Murder in Paradise

A patrician middle-aged woman pointed a sharp straight finger at a young Hawaiian named Joe Kahahawai as he sauntered down the front steps of the Court House in Honolulu one sunny morning last week. "That's the man!" she said.

Out on bail on a rape charge, Joe Kaha-hawai had just made his daily report to court officers inside. Upon the lady's identification, a young white man stepped up to Kahahawai. flashed a piece of paper with a big red seal on it, ordered: "Come with me." Kahahawai, supposing that he was under arrest, got into a sedan waiting at the curb. The car sped off to a house. A gun was jammed into his ribs. He was forced into a bathroom. A shot was fired. . . .

Hours later Police Officer George Harbottle saw a closed car speeding toward him on the eastern outskirts of Honolulu. He flagged it. It whizzed by. He chased it in his police car two miles, five miles, ten miles, firing random shots at the tires. Finally in a burst of speed he edged in front of it, forced it to nose into an embankment. Opening its door he found a grey-haired, middle-aged woman at the wheel, a trim, nice-looking young man beside her. In the back seat sat another young man and, beside him, a mummy-like thing roped up in a sheet. Officer Harbottle ripped open the sheet, was horrified to discover that it contained the naked corpse of Joe Kahahawai, a bullet hole through his chest. . . . Down the road lay Koko Head with its pounding surf from which nothing, dead or alive, ever returns to tell tales.

Arrested on the spot for murder were the woman, Mrs. Granville Roland Fortescue, 57, wealthy socialite of New York and Washington; her son-in-law, Lieut. Thomas Hedges Massie, U. S. N., 26; and an enlisted man named E. J. Lord. Mrs. Fortescue, composed and smiling, sat on the roadside until more police arrived as an escort back to Honolulu where Albert Orrin Jones, a second enlisted man, was also taken into custody. The great siren atop Aloha Tower shrieked a general alarm to the National Guard.

Thus last week did the Paradise of the Pacific become a restless purgatory of murder and race hatred. The killing of Kahahawai climaxed a long chain of ugly events on the island of Oahu growing out of the lust of mixed breeds for white women (TIME, Dec. 28).

Last September Lieut. Massie's 20-year-old wife, who was Thalia Fortescue, was seized by five natives, carried out toward Waikiki Beach, brutally and repeatedly raped. The attack made her pregnant, necessitated an operation. Navy men and the permanent white residents of Honolulu boiled with outrage and indignation. Mrs. Fortescue hurried from her Long Island home to the islands to comfort and help her pretty daughter. Brought to trial for the attack were five brown-skinned young bucks, among them Horace Ida and Joe Kahahawai. The court proceedings were a publicity circus for the half-caste natives. Mrs. Massie testified to the events of her horrible night, identified Kahahawai as the native who had beaten her repeatedly on the ride out of town, had broken her jaw in two places while raping her. U. S. newsmen had decently protected her name during the trial and after until last week's murder made its use imperative. The jury, topheavy with Hawaiians, disagreed and was discharged. The five defendants were set free under bail pending a second trial.

Last month racial feeling reached fever heat when a score of whites snatched Horace Ida off the streets of Honolulu, drove him out to Pali, soundly beat him after threatening to throw him to death off the cliff. Ida claimed but could not prove that U. S. sailors were responsible.

For weeks Honolulu seethed with unrest. Dan Campbell, United Pressman, was threatened with death for cabling the mainland truthfully stark accounts of conditions. Native attacks on white women became so prevalent, protection by the native police appeared so ineffective and bungling, that admirals in charge at Pearl Harbor publicly announced that Oahu was unsafe for the wives of naval officers. Then came the Kahahawai murder--apparently a blinding flash of white revenge.

Honolulu police officers piled up a damaging case against Mrs. Fortescue and Lieut. Massie. The motive for murder seemed obvious. They reconstructed the killing thus: Kahahawai was lured into the sedan, after Mrs. Fortescue's identification, by means of a faked warrant bearing the seal of the Chemical Warfare School in Maryland. He was taken to the Massie cottage in Manoa Valley where he was put into a tub of water, shot and allowed to bleed to death. His corpse was undressed and wrapped in bed sheets from which all laundry marks had been clipped. To support their theory the police announced that they had found Kahahawai's brown cap in the Massie home, a bloody towel in a closet, an unhinged door,.a bathroom freshly mopped, a bed stripped of sheets and a coil of new white rope such as was around the body. On Sailor Jones was found a .32-calibre revolver clip like the one used in the killing, with one cartridge missing.

