In the summer of 1952, I was 7 years old and living on a farm in Cumberland, Maine. That same summer, over a 1000 miles away in Bay City Michigan, Coleman Peterson shot and killed Mike Chenoweth owner of the Lumberjack Tavern. The life of the Upper Peninsula would never be the same and neither would mine.
The facts of the case are well known to people who like old movies. Peterson was defended by a lawyer named John Voelker, who subsequently authored a fictional account of the murder and ensuing trial. Anatomy of a Murder became a bestseller and was then turned into an Academy Award nominated movie. I read the book when I was a highschool freshman and it infected me with a lifelong interest in the law and how people settle disputes.
The crime was fairly run of mill as murders go: one man killed another man because he believed that man had raped his wife. There was no mystery about the basic elements of the crime that inspired the book and Voelker kept much closer to the facts of the actual case in his fictional account then he generally let on.
What made this story so memorable was the realism it brought to the subject with all the wonderful real life contradictions it laid bare as fictional crimes seldom did in those long ago days. What do we really think about a man taking the law into his own hands and killing another man who brutally raped his wife? Can a woman with a great figure ever convince her neighbors she was raped? That was a big question in the 1950’s and as much as we want to believe in progress, it still is. Recently the only surviving juror from People vs Peterson was interviewed about the case. He revealed two things about community attitude that surrounded the real life trial. First, people believed the deceased was a braggart and a bully who had previously gotten away with raping two women. Second, inspite of this community view of Chenoweth and lots of evidence, people in general and this juror in particular, had decided that Chenoweth’s sex with Mrs. Peterson was consensual. What factors accounted for this seeming contradiction, well Mrs. Peterson was dancing barefoot at the bar, they never found her panties and “she was built like a brick shithouse,” i.e. she had a great figure.
Anatomy of a Murder was written by a former prosecuting attorney and member of the Michigan Supreme Court, a person fascinated by man’s attempt to bring some reason to human conduct which so often beggars our ability to understand with all its contradictions. The murder at the Lumberjack Tavern was Voelker's aunching pad to share his fascination with human nature and his critique of our efforts to settle disputes it generates. Like all great criticism it is done with humility and humor.
When I read the book I had never sat through a murder trial but I had been a fly on the wall at about 10 town meetings. I had marveled at the man who one year led the charge to cut the Road Commissioner’s budget and the next year attacked the same public official (“Squeakbox” Burnell) for doing a lousy job plowing the roads after a blizzard. Or the gang who always opposed extra funding for education while providing living example to the weaknesses of our school system. “English and art is not things we need to waste money on.”
The interest that Voelker focused for me led to a career around the law: making law, enforcing law, arguing the law and electing people who make the law. I did it with a modest hope I might leave the world no worse for my efforts and an overwhelming fascination with the human foibles which are so often exposed where the law attempts to moderate human conduct. Even now that I have retired as a lawyer this curiosity has not abated. How can it when on any evening news we’re likely to see one of our neighbors demanding that Obama abandon his efforts to get government into healthcare and also leave Medicare alone.
I know that it was Shakespeare's Hamlet who observed “What a piece of work is a man” long before John Voelker took up pen. But somehow it was the country lawyer and trout fisherman from the lakes and forests of Michigan’s upper peninsula who spoke to this farm boy from Maine.
The facts of the case are well known to people who like old movies. Peterson was defended by a lawyer named John Voelker, who subsequently authored a fictional account of the murder and ensuing trial. Anatomy of a Murder became a bestseller and was then turned into an Academy Award nominated movie. I read the book when I was a highschool freshman and it infected me with a lifelong interest in the law and how people settle disputes.
The crime was fairly run of mill as murders go: one man killed another man because he believed that man had raped his wife. There was no mystery about the basic elements of the crime that inspired the book and Voelker kept much closer to the facts of the actual case in his fictional account then he generally let on.
What made this story so memorable was the realism it brought to the subject with all the wonderful real life contradictions it laid bare as fictional crimes seldom did in those long ago days. What do we really think about a man taking the law into his own hands and killing another man who brutally raped his wife? Can a woman with a great figure ever convince her neighbors she was raped? That was a big question in the 1950’s and as much as we want to believe in progress, it still is. Recently the only surviving juror from People vs Peterson was interviewed about the case. He revealed two things about community attitude that surrounded the real life trial. First, people believed the deceased was a braggart and a bully who had previously gotten away with raping two women. Second, inspite of this community view of Chenoweth and lots of evidence, people in general and this juror in particular, had decided that Chenoweth’s sex with Mrs. Peterson was consensual. What factors accounted for this seeming contradiction, well Mrs. Peterson was dancing barefoot at the bar, they never found her panties and “she was built like a brick shithouse,” i.e. she had a great figure.
Anatomy of a Murder was written by a former prosecuting attorney and member of the Michigan Supreme Court, a person fascinated by man’s attempt to bring some reason to human conduct which so often beggars our ability to understand with all its contradictions. The murder at the Lumberjack Tavern was Voelker's aunching pad to share his fascination with human nature and his critique of our efforts to settle disputes it generates. Like all great criticism it is done with humility and humor.
When I read the book I had never sat through a murder trial but I had been a fly on the wall at about 10 town meetings. I had marveled at the man who one year led the charge to cut the Road Commissioner’s budget and the next year attacked the same public official (“Squeakbox” Burnell) for doing a lousy job plowing the roads after a blizzard. Or the gang who always opposed extra funding for education while providing living example to the weaknesses of our school system. “English and art is not things we need to waste money on.”
The interest that Voelker focused for me led to a career around the law: making law, enforcing law, arguing the law and electing people who make the law. I did it with a modest hope I might leave the world no worse for my efforts and an overwhelming fascination with the human foibles which are so often exposed where the law attempts to moderate human conduct. Even now that I have retired as a lawyer this curiosity has not abated. How can it when on any evening news we’re likely to see one of our neighbors demanding that Obama abandon his efforts to get government into healthcare and also leave Medicare alone.
I know that it was Shakespeare's Hamlet who observed “What a piece of work is a man” long before John Voelker took up pen. But somehow it was the country lawyer and trout fisherman from the lakes and forests of Michigan’s upper peninsula who spoke to this farm boy from Maine.