The Detective Who Discovered HE Was the Murderer: Historic Sleepwalking Cases

17. An Unexpected Twist

Initial investigators thought it was odd that the victim had not been robbed, and nothing pointed to any reason, motive, or suspect. Little did Ledru know at the time just how odd the murder investigation would turn out. When he went to the beach to investigate the crime scene, Ledru noticed footprints that led up to and away from the corpse. After he examined them, he seemed troubled, and remarked that they looked familiar. He ordered plaster casts made of the clearest footprints. When that was done, he sat right there on the beach, and looked at the plaster cast footprints for hours. Finally, he got up and told the gathered gendarmes that there was no need for further investigation, as he had solved the crime and found the killer. There was a bizarre twist, however: the killer was none other than Ledru himself.

16. Ledru’s Bosses Refused to Believe His Confession at First

Ledru told the stunned listeners, he had no memory of shooting the victim. However, one of the footprints had a missing big toe and matched that of Ledru’s, who was missing a big toe. There was also an empty chamber in his revolver, which was always kept fully loaded. Finally, there were the wet shoes and socks he woke with that morning. From all the preceding, Ledru concluded that he had been sleepwalking on the beach that night, when he encountered and shot the victim. When they heard Detective Ledru’s confession to murder, the Le Havre police were skeptical at first. His bosses back in Paris thought that their star detective must have suffered a temporary mental crisis, caused by overwork and stress that made him imagine himself a killer. They soon discovered that their golden boy was, once again, spot on.

15. The Sleepwalking Killer Cop

Ballistics testing proved beyond a doubt that the bullet recovered at the crime scene had, indeed, been fired from Ledru’s revolver. That solved the crime, but it did not explain why Ledru did it. He was jailed for his own good, and kept under constant watch. While in prison, the authorities, acted upon medical advice to test a theory that might explain how and why Ledru murdered the unfortunate Andre Monet. They gave the distraught detective a revolver loaded with blanks. One night, Ledru got up and fired it at a guard. That convinced the authorities that he was a homicidal sleepwalker. From that day until his death fifty years later in 1937, Ledru was kept in a secluded farm outside Paris, where he was watched over by doctors and armed personnel.

14. The Mother Who Killed Her Daughter in an Attempt to Save Her From Imaginary North Korean Soldiers

In 1950, Ivy Cogdon was a fifty-year-old mother from a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, who suffered from various nervous complaints. Among other things, she was afflicted with night terrors. Although unwell, few could have predicted Cogdon’s macabre acts on August 11^th of that year. In the dead of night, with an ax in hand, she entered the room of her nineteen-year-old daughter, Patricia, and smashed her skull. When police arrived, Cogdon admitted what she had done, and was duly arrested and charged with murder. In her defense, Cogdon claimed that she was sleepwalking when she left her bedroom. While in that somnambulistic state, she thought that North Korean soldiers had invaded her suburban home and were attacking her daughter. So she grabbed an ax, and rushed to her daughter’s defense. As she swung at the imaginary North Korean soldiers to fend them off, Ivy killed her daughter, instead.

13. The Korean War as Background to a Family Tragedy Thousands of Miles Away

As Ivy Cogdon told detectives: “I dreamt the [Korean] war was all around the house. I heard Pat screaming and rushed into her room, it was full of soldiers. I hit at them. I remember hitting the bed. Oh Pat, I don’t want to live now“. Cogdon’s actions were weird, but her fears were not unusual in 1950 Australia, gripped at the time with borderline public panic and hysteria about Asians and Asian communists. The country was only five years removed from World War II, when it had been threatened by a Japanese invasion. More recently, Mao’s communists had won control of China, and only two months earlier, the North Koreans had sparked the Korean War when they crossed the 38^th parallel to invade South Korea. Cogdon pled not guilty on grounds that she was sleepwalking at the time and unaware of her actions.

12. Exaggerated Fears of North Korean Soldiers

At a coroner’s inquest, a psychiatrist testified that he thought Ivy Cogdon was a somnambulist, or sleepwalker. As described by other doctors who had treated her before she killed her daughter, Cogdon’s medical history included powerful night terrors. She had been described as a “hysterical type” prone to blackouts and somnambulism. Their conclusion was that Mrs. Cogdon would not have known what she was doing when she killed her daughter. At trial, Cogdon testified that of her many fears, her greatest was of the recently started Korean War, and that she was obsessed with how to protect her family if North Korean soldiers invaded. She was particularly worried that the invaders would “pollute” her daughter. On the night of the homicide, those fears were exacerbated and made more vivid when her daughter told her that she would volunteer as a transport driver if the Koreans invaded Australia.

