the office space for his law firm in New York, he spent a month in the grim lower Manhattan prison that would become known as the Tombs. “I never was so much tortured in my life,” he said of the experience. “I felt as if I would go crazy there. I was put in a little miserable hole, and three or four of the nastiest, dirtiest bummers were put in there with me.” As searing as the experience had been, the first thing Guiteau did upon release—after “soak[ing] my body in the hottest kind of suds I could find”—was to open another law office, this time in Chicago, and begin again.
As Guiteau’s life careened out of control, he began asking anyone he knew—even the most distant acquaintance—for money. His most reliable source was his sister, Frances, and her husband, George Scoville, whom he badgered incessantly with requests for loans they knew he would never repay. At one point, he wrote to Frances, “If Mr. Scoville would let me have a hundred dollars for a month or two, it would greatly oblige me, and I would give him my note with interest for the same.” Never subtle, Guiteau ended the letter with an appeal that was strikingly direct even for him. “But to leave this: money, to meet my personal wants, is what I desire now,” he wrote. “Write soon.”
Much larger sums of money, Guiteau believed, might be acquired through lawsuits. At one point, he attempted to sue the New York Herald for $100,000, accusing the newspaper of libel after it ran a story warning its readers of his unethical practices as a lawyer. The Herald cited one occasion in which Guiteau, acting as a bill collector—the primary work of his practice—had collected $175 of a $350 bill, and then refused to turn any of it over to his client. He claimed that he had been unable to collect anything beyond his own fee, and so owed his client nothing. After another enraged client stepped forward with a complaint against him, however, Guiteau quickly dropped the suit and fled the city.
Searching for another target, Guiteau even tried to sue Oneida. Ignoring the fact that he had signed a waiver of compensation when he joined the commune, he claimed that he was owed $9,000, plus interest, in back pay for the six years he had worked there. When Noyes learned of the suit, he replied drily that, while at Oneida, Guiteau had been not only “moody [and] self-conceited” but “a great part of the time was not reckoned in the ranks of reliable labor.” After speaking with Noyes, Guiteau’s lawyer realized that his client had lied to him and resigned from the case.
Undeterred, Guiteau continued to rail against the commune. In a series of letters to Noyes, he threatened to expose Oneida’s controversial sexual practices and to send the founder himself to prison. “If you intend to pay my claim say so,” he warned. “If you want to spend 10 or 20 years in Sing Sing and have your Communities ‘wiped out,’ don’t pay it.” When Noyes did not reply, Guiteau quickly wrote again. “I infer from your silence that you do not intend to pay the claim. All right. If you find yourself arrested within a week, it will be your own fault.”
Noyes’s reaction to these threats mirrored the thoughts of nearly everyone who came into contact with Guiteau: He was certain he was insane. “I have no ill will toward him,” Noyes wrote to Guiteau’s father. “I regard him as insane, and I prayed for him last night as sincerely as I ever prayed for my own son, that is now in a Lunatic Asylum.” Luther Guiteau, furious with his son and ashamed of his behavior, did not hesitate to agree. Only the lack of money to pay for an asylum, he assured Noyes, prevented him from having his son institutionalized. Luther’s oldest son, John, who was a successful insurance salesman in Boston and had been repeatedly humiliated by Charles, wrote with restrained fury that he believed his brother “capable of any folly, stupidity, or rascality. The only possible excuse I can render for him is that he is absolutely insane and is hardly responsible for his acts.”
Throughout Guiteau’s life, the only person who remained his unwavering ally was his sister, Frances. After their mother’s death, Frances, who was six years older than Charles, had done her best to fill the void in her brother’s life. She had not wanted