Criminal - The Divorce Colony

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

This episode picks up where Episode 193 left off. We suggest you listen to them in order. Blanche Molineux visited her husband while he was in prison for murder to keep up what she called the “ghastly pretense.” But eventually, she couldn’t keep it up anymore, and bought a train ticket to a place called "The Divorce Colony." April White’s book is The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier. Take our survey: vox.com/podsurvey Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. This episode picks up from our last episode, episode 193. It's called A Ring in a Bottle. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, you may want to go back and listen to them in order. Roland Molyneux was on trial for the murder of Kate Adams, who had died quickly after taking a medicine that was sent to her cousin, Harry Cornish. But the prosecution repeatedly linked this crime to another, the murder of Roland's one-time rival for his wife Blanche's attention, Henry Barnett, and pointed to Blanche as the motive. She was really put up there as the cause of the death that was not actually even on trial. Author and historian, April White.

So it was a wide-reaching court case that really covered lots of ills in Rolandanche's life in the attempts to convince the jury that he was guilty of the death of Kate Adams. And all this time, Blanche is, you know, maybe herself starting to be convinced that her husband might be a murderer, but she's forced to look like the wife who's standing by her husband's side. Yeah, Blanche had a lot of respect for her husband's father. And it had really been made clear to Blanche that this was incredibly important through the inquest and through the trial that she stand by him or else he might be convicted and sentenced to death. So it was a really strong case made to Blanche that she needed to stand by her husband to save his life. Even though kind of her name was being pulled through the mud. Yes.

In January, one reporter wrote, Leaving out of account the question as to whether Roland Molyneux is innocent or guilty, the strain to which the events of the past year must have subjected his wife is almost inconceivable. It is plain that no ordinary woman could withstand a strain of so unspeakable severity. It was the longest and one of the most expensive trials in the United States up to that time. On February 10, 1900, Roland Molyneux was convicted of the murder of Kate Adams and sentenced to death.

He was scheduled to be executed in six weeks. And Blanche continues to visit him at the urging of her father-in-law. Blanche later wrote that when she visited, she knew that the end of all things between us had come. But she promised Roland's father that she would keep up what she called the ghastly pretense until Roland was executed, or, as his father hoped, acquitted. His father got his wish.

An appeals court granted Rowland a new trial, finding that all of the details about Henry Barnett and Blanche had no place in Kate Adams' murder trial. The reasoning behind the decision is still referred to in courts today. It's known as the Molinau Rule. Essentially, that to try to show someone's propensity for committing the crime in question

by discussing other crimes or wrongdoings shouldn't be permitted. In other words, it wasn't okay to keep talking about Henry Barnett's death to imply that Roland killed Kate Adams. Roland's second trial lasted less than a month, and without all of the discussion of Henry Barnett, there is not much in terms of motive. The defense called the motive a flimsy thing and said,

Molino didn't like Cornish. That is all you have as a motive for this frightful crime. The prosecutor told the jury not to be timid and shrink from their duties. If you do, he said, all through your life you will hear that still small voice of conscience taunting you, coward, coward, coward. But the jury came back with a not guilty verdict. Roland was acquitted on November 11th, 1902. By this point, Blanche was no longer living with his parents. She's been staying at the Murray Hill Hotel in Manhattan and trying to shape a life sort of away from this cloud that's been over her for, you know, quite a while now. This was definitely not the life that she had signed up for. And she couldn't go out without reporters following her. She just, you know,

lived a very quiet life with none of the things she thought she was going to get in acquiescing to this marriage. But the lawyers for the Molyneux family really want to be able to present a scene for the newspaper reporters of this joyful reunion. So one of the lawyers goes to Blanche's room at the hotel and, you know, says, you have to come with me. You have to go. Your husband's coming home. He's been acquitted. You have to come back to the family home. And Blanche very much does not want to. She basically says, they have their son back. Now can't I have my life back? But eventually, Blanche agreed to go.

The lawyer bought some roses so she would have something to give to Roland when they were reunited. The next day, she bought a train ticket to Sioux Falls? Sioux Falls, South Dakota at this time was a haven for people who wanted to get a divorce. So in New York at the time, you could get a divorce for only one reason, and that was adultery. And so even if Blanche suspected her husband was a murderer, as many people continue to do even after his acquittal, she did not have cause to divorce a husband that she believed to be a murderer. She could only divorce him if she had proof he had committed adultery, which she did not. The requirements for getting a divorce in America varied depending on which state you lived in.

