The prosecution could later address Ida Deane separately if necessary.
The trial opened in December.
The courtroom filled.
The press had already turned Cordelia into one of the most famous accused women in America.
Her lawyers faced a difficult environment.
Public opinion seemed ready to convict.
So the defense attacked the thing that looked strongest.
The story itself.
Maybe it was too neat.
Maybe investigators had taken an affair, a poison purchase and a box of candy and forced them together.
Maybe another woman had written the notes.
Maybe candy-store witnesses were mistaken.
Maybe Dunning had other lovers.
Maybe someone else had motive.
Maybe the arsenic Botkin purchased was not the arsenic inside the chocolates.
Maybe handwriting experts saw what prosecutors wanted them to see.
The defense did not need to solve the murder.
It needed to make Botkin only one possibility.
John Dunning Takes the Stand
Dunning's testimony was essential.
It was also humiliating.
The courtroom heard intimate details of his behavior in San Francisco.
The husband of the murdered woman was forced to discuss affairs.
Defense lawyers wanted names.
If Dunning had been intimate with multiple women, each might become an alternative suspect.
Dunning admitted relationships beyond Botkin.
When pressed to identify other women, he resisted.
At one point the conflict became so serious that he was held in contempt and spent time in jail before the disputed questioning was withdrawn.
It was an astonishing reversal.
The dead woman's husband, whose recognition had helped initiate the investigation, was temporarily jailed during the prosecution of the woman accused of killing his wife.
The defense had achieved something important.
It reminded jurors that Cordelia was not the only woman in Dunning's complicated private life.
But the prosecution returned to physical evidence.
Other lovers did not automatically explain the package.
The Candy Clerks
Store witnesses testified.
They described the customer.
The packaging request.
The box.
The prosecution tried to place Cordelia inside the confectionery chain.
The defense questioned identification.
How many women had entered the store?
How reliable was a clerk's memory months later?
Had newspapers shown Botkin's face before identification?
Could publicity produce false confidence?
These were legitimate problems.
Eyewitness memory is imperfect.
Even today it can be unreliable.
In 1898, formal identification procedures were less controlled than they are now.
But the prosecution did not need the candy-store testimony to stand alone.
It paired it with everything else.
The Drug Clerk
Frank Grey's testimony was more damaging.
The arsenic transaction had been recorded.
The quantity was significant.
The purchaser allegedly said she wanted it for a straw hat.
Grey identified Cordelia.
The defense emphasized the time gap.
June to August.
The form of poison.
The possibility of another customer.
The ordinary availability of arsenic.
Yet from the jury's perspective, the question was not simply:
Could an innocent woman buy arsenic?
Of course.
The question was:
What are the odds that the woman with motive to eliminate Mary Elizabeth also bought arsenic shortly before arsenic appeared inside chocolates sent to Mary Elizabeth?
The Handwriting Battle
Handwriting testimony became a battlefield.
Experts supporting the prosecution described similarities they considered distinctive.
The defense introduced competing explanations and attacked the certainty of questioned-document analysis.
This was not DNA.
There was no numerical match probability.
The jury had to examine examples.
Look at letters.
Look at slants.
Look at repeated shapes.
Decide how much weight to give trained experts.
The anonymous letters were particularly damaging because their purpose seemed connected to the motive.
Whoever wrote them wanted Mary Elizabeth to believe her husband was deeply involved with another woman.
Cordelia was that woman.
If the jury accepted that she wrote the letters, the later note became much harder to view as coincidence.
"Mrs. C."
The signature was clever.
And careless.
"Mrs. C."
It offered enough familiarity to encourage trust without naming the sender.
Mary Elizabeth could interpret it as a friend.
But after the deaths, investigators could interpret it differently.
Cordelia.
A single initial became a bridge between deception and identity.
Had the sender written nothing at all, the package might have seemed more suspicious.
Had she signed her full name, the case would have been easy.
"Mrs. C." occupied the middle ground.
Friendly enough to open the box.
Vague enough to preserve deniability.
Until investigators found the earlier letters.
Cordelia Testifies
Botkin denied the prosecution's version.
She offered explanations.
She challenged timelines.
She said the arsenic she purchased had a legitimate purpose.
The defense argued the physical form did not correspond precisely with that found in the candy.
She presented alibis regarding the candy purchase and mailing.
Her lawyers tried to separate each prosecution clue from the next.
The case, they argued, had been built backward.
Police suspected Cordelia because of Dunning.
Then they interpreted every unrelated detail as evidence against her.
It was a powerful defense theory because that investigative danger is real.
Confirmation bias can destroy a case.
Once police believe they know who committed a crime, ambiguous evidence can begin looking more certain than it is.
Jurors had to decide whether that had happened here.
The Alternative Woman
At points the defense attempted to point suspicion elsewhere.
One name raised was Clara Arbogast.
Newspaper coverage near the end of the 1898 trial reported efforts to suggest another woman might have written the note.
The defense's job was not necessarily to prove Arbogast committed the crime.
It only needed to create a credible second hand holding the pen.
If handwriting could not uniquely identify Cordelia, one of the prosecution's strongest links weakened.
But alternative theories faced the same problem.
They had to explain the whole chain.
Who else knew Mary Elizabeth?
Who else knew of Dunning's plans?
Who else had a motive to prevent reconciliation?
Who else bought arsenic?
Who else matched the candy-store witnesses?
Who else matched the handkerchief purchase?
Who else wrote the earlier anonymous letters?
Reasonable doubt requires possibility.
But possibility becomes less reasonable when it requires a different coincidence for every clue.
The Poisoned Chocolate as a Machine
The prosecution wanted jurors to see the crime as a machine assembled in California.
First component:
Knowledge.
The sender knows Mary Elizabeth likes candy.
Second:
Motive.
Dunning intends to return to his wife.
Third:
Means.
Arsenic.
Fourth:
Delivery object.
Chocolates.
Fifth:
Camouflage.
A handkerchief and affectionate note.
Sixth:
Distance.
The United States mail.
Once the package entered the postal system, the killer did not need to do anything else.
The machine moved east.