Lauren Jae Gutterman. Journal of the History of Sexuality. Volume 27, Issue 1, January 2018.
On 3 November 1964 more than 60 percent of voters in Oregon chose to repeal the state’s death penalty. Only the second time in American history that abolition had directly succeeded at the polls, Oregon’s 1964 vote marked the culmination of years of grassroots organizing by anti-death penalty activists in the state. Progressive journalists heralded the referendum in Oregon as a major victory of the broader movement to abolish the death penalty nationwide, and it paved the way for the successful campaigns of legislators in New York, Iowa, Vermont, and West Virginia, who repealed their states’ capital punishment statutes the following year.
The death penalty was more than an abstract political issue for the Oregonians who went to the polls that day. In the balance hung the lives of three white convicted murderers on death row: Larry West Shipley, Herbert Floyd Mitchell, and Jeannace June Freeman, the first woman sentenced to death in the state. Prior to the vote, Governor Mark O. Hatfield made clear his personal, moral opposition to capital punishment, and he implied that he would commute the sentences of the three death-row inmates to life imprisonment should voters favor abolition When Hatfield followed through on his promise and commuted the sentences of Shipley, Mitchell, and Freeman a mere forty-eight hours after the referendum vote, none understood more profoundly than they how Oregon’s voters had saved their lives. According to the Oregonian, all three inmates stated in separate interviews that they wanted “to thank the people” of Oregon.
In the months and even years leading up to the 1964 vote, Freeman’s case received far more media attention titan that of either Shipley or Mitchell. Tellingly, on 6 November 1964 the headline of a United Press International story on the commutations read: “Hatfield Spares Jeannace, Two Others from Death in Chamber.” According to scholar and activist Hugo Adam Bedau, then a member of the Oregon Council to Abolish the Death Penalty and a professor of philosophy at Reed College, “throughout the early 1960s in Oregon, the controversy over capital punishment had been symbolized for many by Jeannace June Freeman.” Freeman’s case attracted so much attention not only because she had the distinction of being the first woman to receive the death sentence in Oregon’s history—at a mere twenty years old—but also because she was found guilty of an exceptionally brutal and sexually sensational crime. On 11 May 1961, Freeman and her lover Gertrude Nunez Jackson murdered Jackson’s two children: six-year-old Larry and four-year-old Martha. Larry was strangled and beaten with a tire iron. Both children were abused to make it appear as if they had been raped. Their naked bodies were then thrown into the 350-foot-deep Crooked River Gorge. At the time, Martha was still alive. Initially, newspaper articles did not make explicit the homosexual nature of Freeman and Jackson’s relationship, describing Freeman vaguely as Jackson’s “girl friend.” But Freeman’s cropped hair and masculine clothing—consistently described and/or illustrated in early newspaper coverage of the case—signaled that there was something queer about her from the very beginning.
Based on a close examination of the coverage of Freeman’s case in more than three hundred articles, editorials, and letters published in ten of Oregon’s daily newspapers, this article will demonstrate that it was not despite but in part because of her unconventional gender presentation and her homosexuality that Freeman came to be seen as a victim undeserving of execution and capable of reformation. In some ways, this argument challenges what we know about lesbians and criminal justice. Scholars such as Lisa Duggan and Lynda Hart have demonstrated that since the late nineteenth century, the figure of the masculine lesbian has been imagined as posing a violent threat to white, heterosexual, patriarchal society. Journalists and legal scholars have also documented the discrimination that homosexuals and women who transgressed gender and sexual norms faced within the criminal justice system throughout the twentieth century, particularly in capital cases. Considering that the early 1960s marked a high point of hostility against gays and lesbians in the United States and that butch women were regularly portrayed in the media and in popular culture as threatening and dangerous, we might expect that the public would have had nothing but loathing for Freeman. Certainly, there is evidence that she was despised. In a letter to the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the nation’s first lesbian rights group founded in 1955, one Pordand resident described witnessing the hatred some Oregonians held for Freeman firsthand: “In the service station I overheard the remark by a housewife, ‘They better not turn [Freeman] loose and let her come back here or we will string her up.'” Such a casual and public lynching proposal, uttered loudly enough for strangers at the gas station to overhear, is far less striking in retrospect than the ultimate outcome of Freeman’s case. Though even Freeman expected she would die in the state’s gas chamber, instead she became a cause celebre for abolitionists in the state. How, then, did a working-class butch lesbian who participated in the heinous murder of two young children come to serve as such a powerful symbol of capital punishment’s injustice?
To begin with, Freeman’s case overlapped with what scholars have termed the third abolitionist movement in the United States. Between 1953 and 1966 Gallup Poll surveys found that Americans’ support for the death penalty fell by 26 percent; those who opposed the death penalty outnumbered its supporters for the first time on record in 1966. In the late 1950s Alaska, Hawaii, and Delaware all abolished the death penalty. In the spring of 1965 twenty state legislatures were considering abolition; only four went ahead and repealed their capital punishment statutes, but in no other year in American history had such a large number of states done so. In addition, in 1963 United States Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, along with Justices William Brennan and William Douglas, published a dissent from the Court’s decision not to hear the case of Rudolph v. Alabama, which involved a black defendant who wanted to challenge his death sentence for the nonlethal rape of a white woman. Goldberg’s dissent invited a constitutional challenge to the death penalty that civil rights lawyers with the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund were ready to take up. Their efforts culminated in the Supreme Court’s 1972 ruling in Furman v. Georgia, which declared all existing capital statutes to be unconstitutional and officially imposed a national moratorium on executions. Unofficially, this moratorium had begun in 1967; it ended with the execution of Gary Gilmore in Utah in January 1977.
Scholars of the death penalty link the abolitionist movement to the rise of the civil rights movement, to a general leftward shift in American society, and to the 1953 report of Great Britain’s Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, which essentially called for abolition. A series of highly controversial capital cases, all involving white defendants, also helped transform Americans’ attitudes toward capital punishment. The executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953, Barbara Graham in 1955, Caryl Chessman in 1960, and Perry Smith and Richard Hickock in 1965—the subjects of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966)—all captured the nation’s attention and sparked sweeping demands for clemency. By the early 1960s, leading penologists and criminologists opposed the death penalty on the grounds that it was unethical and ineffective in deterring crime. Meanwhile, churches and smaller religious groups from die American Baptist Convention to the Union of American Hebrew Congregations voiced their opposition for moral reasons. As public opinion turned against the death penalty execution figures fell continually, beginning in 1935, with juries returning fewer death sentences each subsequent decade. In March 1960 a Time magazine article aptly dubbed capital punishment “a fading practice.”
The national transition in attitudes toward capital punishment provides a critical background to Freeman’s case, but it cannot explain why she in particular generated such intense interest and public sympathy in Oregon. Herbert Mitchell, for example, who was on death row with her, attracted hardly any in-depth media coverage. On 28 September 1962, Mitchell, then forty-one years old, shot and killed a man in a darkened movie theater. The victim, Dmitre Dan Yerkovich, was in the company of Mitchell’s ex-wife and daughter. Though there was some coverage of Mitchell’s trial, after he was sentenced to death on New Year’s Eve 1962, his name was typically mentioned only in passing in broader death penalty discussions. Larry Shipley serves as a more apt comparison with Freeman. Like Freeman, Shipley was only twenty at the time he was sentenced to death. In August 1961, while on parole from the Oregon State Correctional Institution, where he had been serving a sentence for burglary, Shipley murdered his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Linda Jean Stevens, fearing his parole would be revoked if his relationship with her became known. Shipley’s friend Glenn Dixon was also charged with first-degree murder in the case and, like Jackson, was sentenced to life in prison. Unlike Freeman, who claimed innocence, while in police custody Shipley confessed to shooting Stevens. Shipley was sentenced to death less than a week after Freeman in September 1961, and the pair traveled parallel courses through the criminal justice system. Their automatic appeals to the Oregon Supreme Court were heard on the same day in June 1962, and their lawyers were equally successful in securing numerous stays of execution. Yet Shipley’s story failed to spark the sustained attention and widespread support that Freeman’s did. Even though Shipley garnered assistance from lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union who filed an appeal on his behalf with the United States Supreme Court, there were few photographs of Shipley in the news, no extended articles about his personal history and family background appeared, and editorials and letters to the editor calling for clemency on his behalf were rare. As we will see, while intimate details of Freeman’s life were publicized to Oregonians through the state’s newspapers in the early 1960s, Mitchell’s and Shipley’s life stories remained largely unknown. Thus, while one typical 1963 Eugene Register-Guard article mentioned all three death-sentenced prisoners, it described Freeman’s case alone as “stir[ring] new talk” of abolition.
