In early 1966, a midair crash involving two U.S. Air Power planes set free an unexploded hydrogen bomb someplace close to the coast of Spain. For the subsequent a number of weeks, the U.S. navy’s all-out seek for the nuclear system was the topic of fixed press protection. Nevertheless it was not the most important story in America. That distinction, remembers famend journalist Lewis Lapham, belonged to a homicide trial being held in a downtown Miami courtroom. “The story of america dropping an atomic bomb,” says Lapham, shaking his head in astonishment, “obtained second billing to Sweet and Mel.”
Sweet and Mel. The names could not resonate the best way they as soon as did, however the aftershocks of the trial of Candace Mossler and Melvin Lane Powers are nonetheless being felt. Whereas it was not America’s first tabloid trial, the best way it transcended the tabloids was notable. It was featured in publications usually not related to the scandalous or salacious, together with The New York Occasions and Time journal. On newsstands, it competed for consideration alongside the Beatles.
And it was a magnet for tv. The trial grew to become a spectacle like few had witnessed: the primary true-crime story of the fashionable media age, or, if you happen to desire, actuality TV earlier than the idea had a reputation.
However earlier than the trial, there was the homicide.
At roughly 4:30 a.m. on June 30, 1964 — 60 years in the past this month — Candace Mossler, a former model-turned socialite, returned to her husband Jacques’s house in Key Biscayne to search out his physique on the ground, wrapped in a skinny orange blanket. He had been bludgeoned and stabbed. The crime was surprising each for its extreme violence— there have been 39 stab wounds — and for the id of the deceased. Jacques Mossler, age 69, was one of many richest males in America, a pioneer of the postwar client credit score growth whose private fortune was estimated at $30 million, or about $300 million at this time. Males like Jacques Mossler didn’t routinely flip up murdered, and definitely not in a spot like Key Biscayne, an unique island group close to Miami later well-known because the winter residence of Richard Nixon.
Detectives shortly narrowed the listing of suspects to 2: Candace and her 22-year-old nephew, Melvin Lane Powers. Mel had moved into the Mossler mansion in Houston in 1962, when his mom, Candace’s sister, had requested the Mosslers to absorb the troubled youth. Jacques gave the tall, strapping Mel a job at one his firms. Candace, a classy blonde who was nonetheless youthful at 44, favored to take him round and introduce him to her society buddies. What grew to become obvious — finally, even to Jacques — is that Candace’s curiosity in Mel was not solely that of a caring aunt. Sooner or later, Mel and Candace had begun an incestuous affair.
When Jacques came upon, he evicted Mel from the mansion and, trying to distance himself from the entire tawdry mess, relocated to Miami, the place he owned a number of companies. That was in October 1963. Eight months later, Candace introduced their kids for a go to. Considerably conveniently — too conveniently for police — they had been all away from the house when Jacques was murdered.
Police decided Mel had flown from Houston to Miami solely hours earlier than the homicide, and had returned to Houston within the speedy hours following the crime. Moreover, there have been witnesses who may place Mel close to the crime scene. Round 10 p.m. that night, he had been noticed on the Stuft Shirt Lounge, a bar on the Miami facet of the Rickenbacker Causeway resulting in Key Biscayne. In response to witness testimony, he ordered a scotch and requested for a big, empty, glass Coke bottle. He left the bottle behind. Two hours later he returned to the Stuft Shirt, ordered a double scotch, and requested for an additional Coke bottle. Investigators surmised Mel may need been consuming to screw up his braveness, and that he had used the second bottle to bash in Mossler’s head earlier than stabbing him.
Different discoveries included a handprint belonging to Mel present in Jacques Mossler’s house, bloodstains on the garments Mel reportedly wore to Miami, and a white Chevrolet deserted in a parking zone at Miami worldwide Airport. The automobile, which contained Mel’s fingerprints and matched the description of the automobile neighbors noticed leaving the crime scene, turned out to be a loaner belonging to one of many Mossler firms. It had been final checked out to Candace.
To prosecutors, it appeared apparent: Candace and Mel had conspired to kill the previous man for his cash. A warrant for Mel’s arrest was issued on July 3, the identical day Jacques Mossler, a World Warfare I veteran, was laid to relaxation at Arlington Nationwide Cemetery.
The case in opposition to Candace took longer to construct, however she too was arrested. That occasion came about at Miami worldwide Airport, with information cameras rolling. “Mrs. Mossler, you will have been accused of incest, adultery, and homicide,” started one of many newsmen, shoving his microphone into Candace’s face. “What would you want individuals to find out about you?” Candace’s reply was, in its personal manner, as explosive as that H-bomb the U.S. navy would quickly be in search of: “Properly, sir, nobody is ideal.” The Sweet and Mel present had begun.
