Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
[I]f not for a rash decision by a desperate man on a road in Colchester, Vermont’s first female lieutenant governor might have been Madeleine Kunin. Instead, that honor fell to Consuelo Northrop Bailey.
That Bailey attained statewide office is partly thanks — if that’s the word — to the actions of Walter Mason. Mason was a two-bit criminal until one night near Malletts Bay when he suddenly turned violent. Bailey was the prosecutor who helped put him away and in so doing gained statewide recognition.
Bailey understood the importance of the case to the trajectory of her career. In fact, she began her 1976 autobiography, “Leaves Before the Wind,” with a retelling of the events surrounding it. But her account was short on specifics. Newspaper coverage of the day gave a more detailed and colorful picture of what happened.
Mason’s and Bailey’s lives began to intersect shortly after he was pulled over by U.S. Customs agents on Oct. 7, 1926. Mason was in trouble deep. He knew he was probably headed to prison. Where he had been trying to head was home, in Fort Ann, New York, after a brief visit to Bedford, Quebec.
Mason had made the run eight times before without incident. This time, Mason drove his car across the U.S.-Canadian border accompanied by 19-year-old Alpha White, who was riding a motorcycle with a sidecar. White, who was related to Mason’s wife, didn’t have a motorcycle license, or an automobile license for that matter, but that was the least of their concerns. The men had visited Canada to load as much beer into their vehicles as possible — 14 cases of Frontenac — and transport it back to the United States.
This was the midst of Prohibition, and smuggling could earn the smuggler some much-needed cash. Leaving Bedford at about 9 p.m., the men headed south into Vermont. Waiting for them were U.S. Customs agents Edward Webb and Murray Tucker. The agents were off duty. They had been in Burlington seeing a show and were on their way north to Webb’s home in St. Albans. Though they weren’t on duty, the agents decided to patrol the road north of Sunderland Hollow in Colchester. They pulled their car off the road, leaving the headlights shining across the highway, and waited.
Soon they watched a motorcycle pass, followed by a muddy car with New York plates. The car’s out-of-state plates and high speed raised their suspicions. The agents pulled out and soon caught up with the vehicle, signaling Mason to stop. He refused. So they pulled their car in front and zigzagged across the road on an uphill section until Mason’s car stalled.
The agents ordered Mason out of the car. Tucker searched the vehicle, quickly discovering a cache of beer in a secret compartment under the front seat. Webb grabbed Mason to stop him from fleeing. Mason struggled and Webb called to Tucker for help. Tucker struck Mason on the head as hard as he could with his flashlight. But the blow didn’t drop Mason, who drew a revolver from his pants pocket and fired twice. One shot struck Tucker in the hand; the other hit Webb in the stomach at point-blank range.
In the commotion, Mason jumped back into his car and drove off, soon catching up to White. He told White to ditch the motorcycle — White would later claim it had been stolen from his home — and climb into the car. His head throbbing from the flashlight blow, Mason drove as far as Burlington, before telling White to drive the rest of the way home.
Back in Colchester, Webb lay bleeding beside the road. A friend arrived and took the agent to Mary Fletcher Hospital in Burlington. The next morning, while Mason and White were delivering the beer to buyers around their hometown, Webb died. Police quickly found the motorcycle and traced its plates to Mason, who was arrested that day and taken to the Chittenden County Jail in Burlington. Mason, it turned out, was on parole. His last crime hadn’t been violent. He’d been serving time for bigamy. White was identified as Mason’s beer-running accomplice and was soon persuaded to testify against him.
The trial started with amazing speed. Scarcely a month after the incident, attorneys were offering their opening arguments before a jury made up entirely of farmers. The case was being tried by Attorney General J. Ward Carver and Bailey, who was city grand juror, which meant that she could try cases in Burlington.
Normally, the state’s attorney for Chittenden County, Ezra Horton, would have handled the case. But he was out of town, still suffering from the strain of losing his re-election bid, Bailey wrote in her autobiography. In September, Horton had lost the Republican primary to Bailey. That he had lost to a challenger still in her 20s was bad enough. That she was a woman was more than Horton could bear, Bailey wrote. “In his absence, fortune smiled on me and I was able to help with the Mason case,” she wrote. “I was most fortunate!”
The trial was front-page news in the state’s newspapers and also made the papers throughout New England and eastern New York. Carver insisted she take a prominent role in the proceedings. This was her first case in Superior Court and, in fact, was the first Vermont murder case ever prosecuted by a woman.
Bailey knew this was her chance, and she prepared diligently. She typed out every word of her opening statement and wrote out a shorthand version as well.
The defense didn’t deny that Mason had pulled the trigger, but argued he had done so in self-defense. His lawyer argued that Mason had fired his Remington revolver because he thought he was being attacked by unknown assailants, not arrested by Customs officials. So Bailey’s main job was to prove that Webb and Tucker had worn their Customs badges and hats and had identified themselves.
Most witnesses, though not all, testified that they had seen both the badges and hats. The jury was persuaded of Mason’s guilt but unsure how to punish him. Carver told the jury that “if you find that his conduct warrants putting him in the electric chair, you will have done your duty.” Some of the jury accepted Carver’s reasoning, but others wanted to sentence Mason to life in prison. After 40 hours of deliberation, the judge declared the jury stalemated and accepted Carver’s request for a new trial.
Four days later, a new trial began. This time, the jury agreed to convict Mason of second-degree murder and sent him away to the state prison in Windsor for a quarter of a century. Years later, in her autobiography, Bailey wrote: “The Mason case was a real help to me.” She had gained trial experience in working with the attorney general. But more important to her career, she wrote, “I also gained in public confidence.”
Bailey’s court victory helped propel her political career. For the next four decades, she was an important player in state and national Republican politics. She served one term in the Vermont State Senate before moving to Washington to work as executive secretary to U.S. Sen. Ernest Gibson of Vermont. During that time, she became an officer of the Vermont Republican State Committee and for 40 years represented the state on the Republican National Committee.
After returning to Vermont, Bailey won election to the state House of Representatives and was elected speaker of the Vermont House in 1953, the first woman to hold the position. The following year, she was elected lieutenant governor of Vermont, also becoming the first woman to hold that post.
Bailey never tried to become Vermont’s first woman to serve as governor. Indeed, having attained the state’s second-highest office, Bailey left after only one term to care for her husband, who was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. But if she had run for governor, only a fool would have counted her out. During her career, Bailey ran for office 24 times, and never lost.
