The Anatomy of a Murder Trilogy: A Classic Trial, Book, and Film

By Frank J. Parker

In the early morning of July 31, 1952, a murder occurred in a dingy bar in a small resort town in the uppermost part of northern Michigan. The trial that followed, in which young army lieutenant Coleman Peterson was tried for murdering the bar owner, inspired a number-one bestselling novel and an Academy Award-nominated film. Showcasing the far-reaching power of a single crime, The Anatomy of a Murder Trilogy: A Classic Trial, Book, and Film follows the murder from the barroom to the court room to the theatrical release of Anatomy of a Murder in 1959.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Apr 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9781662939495

Book preview

Prologue

March 22, 1959

It was 20 degrees above Fahrenheit (20° F) in Ishpeming, Michigan. Spring was always late to arrive in this remote upper peninsula town. Approximately 250 people went to the railroad station at 7:45 a.m. to welcome the overnight train arriving from Chicago, Illinois. The first person to leave the sleeping car was the famous actor, Oscar winner James Stewart. He was the principal attraction and almost everyone oohed and aah-ed. Soon thereafter, another 50 people also came down the train steps. The Hollywood movie business clearly had arrived to take over Ishpeming to begin the making of the Anatomy of a Murder film.

Among those greeting the contingent of celebrities was Michigan Governor G. Mennen Soapy Williams and Anatomy of a Murder producer-director Otto Preminger. Also in attendance was the author of the bestselling novel of the same name, John D. Voelker, whose longtime residence was a short walk from the train station in Ishpeming. He had been the successful attorney for the defense in the Chenoweth-Peterson first degree murder trial. His client, First Lieutenant Coleman A. Peterson, USA, had admitted killing the owner of the Lumberjack Tavern in Big Bay with his luger pistol to avenge his wife who claimed that she had been raped by this man one hour previously.

Quite remarkably, Otto Preminger had been able to entice famous McCarthy trial lawyer Joseph N. Welch to make his film debut in this project. At that time, Welch truly was a television celebrity largely famous for having made comments to McCarthy during the Army McCarthy hearing, Have you no decency, Sir? Another name of note who also left the train at this point was 23-year-old actress Lee Remick. She brought her three-month-old baby girl Kate with her. TV and radio star Eve Arden of Our Miss Brooks fame also left the train with her husband, the actor Books West. In addition, there also was a whole gaggle of other performers and technicians.

All of Ishpeming’s claim arrival scenes were photographed by a television crew from the wildly popular Ed Sullivan Show, which aired every Sunday evening from New York City. Always sensing opportunities to publicize its forthcoming films in advance, Preminger had arranged for them to record the cast arrival in Ishpeming. These scenes generally appeared on the television program on the next Sunday evening.

The schedule for the day included a tour of the town, especially the historic Marquette County Courthouse situated in nearby Marquette. For technical and financial considerations, all of the scenes involving the courthouse would be shot first regardless of their actual place in the movie. The same day, Governor Williams was also visiting Ishpeming for the International Ski Event sponsored by the US National Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame and Museum. This governor was relentlessly interested in promoting tourism, especially to the lesser-known parts of the state of Michigan. Almost all of the newcomers from Hollywood attended this outdoor athletic event. Some of them learned quickly that they had not packed a sufficient amount of warm clothing for the snowy, cold, late March climate in this area. Shortly afterward, Soapy Williams was appointed as US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the incoming John F. Kennedy presidential administration. Williams was famously quoted as saying, Africa for the Africans. This seemed to be about the upper limits of his knowledge on the subject.

The Anatomy of a Murder entourage were to be lodged in the Mather Inn. This was a famous local establishment strategically located in the center of the city, with a distinguished history dating back to its early founding days. It was originally built in 1875 by the town founder, Robert Nelson and named Barnum house. This particular building burned down in 1879 and was quickly replaced and renamed Nelson house. Sadly, the Nelson house burned down in 1928. The largest corporation in the area, named Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company erected a large new hotel in the same spot. Its President, William G. Mather, not surprisingly, named it the Mather Inn. This was a large imposing structure for such a small city. Its main use was providing accommodations for visitors to the mining company site.

Advertisement for the new hotel carried the following description: The Mather Inn is a four-story rectangular building, constructed of concrete and steels with a brick facing. The front façade is divided into three bays, with a two-story portico sheltering the entrance in the center bay. The public areas of the interior are paneled in pine, and include a sunken dining room and men’s clubroom. There are 47 guest rooms, including three furnished apartments. On the exterior, the grounds contain uniform terraced gardens and a huge boulder rock garden. Some of the lesser lights in the Hollywood ensemble were to be housed in the more commercial Northland Hotel located in downtown Marquette. The distance between the two lodging houses was only 11 miles.

