The press showed a joyous cruelty in covering the scandal.
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The tragic, twisting story of the killing of a nurse named Vada Martin in a parked car on a street corner in San Francisco could be lifted straight out of a film noir. But the killing, the imprisonment and the suicide that left three children parentless may not be the most interesting thing about the melodrama that dominated headlines. It was the fury of the press toward a perceived feminine emotion, which they believed should be forever banished from the human heart: jealousy.
Vada Martin was a 38-year-old nurse, married to a Navy officer stationed overseas in 1945, and living in the Tenderloin. Martin worked at the Central Emergency Hospital alongside Dr. Mansfeldt. On Oct. 4, Mansfeldt called Martin and asked to meet with her to hash things out. Martin agreed and climbed into Mansfeldt’s parked car on the corner for Geary and Leavenworth.
A steward at the front desk recalled Mansfeldt entering the lobby, placing the revolver gently on the desk and saying, “There’s a dying woman in my car … I killed her.” Next to Hallinan, Mansfeldt’s appearance in court was almost as dramatic as the tragedy that had unfolded on the corner of Geary and Leavenworth seven weeks earlier. She spent hours staring into space in a “trance-like stupor.” At moments she gnawed on the arm of her chair with her teeth, at others shrieked at the ceiling. On the fifth day of her murder trial she fainted, smashing her head on the table and slipping off her chair, before being carried out of the courtroom to be resuscitated.
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