The fact that Freeman was a woman undoubtedly helped inspire public concern for her. Historically, women have comprised a small minority of those sentenced to death; between 1900 and 1961, when Freeman was sentenced, only thirty-eight women had been executed in the United States. Women have also been more likely than men to be later removed from death row through clemency or appellate court reversals. Yet even today not all death-sentenced women are seen as equally deserving of sympathy or forgiveness. Pointing to the case of murderer Karla Faye Tucker, whose death sentence inspired widespread protests in the 1990s after she displayed signs of reforming and conforming more closely to gender expectations, legal scholar Joan Howarth has argued that it is the execution of feminine women in particular that disrupts the overwhelmingly male system of capital punishment. To an extent, this theory holds true for Freeman, who did undergo a temporary feminization. When she appeared in court for her trial, for example, Freeman’s lawyers made sure she was dressed in demure skirts, blouses, and sweaters, and they even paid to have her short hair permed in a softer style. But attitudes toward Freeman did not shift when she appeared in feminine clothing or finally showed emotion in court. In fact, several of the journalists covering Freeman’s trial actively undermined her attempts at appearing more womanly by drawing attention to the tattoos that showed beneath the sleeves of her pretty blouses.
It is important to note that public opinion toward Freeman did not change until a year after she was sentenced to death. Ironically, though Freeman’s masculinity and lesbianism were initially portrayed in the news and in court as proof of her greater guilt in the murders, a year after the trial her gender and sexual deviance began to serve as evidence of her physical and emotional “damage”—her history of childhood sexual abuse and her neglect in the state’s reform school. News coverage that emphasized Freeman’s harrowing youth both reflected and perpetuated a broader mid-century discourse that conflated lesbianism, childhood sexual abuse, and juvenile delinquency. As sociologist David Garland has argued, the criminal justice system is not merely a product of existing cultural norms, it also shapes and transforms cultural meaning: “Penalty communicates meaning not just about crime and punishment but also about power, authority, legitimacy, normality, morality, personhood, social relations and a host of other tangential matters.” Freeman’s crime and near execution drew an otherwise unimaginable degree of public attention to the abuse and neglect she had suffered, fostering understandings of lesbians—especially young, white lesbians—as injured. While historians of the midcentury period have focused on notions of lesbians as predatory and dangerous, Freeman’s story reveals that a cultural understanding of lesbians as victimized was taking shape at this moment as well.
The Making of a Monster
On Friday, 12 May 1961, Oregon newspapers reported that the bodies of two young children had been discovered at the bottom of the Crooked River Gorge in Peter Skene Ogden State Park. Though the coroner suspected that the children were locals, police and journalists ventured that the brown-skinned boy and girl were of Mexican or Native American descent, the children of either migrant laborers or a “Los Angeles Indian woman” on a trip to one of Oregon’s Native American setttlements. Initially, because the children appeared to have been raped, police believed that a “sex deviate” was responsible for the crimes, stoking fears about male sexual criminals. Fears about male sexual psychopaths—often implicitly if not explicitly imagined as homosexual—grew in the 1930s and reached a peak in the mid-1950s. Such anxieties justified the creation of “sex psychopath” laws in several states and served as a convenient excuse for police harassment of gay men. In 1953 Oregon enacted just such a “psychopathic offender” law allowing police to arrest homosexuals and place them in asylums where they could be “cured.” These “cures” may well have included sterilization: as late as 1965 a eugenic law in Oregon permitted the sterilization of those found guilty of engaging in sodomy or any other “crime against nature.” It was ironic, then, that even as Freeman and Jackson were engaged in a lesbian relationship, they appear to have consciously exploited homophobic fears by sexually assaulting Martha and Larry in an attempt to lead police astray. But Freeman and Jackson’s cruel and feeble attempts at disguising their own identities and motivations were ineffective. By Monday, Phyllis Round, Jackson’s onetime neighbor and Freeman’s sister, had identified the children’s bodies. Clyde Whitcraft, Freeman’s former stepfather and abuser, had also contacted police about Freeman and Jackson’s possible role in the crime. On Tuesday, less than a week after the murders, police located Jackson and Freeman along with Freeman’s friend Letha June Little in an apartment in Berkeley, California.
Newspaper coverage after Freeman and Jackson were apprehended repeatedly emphasized Freeman’s masculine appearance, describing her as “mannish” or as wearing “men’s clothes.” On 18 May, for example, the Oregonian included a full-length photograph capturing Freeman’s attire, and the reporter described her clothing no less than three times: “Jean Freeman, who looks, acts and dresses as a man is nonchalant about the whole affair…. Miss Freeman, who acted as babysitter for Mrs. Jackson’s children when they both lived in Eugene was dressed in men’s clothing when arrested…. She cuts her hair like a man and always wears cowboy jeans, cowboy boots and a man’s jacket.” The following day, the Oregonian juxtaposed Freeman’s masculine clothing and Jackson’s more feminine lavender skirt and white sweater set, thus emphasizing the two women’s “contrast of femininity and mannishness.” This article also included a tally of Freeman’s tattoos and their placement on her body as revealed by the police’s examination: “the word ‘Spinner’ over the left breast, ‘Julia’ over the right breast, ‘Lucky’ on the right forearm, ‘Tiger’ on the back of the left shoulder, ‘love’ on the left forearm, ‘fruit’ on the inner ankle, and the letters h-a-t-e, one each on the back of the four fingers of her left hand.” The detailed attention and significant space allotted to descriptions of Freeman’s clothing and body allowed journalists to insinuate the women’s homosexual relationship while calling Freeman’s character into question.
Journalists’ fascination with Freeman’s appearance was pronounced but by no means uncommon. Examining coverage of the executions of female murderers between the late nineteenth and the late twentieth centuries, communications scholar Marlin Shipman has shown that newspapers frequently paid inordinate attention to the physical appearances of female murderers, describing their jewelry, makeup, hair color, and weight. Journalists’ fascination with such women’s appearances persisted even into the execution chamber. In 1955 die Los Angeles Times noted convicted murderer Barbara Graham’s “skin-tight” suit, “jangling, dangling earrings,” and bobbed, bleached-blond hair as she went to her execution. “The brashly attractive 32-year-old … walked to her death as if dressed for a shopping trip,” the article stated. Though the attention paid to female murderers’ appearances could trivialize their stories by describing the care they took to curl their hair or apply lipstick, newspaper coverage could also work to humanize, even glamorize such women. Graham is a prime example. Combined with doubts about her guilt, the attention the media paid to her fashionable clothing, pretty face, and curvy figure undoubtedly played a role in the public sympathy and sustained media attention that her case elicited. In Freeman’s case, however, the emphasis on her appearance, at least initially, had the opposite effect: it desexualized and dehumanized her. Particularly in the early coverage of the case, she was often made into a freak or a scientific specimen whose tattoos, short hair, and sartorial preferences betrayed her underlying deviance.
