Cincinnati's Celebrity Criminal Defender: Murder, Motive & the Magical Foss Hopkins

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FOUNDATIONS

Criminal defense attorneys are not high on the universal list of lovable creatures. They stand on the side of some of the worst individuals society has to offer and seemingly argue against its helpless victims. Accordingly, they can be perceived as heartless, even immoral, and attempts to humanize them can fall on deaf ears.

Foss was not immune to this stigma. Even while he was described as charismatic, brilliant and talented, during his career, he was cursed at, threatened, insulted and received more than his share of dirty looks because of the job he chose to pursue. To some, his outward appearance was one of a hardnosed, thick-skinned defender of the damned. Given this impression, it may be difficult to picture him in a modest, loving, stable and supportive environment, but that is exactly the kind of background that produced Cincinnati’s most famous and controversial criminal defense attorney.

In fact, Foss was the product of several pioneering southern Ohio families who gave him a solid foundation in life. His ancestors were hardworking, respected people who contributed a great deal to their communities and bequeathed to him a love of family, a strong work ethic and a dedication to service. Foss inherited resourcefulness and tenacity from his family; these vital characteristics served him well in his career.

The first Hopkins family emigrated from Kentucky to Ohio in 1804, just a year after Ohio officially became a state, and settled in Warren County’s south central Hamilton Township, near present-day Maineville. The area had earlier been settled through Revolutionary land warrants issued by the government to individuals for service rendered during the war. The village that became known as Hopkinsville, after the family that settled near it, was founded around 1808. For a time, it was an important place of trade, an election center and a public gathering place. Ohio’s original Hopkins settlers consisted of widower James Hopkins and his sons, John and James, who were natives of Virginia before a nine-year stay in Kentucky. Their mother, Margaret, died in Kentucky before the move. All accounts stress that the Hopkins boys were well educated before they arrived in Ohio and that education was important to the family.

Foss’s great-grandfather Colonel John Hopkins.

John P. Hopkins, Foss’s great-grandfather, was around seventeen years old when the family relocated to Ohio, and he became one of the most well-known and respected citizens in the county. John married Susanna Branstrator on July 20, 1812. Shortly after his marriage, John was called to service in the War of 1812, receiving a special commission from the president as a second lieutenant in charge of a battalion of mounted rangers. During the war, he earned rapid promotions within his battalion to first lieutenant, major and finally colonel, a designation that he would hang on to long after the war, going down in Warren County history as Colonel John Hopkins.

Returning home, John settled down with his wife to start a family—the couple eventually had nine children—and to build a public service career in local, county and state government, beginning with several terms as Warren County sheriff, from 1821 to 1823 and again in 1825. He was an Ohio state representative from 1826 to 1827, a Warren County commissioner from 1837 to 1842 and an Ohio state senator from 1846 to 1848. He was also a justice of the peace and trustee for Hamilton Township. But public service wasn’t his only pursuit; John was also a successful merchant who ran a substantial farm supporting many tenants. His property, valued at $14,000 in 1860, was the largest one around.² When Colonel Hopkins died on March 12, 1875, he left a solid legacy. Memoirs of the Miami Valley quotes a local historian as stating, Political honors came to him unsought. His powers of mind, sound judgment, and practical wisdom gave him the full confidence of Warren County’s citizens.³ Later, similar things would be said about the legal prowess of his great-grandson William Foster Hopkins.

Foss’s father regaled his boys with stories of Colonel John Hopkins’s achievements, connections and gentle nature, and as a result, Foss was particularly proud of his relation to the colonel. Of special note was Colonel Hopkins’s close and personal relationship with General Sam Houston, governor of Tennessee, president of Texas, U.S. senator and name-source of Houston, Texas. According to Foss’s father, Colonel Hopkins and Houston were first cousins. Colonel Hopkins also had brushes with Abraham Lincoln. Before his presidential days, Lincoln stayed with Colonel Hopkins during his travels, and later when Lincoln was president, Foss’s father got a chance to shake his hand when he visited the area once more.

Foss’s grandfather William Gray Hopkins was the third son born to John and Susanna Hopkins in 1823. William married Eleanor Harford (known as Ella), daughter of James and Margaret (Darling) Harford on November 15, 1857, and set up house in the village of Morrow. James Harford, born in Virginia, was a shoemaker, and his wife, Margaret, hailed from Canada. The Harfords lived in nearby Clermont County. Along with his older brother, Huston, William Hopkins ran a dry goods business for many years and, following in his father’s footsteps, entered public service in 1861, working as county treasurer for four years.

Walter Gray Hopkins, Foss’s father, was the only child born to William and Ella. He was born on August 2, 1858. Walter went to work on the Norfolk and Western Railroad on October 25, 1880, starting as a telegrapher and then becoming a fireman and, eventually, a passenger conductor. Unfortunately, his father’s dry goods business turned out to be an economic failure, leaving the family in a delicate financial situation. When William Hopkins died still trying to revive the business in 1885, Walter became the breadwinner and his mother’s supporter. Walter’s vision had been to attend Harvard and become a lawyer, but without the money for higher education, he continued his work on the railroad and eventually built a career that would allow him to support his mother, introduce him to his future wife and raise his family.