11. An Assurance That Only Enhanced Fears

As Ivy Cogdon lay in her bed, wrapped in worries, her daughter tried to calm down and assure her: “Mummy, don’t be silly worrying about the war. It is not at your front door“. That attempted reassurance only worsened matters, and made Mrs. Cogdon imagine what would happen if the war actually did come to her front door – and crossed the threshold. Based on the medical evidence, Mrs. Cogdon’s mental history, and testimony by family and friends that she had been a loving mother, devoted to her daughter, she was acquitted. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty on grounds that she was unaware of her actions at the time, and thus not responsible for their consequences. The case, Regina v. Cogdon, made legal history as the first successful use of sleepwalking or somnambulism as a defense in Australia.

10. America’s Juiciest Nineteenth Century Society Scandal

The 1840s’ juiciest American upper class scandal revolved around a New England blueblood rich kid, a prostitute, and murder. In his early twenties Albert Jackson Tirrell, scion of a wealthy Weymouth, Massachusetts, family, shocked society when he left his wife and two children to be with Maria Bickford, a married prostitute living in a Boston brothel. Tirrell fell in love with Mrs. Bickford, who seemed to return the affection. However, that did not stop her from continuing her profession. That state of affairs did not sit well with Tirrell, and was a constant bone of contention throughout the relationship. The result was an even bigger scandal that left the earlier one in the dust. On the night of October 27^th, 1845, loud noises were heard from Bickford’s brothel room. The owner awoke to the smell of smoke and discovered that somebody had set three fires in his establishment.

9. The Fugitive Scion

After he doused the flames, the brothel owner entered Mrs. Bickford’s room and discovered that she had been brutally murdered, savagely beaten and with her throat slit from ear to ear with a razor. Suspicion immediately fell upon Albert Tirrell. He was the last person known to have seen the victim alive, per multiple witnesses, who saw him enter Bickford’s room that evening after her last customer had left. A bloody razor was found near the body, along with pieces of Tirrell’s clothes and broken-off sections of a distinctive cane known to belong to him. Police immediately began a search for the suspect. However, he had fled, having last been spotted bargaining with a livery stable keeper, reportedly saying that he was “in a scrape” and needed to get away.

8. An Innovative Defense

Albert Tirrell was eventually tracked down to New Orleans, where he was arrested on December 6^th and extradited to Massachusetts. The rich kid murder scandal quickly became a local and national sensation that had it all. There was adultery, the class divide briefly bridged between a scion of a wealthy and respectable family who abandoned his wife and children for a prostitute, capped off with a gruesome murder, nationwide manhunt, arrest, and trial. Tirrell’s parents hired Rufus Choate, a former US Senator and respected Boston lawyer known for his creative defense strategies. At Tirrell’s trial, prosecutors called in numerous witnesses who established strong circumstantial evidence that the rich scion was the murderer. The defendant’s lawyer, emphasized that the evidence was circumstantial and that nobody had seen Tirrell actually murder the victim. He then built his defense on the then-innovative sleepwalking defense.

7. America’s First Sleepwalking Defense

Rufus Choate argued that Albert Tirrell was a chronic sleepwalker. If he had actually killed Mrs. Bickford, then he must have done so while in a somnambulistic state. As such, he would have been unaware of his actions and so could not be held legally responsible. Defense witnesses testified that they had spoken with Tirrell on the morning of the murder, and that he seemed to have been in a trance, sounding weird and appearing “in a strange state, as if asleep, or crazy“. One witness testified that he had spoken with Tirrell when the defendant arrived in his hometown of Weymouth, claiming to be fleeing from an adultery indictment. When the witness told Tirrell that Maria Bickford had been brutally murdered, the defendant seemed genuinely shocked. As seen below, Choate also attacked the victim and her character.

6. Attacking the Victim’s Character to Acquit Her Killer

Rufus Choate argued that Maria Bickford could have committed suicide after she ensnared the hitherto innocent Tirrell with her charms, and seduced him away from his wife and children. As Choate pointed out, it was common for prostitutes to kill themselves in disgust and despair over their lifestyle and profession. An implied but unstated subtext to the argument pitched by Tirrell’s lawyer was that “fallen women” such as Maria Bickford might be better off dead, anyhow. That resonated with the jurors’ cultural mores. At a time of disquiet over the recent proliferation of “fallen women” handing their cards to passersby on city streets, it was easy to convince them that the victim was as morally culpable as her murderer. After Choate delivered a six-hour closing argument, the jury retired to deliberate.

