Feb 19, 2018 9 min read

The story so far: Charged with the murder of her husband, Lillian Roupe faces an all-male jury and a packed courtroom at her trial. It becomes clear in testimony that Lillian’s marriage was marked by abuse at the hands of a hot-tempered drinker, but the prosecutor’s case is bolstered by forensic evidence.

In late May 1916, one sensational headline followed another in the local newspapers, giving readers plenty to ponder.

The French and Germans battled for Fort Douamont at Verdun in a war looking more and more likely to involve the United States. And U.S. troops were massing along the Mexican border as revolutionary Emiliano Zapata began dynamiting trains carrying Americans out of Mexico.

A story on the front page of the May 24 editions noted that DeLloyd “Dutch” Thompson, the daredevil aviator and Washington native, had improved slightly in his recovery from serious injuries suffered in a crash on Long Island, N.Y., just five days after he had broken the world air speed record.

The attention of most readers, however, was still riveted on the trial of a young woman, Lillian Roupe, for the murder of her husband in their Tylerdale home on the last day of 1915.

“Mrs. Roupe, during the trial yesterday, showed very plainly the strain she was under during the week and was more nervous yesterday than she had been the day before,” The Washington Observer reported on May 25. “As she sat at times and gazed out the courtroom window, she now and then gave a deep sigh. She was very tired last evening when court adjourned, and when told at 8:30 by her counsel that she might go home for the night, that no verdict would be in, she welcomed the news. She was suffering from a severe headache.”

There would be no sleep for the jury that night. The deliberations, in fact, would go on for nearly 24 hours.

Jury duty in the early 20th century was not easy. Women – half the population – were exempt from serving, so juries were difficult to fill. Because jurors were expected to serve for the entire court term, for as long as three or four weeks, going from one trial to the next, many men would be excused from duty because of hardship. And jurors did not enjoy the anonymity granted those serving today. Their names and addresses were published in the newspapers once they had been chosen to sit for a trial.

Deliberations were secret only before their verdict was reached. Afterward, jurors were free to discuss how they had reached their decision. From the news accounts of the trial concerning the death of William Lazear Roupe, it can be deduced that the discussions behind closed doors were contentious. The 12 men were unanimous from the start of their talks on one thing: The commonwealth had not proved that the killing was premeditated, and so first-degree murder was off the table. A couple of men pushed for murder in the second degree, and others favored manslaughter. At one time during deliberations, six members voted for acquittal.

Eventually, exhaustion might have been the motivation for agreement, which was announced at 4 p.m. Thursday, May 25. The Observer reported:

“Mrs. Roupe, it could be seen, was about to collapse from the strain that she had undergone. She was not asked to stand when the verdict was announced. As the jury came in, she sat within the bar, where the jury filed past her, she breathed heavily as she leaned forward to catch what was said. It was a blow to her when she heard the words ‘guilty of voluntary manslaughter.'”

The verdict, however, carried a recommendation for “extreme mercy.”

“Mrs. Roupe was led from the courtroom in an almost exhausted condition by some of her friends,” the article continued. “She was taken out in the corridor, just outside the district attorney’s office. There she fainted, but was prevented from falling to the floor by those who were with her.”

The jurors over the previous three weeks of the term had been shut up on other homicide trials, but this case, they said, was the most difficult.

The sentencing

It was evident from its recommendation for mercy that the jury perceived Lillian Roupe to be as much of a victim as her dead husband. They determined that the gun had been in her hands, and that she stood apart from Roupe when she shot him. At the same time, they must have concluded that his killing was justified; that no woman should be asked to endure the abuse and humiliation that Roupe apparently put her through.

On Monday morning following the trial, the principals returned to the courtroom to hear Judge John A. McIlvaine pronounce Lillian’s sentence. A newspaper headline on Friday noted, “Washington Woman Charged With Shooting Her Husband Last December Faces Long Term in Penitentiary.”

The judge asked Lillian if she had anything to say.

