In the Shadow of the Gallows
William Leary was too old and too senile to hang
William Leary was 75 years old when he shoved a dagger into the right ventricle of an innocent man’s heart. Leary was drunk, as usual, and his brain was addled by alcohol, age and rage.
The killing was a case of mistaken identity. Leary had stabbed the wrong man.
The tragedy occurred in a Castroville saloon on the evening of Sept. 27, 1893. Castroville had been founded only thirty years earlier; by 1893 it had settled in as a relatively quiet township with about 900 citizens, two churches, three saloons and a brewery. It wasn’t really known for its homicides. So the stabbing of a young fellow named Martino Bonetti at the hands of old man Leary was a big deal. The Salinas Californian called Bonetti’s murder “the most cold-blooded ever committed in Castroville.”
The subsequent legal proceeding was a high-profile drama played out in a packed courtroom. Reporters dispatched lengthy reports of the trial to newspapers across Northern California. The defendant’s advanced age and his peculiar state of mind captured the public’s attention.
William Leary was eventually sentenced to hang in San Quentin. He spent his final years in a prison infirmary’s deathbed, while his defense attorney worked valiantly to keep the hangman away. The attorney, W.A. Kearney, didn’t believe such a feeble-minded old man should die at the end of a rope, and so he spent years outmaneuvering the criminal justice system.
The People v. William Leary was a tragic, strange case for everyone involved.
Bonetti had recently arrived in Castroville from Fresno to dig potatoes on the Abe Fernandez farm. The 29-year-old was celebrating his new situation on Sept. 27, 1893, in a bar across the street from William Leary’s own tavern. His first day at the potato farm would have been the next morning. But he had crossed paths with Leary, and Leary wasn’t right in the head. The old man apparently confused Bonetti for another Swiss man, someone who had insulted him several months earlier.
Without provocation, Leary stormed into the neighboring saloon and punched Bonetti once in the face. Witnesses said Bonetti seemed flummoxed. Of course he was. Imagine being a young buck, minding your own business, when some wild-eyed geezer suddenly runs up and throws a fist in your face. On the one hand, your assailant seems too old and infirm to do much damage. On the other hand, the old man seems intent on murder.
Bonetti turned to the others in the bar and said, “Save me, boys.”
Before anyone could intervene, Leary jammed a knife into Bonetti’s chest. The victim staggered out the door and into the street, bleeding profusely. He died as he fell in front of the Castroville drug store.
Bonetti became one of the few men in Fresno’s history who actually should have stayed in Fresno.
Leary was an Irish immigrant and a war veteran who fought in the Spanish-American conflict. He was a tavern operator who tried to make a comfortable living for his wife and five children in the muck and gloom of Monterey County.
Unfortunately for Leary, he entered into a business relationship with a rotten son-of-a-bitch named David Jacks. Jacks was well-known in these parts as the self-made tycoon who built an empire in Monterey County by destroying men like Leary. He was a predatory businessman with the ethics of a slime dog. In this case, Leary opened a tavern called the Half-way House on property that Jacks owned along the rutted highway between Salinas and Monterey.
It rarely ended well for the poor saps who suffered the misfortune of dealing with David Jacks. Sure enough, Jacks showed up with a U.S. marshal at the Half-way House one day and together they tossed Leary and everything he owned from the tavern.
Destroyed financially, Leary gravitated to Castroville, and worked his way back into the saloon business, opening a bar across the street from one of the other bars in town. He was known to help himself to the spirits on the bar shelf, and the habit sped along the natural dementia that came with age.
Over time, Leary maintained a bearing of extreme disorder, as though he had been held hostage in a madman’s basement. Or maybe he was the madman. His beard was a tangle, the graying hair atop his head an impossible nest. His eyes were crusty and dim. He was obviously slipping, often in a state of profound agitation. He confided to visitors that the government was out to get him. Also, he seemed fixated on what David Jacks had done to him.
Then one day he snapped and he stabbed Martino Bonetti.
Now William Leary sat in the county jail, an addled old man who had no idea where he was or what was happening to him.
The evidence stacked up neatly. A murder conviction was inevitable. Death at the gallows seemed a real possibility.
The state legislature had only recently formalized the process of delivering capital punishment in San Quentin and Folsom prisons. The state started hanging people as the preferred form of capital punishment in 1893, about the time of Leary’s arrest. But Kearney worked feverishly to keep his client from becoming one of the first to swing. Leary’s mental and physical conditions were deteriorating rapidly. It felt especially cruel to sentence such a man to death.
Kearney prepared his defense around the notion that Leary should not be held fully accountable for the crime due to his diminished capacity. He would argue that Leary’s daily intake of distilled beverages had pickled his brain. Perhaps the jury would take pity on the old man.
