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| Sarah Althea Hill |
That old, old story: “Boy meets girl, boy loves girl, boy dumps girl.” Whenever I encounter it, I usually shrug and move on. However, present me with a sequel that says, “Girl takes boy to court, practices voodoo curses, with everything ending in a shootout,” and I start to take an interest in the situation.
During the 1860s, William Sharon was lucky enough to make a tidy fortune from Virginia City, Nevada, silver mines, wealth that he augmented through shrewd investments in California and Nevada railroads and real estate. Before too many years had passed, Sharon was a multimillionaire. In 1875, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. On a darker note, in that same year, Sharon’s business partner William C. Ralston was found floating in the bay off the coast of San Francisco. Ralston had recently suffered catastrophic business losses, which led his death to be ruled a suicide.
Soon after this tragedy, Sharon moved to San Francisco, taking a suite in the Palace Hotel which he had co-owned with Ralston. By this point, Sharon felt he had enough money to ignore business and devote himself to pleasure. The personable widower became one of the city’s most notorious womanizers and general men-about-town.
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| William Sharon |
At some point in his social whirl, Sharon met Sarah Althea Hill, a beautiful Southern socialite. Although she had inherited a handsome fortune from her rich father, it did not take her long to squander it on San Francisco’s many opportunities to enjoy the high life. When a pretty, pleasure-loving woman in need of cash meets an older, stinking rich man with an eye for the ladies, it is not hard to guess what usually happens next. Sarah soon became Senator Sharon’s maĆ®tresse-en-titre. Sarah was gifted with luxurious clothes, exquisite jewelry, and access to the most elite circles in California. Sharon often introduced her to acquaintances as “my little wife.”
This last habit of Sharon’s was to get him into a good deal of trouble. After three years together, Sarah found out that Sharon was cheating on her, and indignantly filed for divorce. How could she do that if they were not married, you ask? It’s simple: Sarah presented the court with a handwritten marriage contract, dated August 25, 1880, that she claimed Sharon had dictated to her. Although the bulk of the document was in her handwriting, Sharon’s signature was at the bottom. She also produced a number of letters Sharon had written to her where he addressed her as “My Dear Wife.” Sharon countered with the claim that the letters and his signature on the marriage contract were all forgeries, and the lawyers were off to the races.
The “Sharon v. Hill” trial opened in 1884. Sordid brawls between wealthy and glamorous elites are always catnip for the public, and the newspapers had an excellent time giving readers every embarrassing detail about the legal battles between the former lovers. The courtroom arguments went on for years. Sharon’s lawyers declared that not only had Sarah forged all the relevant papers, but her whole story about their irregular “marriage” was a giant fantasy. Unfortunately for the Senator, Sarah was able to present a parade of witnesses testifying that on numerous occasions, he had referred to her as “Mrs. Sharon.”
Despite the fact that Sarah had a plausible case, she had a hard time finding lawyers willing to fight a wealthy and influential man. Enter David S. Terry, an attorney bold--or, perhaps, insane--enough to do just that.
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| David Terry |
Terry, a former justice of the California Supreme Court, was, to put it most politely, not a man who feared trouble. In 1856, he stabbed a member of a vigilante group. Even more notoriously, in 1859 he fought a duel with California Senator David Broderick over the issue of slavery. Terry had wanted the state’s Southern Democrats to be allowed to own slaves, while Broderick advocated for California to remain antislavery. The two men were so bitterly opposed on the issue that they finally resorted to pistols at dawn. The duel left Broderick fatally wounded. Many believed that his pistol had been secretly disabled in order for Terry to win an unfair fight. Ironically for Terry and his pro-slavery allies, the public wrath over the allegedly rigged duel did much to ensure that California remained a free state.
Terry won the case for Sarah. Although their relations had started as strictly attorney/client, by the time the trial was over, the pair had fallen in love. In the meantime, Sharon--who had announced that he would sooner throw everything he had into San Francisco Bay than give another nickel of it to Sarah--prepared to contest the court’s decision.
