Who came to witness the trial? Perhaps there
were a few serious students, interested in the processes of law. But in large
they were plump, middle-aged or elderly women seeking vicarious sex thrills
from the spectacle of the two unglamorous lovers on trial for their lives. During
the recesses most of them pretended to be shocked at what they had deliberately
come to hear; while some openly admitted they thought Fernandez “handsome,”
“wonderful,” “so virile,” or “just like Charles Boyer.” Before and during the
trial, Raymond’s mail was heavy with letters from this same type of woman,
beseeching him to call on them if he should escape the electric chair, openly
offering their bodies, quite shamelessly proposing marriage to the man who had already
married bigamously a half-dozen or more times. Martha, too, had her share of
fan mail and, like that addressed to Raymond, it was composed either of
indecent suggestions or proposals of marriage. The woman who felt that no man
would want her, had she by some miracle escaped electrocution or imprisonment,
might have had her choice of husbands among a score of psychopaths.
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