Part II: A Dreiser novel, a Spanish professor, and a drowning
by Jack Neely
Professor Elisha Kane, between summer and fall quarters at UT, was on vacation. He locked the door to his Kingston Manor apartment and drove his roadster east, toward the ocean.
At 37, Kane was a rare combination of military man and antiquarian scholar. A veteran, he'd been promoted to the rank of major in the Army reserves. Kane may have been the only major in the U.S. Army who specialized in Spanish literature of the 13th through 17th centuries.
For two years he'd been chief of UT's Department of Romance Languages. Three years earlier, when he was at UNC, he'd written an unusual book, Gongorism And the Golden Age: A Study of Exuberance and Unrestraint In the Arts, which had gotten national attention. Not all of it positive—"graceless," one reviewer called it—but the author was clearly one of the most promising scholars on UT's faculty.
Rather than driving directly to join his wife and her parents, vacationing by the beaches of Chesapeake Bay, near Norfolk, Kane drove from Knoxville to Fort Bragg, N.C., where he'd served as a major in the reserve corps. In no hurry to join his wife, he camped there with his fellow reservists for several nights, and then drove north to Hampton on Thursday, September 10, 1931.
At Hampton, Virginia, he met his wife, Jenny, whom he hadn't seen all summer. After 12 years of marriage, the Kanes may have seemed an odd couple. He was large, bombastic, adventurous, sure of himself. She was sentimental, frail, depressive, "neurasthenic," in the jargon of the day. She was given to fainting spells, which her friends called "heart attacks." Though she'd spent much of her life by the sea, at 33 she'd never learned to swim. She had a dread of water and even avoided boats. Friends said she wanted to learn to swim just to please her husband Elisha—Sasha, she called him—who was a powerful and enthusiastic swimmer.
The two never had children, but both were musical and artistic, and enjoyed sketching outings together. Some friends and family, on the theory that opposites attract, thought of them as the perfect couple. Others painted their relationship in darker shades.
At her parents' house in Hampton, the two spent their first night together in three months. The next morning, the Grahams would later recall, Kane was surly, uncommunicative, unresponsive. Worse, their daughter seemed scared. They wondered if it was just because it was the day she was going to learn to swim.
In Kane's roadster, the couple drove to a remote shore near Grand View Beach, not far from the old Back River lighthouse. At about 11 a.m., Jenny Kane went into the water.
Elisha would later say he was already in the water demonstrating a stroke for his wife when he saw her slip off of a rock into the surf. She struggled in the water and came up for air a couple of times. By the time he reached her, she was floating beneath the surface. He said she clutched at him. Then, as he struggled to get her to the shore, she went limp.
Some fishermen and clamdiggers, who saw the couple from a distance, claimed the two appeared to be struggling and that they had heard screams, or "distressful" calls. One said he saw Kane at the shore afterward, appearing to dawdle. The man admitted he was illiterate, but he recognized a Tennessee license plate on the roadster.
Though he was a surgeon's son, Kane claimed he knew nothing about first aid or lifesaving techniques. He didn't carry his wife to the roadster, but left her on the beach as he got the car and backed it up. He loaded his wife into his car and drove to a hospital. Jenny Kane was dead on arrival. She bore no bruises or obvious marks of violence. She had water in her lungs, and the fact that she had drowned seemed obvious enough to the doctors who examined her. There would be no autopsy, a fact that several parties would claim to regret in the months to come.
Portly Coroner George Vanderslice at first called it an accidental drowning. He was troubled by Kane's conflicting statements about the incident, however, and the professor's "theatrical" behavior struck Vanderslice as peculiar. Something Vanderslice found in Jenny Kane's purse heightened his suspicions.
It was a letter written in a highly stylized, feminine hand with an art-nouveau cast, with circles for dots. The letter was postmarked New York on Sept. 1 and addressed to Professor Kane at his UT post-office box in Knoxville. It had apparently been forwarded, innocently, to the Grahams' Virginia house. Jenny Kane likely received it before Elisha arrived.
"Do you ever have dreams of my ever being a part of your life?" the letter went. "If you ever got rich would you take me to the 'unusual' and would we do the 'unusual'?"
The letter was unsigned, but the return address was marked with the initials E.H.D. The writer had some knowledge of Kane's married life; when Kane had studied for a year at the University of Madrid in the '20s, Jenny Kane, who feared ocean voyages, had stayed home.
"Where is she?" her letter persisted. "I can't understand how come she stayed at home a year. Do you still intend to stick to it?" There was also an enclosure, an article about Abraham Lincoln's intense but sublimated sexual desires. The writer said the article reminded her of Kane.
The Grahams said they knew too well about the letter writer. They claimed that Jenny had intercepted previous letters in that same handwriting, some of which seemed to suggest that Kane find some way to get rid of his wife. Detectives would have been interested to see them, of course, but the Grahams explained that Jenny had been so upset by the affair that they'd burned them.
The writer was later revealed to be Elizabeth "Betty" Dahl, a 40-year-old divorcee and former ocean liner hostess who lived in New York. To Coroner Vanderslice, the letter forwarded from UT looked like strong evidence of a motive. Shortly after Jenny Kane's funeral, authorities arrested Professor Elisha Kane for murder.
