.