Rashomon in the Latin Quarter: The Kin-Kin murder case
A vicious 1894 homicide sheds a fascinating light on the shortcomings of the 19th century police, the legal system and the press.
Augustine Capurro, the murdered man. From the San Francisco Call.
In the spring of 1894, a vicious murder convulsed the Latin Quarter. It took place during a friendly card game in the back room of an Italian grocery store near Green Street and Lafayette Place. The victim was a kindly, respected 64-year-old widower named Augustine Capurro. The murderer, Felice Merlo, a vegetable gardener with a bad reputation in the neighborhood known as Kin-Kin, stabbed the old man through the heart over a $5 debt and ran down Green Street. Despite the fact that the two proprietors of the grocery store witnessed the murder and that several men immediately ran after him, Merlo disappeared in the crowd on DuPont, made his way through the back alleys of North Beach, got out of the neighborhood, hid out in a strikingly obvious location under the noses of the San Francisco police for months, and finally boarded a ship that took him to his native Italy. Although Merlo was indicted for murder in San Francisco, the Italian authorities refused to extradite him, and he apparently lived happily ever after.
The Kin-Kin murder case, as it was called, initially interested me simply as a ripping good North Beach crime yarn, and because of the frustrating fact that the murderer got off scot free. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized that the case was fascinating for a number of other, less obvious, reasons. It revealed the embarrassing ease with which criminals at the time could escape both the police and prosecution. It revealed the untrammeled way police in those pre-Gideon days were allowed to interrogate people they deemed suspicious. In a side note, it also revealed that the San Francisco district attorney apparently felt no compunction about simply telling out and out lies to a grand jury.
But above all, the Kin-Kin case revealed the slipshod nature of 19th century journalism. I read every story published about the case that I could find in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Examiner, and the Call, and based on their reporting, it is not possible to be 100 percent certain about anything about the case except that Felice Merlo murdered Augustine Capurro, escaped, and was never brought to justice. Why Merlo murdered Capurro was not clear. How he escaped was not clear. The role played by a friend on whose Colma ranch he hid for months was not clear. And there were a host of other factual matters that the different press accounts gave contradictory accounts of. The newspapers could not even agree on what the murderer’s name was. It was a North Beach Rashomon.
Some of these ambiguities were unavoidable, the result of what we might call the fog of crime. But many were not. The biggest shortcoming of 19th century journalism, which was dramatically exemplified by this case, was that reporters at the time did not feel required to identify their sources, and in fact usually did not. As a general practice they relied on unnamed sources, who were often poorly informed or had their own agenda. In criminal cases like this one, it’s obvious that those sources were often policemen. More than a few times, it seems clear that the “source” was simply speculation, gossip or the reporter’s own imagination.
Journalism at the time also meant never having to say you’re sorry. All three of the papers got the Kin-Kin case wrong time and again, but they never acknowledged that. A magic Trumpian eraser wiped the slate clean as the papers breathlessly announced exciting new developments that contradicted their earlier reporting.
Journalists at the time also had a serious omniscience problem. They were often excellent (if sometimes florid) writers, but this exacerbated their disturbing tendency never to let the facts get in the way of a good story. (One of the most egregious of these fabulists was a young San Francisco reporter named Samuel Clemens; fortunately for world literature, he was fired and, under the name of Mark Twain, went on to put his story-telling skills to better use.) With no code of professional ethics guiding them, no fact-checking and few checks and balances coming from their editors, reporters shot from the hip in ways that would have given even Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson pause. The Kin-Kin case reveals the journalistically lamentable, although often wildly entertaining, consequences that resulted.
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