5. A Successful Defense

The jury returned two hours later with a not guilty verdict on grounds that Albert Tirrell was unaware of his actions at the time of the killing. As such, the defendant was not legally responsible for what he had done. In the years after the Tirrell trial, other defendants were acquitted of crimes based on the sleepwalking defense pioneered – at least in the United States – by defense lawyer Rufus Choate. Ironically, it now seems that America’s first successful sleepwalking defense might have been a sham.

4. Was America’s First Successful Sleepwalking Defense a Miscarriage of Justice?

People in a somnambulistic state are capable of complex actions. However, Albert Tirrell’s failed attempts to set fire to the brothel after the murder demonstrate that he tried to destroy evidence of his crime and cover his tracks. Such actions indicate that he was well aware of his actions and their consequences. However, sleepwalkers do not try to destroy evidence of their crimes while sleepwalking. Tirrell was probably guilty of the murder of Maria Bickford. He was almost certainly guilty of the attempted arson of the brothel and the consequent attempted murder of its occupants, or at least the reckless endangerment of their lives. Today, it is highly unlikely that a defendant in similar circumstances would get away with a sleepwalking defense.

3. Nagging and the Sleepwalking Defense

The marriage of Steven Steinberg of Scottsdale, Arizona, and his wife Elena, came to a violent end in 1981: he stabbed her twenty six times with a kitchen knife, as she cried out for her children. He initially tried to blame it on burglars and a home invasion gone wrong. When police investigators debunked that possibility, he confessed that he killed her. However, he claimed to have done it while sleepwalking, a condition caused by excessive stress from his wife’s constant nagging for money. In the subsequent trial in Maricopa County’s Courthouse, the prosecutors put all their eggs in one basket and made a case for premeditated murder. In hindsight, the prosecutors’ failure to hedge their bets and add some more charges as alternates turned out to be a mistake. Steinberg’s attorney, who specialized in insanity defenses, made a case for not guilty by reason of insanity.

2. A Long Shot That the Jury Bought

Steven Steinberg’s defense was helped by evidence of sloppiness and incompetence on the part of the Scottsdale police in their investigation. Steven himself testified that he was unaware of the homicide at the time, that he was asleep when it took place, and so it must have happened while he was sleepwalking. The defense brought in a psychiatrist as an expert witness, who testified that Steinberg killed his wife in the midst of a dissociative reaction. As such, the defendant’s lawyers argued, he could not have been aware of what he was doing at the time. Steven himself was a presentable person who came across as a nice guy. After their deliberations, the jury returned its verdict. They found that the defendant was not guilty on grounds that he had suffered from temporary insanity when he killed his wife.

1. A Travesty of Justice That Led to Law Changes

Steven Steinberg’s insanity was only temporary: he was sane at the time of the acquittal. So the defendant walked out of court a free man. In the trial’s aftermath, Arizona changed its insanity defense laws. Judges were thenceforth required to impose a “guilty but insane” sentence in temporary insanity scenarios such as that of the Steinberg case. Criminal defendants who are found guilty but insane nowadays would have to go to a mental institute. There, they might be interred for as long as if they had been sentenced to prison.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Frondorf, Shirley – Death of a Jewish American Princess: The True Story of a Victim on Trial (1988)

Herald Sun, January 1^st, 2014 – Night Terrors: The Sleepwalking Murder of Patricia Cogdon, From Emily Webb’s Murder in Suburbia

History Collection – Vigilante Justice and the Small Town Bully: A Crime That Shocked America

Knappman, Edward W., et al. – Great American Trials (1994)

Law Buzz – Sleepwalking: A Defense to Murder First Used in 1846

Look and Learn – Chief Inspector Ledru, the Policeman Who Caught … Himself

Madera Tribune, December 20th, 1950 – Sleepwalker Freed on Murder Charge by Australia Jury

New York Times, October 9^th, 1988 – The Defense Pleaded Nagging

Oughton, Frederick – The Two Lives of Robert Ledru: An Interpretative Biography of a Man Possessed (1963)

Smithsonian Magazine, April 30^th, 2012 – The Case of the Sleepwalking Killer