“I shall be as good a prisoner as I know how, and should I be released before my sentence is completed or should I have to wait all the time, when I get out I am going into chemistry with a determination to give to the world more than I robbed it of.”
Jack Rose’s jester and the playboy of the Rosenthal murder, Sam Schepps, testified for six hours and a quarter yesterday in the trial of Lieut. Becker, and exhibited the qualities that made him the joy of the gamblers in their lighter hours.
Murder trials are not supposed to be humorous affairs and Justices bend severe glances upon flippant witnesses, but Schepps somehow dissipated the gravity of the proceedings and lightened the black tale of crime. Even the austere Judge permitted his eyes to twinkle and some of the jurors laughed outright.
Schepps was so pleased with himself, so proud of his skill in coping with John F. McIntyre, his inquisitor, so naive in his appeals to Justice Goff, so pugnacious and alert that his listeners were in smiles most of the time. He took it for granted that the court appreciated him at his own valuation, and Justice Goff seemed to regard him as an extraordinary specimen of another world, one that must not be banged about by counsel for fear of the total loss of a curiosity worth studying.
But the amusing characteristics of the State’s principal corroborative witness by no means lessened the effect of the testimony he gave against Lieut. Becker. Resisting every device of Mr. McIntyre to trap him into admitting he was an accomplice with Rose, Webber and Vallon, and insisting that he was kept in the dark and used only as an errand boy by Rose and Webber, Schepps swore that the night after the murder he talked with Becker in Becker’s house and that Becker sent this message to Rose:
“Don’t mind anything. I’ll fix it all right. They have to prove who killed Rosenthal before they can convict any one.”
And Schepps added that Becker, in the darkened dining room of the apartment, wouldn’t let him smoke and said:
“Don’t light that match. Somebody is across the street and if they see a light they will suspect something. They have been trailing me all day.”
Schepps was an exasperating witness to Mr. McIntyre. He had the dimmest of memories for times and dates, but he had an extraordinary faculty for recalling previous statements, and he frequently corrected the lawyer. Mr. McIntyre resorted to the traditional methods of hectoring and storming and fist shaking, but Schepps hectored and stormed and gestured back at him. Once he called Mr. McIntyre a liar for saying he had paid the gunmen, and while Mr. McIntyre was fuming before the jury and shouting that Schepps was “a thing,” “a creature,” the witness was suavely and deferentially apologizing to the court for “language that a gentleman ought not to use.”