Word: lonergans
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...attendants, learned counsel, plain loafers and plain prurient goons who infest such scenes beat against the court's doors. Behind the doors was beginning one of the most sensational murder trials in Manhattan's legal history. Justice, as men understand it, was being meted out to Wayne Lonergan, handsome, six-foot, crop-headed Royal Canadian Air Force aircraftman charged with murdering his socialite wife last October...
...obvious last week that Defense Attorney Edward V. Broderick would make some plea of insanity involving homosexuality. Again & again he asked discomfited would-be jurors: "Would you be prejudiced, one way or another, against psychiatric or psychological testimony?" The defense would apparently try to prove: 1) that Lonergan was too unstable to commit premeditated murder; or 2) temporary insanity...
...Stanislaus Cusack, top-notch Brooklyn neuropsychiatrist, who interviewed the patient for an hour and a half last week, emerged to announce: "I have not as yet formulated any opinion." Homosexuality? The avid public, aided by an eager press, did not share Dr. Cusack's clinical restraint. Headlines billed Lonergan as a homosexual who seemed utterly unmoved by his wife's murder...
There was already testimony about his perversion: Assistant District Attorney Jacob Grumet testified that Lonergan confessed (this unsigned confession is now repudiated by the defendant and his lawyers) to homosexual relations, both before and after his marriage. One of the men involved is said to have been William Burton, Lonergan's wife's father. (Broderick has referred to a boy corespondent in Mrs. Burton's 1926 divorce action.) Grumet also quoted Lonergan as saying that he derived "a certain amount" of satisfaction from his married life but that his separation from his wife was the result...
...this fits the classic definition of a homosexual: "One who prefers his own but may accept the opposite sex." To most people Lonergan does not look like a homosexual. Contrary to popular legend, homosexuals are not necessarily physically abnormal, though sometimes a glandular disturbance is involved. As a rule, homosexuals are made, not born. Psychologists W. Norwood East and W. H. Herbert list seduction in childhood as the commonest precipitating cause. Other causes: 1) a tendency to varied and primitive sexual outlets; 2) an inherited tendency. From Lonergan's repudiated confession to the police he would seem to fall...