Many of the local people in Ishpeming were hoping to be engaged by Preminger’s Carlisle company as extras in the film. Poverty was an ongoing concern in this tiny mining location. So the large infusion of outside money, estimated at being up to 500,000 dollars for construction costs and hotel expenses was heartily welcomed by all.

The hotel owners were thrilled by the famous James Stewart residing on their property for two consecutive months. Some of this time he would be accompanied by his wife, Gloria. This favorable publicity for the Mather Inn served in some measure to eliminate the bitter memory of a previous incident during World War II when contralto Mahalia Jackson the queen of the American gospel music had been denied accommodations because of her skin color when she came to Ishpeming to sing patriotic songs. Later on, she became a noted civil rights activist.

This time around there was no such difficulty when the world-famous African American composer Duke Ellington stayed at the hotel for a month during the Anatomy filming. His principal assignment was to compose the jazz score of the movie, but he also immediately became involved in many of the social activities in the town—one of which was his volunteering to play incidental music on the piano in the dining room during the evening dinner period. Ellington also paid to have filet mignon steak delivered to him from Chicago on its daily train visits to this small city. The out-of-town visitors always ate extremely well. John Voelker provided them with freshly caught cooked trout on a daily basis.

The residents of Ishpeming were ecstatic to have such a famous visitor as the world-famous actor James Stewart for eight weeks of residence in this small city. Lee Remick, a much younger relatively unknown substitute to Lana Turner who originally had been named in the cast for this role, must have been equally excited, as were the people of Ishpeming. This timing depot for iron and copper and struggling girdle factory at the time would be written up in every major publication in the world dealing with motion pictures.

Introduction

On July 31, 1952, very early in the morning, a murder occurred in a dingy bar in a small resort town, Big Bay, in the uppermost part of northern Michigan. The shooter in question was an army lieutenant temporarily stationed in the area. His victim was the owner of this drinking establishment. Just after midnight, the shooter walked into this noisy barroom. Without saying a word to anyone, he produced a German luger pistol and fired five bullets into the body of the tavern owner. Immediately thereafter, he drove back to his trailer and told his wife what he had done. Then he notified local law enforcement officers and waited for the State police to arrest him. The shooter freely admitted to them that he had committed the crime in question because his wife had claimed that the dingy bar owner, Mike Chenoweth, had just beaten and raped her while driving her home from his bar, the Lumberjack Tavern. Almost immediately, the soldier was charged by the authorities with first-degree murder. This would become a story famously immortalized in the later novel and film entitled Anatomy of a Murder.

Writing in 1982 concerning this crime, John Voelker using the pseudonym of Robert Traver made the following observation: This is the story of a murder, of a murder trial, and of some of the people who engaged or became enmeshed in the proceedings. Enmeshed is a good word, for murder, of all crimes, seems to possess to a greater degree than any other that compelling magnetic quality that draws people helplessly into its outspreading net, frequently to their surprise, and occasionally to their horror.

Continuing on, the author provided the following geographic definition: Murders must happen someplace, of course, and this one and the subsequent trial took place on the water-hemmed Upper Peninsula of Michigan, simply U.P. to its inhabitants. The U.P. is a wild, harsh and broken land, rubbed and ground on the relentless hone of many past glaciers, the last one, in its slow convulsive retreat, leaving the country a jumble of swamps and hills and rocks and endless waterways. Lying as it does within the southernmost rim of the great Canadian pre-Cambrian shield, the region is perhaps more nearly allied with Canada by climatic and geological affinity; with Wisconsin by the logic of geography; but a region which, by some logic beyond logic, finally wound up as part of the state of Michigan; this after a fairy-tale series of political blunders and compromises that doubtless made the angels weep.

Justice moves swiftly in small towns, especially in those days before the state of Michigan experienced a massive population increase starting in the 1960s and 1970s. In this particular case, within six weeks, the accused killer was standing trial on a charge of first-degree murder in the local Marquette County Courthouse. To the astonishment of almost everyone, including, no doubt, the Lieutenant himself, the jury acquitted him. He was found not guilty due to temporary insanity on his part at the time of the shooting.

Everyone agreed his local defense attorney, John Voelker, had pulled the proverbial rabbit out of the hat in achieving this unexpected result. Clearly, he had persuaded the jury that the alleged rape of Lieutenant Peterson’s wife Charlotte by the local tavern owner, Mike Chenoweth, truly had occurred and justified the surprising final result for the trial. The army officer involved quickly left town and returned to his professional position. However, he had not been insane enough to avoid paying Voelker almost all of the attorney’s fee for representing him. For all practical purposes, the acquitted killer was never heard from again and Voelker was never compensated.

Today, the term going viral is used endlessly in all elements of public discourse. It means that the communication involved should be read and reacted to immediately. It often seems almost no one has time left to do anything else but sit in front of a computer screen and receive a constant barrage of information.