Mrs. Fortescue and her son-in-law hired able legal counsel, refused to make any statement. Because Hawaiians milled menacingly about the city jail, the three defendants were turned over to the Navy for safekeeping aboard the U. S. S. Alton. The Navy Department ordered that Lieut. Massie and Seaman Lord should not be released to civil authorities unless it was so directed. Should civil authorities demand custody of Mrs. Fortescue the Navy would be without jurisdiction.

Mrs. Fortescue's social position raised the murder to front-page news throughout the U. S. Her father was Charles James Bell, a cousin of Inventor Alexander Graham ^ Bell. In Washington he lived at "Twin Oaks," an impressive estate on Woodley Road not far from Secretary of State Stimson's home. Until his death in 1929 he was president of American Security & Trust Co. In 1910 his daughter Grace married Granville Roland Fortescue who last week lay gravely ill with pneumonia in Manhattan's Medical Center.

Major Fortescue, 56, was a stepson of the late Robert Barnhill Roosevelt, one-time diplomat and uncle of President GRACE BELL FORTESCUE She smiled on the roadside when . . . Roosevelt. At the outbreak of the Spanish American War young Fortescue left the University of Pennsylvania, joined the First U. S. Cavalry ("Rough Riders"), was wounded at San Juan Hill. President Roosevelt for a time had him at the White House as a military aide and master of social ceremonies. During the War, after a turn as field correspondent for the London Dally Telegraph, he re-entered the U. S. Army as a major in the 314th Field Artillery, was again wounded at Montfaucon.

With special police patrolling the streets and the city on the verge of martial law, oldtime white residents of Honolulu well knew out of what black and bitter soil this latest crime had grown, but for political or commercial reasons they kept their mouths shut. The childlike, romantic Hawaiian of pure blood, they privately explained, has almost disappeared in a polyglot breed of Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese and Portuguese. Most U. S. whites on the islands look down socially upon this hybrid population. While socially inferior, the brown-skinned "Hawaiian" is a full-fledged U. S. citizen with political rights and power equal to those of the ruling white caste. Oldtime white residents claim that they could hold the native in his place if it were not for tourists from the mainland. These visitors, it is said, arrive with sentimental notions about a non-existent people and then proceed to flatter and hobnob with the half-castes in the mistaken idea that they are full-blooded Hawaiians. This outside attention, oldtimers claim, turns the head of the half-caste, makes him arrogant, unruly, lustful.

Chief criticism last week was leveled against the Honolulu police, composed of natives and headed by an elective officer. "The police situation is intolerable." Rear Admiral Yates Stirling Jr., district commander at the Pearl Harbor base, reported to the Navy Department. He contended that the service was ridden with politics. In the Massie rape trial, he declared, police officers worked harder for the defense than for the prosecution.

Governor Lawrence Judd attempted to belittle the outburst of crime and racial animosity on his islands, begged the citizenry to remain calm. Said he: "Conditions warrant no occasion for alarm. The law enforcement agencies have the situation fully in hand. . . ."

But the Navy Department, acting on its own reports from Pearl Harbor, refused to accept Governor Judd's contention that conditions had been exaggerated in the Press. The U. S. fleet maneuvers will be held, as scheduled, next month in Hawaiian waters but neither officers nor men will be given any shore leave in Honolulu or on the island of Oahu because "the situation" there is "too tense."

If Mrs. Fortescue is ever brought to trial, few whites in Honolulu believed that she would be convicted of a part in the Kahahawai murder. U. S. residents might deplore the stupidity of her alleged crime and its bungling methods but most of them at heart fully sympathized with her desperation in behalf of her daughter's honor and were ready to give her their moral support. Last week no less a per son than Admiral William Veazie Pratt, Chief of Naval Operation in Washington seemed to give Lieut. Massie a friendly pat on the shoulder when he declared:

"American men will not stand for the violation of their women under any cir cumstances. For this crime they have taken the matter into their own hands repeatedly when they have felt that the law has failed to do justice."

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