After their arrest, Freeman and Jackson gave wholly different accounts of the murders. Freeman told police a series of five different stories, consistently maintaining that Jackson had murdered the children. In each telling of the story, Freeman gave a different account of her own location at the time of the crimes. Initially, she claimed that Jackson had dropped her off before reaching the gorge; eventually, Freeman said that she had driven them all to the park herself and watched fearfully as Jackson beat her children and disposed of their bodies. Jackson gave another description of the events. She stated that she and Freeman had discussed various methods of killing the children in the days before the murders but that Freeman had selected the ultimate location of the crime, not far from where she had grown up. Jackson also claimed that Freeman beat Larry to death and threw his body into the gorge and that Jackson threw Martha into the gorge while she was still alive. Yet Jackson’s story was not entirely consistent either. Early newspaper articles quoted Jackson as stating that she threw Martha into the gorge before Freeman did the same to Larry, but by the time of the trial this order had changed. Jackson’s account of who undressed her daughter was also inconsistent.
Jackson’s story changed most dramatically, though, with regard to the motivation for the murders. During Freeman’s trial Jackson alleged that the murders had been Freeman’s idea all along, but initially Jackson had told police that she killed her children because she could not afford to care for them. “I couldn’t earn enough to feed the kids, I loved them so much I decided to kill them. I know they are happy now,” she was widely quoted as saying. Indeed, there is ample evidence of Jackson’s poverty, instability, and lack of social support, all typical of mothers who kill their children. Jackson, who had an eighth-grade education, worked as a shirt-presser in a laundromat and reportedly earned $48 a week (the equivalent of about $375 today). The children’s father, Dempsey Otis Jackson, was an unemployed African American skilled laborer living in the San Francisco area. Fie had been in a common-law marriage with Jackson in California, but they had had a tumultuous relationship. They separated at some point in the late 1950s, and Jackson moved to Eugene, Oregon. In the summer of 1960 Jackson had applied for and secured approval to receive welfare in Oregon, but she then reconciled with the children’s father and did not follow up on her application. By November, however, she was living on her own again with the children in Oregon. While the medical examiner claimed that Jackson’s children had been well taken care of in life, Jackson was dearly unable to take care of herself. Though she was only thirty-three at the time of the trial, at least nine of Jackson’s teeth had been removed due to infection.
Both Freeman and Jackson were initially charged with two counts of first-degree murder. On 22 August 1961 Freeman pleaded innocent, and Jackson did so as well, by reason of insanity. However, on 31 August Jackson made an unusual decision and pleaded guilty to killing her daughter. It is unclear what motivated Jackson to change her plea, but by doing so, Jackson was able to take advantage of an obscure Oregon law that allowed alleged murderers who pleaded guilty in open court to avoid trial and receive a sentence handed down from a judge after a hearing. Although Jackson pleaded guilty before Judge Robert Foley in August, her sentencing did not take place until early October, after Freeman’s trial had ended. In effect, this meant that Freeman’s trial for the murder of Larry Jackson served as Jackson’s trial as well. In other words, when Jackson took the witness stand in Freeman’s trial and testified before Judge Foley—the same man who would later decide whether she should be executed or given life imprisonment—she had every reason to portray Freeman in the most despicable way possible and to paint herself in the very best light; her life, quite literally, depended upon her doing so. And although Jackson would claim that without her children she had little reason to continue on, her own words undermined this sentiment. In an interview a month after her children’s deaths, Jackson described her plans to one day open a chicken ranch in California, where there was “money to be had.” Luckily for Jackson, the prosecution’s case against Freeman aligned with her own hopes for survival.
Just as in the press reports, Freeman’s masculinity and homosexuality played an important role in court. The state’s prosecutors alleged that Freeman had engineered the killings because the children were getting in the way of her homosexual relationship with Jackson. With Jackson’s help, the prosecution portrayed Freeman as almost inhuman: a monster incapable of empathy, obsessed with sex and with dominating others. In her testimony before the court, Jackson insisted that Freeman was the “boss” in their relationship, “the man of us,” as she put it. Jackson claimed that Freeman had found the children annoying, had become obsessed with doing away with them, and had spoken of little else in the days before their murder. She stated that when Freeman threw Larry’s body into the gorge “she had a grin on her face,” and Jackson claimed—in a statement that defies belief—that after the murders Freeman noticed some spots of blood on the back of her hand and licked them off, saying, “Fresh blood—yum yum, sure is good.” According to Jackson’s testimony, Freeman was more than an aggressive butch, she was a pseudovampire, the stuff of horror films and macabre comics. After less than a day of deliberation, on Friday, 15 September 1961, the jury found Freeman guilty of first-degree murder without recommending leniency, automatically sentencing her to death.
During the trial, the prosecution cast Jackson, by contrast, as an unwilling accomplice so profoundly under Freeman’s influence that she had been all but brainwashed into murdering her children. Jackson’s own testimony supported this argument, and she explained that since being incarcerated Freeman’s control over her had worn off. “Now I can think for myself. And I wonder how and why it could have happened,” Jackson claimed, reflecting on the murders. In his closing statement, one of the state prosecutors described Jackson as a “frail, docile, numb, unintelligent individual.” This was the same conclusion drawn by Portland psychiatrist Dr. Gerhardt Haugen, who testified in Jackson’s hearing in early October. Haugen called Jackson “passive, submissive, ignorant, [and] dependent” and described Freeman, on the other hand, as “aggressive, a homosexual since her early teens, a very severe sociopath,” “ruthless,” and “incapable of sympathy or feeling for people.” In her testimony at Freeman’s trial, Jackson even went so far as to portray herself as a secondary victim of the murders, since she did not have “much left to live for” without her children. At Freeman’s hearing, the state prosecutors requested that Judge Foley spare Jackson’s life and sentence her to life in prison, which he did. Jackson was released from prison after seven years, but her parole was revoked several times due to what one journalist vaguely described as “ongoing mental problems.” In 1984 she was sentenced to one year in Oregon’s state psychiatric hospital after setting fire to a room at Mountain View Hospital, roughly twenty miles from where she and Freeman had committed their crime decades before.
The scholarship on lesbian history might lead us to anticipate Freeman’s depiction in the media and in court as a masculine aggressor. What historian Lisa Duggan terms “the lesbian love murder story” first developed in the American press in the wake of Alice Mitchell’s 1892 murder of her lover Freda Ward in Memphis, Tennessee. According to Duggan, such news stories were marked by “a masculine/feminine contrast between the central female couple, a plan to elope, an erotic triangle, and a murder.” They were also critical to the formation of “the lesbian” as a distinct social and cultural figure. Pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis cited the Mitchell-Ward case among others when he argued in 1897 that there was a correlation between what he called female “sexual inversion” (a precursor to the notion of homosexuality) and violence. “A considerable proportion of the number of cases in which inversion has led to crimes of violence … has been among women,” he noted. In each of the cases Ellis cited, furthermore, it was the more masculine, sexually assertive partner in the couple, or the “true” invert, who committed the violent act. Ellis’s understanding of female inversion was informed by the work of Cesare Lombroso, a founder in the field of criminology who drew an even stronger connection between female masculinity and violence. In his 1893 treatise The Female Offender, Lombroso argued that innately criminal women could be identified by their masculine behavior, personality, and appearance. According to Lombroso, the “born” female criminal, bent on dominating others and consumed by her excessive sexual desires, “belong[ed] more to the male than to the female sex,” just like the inverts Ellis would later describe. As the late literary scholar Lynda Hart has argued, the figures of the sexual invert and the female offender worked together at die turn of the twentieth century to mark the boundaries of womanhood and to ensure that the lesbian “was always already a criminal.”