“I did not do it,” she replied.

Her attorney, James Magill, made a plea for leniency.

Judge McIlvaine took the jury’s suggestion for mercy to heart. He sentenced Lillian to one year in the county jail and ordered her to pay costs and a fine of one dollar.

Though her sentence could hardly have been lighter, Lillian swooned and had to be carried from the courtroom. After she recovered somewhat, she was taken to the jail to begin her year of confinement.

Life after prison

After her release from the county jail, Lillian moved into the home of her father in Canonsburg, where her son, Lester, had stayed during her absence. On Nov. 1, 1920, in Brooke County, W.Va., Lillian married Arthur C. Brown of Canonsburg.

Shortly after that, Lillian, her husband and son moved to Gary, Ind., to live with William Neathway, the relative who had lived with Lillian’s family in Washington. Neathway worked at the tin mill in Gary until 1926, when he became night superintendent of the Youngtown Sheet and Tube Co. at Indiana Harbor.

Lester, who had taken the surname of his first stepfather, married Irene Heikkinen, the daughter of Finnish immigrants in Gary in 1927. According to the 1930 census, those living in the house at 369 Monroe St. in Gary were William Neathway and his wife, Katherine; Arthur and Lillian Brown; Lester and Irene Roupe and their son, Theodore, born in 1928; and three boarders. Arthur Brown’s occupation was listed as electrician; Lillian’s as boarding home cook.

And that is where the trail of Lillian Moss Roupe Brown ends. Neither she nor her husband was listed in the 1940 census.

Margaret Hsu of Bellevue, Wash., Lester Roupe’s great-granddaughter, relates that Lester often said that he never drank alcohol because of the damage it did to his slain stepfather. Although a photo of Lillian, probably taken when she was in her late 40s, has been passed down through the generations, family members can’t recall when or where she died or from what cause. Hsu said no one can remember Lester ever speaking about his mother, either. Internet searches for her grave have proven futile.

Lillian’s departure from this world, it seems, went as unnoticed as her arrival.

However, all lives are significant, to one degree or another, and Lillian’s life had no small impact. She was for all but this episode one of the anonymous working class, the overworked and underpaid thousands toiling in Washington factories and mills, scrabbling for a better life. Then, her arrest and trial captured the attention of the entire community, shedding light on not just her own wretched circumstances but that of so many other women.

Men, 100 years ago, still wrote the rules that kept themselves in power in the world, the workplace and in the home. The events of ordinary lives like Lillian’s, however, made more of those men consider the injustice of it all.

THE END

Dr. James R. Maxwell was called to the stand several times as a prosecution witness during the murder trial of Lillian Roupe in May 1916.

He was, at that time, 38 years old with an established practice in Washington. He would go on to practice medicine from his home and office at 900 Jefferson Ave. for another four decades and become one of the city’s better-known and respected citizens. But he would never be as renowned as one of his close relations.

Maxwell’s daughter, Susan, graduated from the Washington Seminary and Wellesley College. She taught biology at the Margaret Morrison School of Carnegie Institute of Technology before marrying Dr. John Bardeen, a geophysicist with the Gulf Research Development Corp. in Pittsburgh. Bardeen had earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering and a doctorate in mathematical physics from Princeton University and would go on to teach at Harvard University.

Later, Bardeen would work at the Bell Telephone laboratories, where his work with two other theoretical physicists, William Shackley and Walter Brattain, would earn him the Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry in 1956. They earned the prize for their work in developing the tiny transistor, which gave birth to the Information Age. It was the transistor that made every modern electronic device possible, from computers to cellular telephones to missiles.

Furthermore, Bardeen is one of very few people to have won the Nobel Prize twice. He was awarded the prize along with Leon Cooper and John Schrieffer in 1972 for the development of the fundamental theory of superconductivity known as BCS theory.

The Bardeens had two sons, a daughter and six grandchildren at the time of his death in January 1991.