(She hated that identify — “Sweet” was so déclassé — however it was the one the press pinned on her, and she or he would put on it from then on.)
The attorneys concerned within the case would solely add to the attract of the trial. When Mel was arrested, Sweet employed famed Texas protection lawyer Percy Foreman to defend him. A giant, imposing man who wore his hair slicked again, Foreman was a legendary trial lawyer who had litigated tons of of homicide circumstances and, by most accounts, misplaced just one. Foreman favored the highlight — a number of years earlier, he had been briefly retained as Jack Ruby’s protection lawyer after Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald — and had a down-home method that was each charming and ruthless. He was identified to boast that he most popular making an attempt homicide circumstances as a result of there was “one much less witness.”
Sweet’s protection featured the Houston-based authorized staff of Clyde Woody and Marian Rosen. The latter was a rarity on the time: A distinguished lady lawyer. Rosen was strikingly lovely — and as sharp as any man within the courtroom. The final surviving lawyer to have labored the trial, she remembers the protection staff’s first hurdle. “Let me simply reduce to the chase,” she says. “We didn’t need girls on the jury… as a result of feminine jurors, as a rule, are very harsh on feminine defendants. They actually scrutinize them fastidiously, discover fault with any little factor, whether or not it’s their clothes, their make-up, their demeanor, their gown. No matter it’s, they’re going to search out fault with it. So we actually needed an all-male jury.” A wrinkle in Florida legislation — girls had been excluded from being referred to as for jury responsibility until they opted in — made this pretty straightforward. Rosen obtained her all-male jury.
By the point the trial obtained underway in January 1966, journalists had spent a year-and-a-half reporting on the homicide of Jacques Mossler and the revelations that had come to mild in its aftermath. With the principle occasion lastly at hand, the urge for food for all issues Sweet and Mel solely intensified. The New York Every day Information, sensing a circulation builder, despatched famous crime reporter Theo Wilson to Miami to file each day dispatches. “Sweet Mossler Homicide Trial — Observe Theo Wilson Each Day,” suggested a poster that confirmed Wilson, pocket book and pen in hand, sitting side-by-side with Sweet on a settee. The picture of the 2 girls (“Theo” was brief for Theodora) was plastered on subway automobiles and the edges of Every day Information supply vehicles for weeks.
“You had a case that concerned intercourse, cash, blood, and that was going to attract a variety of media consideration,” says Rosen, including that, in fact, “individuals actually loved the sexual angle.”
Somebody who didn’t was presiding decide George E. Schulz. He declared that, owing to the graphic nature of a number of the testimony, nobody below 21 could be admitted. Naturally, this solely had the impact of fueling the general public’s fascination with the trial; tons of of spectators lined up each day exterior the Miami courthouse as early as 5 a.m., hoping to nab a seat within the courtroom. The 2 dozen or so seats reserved for the media had been no much less coveted.
Curiosity within the trial reached a fever pitch and stayed there. “It was not unusual for Candace Mossler to be on the entrance web page of a newspaper someplace on the planet each day throughout this trial,” says Ron Smith, creator of No One Is Good: The True Story of Candace Mossler and America’s Strangest Homicide Trial. “Actually, it was stated that solely Candace Mossler may knock Jackie Kennedy off the entrance web page.”
Although tv cameras weren’t allowed in courtrooms on the time, networks and native stations had been in a position to seize Sweet and Mel’s comings and goings. Usually, Sweet would cease to share her ideas on the proceedings in a breathy voice that conveyed equal components intercourse enchantment and defiance. As soon as, says Smith, “she truly convened a reception for the media at her lodge suite.”
Usually, making a defendant in a homicide trial obtainable to reporters could be thought of skilled malpractice by a lawyer, however Rosen knew precisely what she was doing: “Candace was nicely spoken. She was lovely. She was charming. She knew the way to deal with herself. And step by step it grew to become evident that she was actually nice with the reporters. They liked her quips, and the best way she approached issues. She was a fighter. She was not going to be cajoled into something.”
Whereas Sweet wooed the media exterior the courtroom, the protection centered on overcoming the prosecution’s case. Dade County State Legal professional Richard Gerstein gave the impression to be holding all of the playing cards. The prosecution had the motive (a $30 million fortune), it had important bodily proof (the handprint within the house, the fingerprints within the automobile), and it had the couple’s demonstrated ethical depravity (their incestuous relationship).