Concerns about dangerous lesbian criminals declined in the 1920s and 1930s, but they reemerged with full force at midcentury. As historian Estelle B. Freedman has shown, after World War II the “aggressive” prison lesbian became the object of increasing fascination and surveillance. In Hollywood films, True Confessions stories, and pulp novels, prison or reform-school lesbians were portrayed as dangerous and morally corrupting. Politicians, academics, and prison administrators all decried the “problem” of lesbians in prison in the 1950s and early 1960s, while penal institutions replaced earlier policies of quiet toleration with efforts to identify and physically segregate “true” or “hard-core” lesbians. Much like Donna Penn, who has argued that lesbians became demonized through an association with prostitutes in the postwar cultural imaginary, Freedman sees the stigmatization of prison lesbians at midcentury as part of a broader categorization of lesbianism as a working-class phenomenon. Whereas psychologists and criminologists in the early twentieth century had defined the aggressive prison lesbian as African American, by midcentury they considered all working-class women in prison to be at risk of homosexuality. Furthermore, they imagined white working-class criminals, in particular, as posing the primary sexual threat to women both within and outside of prison. Taking such attitudes about lesbian criminality into consideration, it is little wonder that Freeman’s masculinity and history of lesbian relationships marked her as more deadly and more responsible for the murders than Jackson in the courts of law and public opinion. The cultural context that informed popular understandings of lesbianism makes it easy to understand why Freeman was cast as a monster; why and how she became the central figure in the state’s abolition movement is more puzzling.
From Villain to Victim
Significant public opposition to Freeman’s execution did not appear immediately after she was sentenced to death on 15 September 1961. After Freeman’s trial ended, almost no one spoke out on her behalf in Oregon’s newspapers. In an exceptional letter to the Medford Mail-Tribune titled “A Reasonable Doubt,” one woman argued that the trial had essentially been a case of Freeman’s word against Jackson’s. To her mind, this left; some doubt about Freeman’s guilt, and she challenged the people of Oregon to intervene: “Let’s see what you can do about it. The life of a young 20-year-old woman hangs in the balance.” Though this letter is the only one I have found from 1961 critiquing the ruling in Freeman’s case, there was some sense in Oregon’s newspapers that Freeman’s death sentence had the potential to reignite opposition to the death penalty in the state. Several newspapers even compared Freeman to Caryl Chessman, the convicted robber, rapist, and death-row author whose execution in California—despite the fact that he was not accused of murder—had inspired international protests the year before. Under the headline “Female Chessman?” the Eugene Register-Guard suggested that at least some people saw Freeman’s death sentence as unjust, particularly because she was a woman and a “sick” one at that. The very same day, another paper commented that Governor Hatfield’s press secretary was “fearful they may have a female Chessman case on their hands.” But the public’s striking silence regarding Freeman’s case lent little credence to these prophecies, and other commentators disagreed with the comparison between Freeman and Chessman, who was not a murderer. Robert Chandler, publisher and editor of the Bend Bulletin, supported Freeman’s execution but claimed to oppose the death penalty. In an editorial entitled “She Shouldn’t Be Made a ‘Chessman,'” Chandler suggested that the best use of Freeman’s life would come through her death. “Execution of a woman, even a woman like this one” he insisted, might motivate Oregonians to overturn the death penalty.
For a year Freeman disappeared from Oregon’s newspapers while the state supreme court considered her case on automatic appeal. During that period, Oregon witnessed the execution of another convicted murderer, LeeRoy Sanford McGahuey, whose death helped transform attitudes toward capital punishment in the state. McGahuey, a forty-year-old logger, was executed on 20 August 1962 for murdering his girlfriend and her infant son. McGahuey’s execution was the first in the state in nine years due to the fact that Oregon’s governor between 1957 and 1959, Robert D. Holmes, an opponent of the death penalty, had commuted the death sentence of every death-row inmate during his brief term in office. In an attempt to distinguish himself from Governor Holmes during his gubernatorial campaign in 1959, Mark Hatfield declared his personal moral opposition to the death penalty but pledged to uphold the letter of the law and the will of the people while in office. This political background is significant, because McGahuey’s execution forced Hatfield to uphold his promise not to commute the sentences of those on death row because of his own beliefs, as his predecessor had. In his 2001 memoir, Hatfield recalled how deeply troubled he was in the weeks preceding McGahuey’s death. Although he attempted to find a legal justification for commuting McGahuey’s sentence, he could not. Ultimately, Hatfield did not prevent McGahuey’s death, but he did invite a few respected journalists—the Capital Journals Scott McArthur and the Oregon Journals Bob Boxberger—to attend the execution in the hope that they would provide the public with a “realistic and human account of the event” that might move Oregonians to take action on the issue. (84) McArthur’s and Boxberger’s subsequent articles did convey the disturbing details of McGahuey’s final moments to the public while also suggesting the futility of his execution.
As Governor Hatfield had hoped, McGahuey’s death helped reinvigorate the movement to abolish capital punishment in Oregon, which had stalled after the electorate voted to retain capital punishment in a referendum vote in 1958. It also put Freeman’s impending execution in a different light. Less than two months after McGahuey’s death, Freeman appeared in the news again when the Oregon Supreme Court denied her appeal and set her execution date for 9 December 1962. Due to her lawyers’ legal maneuvering, Freeman’s execution would be delayed and rescheduled four more times before Hatfield commuted her sentence. While this legal practice has since become standard in death-row cases, Oregonians most likely expected that Freeman’s December death sentence would stand. In 1962 the national median for elapsed time between sentencing and execution was only 20.5 months.
With her execution now imminent and McGahuey’s recent death fresh in the public’s mind, Freeman reemerged in the press as a more sympathetic figure. A half-page article in the Oregonian in November 1962 was the first to present the public with a more feminine and helpless image of Freeman to counter, if not erase, the earlier malignant one. The article’s author, Ann Sullivan, was the same journalist who had attended and reported on Freeman’s trial for the Oregonian the year before. While Sullivan’s earlier coverage of the trial had done little to elicit readers’ sympathy, Sullivan now presented Freeman as a tragic figure, one who had undergone a tremendous transformation: “Jeannace Freeman, a year and a half ago, was a cocky, cigar-smoking prisoner. She looked more like a tomboy teen-ager than a desirable female, and she always preferred playing baseball to wearing pretty clothes. Today the starch appears all gone from her shoulders, and she sits, rather dull but with haunted eyes, in a special cell in the women’s quarters at the prison. When she is alone, she cries.” Gone is the blood-licking monster of Jackson’s testimony; in her place we find a pitiful young woman, “haunted,” “alone,” and crying. While during the trial reporters had often remarked on Freeman’s lack of emotion, describing her as unfeeling, “icy,” and “nonchalant,” Sullivan’s article alludes to Freeman’s tears or emotional distress several more times and describes Freeman in terms that consistently contradict the characterization of her presented in earlier coverage of the case; rather than “mannish,” “aggressive,” and “tattooed,” she was now “scrawny,” “small,” and “attractive.” Accompanying photographs of Freeman in masculine clothing at the time of her arrest and more feminine curled hair and lipstick at the time of her trial added force to the article’s description of her gender transformation. Indeed, Freeman’s feminization had continued dining her yearlong absence from the news. An Associated Press photo taken when Freeman appeared in court to receive her execution date showed her wearing a plaid dress and makeup, her hair grown out to shoulder length. The photograph also emphasized Freeman’s small stature. Standing next to a broad-shouldered, six-foot-tall prison matron, the five-foot-two Freeman appeared almost childlike.