As a side note, when I was reading about this case, you can imagine how delighted I was to encounter the name of my old pal Mary Ellen Pleasant, a woman who clearly attracted dysfunctional relationships the way a magnet attracts iron filings. Sarah and Mary Ellen were long-time friends. Pleasant bankrolled Sarah's lawsuit, and appeared in court with her nearly every day. The newspapers enjoyed spreading assertions that San Francisco’s notorious “Voodoo Queen” had also been providing more unorthodox legal assistance in the form of various unpleasant-sounding spells and rituals. Sarah denied most of the more lurid details, but she did finally have to admit to bribing a gravedigger to bury a pair of Sharon’s socks in a freshly-dug grave. Apparently, once the socks rotted, the Senator would die. Everyone laughed at this story…until Sharon suddenly and unexpectedly dropped dead not long afterwards.
So.
Sarah and Terry married just weeks after Sharon was socked, so to speak. Meanwhile, the late Senator’s appeal of the case carried on. Justice Stephen Johnson Fields of San Francisco’s U.S. Circuit Court eventually overturned the lower courts’ ruling. Fields, blithely ignoring the fact that several handwriting experts had testified that Sharon’s signature on the “marriage contract” was genuine, took it upon himself to declare that it was a forgery. After Sharon had died, Sarah had produced a will she claimed he had written, in which he left everything to her. Not surprisingly, Fields said that was fraudulent, as well.
Sarah did not take the ruling well. When Fields’ verdict was read in the courthouse, she stood up, yelled some very unladylike epithets at the judge, and wailed that Fields had been bribed by Sharon’s son. She opened her purse, and reached for the revolver she always carried with her. When security guards began hustling the outraged woman from the room, Terry pulled out a knife and ordered the guards to release his wife. He hit one of them, knocking out a tooth. This bit of misplaced gallantry got Terry arrested and imprisoned for six months. Sarah got thirty days for contempt of court. Later, the pair’s courtroom antics also caused them to be indicted by a federal grand jury. The California Supreme Court upheld Fields’ verdict, also stating that Sarah and Sharon had never been legally married.
After their release from prison, Mr. and Mrs. Terry retreated to their Fresno ranch in apparent defeat. However, the tragedies were just getting started. On the morning of August 14, 1889, the couple boarded a train in Fresno. Through a stroke of appallingly bad luck, Justice Fields happened to be on that same train, accompanied by Marshal David Neagle, whom the court had appointed as Fields’ bodyguard. At 7 am, the train paused in Lathrop, and the passengers disembarked to eat breakfast at the railroad station’s dining room.
When Sarah and her husband entered the dining room, they immediately spotted Fields. Sarah dashed back to the train, apparently to get her trusty revolver. Meanwhile, Terry menacingly approached Fields from behind, raising his hand to slap the justice. Neagle stood up and yelled, “Stop that! I am an officer!” Neagle then drew his gun and shot Terry through the heart. He died almost instantly.
Neagle was arrested at the scene, but was soon released thanks to a writ of habeas corpus. The courts eventually ruled his actions had been within the scope of his authority as a Marshal.
After Terry’s shocking death, Sarah--who does not seem to have been the most stable personality even at the best of times--went completely to pieces. She became obsessed with hiring mediums in an effort to contact her dead husband. She took to aimlessly wandering the San Francisco streets, convinced that she was being hypnotically attacked. There were periods when she would physically assault anyone within range. Finally, Mary Ellen Pleasant--one of the very few people who had stuck by Sarah--felt she had no choice but to have her friend committed. After a brief hearing in front of the Insanity Commission, where she was diagnosed with “dementia praecox” (what we now call “schizophrenia,”) 41-year-old Sarah was committed to the Stockton State Hospital on March 11, 1892. It would be her home for the rest of her long life.
During her first few years in the institution, Sarah was often so violent that she had to be restrained, but she eventually settled down, buoyed by the delusion that the hospital was her grand mansion, and the staff and other patients were her servants. She died of pneumonia at the age of 86, on February 14, 1937. Compared to Sarah’s fate, the two men in her life got off pretty easily.