The case made national headlines. E.H.D.'s confidential letter would be printed in full in the New York Post.
Out of Pennsylvania, outraged Kanes streamed to the heir's defense. His bewhisk-ered, 71-year-old father, the surgeon famous for performing his own appendectomy and, more recently, his own herniotomy, spoke sarcastically about the murder charge. Lawyer cousins agreed to help with the defense.
From Elisha Kane's jail cell, he could see his wife's grave.
Knoxville heard about Jenny Kane's drowning three days after it happened, when Elisha Kane had already been charged with murder. "UT Professor Held In Quiz," went the Journal headline. The city buzzed with rumors, as everyone recalled encounters they'd had with either of the Kanes over the last two years.
Most of the Kanes' down-the-hall neighbors at Kingston Manor said they didn't know them well, that the Kanes kept to themselves. One woman said they were very quiet, didn't even play the radio. The custodian recalled that Kane's desk was always piled with papers.
Some quoted Kane's whimsical autobiographical essay that had appeared in the News-Sentinel last year: "Personally I never tell the truth when a lie can be more entertaining."
Some reported that Kane had been pursuing an affair with a "beauteous former UT co-ed," that he bought flowers for her frequently at a Cumberland Avenue florist. Police looked into rumors that Kane kept a "secret apartment" for trysts on Riverside Drive in East Knoxville.
Detectives came from Virginia looking for clues, expecting to find more than they did. They combed through Kane's Ayres Hall office and found no more letters from E.H.D. They turned the Kanes' Kingston Manor apartment upside down and found nothing out of the ordinary, except that the windows had been left open and the electric refrigerator left running, then an unusual habit. The cliche "absent-minded professor" came up more than once.
Murder was common in Knoxville in 1931, but the Kane story captured the imagination as few did. It seemed as if it had been written by Agatha Christie, supplied with bizarre red herrings, like the service revolver in Kane's car, painted with the words I Am the Remedy. (He said it was a gift from a friend, a relic of the World War.) And it was the era of Leopold and Loeb, and Elisha Kane seemed to fit the mold of the Nietzschean intellectual who regarded his destiny as more important than the lives of others.
Hardly a week passed that fall without the newspapers disclosing some new revelation or theory about Jenny Kane's death. One of the most talked-about developments was the detail that just before he left, Kane had checked out a controversial novel from the UT library. It was Dreiser's An American Tragedy, about a desperate man who attempts to drown his mate so that he can marry someone more useful to him. Many thought that detail passing strange.
As fate had it, the Von Sternburg motion picture based on the book was the main feature playing at the Tennessee the same week that the details of the Kane drowning were appearing in the newspapers.
The prominence of the Kane "uxoricide" case in the newspapers even approached Major Neyland's Vols, in one of their undefeated seasons. (It seems more than likely that Kane and Neyland knew each other. Close in age, both were World War veterans and both were then majors in the army reserves.) Rumors of a Rose Bowl bid wilted in late November when Kentucky tied the Vols, 6-6.
The trial came up in early December. The commonwealth's attorney, Roland Cock, demanded the death penalty.
The defense was based on Jenny Kane's health and the idea that she had suffered from "heart attacks" that rendered her unconscious for five or six minutes at a time. Elisha Kane's friends were sure that was what happened in the water.
The prosecution witnesses were the clamdiggers and fishermen, who had only seen and heard some disturbance far down the beach—as well as the Graham family, who clearly hated Kane. They said their apartment was a "mad house," that Kane was a harsh, cruel man, a "lothario" who flaunted his affairs as if to upset his wife. His sister-in-law called him a "bullying braggart." The Grahams said Kane boasted of his atheism and called their German Shepherd "Jesus Christ" just to unnerve his wife.
Judge Vernon Spratley ordered that references to Kane's alleged blasphemies be stricken from the record.
There would be 50 witnesses, most of them for the defense, several of them colleagues and acquaintances from Knoxville and Chapel Hill, the Kanes' former home when he taught at UNC. Professors Stratton Buck and Walter Stevens spoke on Kane's behalf. Among the witnesses was prominent Knoxville physician Dewey Peters, who testified that he had treated Jenny Kane for heart trouble. A Dr. E.A. Abernethy of Chapel Hill described Jenny as "neurasthenic...an unfortunate woman," who had a gloomy outlook on life.
There was talk of bringing in the mysterious Betty Dahl as a witness, but it didn't happen. Judge Spratley even rejected a motion to present her letter as evidence of motive.
Kane himself testified, weeping as he described his wife. He admitted to having gone out with Dahl, vehemently denied that he had ever called their dog Jesus Christ.
He described the events of Sept. 11 as a bizarre accident. She fell in the water and apparently had one of her heart attacks. He found his wife hard to haul into shore. "It was a terrible weight, in my tired condition. I kept her face above water. When I got her near shore, she suddenly went limp."
The prosecution claimed the screams didn't come from Jenny but from Elisha, who was fruitlessly calling for help. The trial lasted five days. The jury, reminded of their charge to assess guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, deliberated for only three hours and 45 minutes.
[To be continued....]
September 14, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 37
© 2000 Metro Pulse
| 