Kearney did his best to slow the legal process, hoping that Leary would die naturally in a hospital bed, rather than from the end of a rope.
The attorney developed a talent for delay, filing motions based on facts he seemed to manufacture from the ether. He challenged entire pools of jury candidates, successfully arguing on the first day that the sheriff had exposed his bias against Leary while recruiting the potential jurors. He prevailed in that argument. And when a new group of four dozen men was brought to court the following day, Leary complained loudly that most of them had no business serving on the jury because they had all been among the observers who had jammed into the Salinas courtroom a day earlier. The judge overruled that objection, but Kearney dragged out the proceedings by grilling each juror at length and questioning their competency to serve.
The prosecution’s case was ironclad. A parade of eyewitnesses testified that Leary did in fact storm into the bar with the express intent of stabbing Bonetti. For two days, the story was always the same. Leary was upset that a Swiss man had insulted him, Bonetti was the wrong Swiss man, but Leary killed him anyway. It was really that simple.
After the defense rested, Kearney rolled up his sleeve and went to work on the jury, spinning a sad tale about Leary’s misfortunes. A transcript of the proceedings is not available, but here’s how one newspaper reporter described Kearney’s opening statement:
He spoke for a full hour, tracing the subtle steps of evolution as it leads man towards the path of human advancement, dwelt with eloquent emphasis on the influences of environment upon the individual, and pointed out with analytical clearness the narrow margin between saneness and insanity in minds of the lower order, especially when preyed upon by reverses in life and the debasing effect of over-indulgence in strong drink.
What followed was testimony from a substantial number of Castroville’s leading citizens, who told jurors they had rarely seen Leary sober.
Leading things off was Leary’s long-suffering wife, Catherine. She told the jury she had worried about her husband for a long while. She described the times he woke her in the middle of the night, scared out of his wits. He would tell her that something was wrong with his brain. He would shake his head and ask her if she heard the rattle from within.
Leary ranted and raved throughout those frightful nights, Catherine testified. He brooded about the way he was treated by the government, and he continued to curse the name of that bastard David Jacks.
Soon after Catherine Leary’s testimony, the jury heard from Juan B. Castro, the distinguished founder of Castroville. Castro said Leary was “of unsound mind.” He also testified that he had seen Bonetti at the livery stable about a half hour before he was killed, and warned him to stay away from Leary.
Dozens of others followed Castro to the witness stand, and all of them said Leary had no control over his faculties. Many of them said Leary thought of himself as a doctor, and often offered them powders, talcs and liquid concoctions he’d come up with. Thomas Peckham, a Castroville man, said Leary tried to convince him to send a message to President Grover Cleveland, post haste, letting the president know that Leary had come up with a cure for a mysterious illness that had laid the president up at Buzzard’s Bay.
Defense witnesses all said that they had never seen Leary when he wasn’t drunk.
None of it mattered to the jurors. They found Leary guilty of murder in the first degree. The judge sentenced him to death by hanging, and remanded him to San Quentin for quick dispatch.
Kearney next went to work on the appeals, coming up with at least a half-dozen reasons why the trial was unfair. The actions of the sheriff were prejudicial, he argued. The judge was biased against his client. The jurors were drunkards who surreptitiously passed flasks among themselves during breaks in the trial.
The appeal wended its way to the state Supreme Court. The court ultimately ruled against Leary, but at least the process had kept the old man alive another two years. After the Supreme Court ruling, the local judge set a new execution date anyway: March 29, 1895.
Kearney next begged Gov. James Budd for a stay of execution, citing his client’s advanced age and the fact that Leary had absolutely no grasp on reality. Three days before his scheduled hanging, Budd granted a 12-day reprieve so he could review the facts of the case. The governor continued to issue brief stays of execution, until he gave Leary a two-year reprieve in December 1895.
Fourteen months later, Budd extended the reprieve another couple of years after being told by the prison physician that “Leary is so weak mentally and physically that he is, to a great extent, oblivious to his situation.”
Leary died Aug. 6, 1897, in the San Quentin infirmary, at the age of 89.
“It was generally understood that no matter how long he clung to life he would not be hanged,” reported the San Francisco Examiner. Leary, according to the Examiner, “lived long in the shadow of the gallows.”
Sources:
The Monterey Cypress
The Salinas Californian
The San Francisco Examiner
The San Francisco Call & Post
The Gonzales Tribune
California Supreme Court. The People v. William Leary, Jan. 5, 1895
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
Monterey County Historical Society
Noticias del Puerto de Monterey, Monterey History and Art Association
Subscriptions are free, but you can express your appreciation by treating me to a coffee via my Ko-Fi page. I get my coffee at East Village Cafe.
Very interesting reporting. But toward the end the graf that begins, “But all the witnesses said” I think it should read that they had never seen him sober, instead of ever