CRIME: Case Solved

In 1928 James Eugene Bassett of Annapolis, Md., just out of the U. S. Naval Academy, was transferred to the Pacific Fleet at Manila. He drove across the U. S. to Seattle. There he put an advertisement in the newspapers to sell his car. An unsmiling 63-year-old woman named Mary Eleanor Smith and her crippled son, Earl, answered the advertisement. James Bassett drove out to their house. Mrs. Smith engaged him in conversation while Earl hobbled up behind and hit him over the head with a hammer. Then they cut him into pieces, burned part, buried part, and scattered his teeth up and down the road.

Thus, last week in the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla, Mary Eleanor Smith told the story. The murder of James Bassett was the most celebrated West Coast crime of the 1920’s. Mrs. Smith and her son Earl were picked up in Oakland, Calif, in Bassett’s car. The fragmentary corpse was never found though much excavation was done about Mrs. Smith’s premises. The trial of Mrs. Smith was the first in the U. S. in which the prosecution used the lie-detector and “truth serum.” Mrs. Smith and Earl, who were rather simple people, were so terrified by science that they confessed enthusiastically to everything. But the public indignantly protested the newfangled lie-detector. The defense got an injunction, mother and son were finally sentenced only for stealing Bassett’s car, which, when not under the lie-detector’s influence, they claimed they had legitimately bought. Mrs. Smith got eight years; Earl, as an habitual criminal, got life.

The efforts of the State to get a confession by less scientific methods were unending. Earl at one point was put in solitary confinement for a year. A year ago State Patrol Sergeant Joseph McCauley disguised himself as a clergyman and went to see Mary. After a few visits he got her to thinking along religious lines and finally last week, five days before her sentence was up, she decided “to make herself right with her Maker.” And Earl, she said, had not only killed James Bassett. When he was younger, in Montana, he had killed three other people. He had been disguised as a clergyman at the time, which must have given State Patrol Sergeant Joseph McCauley quite a start. When she was taken to Earl and taxed him with his crimes. Earl said, “Ma, do you feel all right?” But two days later he confessed, too. The State Parole Board let Mrs. Smith out five days early, and she went to Seattle with State Police carrying shovels, to see if she could help them dig up a piece or two of James Bassett’s body.