They still do. At one point, you had to lobby the state legislature for a private bill to get a divorce. It could be expensive, complicated, and humiliating. But eventually, the process moved to the courts. The new process required a husband or wife to bring a suit against their spouse for a breach of the marital contract. Some states made it harder than others. For a long time, you couldn't get a divorce in the state of South Carolina at all. But in the western part of the country, where states and their laws were still becoming established,

the divorce laws were much more permissive. You could file for a divorce for a number of reasons that weren't on the books in other parts of the country. And many of these new western territories and states like South Dakota didn't require you to live there long before you became a legal resident eligible to file for divorce. South Dakota had the most permissive divorce laws in the country and Sioux Falls was the nicest, most comfortable place in the state to spend what would end up being almost a year waiting for both residency and then one's actual divorce decree. The phrase going to Sioux Falls became a euphemism for getting a divorce. So she was following in the footsteps of unhappy spouses before her and seeking a divorce in Sioux Falls.

We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives,

ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. The first national report on divorce statistics was put out by the Bureau of Labor in 1889.

They found that divorce rates had been climbing, most of all in the Dakota Territory, which would soon become the states of North and South Dakota. One Sioux Falls newspaper wrote that to look at these divorce numbers without taking all the out-of-towners into account was like saying that hospitals were the least healthy places in the world because more people die in them. Newspapers around the country responded to the news of the divorce statistics with headlines like, is marriage a failure? And what you see happen is efforts to reduce the number of divorces through pretty much any means people could come up with. So you see additional judicial barriers. You see legislative changes to

make it more difficult to obtain a divorce. You see harsh criticism from religious institutions trying to make it really difficult to get a divorce or even more difficult to remarry once you have divorced. And you see efforts at social ostracism, just, you know, making sure that people, and particularly women, who seek divorces are not part of, quote-unquote, good society, that we're not going to allow this to be normalized. So we've seen these barriers going up over the decade before Blanche goes to Sioux Falls. But we also see men and women, mostly women, in this position still going to great length to seek an escape from their marriages. What types of links? Well, so, you know, we see this in Sioux Falls.

Blanche, it's a four-day train ride to Sioux Falls, a place she's never been, where she has no family or support system, where she is going to spend money, you know, she doesn't really have a lot of at this point, to live there for six months to become a resident so that she can file a suit and then continue to wait for that to wend its way through the courts. So she has committed herself to essentially a year, in Blanche's case, a year outside of her community,

away from her family, away from the things she's known, in order to be able to leave her husband. By the time Blanche arrived, newspapers had a name for the group of aspiring divorcees who had settled in South Dakota, the Divorce Colony. So the women who make up the Divor, as it becomes known, are almost to a woman, wealthy and white, sort of moving among the socialite classes of the big cities of the East Coast and Chicago. They needed to be wealthy in order to be able to afford the trip and the money for lawyers. So there's a reason why this was only accessible to this particular class who had, you know, months on end to spend in the West and not have to worry about their economic situation in that time.

And it is often women who have seen other women travel out to Sioux Falls. So Sioux Falls was certainly in the headlines, but we also see that women from the same social circle, women who had been friends, will follow each other out to Sioux Falls because that's how they've learned about this possibility. That's how they've learned what to do, you know, how to get there, who to hire, where to stay. And Blanche was not exactly among these women, but she always wanted to be. So it makes sense to me that she would follow in their footsteps. Where did she go? I mean, was there a certain place where all of these women waiting for divorces congregated? So many women in the divorce colony stayed at the Cataract House Hotel. This was the nicest hotel for hundreds of miles at this time,

and it was also the center of life in Sioux Falls. The women who arrived at the Cataract House Hotel came for all kinds of reasons. One woman said that her husband referred to his female friends as his orchestra, and that he called one woman in particular his first violin. While they were waiting for their divorces, they went for walks, gambled, and attended performances. One stage comedy called Divorce was opening when Blanche arrived. And there were huge parties to celebrate once they'd gotten what they'd come for.

One was catered by the New York steakhouse, Delmonico's. The divorcee of honor wore her wedding gown for the occasion. And so you had these divorce colonists rubbing up against local Sioux Falls residents who were not always so happy they were there. But Blanche had hoped that she could find a community at the Cataract House because she would be among many other women who were seeking the same escape. Blanche checked in in November 1902, but she tried to keep her arrival a secret. She signs the register at the Cataract House Hotel with a fake name, Mrs. Elsie Johnson.

And so she spends about 24 hours without anyone knowing that she is in the city. But she comes downstairs and there is an envelope waiting for Mrs. Molyneux, and she takes that envelope, alerting the clerk to the fact that actually he does know this woman, he's heard of her before, and the city begins to realize the quote-unquote celebrity they have in their midst. Blanche's arrival in Sioux Falls was front-page news back in New York. One headline read, Mrs. Molyneux Seeks Freedom in South Dakota. Her only visitors were the hotel manager and one of her lawyers.