Foss’s mother’s family, from whom he inherited his famous nickname, were from hardworking Adams County farming stock. His mother, Lillian Foster, known in the family as Lilly, grew up on a modest farm in Scott Township with her parents, Robert and Susan (Gregg) Foster, and her four sisters. Lilly, born in May 1877, was the baby of the family. Adjacent to the Foster farm was the large property owned by Lilly’s grandparents Samuel and Sarah (Grubb) Gregg, who migrated to Adams County from Virginia just before Susan’s birth in 1836.

Foss’s father, Walter Gray Hopkins, also known as the Governor.

Lilly’s father, Robert Foster, born on May 28, 1830, was the son of Samuel and Elizabeth Foster, another farming family. Samuel was born in Kentucky in 1797, the first of many children born to Samuel and Mary (Powell) Foster, natives of Virginia, who moved the family to a farm in Liberty Township, Adams County around 1815.

Foss valued and respected his family. While he took pride in the memories of his Hopkins ancestors handed down to him by his father, he had a special closeness with his mother’s family. It was the Gregg farm that he remembered with fondness as the place where he would take his mother to visit in later years.

As a railroad conductor, Walter traveled across southern Ohio and consequently developed acquaintances with customers who used the trains as their regular means of transportation. One of those regulars was Lilly Foster. Lilly was nineteen years younger than Walter and fell in love with the dashing, uniformed older man. Walter and Lilly married in 1895 at the Gregg farm in Adams County. After their marriage, they relocated to Hamilton County, purchasing a house on Ivanhoe Avenue in the city of Norwood, Ohio. Walter’s mother, Ella, moved in with them and remained with the family until her death in 1912. Their first son, Robert Gray Hopkins, was born on January 6, 1897. William Foster Hopkins was born two years later on February 28, 1899.

The family didn’t stay in Norwood long but relocated across the river when Foss was around three years old. They purchased a home at 560 Lexington Avenue in Newport, Kentucky. Newport’s history is probably best remembered for its stint as Kentucky’s Sin City, beginning just prior to Prohibition when it was full of speakeasies, brothels, gambling dens and organized crime. What started as a small but profitable slot-machine operation burgeoned into a lucrative enterprise for the small river town, which became the area’s center of vice. Newport’s location on the river, along with its otherwise isolated land position, allowed it to develop autonomously and kept outsiders from interfering in its business. While there were attempts through the years to clean Newport up, the local population was not entirely unsatisfied with its activities considering the economic benefits that vice brought to individuals and the community. It was not until the 1980s that Newport was really out of the influence of its notorious past.

William Foster Hopkins in 1899, age two and a half months.

The Hopkins family settled in Newport on the eve of its conversion from a sleepy little isolated town to the corrupt enterprise that it would become. Foss recalled a wonderful childhood in Newport with loving parents. As he remembered, the Hopkins brothers called their father the Governor because he had the dignity of that title.⁴ Indeed, Walter Hopkins conveyed an air of distinction; at over six feet tall, he was a handsome man with a strong jaw and intelligent eyes. Lilly Hopkins was strong willed and devoted to her husband and her sons. Foss never remembered hearing his parents argue. Foss was a good student at Newport Public Schools, where his grades usually fell between ninety and one hundred, especially in reading and conduct.

Foss got his first exposure to criminal activity as a boy in Newport when his father took him and his brother, Rob, on an excursion to visit the various sites related to the Pearl Bryan murder. The experience had a great deal of influence on his decision to become a lawyer. Pearl Bryan was a young woman from Greencastle, Indiana, who had become involved in a relationship with Cincinnati dental student Scott Jackson in 1895. When their union resulted in an unwanted pregnancy, Jackson convinced Pearl to travel to Cincinnati to secure an abortion. Much of what happened after she arrived is a mystery—and a source of both myth and speculation among locals—to this day. What is certain is that Pearl’s body was found on a farm near Fort Thomas, Kentucky, on February 1, 1896. The discovery of a murdered pregnant woman would have been scandalous on its own, but there was a unique aspect to Pearl’s case that made it especially gruesome—her head was missing. Suspicion soon fell on Jackson and his roommate, fellow dental student Alonzo Walling, both of whom were convicted and hanged together on March 20, 1897. Pearl’s head was never found. The most popular theory as to the fate of Pearl’s head is that Jackson and Walling threw it down a hole in the basement of what is now Bobby Mackey’s Music World. The same story has the two murdering Pearl in the bar’s underground tunnels in a satanic ritual. According to Dan Smith, author of Ghosts of Bobby Mackey’s Music World, there is little evidence to support this. Still, some say that Pearl’s ghost haunts the venue.

Walter Hopkins took his boys to see a kaleidoscope account of the murder and then to the actual sites where Pearl’s headless body was found and where Jackson and Walling were hanged in the courthouse yard. A noose used in their execution was still on display in the courthouse basement. Exactly what aspect of this case influenced Foss to go into criminal law is uncertain, but it is safe to say that the mystery attached to it was a stimulus. The lure of the case prompted him to dig