Sullivan’s article noted the absence of opposition to Freeman’s impending execution, but within a few short months this would change. In January, Democratic state senator Don S. Willner introduced a bill, Senate Joint Resolution No. 3, to bring the issue of capital punishment before voters once again in the 1964 general election. Though the bill would not pass until May, news of it stoked anti-capital punishment attitudes in the state. Public opposition to Freeman’s death sentence grew dramatically during the winter of 1962-63 as her execution was pushed back until January and then March to allow her attorneys to file an appeal with the United States Supreme Court. In November 1962 an Associated Press article stated that the governor had received eighty-four letters regarding the Freeman case, all but nine of which asked that he commute her sentence to life in prison. Only two months later, in mid-January 1963, this number had increased more than fivefold to 457, with more than 60 percent of letters arguing that Freeman’s sentence should be commuted. (By comparison, when McGahuey was executed in August, Hatfield had received fewer than fifty letters in total regarding his case.) This same month a number of moral leaders and influential public figures joined the ranks of those who opposed Freeman’s execution, often describing it as a prime example of the death penalty’s inconsistent and unjust application: the Reverend Dr. Richard M. Steiner of Portland’s First Unitarian Church; Rabbi Emanuel Rose of Portland’s Congregation Beth Israel; Democratic state legislator and former Portland city councilman J. E. “Jake” Bennett; and Reed College professor Thomas Gaddis, author of Birdman of Alcatraz: The Story of Robert Stroud (1955), an excoriation of the American prison system in the guise of a biography of the convicted murderer and noted ornithologist. By February 1963 several of Oregon’s daily papers—the World, the Register-Guard, and the Mail-Tribune—had all stated their opposition to Freeman’s execution and called on the governor to commute her sentence.
Beginning in late 1962, Oregon’s newspapers not only portrayed Freeman in more feminine terms than they had during her trial but also began to highlight Freeman’s history of sexual abuse and neglect by the schools and reformatories responsible for her care as an adolescent. Legal scholar Lorraine Schmall has argued that women who are sentenced to death generate greater public interest than men, making it more likely that the details of their very often traumatic lives will become public knowledge, in turn eliciting greater sympathy and compassion for them. This was clearly the case with Freeman. In December 1962 and January 1963 new details about her early life were made public. This information may have emerged first in Freeman’s eleven-page appeal to Governor Hatfield. In the letter, she argued for clemency on several bases, including her young age at the time of the crime, her troubled childhood, and her inability to obtain the mental health care she needed as an adolescent. Though Freeman’s letter was not published, the information it contained soon made its way to the public in a series of sympathetic newspaper articles, editorials, and letters to the editor. By these accounts, Freeman’s sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather had not been a one-time occurrence, as coverage of the trial had made it seem, but had in fact continued throughout her childhood after she had first been raped at the age of four. Furthermore, after Freeman became a ward of the state and was shuttled from one school to another before being sent to the Hillcrest School of Oregon, the state girls’ reform school, she repeatedly asked for psychological help, which the institutions she attended were unable to provide.
In this wave of news coverage, Freeman’s homosexuality and masculine appearance began to serve as evidence of the ways she had been wronged rather than the threat she posed to others. In a letter to the editor that appeared in the Oregonian under the heading “She Was a Pretty Girl,” Freeman’s former school counselor Guy Delamarter explained how when she was twelve years old Freeman had confided in him about her ongoing sexual abuse. Delamarter and the principal contacted the authorities, and Freeman recounted her story to a police officer, but Delamarter was later told that there was not sufficient evidence to bring charges, even though Freeman had once been treated for gonorrhea. In light of her sexual abuse, Delamarter argued, “It is not strange … that Jeannace became a homosexual. How many women subjected to such treatment by a man would ever react normally to the opposite sex?” Apparendy, Freeman told another counselor at the time that “when a boy put his arms around her she turned cold and stiff all over because of the memories” of her abuse. In an op-ed published in the same paper soon after, Thomas Gaddis similarly argued that Freeman’s lesbian tendencies and gender deviance had emerged after being abused. “She was beginning to hate the idea of being a woman. Look what they can do to you, and get away with it. She began affecting a less feminine appearance. She tattooed her hands,” he wrote. Psychoanalyzing further, Gaddis claimed that Freeman’s homosexuality “crystallized” when she was placed in Hillcrest, which he described as “a notorious (under budgeted) state institution.” Lesser-known Oregonians shared Gaddis’s understanding of Freeman’s sexual development. In one letter to the editor, a University of Oregon undergraduate claimed that while at Hillcrest, rather than learning the skills that would help her to “get along in society,” Freeman had instead “learned her lessons … in the weird ways of Lesbian love.” For this young writer, Freeman’s lesbianism was proof not of her immorality but of the extent to which she was “a creature of [the state’s] own making.”
In portraying Freeman’s homosexuality as an effect of her childhood sexual abuse and neglect in reform school, these commentators deployed emergent associations between lesbianism, sexual abuse, and juvenile delinquency that worked together to cast adolescent lesbians as victims. While most psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and psychologists at midcentury did not assert a direct causal relationship between lesbianism and childhood abuse, some were beginning to make a connection between the two, particularly among otherwise “troubled” girls. In a 1949 study of homosexuality among adolescent girls in their ward at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, for example, psychiatrists Sylvan Keiser and Dora Schaffer drew a correlation between sexual abuse by fathers or father figures and lesbianism. Building on Freud’s argument that traumatic events at puberty could precipitate lesbianism, Keiser and Schaffer cited “frequently having been seduced by the paramours” of their mothers as among the disturbing events homosexual girls in their ward had experienced. The authors of a later study of girls at Boston’s Judge Baker Guidance Center who had been involved in incestuous relationships came even closer to drawing a causal link between father-daughter incest and lesbianism, writing that “the trauma associated with the heterosexual experience with the father further motivated the turn to homosexuality.” Likewise, in their 1963 study of adolescent girls’ homosexual behavior at a correctional institution in Wisconsin, psychologists Seymour Halleck and Marvin Hersko noted that “approximately 20 per cent of the girls have verifiable histories of sexual contacts with their fathers, step-fathers, or brothers,” men who “frequently exploited, degraded, and physically abused them.”
The idea that girls turned to homosexuality as a result of sexual abuse and institutionalization undermined the validity of girls’ lesbian relationships, as well as their sexual autonomy. One 1953 study of delinquent girls’ sexual experiences noted both their histories of incestuous relationships with their fathers (which the author noted most “had been forced into”) and their frequent homosexual experiences while incarcerated in an unnamed industrial school. When the author, psychiatric social worker Spencer Stockwell, asked the girls whether they planned to continue their homosexual relationships after being discharged, he claimed that “without exception they laughed at such an idea” and stated they would return to “normal” relationships as soon as they became available. This depiction of delinquent girls’ lesbian relationships as temporary and insignificant was consistent with understandings of incarcerated women’s homosexuality more broadly. As historian Regina Kunzel has shown, twentieth-century studies of incarcerated women typically described their homosexual behavior in ways that affirmed their femininity and denied the importance of their lesbian relationships. In the first half of the century, most prison researchers likened women’s homosexual relationships to the crushes that arose between girls at boarding school; and beginning in the early 1960s, a new wave of sociological studies argued that incarcerated women engaged in lesbian relationships in an attempt to create “surrogate families” and thus fulfill their primary cultural roles as wives and mothers.
Yet studies that linked juvenile delinquent teens’ lesbianism to their experience of sexual abuse simultaneously provided rare—albeit limited—indictment of sexually abusive fathers and father figures. According to historian Linda Gordon, at the turn of the twentieth century, middle-class social reformers considered father-daughter sexual abuse to be a “vice of the poor.” Although they did not speak out about incest publicly nor consider it to be a problem among members of their own social strata, reformers did recognize it as a problem among their clients. Beginning around 1910, however, child-protection agencies became more concerned with the sexual threat that men outside the family, rather than those within it, posed to young girls. As strangers became the focus of social workers’ anxiety, father-daughter incest faded from view, and all girls—whether they had participated in sexual relationships willingly or by force, with adults or juveniles—were defined as “sexual delinquents” and increasingly blamed for their own sexual “maladjustment.” Indeed, one 1937 psychiatric study insisted that children did not “deserve completely the cloak of innocence” and that they were sometimes “die actual seducer rather than the one innocently seduced.” This tendency toward victim blaming was only exacerbated after World War II, when, as historian Rachel Devlin has shown, psychoanalysts argued that adolescent girls were often sexually drawn to their fathers. Psychoanalysts considered such incestuous fantasies—and in some cases acts—essential to the development of girls’ heterosexuality and femininity, since at puberty a girl needed to shift her Oedipal attachment from her mother to her father. The psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and psychologists described above who did categorize father-daughter incest as a traumatic experience in the lives of young lesbians thus tentatively challenged the belief that it was a rare and relatively benign result of girls’ own willful seductions. As demonstrated by the examples cited above, some of these psychological experts cautiously presented incest as involving abusive fathers and victimized daughters.