She rented a piano for her room, and the other guests at the hotel said they heard her playing for a few days, but then eventually she stopped. She spent Thanksgiving alone and had dinner delivered to her room. Reporters tried to get close to Blanche however they could. Some posed as maids or manicurists.

One reporter pretended to be a saleswoman and tried to sell Blanche a new hat. Blanche told the woman, As I do not go out, I have really no use for a new hat. She told a reporter, I thought that out here in this Dakota town, I could once more breathe freely and forget that I had ever known sorrow or despair.

The colony had been existing sort of quietly. There wasn't as much national attention to it. And so there was a sort of detente between the residents and the colonists that basically said, as long as you don't bring back that bad reputation to Sioux Falls, that we are, you know, this mecca for divorce seekers, that we are this divorce mill. As long as we don't have that reputation, we will ignore you, you will ignore us, and everything will be fine. And that all changes when Blanche arrives. She brings all this attention back to the city. And she sort of is disliked by the colonists as well as the locals because she's not following sort of these unwritten rules

that have been established to get a quiet divorce in South Dakota. One woman is quoted as saying, It's a shame to think think after my serving here four months and two weeks that now I might be exposed at the very end just because of that woman from New York. Eventually, Blanche did get her divorce in South Dakota, but that wasn't the last step. So it's important to understand that South Dakota divorces were only tentatively legal. The other states did not have to honor those divorces, probably. It was a very much illegal gray area. we'd seen divorces that had been challenged when the spouse returned home with the decree,

including one that made it all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court decided that that particular divorce was null and void. So what she needed to do was to convince Roland that he could not or should not challenge the divorce. So she, after getting the decree, went back to New York and basically strong-armed Roland into deciding it was in his best interest to allow her to have her divorce. How did she strong-arm him? She hired a lawyer who was known as a bit of a brawler, sort of had some unusual tactics. And basically, he threatened to file a kind of unusual lawsuit, looking for money to compensate Blanche for the mental anguish that she suffered while she was supporting her husband through his trials and imprisonment.

Essentially, what the lawyer said publicly was, the full story of the Molyneux family has not yet come out, but it will in this trial. So basically, they were promising that Blanche wouldn't tell any tales, true or false, as long as Roland did not challenge her divorce. And she got the divorce. She did. Blanche would get married again to her divorce lawyer. We'll be right back.

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You head to the Brasserie, then the Terrace. Cocktail? Don't mind if I do. You raise your glass to another guest because you both know the holiday's just beginning. And you're only in Terminal 3. Welcome to Virgin Atlantic's unique upper-class clubhouse experience, where you'll feel like you've arrived before you've taken off. Virgin Atlantic, see the world differently. In the spring of 1908, it was reported that the so-called manufacture of divorces was South Dakota's greatest and most profitable industry

outside of mining. But in November of that year, South Dakota voted to extend its residency requirement. So they extend their residency requirement to a year, which is about as long as any other state. And so it's no longer an easy escape. And I put easy in quotes because it never was easy exactly. It was just the best option. But it's no longer the best option to leave your marriage. And so the divorce colony closes. People are no longer traveling there for a divorce. Nevada becomes the next destination.

And what we see happen there, with one small exception, is that the residency requirements get progressively shorter. So we've realized that this relief valve of a colony, of a place to go is necessary. And so Nevada, ultimately at one point, you only have to live there for six weeks in a local motel in order to become a resident and file for divorce. So although the colony in Sioux Falls is shuttered, from the distance we're at now, we can understand it as a tipping point in the realization that people were going to continue seeking divorces, no matter what type of obstacles you put up in front of them. The year after the divorce colony closed down,

a Cornell professor analyzed Census Bureau data and calculated that one in every 12 marriages in America ended in divorce. He predicted that it would be one in two by the end of the century. April White describes a lecture the professor gave to his students, in which he said,

We are slowly awakening to a new ideal of the family based not upon the subordination of the wife. The increase of divorce in this country may be due rather to a rising of ideals than to a decay in family life. How did people continue to kind of get around stringent divorce laws? Well, so Blanche left New York for Sioux Falls because she could only get a divorce with proof of adultery. That was 1902. That particular law in New York stayed in place until the 1960s. So that law did not change. And so people found ways around it. And in New York, that was, for instance, later traveling to Mexico, where there was one particular Mexican state where you could get a

divorce in a day. Or if you wanted to stay in New York and not have to travel, there did develop a cottage industry of actresses who would pretend to be the other woman. So a couple that mutually wanted to get divorced could hire this woman to claim she'd had an affair with the husband. And she would take the stand and she would testify to that. And then the court would issue the divorce. So people got creative. And then as ever, I mean, as had happened prior to the divorce colony, there were people that just walked away from their marriages,

