Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,76

and a postcard addressed to Moyer. After Brown identified him, Orchard had cooperatively surrendered and was formally charged less than forty-eight hours after Steunenberg stooped to close the gate.

And there were, in fact, other potential motives for the bombing. Steunenberg was a leader of Idaho’s wool growers, whose war with the state’s cattlemen had periodically erupted with deadly violence and histrionic murder trials. Then there was this to consider: Steunenberg’s wife said he had seemed troubled in recent weeks, and particularly on the day he died. Federal investigators had targeted him for his role in a massive timber fraud conspiracy, with links to Borah, Idaho mine owners, and the family that published the Statesman. Idaho’s Republican establishment had ample motive to want the murder case closed quickly, with blame fixed on the union. Orchard most assuredly had killed Steunenberg. But not until Lee Harvey Oswald would an assassin’s motives, and his paymasters, be the topic of such dispute.

GOODING STASHED ORCHARD in the state penitentiary in Boise, where, after time in solitary confinement, he was introduced to the Pinkerton detective who had been hired to lead the investigation. J. P. McParland was a legend: the nerveless private eye who had gone undercover, risked his life, and brought down the Molly Maguires. He had drunk and bunked and schemed with the Pennsylvania coal field rebels, then testified at trials that sent twenty to their deaths. Other famous private eyes cashed in and started their own firms, but McParland stuck with the Pinkertons, who prized his anti-union zeal, and his ability to move with equal facility in the “higher or laboring classes,” and among “sporting men or thieves.” He was past sixty now, afflicted with various ailments and reliant on a cane. He had, of course, prejudged the case. It was the Molly Maguires all over again, and would serve as a spectacular bookend to his career.

Before he ever began to investigate, McParland declared that the “inner circle”—Moyer and Haywood—were behind the crime. Using Steunenberg’s murder to dismember the union was a prime business opportunity, McParland told the Pinkertons: “It means a great deal … so far as the mine owners of Idaho are concerned and in fact all mine operators in the whole district.”10

McParland knew the value of manipulating public opinion, and his conversations with Orchard, which he deftly leaked to the press, were portrayed as sacramental: the killer converted by the sage lawman, finding Jesus, and confessing his sins. “I have been an unnatural monster,” Orchard wrote in a letter that found its way to the newspapers. “But the dear Lord regenerated me, so he could use me.”11

Both the actual transcript of Orchard’s confession and McParland’s notes were kept secret for decades. In truth, it was a pedestrian interrogation, the kind conducted by coppers and DAs everywhere. “If you take my advice you will not be hung,” McParland told Orchard. “If you do not you will be hung in very quick order.”

The authorities knew that Orchard was “simply a tool of the Inner Circle,” McParland told him. If the assassin implicated the Federation chiefs as his co-conspirators, the state would spare his life, and one day even set him free. “We would get the leaders, and that was all that the State of Colorado and the State of Idaho wished,” McParland said. “I recited a number of instances which he knew of himself wherein men had become States witnesses in murder cases and not only saved their necks but also eventually got their liberty.”

Orchard asked for, and McParland supplied, the precise story he needed to relate. He must describe how the Federation leaders “being men in authority, detail you to go and commit the murder, advise you how to do it, furnish you with the means,” McParland said. The deal McParland offered was good for Harry Orchard, and Harry Orchard grabbed it. He hoped to be free soon, he told a fellow prisoner, and to start a new life overseas. “I awoke, as it were, from a dream,” Orchard said in his confession. “And realized I had been made a tool of, aided and assisted by the members of the Executive Board of the Western Federation of Miners.”

FOR THE NEXT five days, as McParland crafted the questions and a stenographer took notes, Orchard told how he had been dispatched to kill Steunenberg by Haywood and the others. But he did not stop there: He linked every infamous act of western labor violence to the Federation. He had bombed the Vindicator mine