The title may be misleading in that I never knew Claudine Longet, nor anyone who might have known her, nor anyone who… well, you get the picture. It’s just that Longet, a minor French actress and singer who died at age 84, was a signpost in my life.
In 1976, when she first made the front pages of the world’s major papers, I was still coming to terms with life in the West. Having left Russia in 1973, I lived in Houston at the time, still trying to figure out how the West worked.
Miss Longet didn’t come to the world’s attention because of her modest talents. Rather that happened because she shot and killed her lover, the champion skier Spider Sabich. That happened in Aspen, which might as well have been on Mars as far as I was concerned.
I had only a vague notion of the place. All I knew was that Aspen was a Colorado ski resort fancied by celebrities, which is to say by people I had never heard of.
Apparently, both Sabich and Longet qualified as such, although I couldn’t tell them from Adam and Eve, respectively. That gap in my education didn’t survive unfilled for long. The case was the talk of the town. There was no escape, it was in every newspaper or TV newscast and at every dinner party as a topic of incessant gossip.
Thus I couldn’t help finding out that Longet was a divorced wife of the crooner Andy Williams, who was adored by everyone, but unknown to me. Her photos showed she was good-looking, but not sufficiently so to disturb my sleep.
The shooting incident later inspired a song by the Rolling Stones, and there I found myself on firmer ground: I had heard of them and knew they were some kind of rock group. No, of course I had never heard any of their songs, need you ask?
But I did hear that one because the case had piqued my curiosity. “Now only Spider knows for sure,” the song went, “But he ain’t talkin’ about it anymore/ Is he, Claudine?/ There’s blood in the chalet/ And blood in the snow…”.
The song came a couple of years after the event, but the only piece of verse I recall from 1976 was a limerick in National Lampoon: “There once was a girl named Longet/ Who flew into Aspen to stay./ Along came the Spider/ And sat down beside her,/ And she blew the poor f***er away.”
I thought the limerick was quite funny, and I was proud of myself for getting the cultural allusion. But my understanding of Western, specifically American, legality was still too sketchy for me to get my head around the subsequent trial.
The circumstances of the crime seemed fairly straightforward to me. Actually, the Rolling Stones got it wrong: there was indeed blood in the chalet, but not in the snow. Longet shot Sabich point-blank in his bathroom, killing him on the spot and therefore rendering him unable to have one last run on the slopes.
However, because Longet claimed the gun went off by accident, she was only charged with reckless manslaughter, not homicide. Some accident, I thought at the time – and still do.
Any gun owner knows the mantra: don’t point a weapon at anything you don’t intend to shoot. To kill Sabich with such brutal efficiency, Longet had to carry the weapon into the bathroom, which struck me as odd. One doesn’t think of such places as pistol ranges.
Then she had to aim her .22 Luger at Sabich and pull the trigger. Even assuming she didn’t mean to do so, it was still manslaughter, if one with extenuating circumstances. Or so I thought.
Anyway, even the charge of reckless manslaughter called for a stiff sentence, up to 10 years, according to the obituaries. However, Longet claimed she only asked Sabich to teach her how to use the safety-catch. Alas, before he could give her the benefit of his superior expertise, the gun discharged all by itself, with no human agency involved.
Buying that story should have involved not just suspension of disbelief but discounting disbelief even as a remote possibility.
Longet fired her shot from three feet, and the bullet hit Sabich in the stomach. That meant she had to hold the weapon at her waist, pointing at her target. Had she merely wished to ask for a quick lesson in gun handling, wouldn’t she have held the pistol chest high to hand it to Sabich?
The prosecutors asked many such questions, also pointing out that the body’s position on the floor, prone and facing away, didn’t tally with Longet’s story. But the prosecution was hamstrung because much of its evidence was ruled inadmissible.
One such piece of evidence was Longet’s highly explicit diary that the prosecution desperately wanted to present. The document must have suggested malice aforethought, for otherwise the prosecution wouldn’t have been as determined to include the diary as the defence was to exclude it.
But the police seized the journal without a proper warrant, which kept it out of the proceedings. Then Longet’s blood tests showed a high content of alcohol and cocaine, but those tests too were ruled inadmissible because they had been improperly administered.
In the end, the judge told the jury it had the option of convicting Longet of the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide, a misdemeanour. The jury jumped at the chance, and Longet was sentenced to 30 days – no, not years, don’t be silly – and told she could serve it at a time of her choosing.
Such a derisory sentence was largely due to the impeccably sound rhetoric of her co-counsel. Who could resist such arguments as “ she never believed that this tiny little bullet could hurt anybody”?
Unlike artillery shells, all bullets are more or less tiny. Hence, extrapolating from that argument, the claim was that Longet didn’t believe guns could kill. That should have called for lifelong commitment to a facility for the criminally insane.
Anyway, if she didn’t think guns could hurt anyone, what was the point in owning one in the first place? And if she didn’t think a bullet could hurt, didn’t that prove indirectly that she meant to fire it?
But the other argument mentioned in the obituaries was even better: “This is not an inanimate object over here,” orated her co-counsel. “This is a woman who is living, breathing, and suffering. Mentally hold her hand. And ask yourselves: Guilty? Or not guilty?”
Yes, but that living, breathing woman killed her living, breathing lover by firing that tiny inanimate object through his pancreas. So what was the point exactly? Well, whatever it was, that demagoguery carried the day.
When I read about that at the time, I was aghast. I simply couldn’t believe how far the law could veer away from justice. The thought that some procedural mishaps and spurious arguments could get a murderer off the hook was unbearable to me.
Since then I’ve mitigated my position somewhat. It’s good to have a penal system that can not only punish a criminal, but also protect his ancient rights. If cops could seize evidence without due process or, worse still, tamper with it, it’s not only criminals but also ordinary citizens like you and me who’d feel unsafe. Having lived in Russia for 25 years, I can attest to that.
However, reductio ad absurdum could kill even any sound system stone-dead. Pushed to its logical extreme, even the postulates of presumed innocence and reasonable doubt can shatter against the wall of casuistic nitpicking.
Looking at two celebrity trials in the US, those of Longet and OJ Simpson 20 years later, one is bound to lament the law served, but justice abused.
Had I sat on that Aspen jury, I would have replied to the counsel’s question with an unequivocal “guilty as Cain” (or rather his sister that naughty boy later married). But because that trial made me ponder law and justice, the Western concept thereof, I’m grateful to Longet, in an odd sort of way.
Claudine Longet, RIP