In 1892, when Parisian Sarah Bernhardt made a visit to the county jail, she was warned not to speak with the 19-year-old prisoner whose sensational crime called to her like a siren. The actress was in Memphis on tour for the play Fedora, for which she starred as a grieving woman hellbent on avenging her recently slain fiance. When Bernhardt wasn’t on stage, she was consuming every newspaper column she could find about the murderous and so-called insane girl in the cell before her. She cut articles out and pasted them into a scrapbook; she went to the murder scene and sketched it. It was for research, she said, for she hoped she could find a writer to create a play that favored her penchant for blood-thirsty roles. It was a great story, a “sublime tragedy with a grand motive.”
And it was — and is, as the writer in me must admit — a great story. It captivated audiences throughout the world at the time, and put Memphis on the map in some ways. People have always loved true crime.
It all started at the Higbee School for Girls, a finishing school for the daughters of prominent Memphians, where Alice Mitchell and Freda Ward would roam the school halls kissing, hugging, and hand-holding. Back then, this kind of behavior wasn’t seen as anything more than “chumming,” a kind of rehearsal for the courtship by a young woman’s future husband. But for Alice and Freda it was more — especially for Alice, who became deeply obsessed with Freda.
Freda, it turned out, was in love with two men in addition to Alice. Soon, Freda’s family left Memphis, visiting only during the summer months, leaving Alice depressed and desperate. She proposed marriage, saying she would begin dressing as a man and that they could live as husband and wife in St. Louis. Freda accepted, but her older sister discovered their engagement and forbade them from communicating with each other.
The next time Alice saw Freda she slashed her throat with her father’s razor. Freda died within moments. When Alice confessed to her crime, she said if she couldn’t marry Freda, then no one should, a perplexing motive to just about everyone at the time. To those in the 1890s, same-sex love just wasn’t heard of — at least, it wasn’t publicly recognized. Doctors diagnosed Alice with a “malady of the mind” that could easily “lead on to murder,” and the jury for her trial found her insane on the basis of her “unnatural” love for Freda. Subsequently, the state ordered her to be committed to the Tennessee State Insane Asylum in Bolivar.
The actress Bernhardt kept in touch with Alice, but the play about Alice she wanted written never materialized. Bernhardt would go on to have a successful career, though, playing dreadful and powerful women on stage, while Alice withered away in an asylum and Freda laid in her unmarked grave, which remained so until 2018.
Alice died in 1898 of unknown causes in Bolivar. Today she is buried in Elmwood Cemetery, only a short walk from Freda’s grave. Her gravestone shows the wear of years — a chunk of stone is missing at the bottom, it’s discolored in places, spotted with moss in others, with the occasional drop of bird mess. It’s a reminder of her ordinariness, that she wasn’t some monster, a Medea in wait for her final act. She was just a girl — a murderer, to be sure — but first a girl, and then a story that has since faded from collective memory, replaced by more sensationalized and gruesome stories, which will one day be replaced themselves.
Through a modern lens, Alice’s case can seem more sympathetic, with our understanding of the LGBTQ community and mental health issues. We can analyze her case for the impacts of her family’s wealth and race; we can note its relevance. We can look at the bigger picture. We have to look at the bigger picture. After all, it’s the bigger picture which all the gravestones beside Alice and Freda helped create before passing it onto the next generations — the very gravestones who poured over the newspapers detailing the salacious story.
But, as the Commercial Appeal wrote in her death announcement, “sensations are ephemeral, for the death of Alice Mitchell recalls to many the fact that she had lived.” And, I would add, the murder of Freda Ward recalls to many the fact that she, too, had lived.