Prosecutors appeared to revel within the particulars of Sweet and Mel’s relationship, amongst them, Sweet’s supposed predilection for (receiving) oral intercourse. One witness for the prosecution informed the courtroom that Mel as soon as claimed Sweet was pregnant along with his little one. (Sitting within the courtroom, Sweet gasped — then smiled on the jury.) The prosecution additionally produced a parade of ex-cons and jailhouse snitches who testified that, at numerous instances, they’d been approached by Sweet and Mel about killing Jacques Mossler. It was doubtlessly damning stuff.
However the protection staff was unshaken. This trial was a few homicide the state claimed Mel Powers had dedicated. And for all of the so-called proof tying Mel to the crime, there was no witness who may truly place him in Jacques Mossler’s house on the night time in query. And what in regards to the supposed homicide weapon? No knife — or, for that matter, a Coke bottle just like the one Mel allegedly had faraway from the Stuft Shirt— was ever discovered. No, the protection argued, the prosecution was going to need to do higher than that.
Foreman had an alternate idea of the crime, which he fortunately shared with the jury: Jacques Mossler had constructed his enterprise on predatory lending and loan-sharking; he had destroyed numerous people by driving them into debt. And he was not the household man individuals imagined. Moderately, Mossler had been main a double life as a closeted homosexual man who would typically invite sexual companions into his dwelling, then discard them. Summing up his portrait of Jacques Mossler, Foreman provided that “if every a type of 39 knife wounds on Mossler’s physique was inflicted by a unique individual, there nonetheless could be many instances that variety of (potential suspects).” If that didn’t represent cheap doubt, Foreman requested, what did? After seven weeks, the trial went to the jury.
“I feel we had a number of on the jury that thought they had been responsible,” relates former juror Fred J. Zoller. “Possibly half of them weren’t certain.” After two days of deliberations, the jurors knowledgeable Choose Schulz they had been deadlocked. The decide instructed the twelve males to maintain making an attempt. Following one other lengthy day, they’d unanimity, or one thing prefer it. “I feel a variety of (the jurors) didn’t wish to keep there; they had been getting drained,” says Zoller, then a submit workplace employee who, not like a few of his fellow jurors, was having fun with the time away from his job.
On Sunday, March 6 — the timing caught even Choose Schulz off guard — the jury got here again and introduced it had reached a verdict. After everybody had unexpectedly convened within the courtroom, it was learn aloud. Not responsible. The photographers who had been within the courtroom started yelling for Sweet and Mel to kiss. (Wouldn’t that make for a memorable entrance web page?) As a substitute, Sweet went over to the jury field and kissed the jurors. “Yeah, she stated ‘Thanks,’” remembers Zoller, who provides that he got here to his verdict actually: “I glided by the proof.”
Some would later fault the prosecution’s choice to strive Sweet and Mel collectively; the speculation being that it might not have been that tough to convict the hulking, brooding Mel of the crime, however that, when his destiny was tied to Sweet’s, that made it a lot harder, as a result of to search out him responsible, the jury additionally needed to discover her responsible.
For Lapham, who lined the trial for The Saturday Night Put up, it was easier than that. “Percy (Foreman) informed a much better story and informed it… in a manner that the prosecutor couldn’t match,” he says. Not essentially a real story, thoughts you, however a greater one.
After leaving the courtroom, Sweet and Mel jumped right into a gold-colored Cadillac convertible that had been strategically positioned exterior the courthouse. With Clyde Woody on the wheel, the couple, accompanied by Rosen, rode off into the long run: in Mel’s case, a decades-long profession as a Houston developer; in Sweet’s, marriage to a person whose luck was no higher than Jacques’s. That husband, Barnett Garrison, suffered mind injury following a mysterious fall from the roof of the couple’s three-story dwelling. (He spent the final 25 years of his life in a nursing dwelling.)
For Sweet, the top got here in 1976, when she traveled to Miami for a gathering of her financial institution board — one of many companies she inherited from Jacques — and was discovered useless in her lodge room, the sufferer of an obvious overdose of painkillers and sleeping drugs. In what can solely be referred to as one closing plot twist… she was buried beside Jacques at Arlington Nationwide Cemetery.
When Mel died in 2010, The New York Occasions referred to him as one-half of what was doubtless “the nation’s most infamous couple” within the mid-Sixties. However that designation doesn’t fairly appear to seize the cultural significance of Sweet and Mel, or the ocean change they helped usher in.
“Are you able to think about what the trial of ‘Sweet and Mel’ would seem like in at this time’s world?” speculates Smith. “It might be off the charts. Everybody could be protecting observe of it on their telephone. CNN, Fox, everyone would make it the lead story of the day. I imply, given Candace’s propensity for cameras, she would have invited us proper into her home.” In a manner, she did.