The media’s emphasis on Freeman’s adolescent troubles also linked her case to a discourse around juvenile delinquency that blamed teenagers’ misbehavior on their parents and to an extent on society as a whole. Though hardly new, concerns about juvenile delinquency in the United States reached an unprecedented height during the 1950s. Coverage of juvenile delinquency in the news media exploded in the 1950s, and Hollywood produced at least sixty dramatic films on the topic, including such classics as The Wild One (1953) and Rebel without a Cause (1955), as well as lesser-known films like So Young, So Bad (1950) and Girl Gang; (1954). Historian James Gilbert has argued that this anxiety was a response to new forms of youth culture that seemed to jeopardize conventional middle-class values. Research provided some basis for these fears, finding that youth crime was growing. Though scholars have since questioned the reliability of its statistics, the FBI reported increasing arrests of those under eighteen throughout the 1950s; one 1959 study announced that juvenile court cases had increased 220 percent between 1941 and 1957. There was much disagreement about how to deal with juvenile crime, but government agencies emphasized prevention and rehabilitation rather than punishment. In 1952 the Children’s Bureau established the Special Delinquency Project and the Juvenile Delinquency Branch to help improve the care and treatment of juvenile delinquents at the local level. During the 1950s and early 1960s the National Institute of Mental Health underwrote government and civil sector research projects on juvenile delinquency, and in 1961 Congress passed the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act, providing $30 million in grant money for the prevention and control of youth crime.
By the early 1960s, Oregonians were as concerned as other Americans about the problem of juvenile delinquency. In 1958 the University of Oregon and the Oregon Juvenile Judge Association began holding a yearly summer institute on juvenile delinquency. In 1961 the Pordand Metropolitan Youth Commission announced its plan to combat juvenile delinquency in Pordand and Multnomah County by creating a school for parents of troubled youth, appointing a full-time juvenile judge, and studying how schools and police responded to charges of delinquency. Oregon’s newspapers contributed to both the alarm over juvenile delinquency and the belief that troubled youth could be redeemed. With tides like “Portland Juveniles Land in Trouble after Cruelty to Small Cat” and “Crackdown on Youths Nets 89,” articles about juvenile delinquents who had engaged in fights, stolen cars, set fires, drunk alcohol, or run away from home appeared regularly in Oregon’s papers in the early 1960s. In response to the anxiety such reports generated, in 1964 Tom McCall, a candidate for secretary of state, called for greater funding for school social workers and for halfway houses for troubled teens. “Oregon cannot afford to neglect these problems any longer,” he declared. “The cost in terms of social unrest, personal tragedy and the general effect on society’s social fabric cannot be calculated.” The fact that McCall was elected later that year, when voters also chose to overturn the death penalty, suggests that most Oregonians shared his views.
Within this context, Freeman’s case provided evidence of both the disastrous effects of juvenile delinquency and Oregon’s need to better address the problem. In Oregon as elsewhere, boys were the face of juvenile delinquency, but girls also figured into the debate, and Freeman’s case only brought more attention to them. In January 1963 the Portland Reporter published a four-part series on juvenile delinquency, focusing on Hillcrest reform school. The authors of the series linked their investigation to Freeman’s case in their introduction, stating that they hoped to uncover “why the school releases youngsters so emotionally disturbed they turn out to be killers later on—like Jeannace Freeman.” The series presented sympathetic portraits of Hillcrest’s residents and maintained throughout that the girls were capable of being reformed, but it also demonstrated how limited funds, inadequate facilities, and a lack of psychiatric expertise hampered Hillcrest’s rehabilitation efforts.
Reports of rampant lesbianism served as a major example of Hillcrest’s failures. The first article in the series quoted a delinquent girl who had attempted to run away from the institution. After police found her, she supposedly begged the officers not to take her back to Hillcrest, because “she was afraid she’d be a Lesbian for the rest of her life” if she returned. Another article in the series focused solely on the problem of the “Hillcrest Homosexual.” According to “Kelly,” the young lesbian who served as the journalist’s main source, “quite a few girls have been raped by their own fathers, and it isn’t hard to get them to reject men completely.” As a whole, the series implied that Freeman was merely one of many delinquent girls that Hillcrest—and by extension the state itself—had unsuccessfully served.
An editorial published in die Portland Reporter the same month as the Hillcrest articles made explicit the series’ implied message: Oregon had created the “tragedy” of Freeman’s case, and unless the state devoted greater resources to the care of troubled youth, it would likely produce others like her. “What is the state of Oregon going to do to help its delinquent teen-age girls?” the authors began. “Much of the grief suffered by these unfortunate young girls … is due to the miserable combination of illness and poverty. Those two dreary companions brought Jeannace Freeman, one of our neglected girls, to the death house in the state prison.” Though Freeman was twenty-one years old by the time the editorial was written, this fact did not prevent the authors from referring to Freeman as a “girl” and focusing on her youth, as many of those opposed to her execution had also done. In concluding, the editorial stated melodramatically, “The idea that Jeannace may have to be offered as a human sacrifice to remind our state legislature of its responsibility to poor, sick, unwanted children is horrifying.”
The Portland Reporter was not alone in arguing that because the state had failed to help Freeman earlier it had no right now to take away her life. In an extended letter to the editor first printed in the Oregon Journal, state legislator J. E. Bennett argued for clemency and placed the blame for Freeman’s crimes on the state as a whole. “Society failed her,” “we failed her,” Bennett repeated again and again in telling Freeman’s life story before summarizing: “And so it has been—school teacher, counselor, school principal, school psychiatrist, Hillcrest assistant superintendent in charge, house mother, and state doctor, all point the finger of shame at Oregon’s neglect in this case. They all cannot be wrong.” Bennett made the argument for Oregon’s responsibility to Freeman with particular passion, and his repeated use of the term “we” excluded no one from blame. One Portland woman’s letter to the editor expressed this same idea but in more lurid terms. “Snuffing out the life of this misfit may bring a sense of wellbeing to some, but we can all lick the blood from our hands if we continue to offer the aid to unfortunate maladjusted people that we offered to the Freeman girl,” she wrote.
As Freeman became a more tragic figure in Oregon’s newspapers, the disparate sentences she and Jackson had received began to strike Oregonians as unjust. This was the argument made with the greatest frequency in letters to Governor Hatfield on Freeman’s behalf. It was also reflected by a January 1963 Portland Reporter cartoon depicting a blindfolded Lady Justice who has cast aside the scales of justice; in her arms she holds a book marked “Mrs. Jackson,” while another book marked “Miss Freeman” lies on the ground beneath her feet, pierced by a sword.
Freeman’s defenders questioned why she alone had been sentenced to death even though she had pleaded innocent and Jackson had admitted to murder. They questioned as well why Jackson had been sentenced after Freeman, even though she had pleaded guilty in open court months before Freeman’s trial began. Freeman’s defenders also drew attention to aspects of the case that had been overlooked during her trial: inconsistencies in Jackson’s accounts of the murder, Jackson’s greater responsibility for the children, and her earlier failed attempt to put them in foster care. They also suggested that the division of power in Freeman and Jackson’s relationship may not have been as simple as the trial had made it seem. Jackson was more than ten years Freeman’s senior and could have used her “‘feminine’ imploring” to pressure her young lover into committing the crimes, just as easily as Freeman could have used her “‘masculine’ demanding.” Summarizing these critiques, a Register-Guard editorial stated, “Jeannace Freeman, innocent or guilty, was the victim of an odd set of circumstances in that courthouse, just as she had been the victim of circumstances all her life.”