that just established their own sort of extra-legal situations when they could not get the relief from the courts that they wanted. By 1930, marriage counseling had been introduced in America. Some scholars say the idea had come from Germany and was rooted in eugenics, and that one of the first marriage counseling centers in America was opened with the hope of promoting family stability and procreation for, quote, fit couples. The founder said, I began to realize that if we were to promote a sound population, we would not only have to get the right kind of people married,

but we would have to keep them married. In 1949, a group called Divorces Anonymous was founded to try and keep couples together. The story goes that a divorce attorney was meeting with a couple breaking up over what he thought were small things. He called them peeves. He had another client in his waiting room who had regretted her divorce. She overheard the couple and asked to talk to them, begging them not to wreck their marriage.

The couple listened to her and stayed together. And this gave the divorce attorney an idea to create an anonymous network of former wives to counsel couples. In 1950, Good Housekeeping called it a strange sisterhood. Divorce rates fell slightly in the 1950s, but began to rise again in the 60s. In 1966, The Atlantic published a piece that reads, Most Americans apparently believe that an unhappy marriage is worse than no marriage at all,

and that the best way of ending an unhappy marriage is divorce by mutual consent. Yet the laws compel them to undergo the distress and humiliation of an adversary proceeding in which one party has to file charges against the other, even to fabricate them, with disastrous moral and emotional consequences for everyone concerned.

The author described a cultural lag between the law and people's lives. And then, three years later, in 1969, Ronald Reagan, who was himself divorced, and the governor of California at the time, signed a bill allowing couples to get a divorce just because they couldn't get along. It was the first no-fault divorce law in the United States and meant you could get a divorce

without having to prove that one spouse had done something wrong. So in the 1970s, we start to see a real shift towards the idea of no-fault divorce. A no-fault divorce doesn't require the demonstration of any wrongdoing, like adultery or cruelty. Instead, the spouse filing for divorce only needs to say that the couple just can't get along and the marriage isn't working. Different states have different ways of putting it. Incompatibility, irreconcilable differences, or irretrievable breakdown of the marriage. Newspapers reporting on states' adoption of no-fault divorce laws called it a revolution. It was an option that didn't require spouses to perjure themselves or find a court in a different state, like Blanche had.

So we see this slow progression of no-fault divorce showing up in every state until finally, in this century, we get no-fault divorce in New York. New York was the last state finally adopting no-fault divorce in 2010. It took a long time. It took a long time. It took a long time in part because the people who were seeking divorces in the time of the divorce colony, they weren't trying to change the laws. They were trying to use the laws as they were written. So often as we start to see the divorce laws change, it's in response to people continuing to seek divorces. It's basically the state saying, uh-oh, people have found ways around this.

We no longer have any control over this. So we need to change our laws to be more realistic so that we can have some say over what happens. Today, it's still much easier to get married than it is to get divorced. In many states, even if you file for a no-fault divorce, you need to be separated for a certain amount of time before the divorce goes through. In Arkansas, you have to live apart from your spouse

for a full year and a half before you can file for divorce. And many states require a cooling-off period before the divorce is finalized. What effect do you think Blanche and the other women who went to Sioux Falls had? The 20 years of women who went out there being vilified or followed by the newspapers for their divorces maybe paradoxically had the impact of normalizing divorce. We saw divorce in the front pages every day. This was something that people did as it

turned out. So I think what started off as an attempt to sort of smear the people who were headed out there ultimately helped drive changing attitudes about divorce. What ends up happening, what few people probably expected would happen, is that these women, without trying to, end up forcing this conversation into all kinds of places that they did not otherwise have access or power. So we see the conversation about divorce forced into the courts, forced into the legislature, forced into religious communities.

We see it in the White House. We see it in the Supreme Court. women did not have suffrage largely and did not have a say in these spaces. They were really driving the conversation around divorce. And that, along with the truth that becomes evident that putting up these barriers was not going to prevent women from escaping marriages they did not want to be in, I think is the legacy of the divorce colony. Blanche once said, I desire my freedom above all else in the world, and I am justified in seeking it.

April White's book is The Divorce Colony, How Women Revolutionized Marriage and found freedom on the American frontier. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Samantha Brown, and Libby Foster. Our technical director is Rob Byers. Engineering by Russ Henry.

Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. If you like the show, tell a friend or leave us a review. It means a lot. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also trying our hand at TikTok. See what you think. We're criminal underscore podcast. We're also trying our hand at TikTok. See what you think. We're criminal underscore podcast.

Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Don't receive Botox Cosmetic if you have a skin infection.

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