It Is Barely Illegal to Kill a Lawyer, 0515 ALBJ, 76 The Alabama Lawyer 180 (2015)
| Author | David A. Bagwell, J. |
| Position | Vol. 76 3 Pg. 180 |
David A. Bagwell, J.
Mr. Harry Seale was the undisputed Don of the Mobile trial bar in the mid-half of the 20th century. I don’t remember exactly when Mr. Harry died, but I do remember that one reason he was such a great lawyer is that he could put it down where the hawgs could get it, and keep it short. Here’s how Mr. Harry described the Foster K. Hale murder, in the 1983 book Stories of the Mobile Bar:
While Judges Saffold Berney and Tisdale J. Touart were serving on the bench, there practiced before them Foster K. Hale, a most unusual gentleman, who reached nearly 60 years of age before he was shot to death at his desk. He represented more clients in the Inferior Court and the Recorders Court than all the other lawyers in the city combined. His standard fee was $10, no more, no less. Upon arriving at this office around 7:30 a.m., he would find it jammed [sic] packed with clients who were being charged with misdemeanors and had to face the court in a preliminary hearing. He would ask those with money to stand. He would then direct the standing clients to move to one side of the waiting room and directed all others to leave. He did not do a credit business and depended on low charges and volume. Mr. Hale was a great sportsman and frequently went fishing in his “Gulf” boat.1 He also hunted ducks, quail, geese, dove and deer. He did not expect any favors from the judges but he delighted in furnishing them fish and game. They realized that he did not expect favors and they gave him none. They were honorable men. Unfortunately, Mr. Hale had an almost irresistible impulse to associate intimately with lovely women. As a result, he had a “girlfriend.”2 On an occasion she got into an argument with Mr. Hale over some trivial matter, and he fell dead at her feet while in her hand she held a blasting .38 caliber revolver pointed toward him. She was charged with murder and employed the great criminal lawyer, Samuel A. Johnston, to represent her. At the trial of the case, Mr. Johnston painted such a touching picture of the abuse she had allegedly suffered at the hands of Mr. Hale that she received a very light sentence. MORAL: It is barely illegal to kill a lawyer.3
This case clearly merits a closer look.
On June 17, 1931 a headline in the Mobile Register screamed, “Attorney is Shot to Death by Woman,” and the sub-head said, “Two Slugs are Fatal to Lawyer.” The zippy lead to the story just about said it all: Quoted by her dying victim as vowing, “You will go to Hell with me,” Mrs. Willie Mae Clausen, 35-year-old mother, early last night sent a deadly stream of lead into the body of Foster Kr. Hale, Jr., 53-year-old lawyer, while they were alone in his law offices at 66 ½ St. Michael Street. Hale, wounded in the abdomen and the left side, lived only an hour. “She shot me for nothing,” Hale said just before he died in the city hospital, explaining he had been trying to break off relations with the woman. “He wrecked my life and he got what he deserved,” police quoted the woman as saying when they reached Hale’s offices to find him lying on the floor groaning, with Mrs. Clausen standing over him. Two feet from where Hale was lying, police picked up the death weapon, a 32-caliber revolver, containing three empty and two loaded cartridges.4
Mr. Hale was still a good enough lawyer to give two dying declarations,5 likely admissible whether or not he was current enough on the law6 to know it, both statements naming Mrs. Clausen as the killer, one made to a Mobile Register reporter, and one made to the police. Mrs. Clausen was booked at the police station and interrogated by Bart B. Chamberlain, Sr., universally called “Mr. Bart,” the remarkably effective circuit solicitor [the job is now called “district attorney”]. Mrs. Clausen’s statement to Mr. Chamberlain said that lawyer Hale had called Mrs. Clausen at the Bienville hotel, where she had just checked in after arriving from Atmore; that Mr. Hale cursed her and told her that he was through with her: She loaded her pistol, wrapped it in brown paper and went to his office, where she laid it on his desk under her raincoat. Mr. Hale again cursed her, threatened to eject her from the office and grabbed at the pistol, . . . but she also got hold of it and fired it three times “toward the floor.” “When the pistol fired the second time, he still had hold of it, but when the third shot was fired he fell over,” she was quoted as having said.7
Who was this Mrs. Clausen? This was 1931 and it was the Mobile Register, so listen to how they described what passed for her pedigree: Mrs. Clausen, who is better known by her former name of Mrs. Pugh, returned to the city yesterday from Atmore, Alabama, after having been at Phoenix, Arizona, where she is said to have gone a year ago for her health. She was Willie Mae Hancock before her first...
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