Note: This article, by Ron Roizen, was published in the Shoshone News-Press on October 14, 2016. (For more on the Rossi murder, see here.)
Today, October 14, 2016, marks the 100th anniversary of Herman J. Rossi’s acquittal, by a jury of his peers, for the murder of his wife’s alleged lover.
Rossi had shot Clarence “Gabe” Dahlquist three-and-a-half months earlier, on the evening of June 30, 1916. The incident occurred in the lobby of the Samuels Hotel, in downtown Wallace, then a booming mining town.
Earlier that same day, Rossi had returned to Wallace from a politics-related trip to Boise. He’d gone to his office to catch up on work obligations. Then, later in the afternoon, he’d returned home to find his wife, Mabel (nee Price) Rossi, at home in a disheveled state in their bedroom. On pressing the matter with both his wife and the maid he employed, Ruth Melville, a very angry Rossi discovered that Mabel had spent much of the past three days (and nights) partying with Clarence Dahlquist, a popular local musician. The frame of their brass bedstead was “bent down” and Mrs. Rossi had telltale bruises on her neck. Mabel protested that if anything had happened between Dahlquist and herself it was because she was drunk.
Herman J. Rossi was a widely respected businessman and a former mayor – incidentally, he’d be elected mayor twice again in years following the trial as well.
From home, Rossi marched down to the Samuel’s, where he shot Dahlquist a single time and then warned the wounded man to leave Wallace immediately.
First reports were uncertain about the victim’s condition. Dahlquist had been taken to Providence Hospital and was initially reported as “resting easily” after the shooting. But the victim died the following day, July 1.
Newspaper reporters also didn’t know quite what to make of the shooting itself. What had occasioned it? Rossi would give no statement to the press. Rumors circulated however that “family troubles,” as it was courteously put, lay behind the behind the shocking incident.
It was only in October, with the commencement of Rossi’s trail at Shoshone County’s courthouse in Wallace, that a clearer picture of the reasons for Rossi’s grave and violent act would emerge.
Then, like a photographic image slowly taking shape in the developer solution, the crime’s intimate history began to take form. Necessity, in this case, became the parent of revelation. Herman Rossi needed to tell his story as fully and effectively as possible in order to defend himself at his trial.
The shooting event itself was simple enough. A number of witnesses at Samuels Hotel’s lobby described it more or less the same way.
Beyond the interpersonal drama at hand, the accounts offered by the players in these events revealed and reflected a great deal about the tenor of the times and about the culture the players inhabited, both in lonely little Wallace and across a wider American cultural landscape.
Herman J. Rossi was a man fashioned after Teddy Roosevelt’s ideal of virile and uber-manly manhood.
Mabel Price Rossi, in sharp contrast, might have been ripped from the tear-jerking pages of a contemporary temperance novel. Mr. Rossi struggled for years to keep young Mabel sober and free her from the grip of her “drink” habit. Mrs. Rossi, on the other hand, played out the part of an ingénue bride brought low by the fast crowd her marriage to a socially superior mate exposed her to.
If Herman Rossi was T.R.’s manhood incarnate, then Mabel Rossi was Mary Pickford, brow cast downward because her upwardly mobile marriage had thrown her into John Barleycorn’s tight embrace.
Here, then, was a gripping western melodrama very much of the times.
The jury would acquit him in “less than 20 minutes,” on grounds of temporary insanity.
On hearing the verdict read out, the packed courtroom exploded in “deafening” cheers and applause; Rossi triumphantly slammed the tabletop in front of him with a heavy hand.
Soon thereafter, with the ink on Rossi’s not guilty verdict still only barely dry, Herman Rossi sued Mabel Rossi for divorce, citing immorality and habitual intemperance. Mabel, on the other hand, declared her intention to fight the divorce by filing a countersuit.
She claimed, among other things, that her husband was the one responsible for her downfall.
The subsequent struggle between husband and wife would bring out into the open two strikingly different pictures of the events leading up to the Clarence Dahlquist’s tragic murder.