While at least one letter to the editor suggested that Freeman had been given a harsher sentence than Jackson because of her homosexuality, gays and lesbians in Oregon, whom one might have expected to agree with the argument that Freeman was a victim of discrimination, did not do so in the state’s papers. One woman, in fact, who claimed to know the “consensus of homosexual opinion” in Oregon, wrote to the Oregonian applauding the state for its “fair and speedy” handling of Freeman’s case and asserting that had the “jurors all been homosexuals themselves, they would have shown no sympathy” for her. Confronted with significant discrimination in the state, Oregon’s homosexuals had good reason to distance themselves from Freeman’s case. Portland’s gay and lesbian population had grown during World War II, as had the number of bars and nightclubs catering to a queer clientele. But beginning in 1949 Mayor Dorothy McCullough Lee began a campaign to wipe out what she viewed as the vice that had proliferated during the war and persisted thereafter. Working with die Oregon Liquor Control Commission, the mayor cracked down on die city’s best-known gay bar, the Music Hall, bringing an end to its notorious female-impersonator floor shows. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Pordand police entrapped gay men in public parks and restrooms; conveniently for police, the state’s sodomy law had been expanded in 1913 to apply broadly to “any act or practice of sexual perversity,” including oral sex. Meanwhile, concerns about homosexual male “sex deviates” ran rampant in the news. In 1956 and again in 1963 police arrested groups of men for having sexual relations with underage boys. In the latter, highly publicized case, police even claimed to have uncovered a “state-wide homosexual ring.” Moreover, as historian Peter Boag has noted, the development of gay and lesbian political organizing in Portland lagged behind that of other major cities in the Pacific Northwest such as Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. Indeed, it was not until 1970 that a gay and lesbian movement in Portland finally emerged.
A small number of homophile activists did, however, make some attempt to defend Freeman. In 1963, after receiving letters about the case from multiple women in Oregon, Barbara Gittings, editor of the DOB’s monthly newsletter, published two articles about Freeman. The articles were directed in particular at “upper-middle class professional” lesbians who might be wary of associating themselves with such a disreputable “lower class butch.” They retold Freeman’s troubled life history, argued that society shared responsibility for creating her problems, and urged readers to write Governor Hatfield demanding clemency. In her own letter to the governor, Gittings argued that Freeman had been unjustly sentenced to death because of her homosexuality. The disparity between Jackson’s and Freeman’s sentences, Gittings wrote, “makes it look as though Oregon has sentenced this woman to die not because she is a murderer but because she is a lesbian.” By linking themselves and the DOB with one exceedingly marginalized woman, Gittings and the few DOB members in Oregon concerned with Freeman’s case demonstrated a far broader and more revolutionary conception of lesbian “community” than has typically been ascribed to this organization. Unfortunately, few other DOB members shared their interest in the case. Privately, Gittings complained that “haughty” women involved with the San Francisco’s DOB chapter had discussed Freeman’s case and “generally felt it was too bad” but were unwilling to take action. Though not surprising, lesbians’ reluctance to assist Freeman makes the support she garnered even more remarkable.
Oregonians’ willingness to see Freeman as a victim had a great deal to do with her race. Had Freeman been black, it is highly unlikely that the public would have been so willing to see her as a victim. As historian Kali Gross has argued, black women’s exclusion from protection under the law, beginning with the codification of slavery, has long put them at increased risk of violence and abuse and thus compelled black women to resort to extralegal violence in order to protect themselves. At the same time, assumptions about black women’s inherent guilt have exposed them to particularly harsh legal punishment: disproportionately high incarceration rates, longer sentences, and brutal treatment while in prison. Betty Butler provides the closest case of comparison to Freeman. Butler, a black woman, murdered her lover Evelyn Clark, also black, in 1954 in Ohio. Butler murdered Clark in broad daylight in a public park. She and Clark first began to argue while on a fishing boat with a male friend in Sharon Lake. The group rowed to shore, and the women began physically fighting. Butler then strangled Clark with a handkerchief, dragged her back to the lake, held her head underwater, and drowned her. Butler and Clark’s friend, as well as two men fishing nearby, witnessed the crime. According to their accounts, after dragging Clark to the water, Butler remarked, “My work is done.”
Despite Butler’s lack of repentance she was in many ways a more sympathetic figure than Freeman. She was conventionally feminine in appearance and did not have a history of lesbian relationships. An impoverished mother separated from her husband and struggling to care for her two young children, Butler had engaged in a homosexual relationship with Clark out of economic desperation in exchange for housing and financial support. Butler stated publicly that she was a “sex slave” who killed Clark in order to escape “her perverted intentions.” What is more, there was no evidence that the murder was premeditated, as there was in Freeman’s case. Butler and Clark reportedly argued often, and the day of the murder both women had been drinking. Yet, although Buder murdered a woman in the heat of passion and in an attempt to escape an exploitative homosexual relationship, she was granted neither the sympathy nor the degree of public attention Freeman received. The Ohio Supreme Court refused to review her conviction, and the governor denied her request for clemency. She was electrocuted in 1954.
The race of Freeman’s victims undoubtedly impacted public opinion toward her as well. Many legal studies have found that the death penalty has long been disproportionately applied in cases in which the victim or victims are white and the defendant is black. In this respect, the fact that Freeman was sentenced to death for the murder of a mixed-race boy went against the grain. Sparing Freeman’s life thus metaphorically righted the racial “error” made in her case. The biracial status of Jackson’s children, furthermore, may have made it easier for the public to replace the story of their victimization with that of Freeman’s. Certainly, Jackson’s children were mourned in Oregon’s press, but the language of ownership and affiliation journalists and citizens applied to Freeman (for example, “we failed her,” “one of our neglected girls”) was not ascribed to Martha and Larry. As noted earlier, from the very earliest discovery of the children’s bodies police and journalists took Martha and Larry’s brown skin as evidence that they were not truly Oregonians. This attitude might be expected, considering that nonwhites comprised only 2.1 percent of the population of Oregon in I960. Still, journalists’ initial reluctance to claim Martha and Larry as part of the local community did not disappear after it was revealed that they had spent much of their young lives in Eugene. The children’s father’s utter silence in the news—whether due to his own refusal to talk to the press or to the press’s lack of interest in him we do not know—also helped to ensure that additional humanizing details about Martha and Larry’s tragically short lives failed to reach the public. And while images of Freeman were printed and reprinted in Oregon’s newspapers between 1961 and 1964, as far as I can tell, photographs of Martha and Larry never appeared. From one perspective, the children’s visual absence from Oregon’s newspapers may have allowed Oregonians to conveniently overlook the fact that they were not white and thus increased public sympathy for them. At the same time, though, the children’s visual erasure from the news may have made it easier for Freeman to take their place as the symbolic victim in the narrative as it unfolded.
