Kate Soffel's Life of Crime: A Gendered Journey from Warden's Wife to Criminal Actress

Abstract

Kate Soffel's Life of CrimeA Gendered Journey from Warden's Wife to Criminal Actress Kristi Good (bio) Many residents of Pittsburgh are well acquainted with the story of the "Biddle Boys," Edward and John (Ed and Jack), who escaped from the Allegheny County Jail in winter 1902, with the help of the warden's wife, Kate Soffel. Their escape from the city and the ensuing horse-drawn sleigh chase across the snowy roads of Butler County thrilled newspaper readers across the country. The final confrontation between law enforcement and the "desperadoes," as journalists characterized them, was a bloody shoot-out that left the Biddles and Soffel on the brink of death. Soffel survived, but the public's excitement about her role in these events waned much more quickly than did their enthusiasm for the event itself. In Medea's Daughters: Forming and Performing the Woman Who Kills, Jennifer Jones posits, "Idealized 'woman' has traditionally been constructed as self-sacrificing, passive, and nurturing; therefore, when actual women become violent, some sense must be made of their actions if the myth of feminine passivity is to be maintained."1 Jones cites as a major influence the work of Ann Jones, who, in her book Women Who Kill, analyzed how various historical murder trials have perpetuated the subordination of women. Jones builds on this feminist analysis by exploring the dramatic texts that spring from these criminal events and legal proceedings and argues that dramatic representations of female criminality serve as similar historical documentation to "contain and control cultural anxiety" regarding the abnormality of the criminal woman.2 The jailbreak itself was a public spectacle that held the interest of the American people from coast to coast, and a popular true-crime melodrama [End Page 53] by Theodore Kremer quickly followed the newspaper headlines. A Desperate Chance detailed the sensational events of the Biddle jailbreak and debuted in the same year as the escape. Kremer's play functions as Jones suggests: a morality play that warns women of "the dangers of self-determination" and encourages them to "embrace their submissive status."3 But Kremer wrote his play before Soffel served her jail time, and her determination to cultivate a public life for herself post incarceration was not consistent with the narrative of passive femininity that the media, the courts, and Kremer had constructed to assure society that this unnatural, criminal woman was no longer a moral threat. While A Desperate Chance played across the country for years following the crime, Soffel's attempt to reclaim her life through a career in the theatre was met with opposition, particularly in her home region. This article serves as an act of feminist reclamation by documenting Soffel's involvement with the Biddles as well as her attempt to reenter society, a period heretofore unexamined in her life, and intervenes in the current historical narrative by painting her as a model not of submissive femininity but of feminist subversion. Peter Soffel and Kate Dietrich were married in the German Evangelical Protestant Church in Pittsburgh on December 9, 1886.4 They started a family within the first years of marriage and had four children. Aside from her duties as a mother, Soffel regularly ministered to men incarcerated at the Allegheny County Jail, where her husband was the warden. This was how she came into contact with Ed and Jack Biddle in 1901, as they sat waiting for their execution dates. The Biddles were sentenced to execution for fatally shooting a Mount Washington grocer named Thomas Kahney during a robbery in April 1901. Police profiled the Biddles and an accomplice named Walter Dorman, who were understood to be members of a group of robbers known as the Chloroform Gang. The day following the shooting in Mount Washington, police arrested Dorman and his common-law wife, Jennie Seebers, at their residence. At another house nearby, authorities arrested Jack Biddle on the ground floor before a shoot-out began upstairs. By the end of the skirmish, a police officer was killed, Ed Biddle was in custody but close to death, and a woman named Jessie Bodyne was arrested while trying to flee.5 The Biddles were the only two of...