Betsey Culp

Simon ran up the street. Noticing that his feet pounded hollowly on the wooden sidewalk, he moved out into the road. Tiny puffs of dust rose behind him at every step. Frame houses rose like specters on either side, their shadows more distinct than the houses themselves in the gaslight. The street was open and deserted. An empty carriage stood with its shafts tilted against the curb. Across the street, a church with no steeple blocked out the moon.

He could feel the road begin to climb. What time was it? If he did not hurry, the people sleeping in the houses would begin to waken. He did not want to meet anyone on this road.

The houses grew taller. Hills rose higher and higher behind them, until Simon felt that he was about to be buried in a great canyon. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, but whose death? Rob’s? Or his own? He was not afraid of dying, but he did not want to be interrupted before he completed his journey. In any case, they would not kill him. Clearly he was mad, he must be. They would send him to Stockton, where all the mad people of San Francisco went. Simon knew about the insane asylum in Stockton. When Mary Maguire began to parade about in her petticoat, the police bundled her off to Stockton. When Peter Lenehan tried to burn down his neighbor’s house, he soon found himself aboard the Stockton steamer. It was a large brick building on an adobe plain, a place so crowded that inmates spent the night on the floor, kept awake by the ceaseless babble of voices, a place where the attendants did not hesitate to apply cold water or hard fists to control their charges. Had he left the sea to discover a new confinement in hell?

Even though he was breathing hard from the climb, he increased his pace. When he reached the corner of Vallejo Street, he turned left. The street spread out before him, every rut and pebble accented by the faint light of the day. A lone dog padded across, heading for a pile of refuse in front of one of the houses.

Simon came to the stone façade of St. Francis Church and stumbled up the steps. He pushed one of the heavy doors open a few inches and slipped inside. Before his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he was assailed by the odor of smoke and incense. He stood in the doorway, uncertain what to do. A dark figure entered from a side door and walked toward the altar. Simon ran down the center aisle.

“Father Cotter!”

He stammered out his story. The priest spoke to him gently, trying to find the words that would wipe the terror from his eyes. At last, he took Simon by the shoulder and led him outside. They walked through the narrow alley that separated the church from the wooden wall of the distillery next door. Behind the church was a one-story cottage surrounded by a neatly swept garden. Father Cotter guided Simon inside, into a drab sitting room, where the two men sat until the San Francisco police arrived an hour later.

In the end, Simon proved his voices wrong: he did not hang. Nor did he return to Alcatraz, to join the prisoners in the guardhouse whose only view of freedom was the dried, yellow grass of the East Bay hills. Instead — for this is a “true” story — he made history, of a sort.

After a few days in the city jail, Simon Kennedy was turned over to the military authorities for trial. At his request, his commanding officer, Captain William A. Winder, served as counsel for the defense. The transcript of the trial shows that Winder, who knew the depths of his anguish, defended him passionately, arguing that in the civil courts,

no questions are there presented so difficult, so refined, so subtle, and so full of responsibility, as those of mental aberration…. [But] in the books relative to courts martial, a single authority cannot be found when the plea of insanity has been made in a capital case. So far as I am informed this is the very first that has been presented in the United States to a military court.

He asked the court to commit the defendant to “one of those institutions which human charity has dedicated to just such human frailty and weakness as has been unmistakably developed by the prisoner at the Bar.”

The plea was too novel. It seemed destined to fail. On August 4, 1864 a court-martial found Private Simon Kennedy guilty of manslaughter and assault with intent to kill, and sentenced him to life in prison.

But the story doesn’t end there. The case made its way to the top, to the desk of Major General Irvin McDowell, the commander of the Department of the Pacific of the U.S. Army. McDowell saw gray where the lower court had seen black and white, reprimanding the guards for allowing weapons in the possession of prisoners, especially one who was “suffering from mental derangement.” But he added, “As there is abundant evidence to show that the acts were committed whilst the prisoner was insane, he will be held in confinement till he can be sent to the insane asylum.”

And so, like many other human beings who have wandered through the streets of San Francisco, Simon Kennedy faded from sight. Or at least he would have, if the tale of the Black Point murder hadn’t caught the attention of an aspiring young writer at the San Francisco Daily Morning Call.

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