In 1894, the Bank of Nevada Building in Reno was a three-story affair. On the first floor presided the wealthy president of the bank, M.D. Foley, 44, a former state senator and one of Reno's leading citizens. The second floor held medical and law offices. On the third, where the rent was cheapest, resided one Alice Maud Hartley, a beautiful portrait painter.
But on a late afternoon in July of that year, Reno's businessmen found the normal bustle of commerce interrupted by a pair of gunshots from inside the bank building.
A lawyer and a doctor tentatively stuck their heads outside their office doors and were stunned to see the banker, M.D. Foley, staggering down the stairs from the top floor with a gunshot wound in his chest. The medical man led the wounded banker into his office as the latter stated the obvious: "Doctor, I am shot and am a dead man." This became true almost immediately.
In the meantime, the lawyer looked to the staircase, and he saw Miss Hartley, the small, brown-haired, grey-eyed, 30-year-old artist, standing on the landing with a pistol in her hand. Advancing toward the lawyer, she demanded that he summon the police.
When the uniformed man appeared, Miss Hartley said, "I believe you are the sheriff," and she handed him her gun. "I surrender as your prisoner."
The sheriff obligated her, though the jail had no cells for women; Miss Hartley was locked up in the courthouse and put under guard. At her arraignment, she was represented by the same lawyer who met her on the stairs. She confidently pleaded not guilty, declining to explain why she killed the banker, but it was apparent soon enough that she was to be a mother in the near future, and this was the first clew to the motive behind the fatal shooting.
Alice Hartley was put on trial for murder in September of that year in the Washoe County Court. The women of Reno were particularly interested in the story and packed the courtroom; many had already come to the conclusion that the married banker and the beautiful painter were secret sweethearts, her life had been wrecked by pending maternity, and it was the banker's fault.
Their assumptions found proof when Miss Hartley took the witness stand. She described an affair with the banker that made him appear to be a coercive ogre. He frequently called on me, she said, staying long past a reasonable hour... he demanded that I drink brandy with him... his expressions grew warm, causing me to grow fearful... he stayed until daybreak... and so her story continued, herky-jerky.
Three hours later, the fact of their relationship was finally established as the spectators blushed and tittered and made other noises. This scene was repeated for another five hours the following day until she finally reached the point of conception. At that time, she testified, she asked the banker to acknowledge the child to come. He stopped visiting. A quarrel followed on the fatal day, during which the banker struck her, she said, and denied the child; he said he would "buy some men with a few twenty-dollar pieces to testify to anything."
That's when she grabbed the pistol, and the rest was well known. But when it came time to describe the shooting, the heavily pregnant defendant descended into hysterics, repeatedly fleeing the courtroom to be corralled in the hallway and returned to the stand.
The reaction to this pitiful tale was mixed in Reno. Many prominent women of the town took the lady's side in the matter, but others considered her a fallen woman, best convicted of her crime. One woman minister who visited and consoled her, Mila Tupper Maynard, was ostracized and had to leave Nevada.
The all-male jury was sympathetic, but the facts and the law were clear. They convicted Miss Hartley of second-degree murder.
For a moment, the defendant sat still. Then she stood and turned to the jury, saying, "Gentlemen, I thank you. I had hoped that you would exonerate me."
After her conviction, bail was granted, since nobody wanted to see the baby born in the courthouse. The convicted murderess had a baby boy, Vernon Harrison Hartley, and a few weeks later she received a sentence of eleven years in prison. After losing her appeal, she entered a women's penitentiary the next summer with her baby.
Almost immediately, an effort began to obtain her release, and the Pardon Board found itself ankle-deep in petitions for clemency. When one of these documents arrived containing the signatures of the very jurors who convicted her, the Parole Board relented, and after serving 1 1/2 years in prison, Miss Hartley and her little boy were released.
Miss Hartley promptly moved back to Reno and brought suit on behalf of her son against the Foley estate. The case dragged on in the courts, and at every hearing, the lively little baby was a prominent figure. But Miss Hartley's life again took a tragic twist when the baby died at the age of two from scarlet fever. She eventually lost the claim on the Foley estate and left Nevada for good.
Miss Hartley appeared in the newspapers on two more occasions before falling into obscurity. In 1897, she created a drama inside San Francisco's Emanuel Church. At the time, the city was rocked by a dramatic murder case involving one Durrant; the minister of the church preached about the case. Durrant had been convicted and sentenced to hang for the rape and murder of women inside the church (see the Court TV Crime Library essay on the Durrant case). At the end of the sermon, Miss Hartley stood, and before the entire assembly, she declared that she had a message from God that Durrant was innocent, his life should be saved, and the congregation should make it a duty to see to this. Her speech was successful only in putting her on the front page again.
Her name appeared in the newspapers only one more time in 1899, when she married a San Francisco lawyer named William S. Bonnifield (who so happened to be nephew of one of the Supreme Court justices who sat on the Pardon Board in Nevada and voted to grant her release). One has to wonder whether the wedding guests confined their congratulations to the bride.
Sources:
"Mrs. [sic] Hartley's Case. Application for Pardon Denied - Interesting Proceedings - Will She Get A Rehearing of Her Case or Go to State Prison with Her Baby Boy?" Daily Nevada State Journal, June 4, 1895.
"The Hartley-Foley Case Continued Until After Thanksgiving - Its Consideration To-Day," Daily Nevada State Journal, Nov. 26, 1896.
"Dust to Dust. Death of Little Vernon Harrison Hartley," Reno Weekly Gazette and Stockman, Feb. 25, 1897.
"The Foley Estate. A Jury Procured and the Trial Commenced," Reno Weekly Gazette, June 10, 1897.
"Foley Estate Case. The Hartley Interest and the Dead Man's Property," Reno Weekly Gazette and Stockman, June 24, 1897.
"In Emanuel Church. Alice Hartley Creates a Scene Over the Durrant Murder," Fort Wayne Sentinel, Dec. 13, 1897.
"Fatal Shooting in 1894 Rocked Reno to its Roots; Trial Had Drama and Histrionics; Two Shots One July Afternoon Launched Strange Sequence of Events," by Peggy Trego, Reno State Journal, April 8, 1951.
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