We live in a world where the flow of information—true or false—is rapid-fire, where the President of the US can speak directly to the masses incessantly. Today, speed is everything. As a result, the shelf life of all viral interchanges is extremely short.

There used to be a saying that nothing is as dead as the headlines in yesterday’s newspaper. Today, this is no longer true. There are a tremendous amount of new news items each day, so it is still possible to go back and trace previous information on the web easily unlike the ability to store paper versions of previous newspapers.

It is astonishing to believe that a small township murder in the 1950s could go viral in its own way, but John Voelker’s novel and the sensation it made, followed by the success of the Hollywood film Anatomy of a Murder, did just that. However, it did take more time.

Going viral in the 1950s could be a slow process. A book that became a bestseller took months to develop. Newspapers and magazines were far more numerous than is the case today. It also took a period of time for people to read enough of different accounts for any particular item to be considered to be of lasting importance.

They became the most talked about novel and movie of that time period. Domestically and internationally, both the novel and film earned the designation of being truly viral events and longtime classics.

As of the major reasons for the enduring success of Anatomy of a Murder, John Voelker was the only one who played a significant role in all of them. He was a vital contributor to the actual homicide trial. Then over the next five years, he paused from his habitual quest of catching and eating or giving away virtually every trout fish that he discovered in his hometown area, in order to write the extremely lengthy novel based on this case. To capture the inner workings of the judicial system with authenticity and accuracy, Voelker drew heavily upon the expertise he had gained during his three years of service as a Justice of the state of Michigan’s Supreme Court. He then collaborated closely with Hollywood producer-director Otto Preminger to ensure that same authenticity in the many vital courtroom scenes that appeared in the film version of the novel. Otto Preminger, an Austrian native, had also studied law in Vienna before moving to the United States on a permanent basis.

The dictionary tells us that homicide is the deliberate and unlawful killing of one person by another. In its most severe form, governmental authorities designated this crime to be tried under a first-degree murder charge. In a number of states, execution is the most severe penalty that the state allows to punish the killer. Michigan, where the homicide in this case occurred, was not such a state. Instead, life in prison without parole was the maximum possible sentence that a judge and jury could hand out to punish such a killer.

Because of the severity of the ultimate penalties, most citizens gave great attention to any and all first-degree murder cases which took place in their area. This three-part event, which later came to be described almost universally as the Anatomy of a Murder trilogy, certainly fit into this category.

Although the transcript for the actual trial remained consigned to relative oblivion thereafter, both the novel and the cinematic screenplay did not. John Voelker was obsessed with describing the workings of the trial in fulsome and accurate detail. Many lawyers and law students profited from this treatment in their own study of criminal law. The film by Otto Preminger introduced the general public to the workings of the jury system in a criminal trial. The contents of the film were studied in many classrooms of all types throughout the country. Later on, the United States Information Agency (USIA) displayed the film in Southeast Asia and the Soviet Union during the 1980s to instruct the audiences involved in the fairness inherent in the American criminal justice system. Netflix and the Turner Movie Classic series continue to replay the film, bringing it continually to new audiences. Someday in the future, the contents of the trilogy could well be remade as a new movie or an episodic television drama. Detailed study of the original trial, novel, and movie still can provide a number of helpful lessons for anyone interested in the criminal law or in splendid moviemaking techniques.

Most later discussions of Anatomy of a Murder in its entirety concentrate almost exclusively upon the Voelker-Traver novel and the Preminger-Mayes movie screenplay and its aftermath. What is forgotten is that there would never have been a court case if in the early morning hours of July 31, 1952, Army Lieutenant Coleman A. Peterson had not fired five bullets into the body of Big Bay local dingy bar owner Maurice Mike Chenoweth.

Chapter 1

The Homicide and Trial of Lieutenant Coleman A. Peterson, USA

To describe the Lumberjack Tavern in one word, it might accurately be called seedy. Nothing about it could attract the interest of any well-to-do tourist. Situated on the main street of the small resort town of Big Bay in the Upper Peninsula of the state of Michigan, it contained a long bar with many bottles of whiskey behind it, a group of barstools in front of it, and then some tables and chairs, and a couple of pinball machines. As required by law, there also was a ladies’ room and men’s room, and a perfunctory staging area for selections of light snacks. A small dance floor, a couple of pinball machines, and an old-fashioned jukebox topped off the equipment contained in this dimly lit squalid setting.

Local saloon keeper Mike Chenoweth’s patrons almost exclusively comprised of workers from the tiny resort town, and their spouses. Outside of the Lumberjack Tavern was a bright electric sign that drivers on Route 550 were obliged by from the two-lane highway leading to and from town situated 27 miles from the nearest local