Finally, race also had a more indirect impact on Oregonians’ attitudes toward Freeman. As Freeman became the victim in the public discourse and in a sense regained the privileges of her race, Jackson began to appear in the press as both less white and more culpable. Several of the newspaper pieces that were more sympathetic toward Freeman highlighted Jackson’s interracial relationships: her earlier marriage to an unnamed Mexican American railroad worker and her common-law marriage to the children’s father, which began long before her divorce was final. In the same November 1962 Oregonian article that had first portrayed Freeman in a sympathetic light, for example, journalist Ann Sullivan drew attention to Jackson’s cross-race relationships. “Lives with Negro” one subsection of the article about Jackson was titled sensationally. Likewise, in one of his op-eds, author Thomas Gaddis described Jackson’s children disapprovingly as “the issue of a common-law relationship with a Negro.” Sullivan and Gaddis used Jackson’s failures as a mother, as well as her interracial marriages, to indicate her immorality. They noted that she had long ago abandoned an older son from her first marriage and put her younger children in foster care shortly before the murder, only to have them “thrown back at her” when it came to light that their father was black. In emphasizing Jackson’s inability to fulfill middle-class standards of domestic motherhood, her unconventional family structure, and even her financial hardship, these pieces associated Jackson with a stereotypical vision of female poverty more often ascribed to unmarried black and Latina mothers. Oregon’s newspapers thus began to portray Jackson as one who was, if not literally black, then not entirely white either.
Conclusion
In the winter of 1963-64, a year after attitudes toward Freeman had begun to change, a small group of individuals, including state legislator Willner, founded the Oregon Council to Abolish the Death Penalty in order to launch the referendum campaign. They secured the backing of two dozen well-known Oregonians and raised $10,000 to support their work. In the summer before the vote, they started bombarding Oregonians with a mass media campaign: they printed three hundred thousand handouts urging Oregonians to vote “yes” on ballot measure no. 1; they prepared research papers demonstrating capital punishment’s ineffectiveness in deterring crime; they organized lectures and discussions at various organizations and on radio and TV; and they held the first ever two-day national conference on capital punishment at Lewis and Clark College. Letters from those who favored capital punishment and supported Freeman’s execution also appeared in Oregon’s papers in tire early 1960s, but, according to Hugo Adam Bedau, there was no organized pro-death penalty movement capable of countering the council’s efforts. Well in advance of the referendum vote the state’s warden and ex-prison chief called for the end of capital punishment, as did the governor and both state senators, several newspapers, and multiple religious groups. By October many were predicting that the death penalty would be overturned and were suggesting that Oregon’s death-row inmates had reason to be hopeful.
Oregonians saved Freeman’s life in 1964, but their attitudes toward her and toward the death penalty ultimately proved unstable. In the late 1960s, as riots broke out in many major cities and the crime rate rose, conservatives began calling for “law and order” and attacking liberal politicians they perceived as “soft” on crime. By the late 1970s support for the death penalty had increased nationally and in Oregon. Two years after the United States Supreme Court’s 1976 Gregg v. Georgia ruling made the death penalty constitutionally permissible again, Oregon’s voters reinstated capital punishment. The Oregon Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1981, but Oregonians reinstated it yet again in 1984. Since 2011 there has been a moratorium on executions in Oregon. As Oregonians’ position on capital punishment shifted, so too did depictions of Freeman. When Freeman came up for parole in 1972 and again in 1978, letters to the Oregonian were almost uniformly hostile, and many called for reinstatement of the death penalty. By 1983, when Freeman was released from prison, little sympathy for her remained. Significantly, in a series of decisions issued that same year, the United States Supreme Court upheld contested death sentences in several states and reduced the legal protections available to death-row inmates, thus signaling an even greater turn away from abolitionism.
Within this national context, the original stereotypes about Freeman’s gender and sexuality resurfaced. A Bend Bulletin article about Freeman’s release, for instance, described her as “tough” and “masculine.” The article featured an interview with Judge Robert Foley, who had presided over Freeman’s trial and handed down her sentence. Foley expressed concern about Freeman’s reported “aggressive sexual pursuit of other women” while incarcerated, and he claimed that she would not be able to succeed outside prison until she modified her sexual behavior. In this same vein, an article in the Oregonian quoted one of Freeman’s defense attorneys, who called her “a seriously disturbed sociopath, irreversible.” No longer did Freeman’s case serve as an example of capital punishment’s unfairness. In a radical reversal of the abolitionist arguments Oregonians had made in the 1960s, Jefferson County’s district attorney stated publicly that the release of Freeman and others like her was “the best argument” for the death penalty’s return.
In contrast to the sensationalized depictions of Freeman as either a victim or a villain that I have described, the living, breathing Jeannace June Freeman troubled simplistic categorizations. Freeman attempted suicide multiple times while on death row. Years after her sentence was commuted she was restricted to her room for months at a time. According to a corrections officer, this was for Freeman’s own protection, as some of the other inmates did not “like her.” Once transferred out of Oregon, though, to a federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia, in 1969, Freeman became a nearly model prisoner. One 1976 progress report stated that Freeman was “pleasant, courteous and cooperative towards staff,” a “dependable” worker who seemed to get along well with other residents despite her being “somewhat moody” and spending much time alone in her room. In 1977 Freeman was transferred again to a low-security women’s prison near Pleasanton, California. Shortly after Freeman was released in 1983, however, she broke the terms of her parole by living with a woman and her two minor children, possessing a weapon, and failing to inform her parole officer of her new address. Freeman was subsequently incarcerated for these infringements and rereleased in 1985. After her second release from prison Freeman worked at a cannery and on ranches and farms, but her jobs typically lasted only until her employers found out about her crime. For this reason, she changed her name to Wilma Lin Rhule in 1988. Freeman stayed out of trouble for more than a decade, but she eventually became enamored with a woman named Darla who owned an escort service not far from where Freeman had grown up. According to her grandnephew, Freeman served as driver for the escort service and considered herself Darla’s bodyguard. Freeman’s family believes that Darla exploited Freeman’s feelings for her. In 2002 Freeman caught Darla with a man, and after threatening both of them in a jealous fit, Freeman then forced Darla, at knife point, to drive her to a convenience store to buy cigarettes. Freeman was charged with coercion and unlawful use of a dangerous weapon and sentenced to four more years in prison. Neither a hardened criminal nor a redeemed one, Freeman was violent and emotionally volatile. She made poor decisions and repeatedly placed her trust in the wrong people. After spending her entire adult life in prison she was ill equipped to build a life outside of it. She died of lung cancer and emphysema while incarcerated on 19 December 2003. She was sixty-two years old.
Freeman’s story has remained at best a footnote in the history of the movement to abolish capital punishment. Though her case was covered in the national and even international news media, historians of homosexuality have shied away from it. This is understandable, as Freeman’s crimes lend credence to the very worst stereotypes about lesbians’ violence and the threat they pose to children. But ignoring Freeman—or other “bad” queers like her—carries risks. To begin with, when we avoid historical figures like Freeman we surrender our ability as scholars to help contextualize and shape the meanings of their stories, clearing the path for others to do so. While some may prefer to leave Freeman out of the annals of gay history, the public’s interest in her persists. Freeman’s story continues to appear in “true crime” books such as Lustmord: The Writings and Artifacts of Murderers (1996) and Bodies of Evidence: From the Case Files of Notorious USA (2013), and Googling her name turns up more than a thousand hits. Avoiding those aspects of the queer past we find ugly or distasteful simply does not ensure that they will be erased.
Furthermore, in overlooking stories like Freeman’s we lose opportunities for insight into the history of sexuality: in this case, a sense of the connections between the movement to abolish capital punishment and shifting conceptions of lesbianism, and a grasp of the ways lesbians have been seen as both aggressors and victims. Newspaper coverage that cast Freeman as a victim drew Oregonians’ attention to sexual abuse within the family and facilitated widespread critique of a state government that was prepared to execute but had failed to help a deeply troubled young woman. Nonetheless, stereotypes of the lesbian as villain and the lesbian as victim ultimately comprised mo sides of the same coin. Both characterizations flattened Freeman’s complexity and denied her subjectivity; they transformed her into a symbol, one that capital punishment’s supporters—just as easily as its opponents—could deploy. Both depictions of Freeman, moreover, facilitated an understanding of lesbianism as pathological, either a symptom or a source of violence. Thus even as Oregonians’ attitudes toward Freeman and capital punishment changed dramatically in the early 1960s, conceptions of lesbianism as a perversion remained firmly in place.