YESTERDAY IN PART 1, Mrs. Laura D. Fair led an adventurous life of five marriages and an extended affair culminating in her shooting her lover after his being reluctant to divorce his wife. Today in Part 2 we sort through four sources examining her two—count them, two!—murder trials and subsequent place in feminist history. The sources are Chuck Lyons’ essay at C.A. Asbrey’s website Mystery Romance Literature; Carole Haber’s book, The Trials of Laura Fair: Sex, Murder, and Insanity in the Victorian West, Lisa Zevorich Susner’s review of this book at OSU.EDU‘s Origins; and Holly Streeter’s “The Sordid Trial of Laura D. Fair: Victorian Family Values” at Digitial Georgetown, Georgetown University. Tidbits gleaned from these sources are identified by Lyons, Haber, Susner, and Streeter, respectively.
Background. As background, Streeter notes, “After Fair learned Crittenden was married, he continually promised to divorce his wife. That promise was never fulfilled. The day of the killing, he was meeting his family on the ferry. Fair followed him there, fired the fatal shot and fled to the boat’s saloon, where she confessed. Crittenden died a few days later.
The First Trial. Streeter recounts, “The court was packed for all 30 days of the highly anticipated and publicized trial. A group of suffragists attended the trial in support of Fair. They claimed that Fair was temporarily insane due to a female malady and argued that the concept of female hysteria was used to deny women their rights and keep them under the control of men. They helped frame the trial in gender terms.”
Streeter continues, “San Francisco’s newspapers, the Chronicle and the Examiner, also played the gender card, though they criticized Fair as a man-hungry murderess who had seduced an upright citizen and destroyed his family. The papers played to the Victorian notion that the passion of women was potentially dangerous and destructive.”
Legal Arguments? “During the Victorian era,” Streeter says, “mental illness in women was often linked to the menstrual cycle…. The prosecution relied on other assumptions about gender, picturing women as dangerous sexual creatures subject to control only by moral constraints.”
First Verdict. In Mystery Romance Literature, Lyons writes, “After deliberating for something like 40 minutes, the jury found her guilty of first-degree murder. Fair was sentenced to be hanged.”
Lyons (who offers the most details) continues, “As one area newspaper put it commenting on the verdict, ‘The chastity of California womanhood, the sanctity of the home, and the Christian religion itself (have) been saved from the assaults of the ungodly.’ The New York Times, taking a broader view, opined that ‘the very principles on which society and order are established seem to have crumbled away,’ and the New York World wrote, ‘It is in behalf of women like Mrs. Crittenden, and in despite of women like Mrs. Fair, that the divorce laws are kept stringent.’ On the other hand Emily Pitts Stevens, founder of the California Woman Suffrage Association wrote that if Fair were hanged “the very name of San Francisco will be odious for ages to come!”
“But,” Lyons added, “Fair was not hanged.”
The Second Trial. Streeter notes, “Fair’s execution was precluded, however, by the state supreme court when it ordered a new trial because evidence was improperly admitted. Fair was acquitted at her second trial, but her reputation remained tarnished. In the end, the suffragists who criticized her trial were at least partly right: she was subjected to a system of justice made by and for men and was not tried by a jury of her peers.”
An “Unwritten Law.” In her review of Haber’s The Trials of Laura Fair: Sex, Murder, and Insanity in the Victorian West, Susner recounts in “A Woman Scorned?,” “A guilty verdict prompted an appeal, heard in court in September of 1872. Laura’s case curiously inverted the ‘unwritten law,’ which effectively stated that ‘the accused were justified in murdering any individual who dared to disturb the sanctity of the home.’ In several previous cases, a husband or ex-husband shot and killed his wife’s lover.”
Susner continues, “The unwritten law justifying the violent defense of virtue typically worked in tandem with the legal defense of temporary insanity…. Lawyers and witnesses at Laura Fair’s trials also wrestled with the question of how medical experts and the courts should define insanity in the first place. Was insanity simply the inability to comprehend right and wrong? Or could a person be insane even if he or she technically did know right from wrong? A tricky question and one that Laura Fair’s trials did not answer…”
Lyons notes, “Laura Fair continued to reside in the Bay Area and died quietly there in 1919 at age 82. She had been a subject of local gossip until something else came along to replace her in the public consciousness, had tried the lecture circuit to explain her side of things with limited success, and had appeared in 1873—under a different name—in the satirical novel The Guilded Age by the young Mark Twain.”
Susner’s Summary. “In The Trials of Laura Fair,” Susner says, “Haber expertly evokes a mid-nineteenth-century American West that seems both familiar and foreign. It is a world in which Laura’s long-term drug use probably contributed to her criminal actions as well as a world of unbridled sentimentality in which attorneys used lengthy courtroom readings of Shakespeare to characterize the defendant and victim at a murder trial.”
Susner concludes, “The twists and turns of The Trials of Laura Fair will prove engaging to a general audience as well as to historians of criminal justice, medicine, mental illness, women, sexuality, and the West.”
It makes for a nice research project here at SimanaitisSays as well. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025