in a white tropical suit, opened with an account of Kahahawai’s murder. Massie had set out on the morning of the killing dressed as a chauffeur, disguised with a fake mustache. Mrs. Fortescue had served as a lookout, and Jones had forced Kahahawai into the car. They all then drove to Fortescue’s rented house, where they tried to make Kahahawai confess. It was there, Kelley said, as Kahahawai sat on the edge of a bed, that he had been shot and his body toted to the bathtub, where his blood ran down the drain.
Though the weapon was never found (before he was arrested, Jones gave it to Thalia’s sister, who threw it into a pool of quicksand), the slug had no doubt come from a .32 automatic pistol that Jones had purchased, Kelley said. With a flourish, he showed the jury the bullet, and how it matched the expended .32 caliber shell and clip of .32 caliber ammunition found on Jones when he was arrested. Over four days, the prosecution demonstrated that the murder was a carefully planned crime, and not some act of temporary insanity. A police officer, describing the discovery of Kahahawai’s body, told how he had praised a younger colleague for chasing down the Fortescue car with a hearty “Good work, kid!” Massie had thought the officer was talking to him and replied, “Thank you very much.”
“Darrow at times appeared confused by the inflexions of speech and the English used,” the Hochi reported. “Twice one of the local lawyers had to explain … answers.”8
Darrow launched the defense on the afternoon of Thursday, April 14. He stood with folded arms and bowed head, as his calm, thoughtful questions took Massie back over the events of the night that Thalia was attacked. The young lieutenant replied in short, clipped sentences. He spent much of the time staring at the floor. The spectators could see his jaw muscles tighten, and he spoke in “a voice suggesting that of a frightened schoolboy,” one recalled. Massie choked up, and Mrs. Fortescue sobbed, when he told how Thalia had been raped.
The day’s session ended before Massie’s tale reached the kidnapping of Kahahawai, and he did not disappoint when he returned to the stand on Saturday morning. He told the court how, at gunpoint, Kahahawai had confessed to raping Thalia—“Yes, we done it,” the young Hawaiian supposedly said—and at that point, Massie testified, his mind was filled with an overwhelming image of his wife being raped. He remembered nothing more, Massie told the court, before their car was pulled over by the police on the bluffs above the ocean.
Massie’s blackout was an exceptionally fortunate development, for the defense had a problem: it was not Massie who fired the fatal shot. Years later, Jones would confess that he had killed Kahahawai, when the “black bastard” made a sudden move. But Jones could not claim, to a sympathetic jury, to have been driven to insanity by rage and shame over a young wife’s ravishment. Massie could. It was “Mr. Darrow’s idea to let Tommie take the rap,” said Jones. “Tommie had a motive and the reason. After all, it was his wife.”
Darrow finished his presentation by calling Thalia to the stand. She spoke “like a hurt child,” Owen wrote, “and with uncontrollable fits of silent weeping she told a story that brought tears to the eyes of many of the women in the room.” Thalia twisted and tugged on a handkerchief and buried her face in her hands. And when she looked up, after describing the assault, her features were “distorted in agony.”
The trial’s unforgettable moment belonged to Kelley, however. The previous summer, a few weeks before she was attacked, and when her marriage to Massie seemed to be disintegrating, Thalia had sought psychological counseling from Professor E. Lowell Kelly at the University of Hawaii. After two or three sessions, Kelly informed Tommie that his wife needed psychiatric help. When the professor read about her in the newspapers, “I could not but doubt the validity of her accusations,” he recalled. Indeed, his files still held a confidential questionnaire that Thalia had answered, in which she detailed the problems in her marriage. It contradicted the tales of marital sweetness that Tommie and Thalia told on the stand.
After Kahahawai was murdered, the professor discussed his ethical quandary with a colleague and concluded that doctor–patient privilege kept him from saying anything. But the colleague passed the word to Kelley, who got Thalia’s files from the university when Kelly was