What are friends for? Miss Rappe and Mrs. Whitehurst

Mrs. Helen Adeline Whitehurst, a witness for Arbuckle at his third trial, has been mentioned here and there in the Spite Work blog. This passage, from the work-in-progress, is a narrative of her testimony on April 3, 1922. She is a “set-up” witness for Arbuckle himself, who will testify two days later. She represents a sketchier witness “type” for the defendant, one of several, who saw Virginia Rappe behaving in ways that resembled her crisis in room 1219 of the St. Francis Hotel on September 5, 1921. In regard to Rappe, Mrs. Whitehurst met her when she was modeling in Atlanta. She even testified that Rappe visited her in the hospital, even though she was abroad. But reporters and lawyers did not have Newspapers.com back then to know that Rappe was getting good press in the latter half of 1913. So, Arbuckle’s lawyers had Mrs. Whitehurst come from Chicago to take the stand, so as to show jury that Rappe had been suffering from abdominal pain, urine retention, and hysteria ever since…