In the early 1930s, when the Territory of Hawai'i seemed to most Americans to be an idyllic tropical melting pot, the murder of a young Hawaiian by white Southerners revealed a society fraught with racial tension and unspoken boundaries of class and place.
Joseph Kahahawai, the 20-year-old leader of the "School Street gang," was one of five men arrested for the alleged rape of Thalia Massie, the 20-year-old wife of Navy Lt. Thomas Massie.
The Massies were at a party on Sept. 12, 1931, at the Ala Wai Inn, a Waikiki nightclub. But Thalia Massie disappeared for several hours, and when she surfaced — beaten and her jaw broken in two places — she told police she had been forced into a car and raped at Ala Moana Park.
Five men were arrested and subsequently charged after Thalia Massie identified the driver of the car.
Thalia Massie was never named in the city's major newspapers, but the five suspects were, and also were called "thugs," "fiends" and "gangsters."
And the invisible line between the Hawaiian population and the white, Navy newcomers was underscored by news coverage. Thalia Massie was the "cultured" woman victimized by oversexed natives.
The trial lasted nearly a month, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict, despite the fact that there was no evidence Thalia Massie had been raped.
Many of the territory's white residents, and a good deal more on the U.S. Mainland, viewed the outcome as outrageous.
Thalia Massie had come from a privileged family with ties to Alexander Graham Bell and President Theodore Roosevelt. Her husband Thomas, whom she married when she was 16, was raised as a Southern gentleman — and was a graduate of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md., as well.
Thalia Massie's father was a decorated Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider, but it was her mother, Grace Fortescue, who sailed to Hawai'i to defend her honor.
After the mistrial, Fortescue and Thomas Massie kidnapped Kahahawai, intending to get him to confess to rape. They convinced two enlisted sailors to help.
On Jan. 8, 1932, Fortescue and her three accomplices drove two cars to the Honolulu courthouse and forced Kahahawai to come with them to Fortescue's rented Manoa home.
At some point during their interrogation, Kahahawai was fatally shot in the chest. The kidnappers decided to dump Kahahawai's body along the rocky coast near Koko Crater, but were stopped by a police officer.
Fortescue, who was at the wheel of the car, hired the nation's most celebrated defense attorney, Clarence Darrow.
There were lines outside the courthouse to attend the trial, with some territorial high-society figures paying up to $50 to get in.
Thomas Massie took responsibility for Kahahawai's death but insisted he could not recall the actual moment he shot him.
Darrow argued that the aggrieved husband had a temporary bout of insanity, while much of the American public believed the young lieutenant was defending his wife's honor.
Darrow's impassioned closing argument — the last of his career — went on for more than four hours, but it was not enough. The jury found all four defendants guilty of manslaughter.
The conviction carried a mandatory 10 years of hard labor at O'ahu Prison, and while the judge pronounced that sentence, Gov. Lawrence Judd quickly commuted it to one hour.
The Massies and Grace Fortescue left Hawai'i by steamship soon afterward. There was never a retrial in the rape case, and the young couple later divorced.
Thalia Massie committed suicide in Florida in 1963.
