James Emmett Thompson

The Sharon Trials James Emmett Thompson

Sarah Althea Hill was a real beauty, a buxom, slender strawberry blonde with an engaging smile who broke upon the San Francisco social scene in the 1870s as a fascinatingly beautiful, witty, and intelligent young Southern lady of good family, possessed of moderate wealth, a woman readily welcomed into the city's best social circles. But Allie, as she preferred to be called, was also something of a rebel, chafing under the rigid role prescribed for ladies in the Victorian age. She desperately wanted to enjoy a luxurious life style without sacrificing her precious maidenly "honor" or her social position. By 1880, she had impulsively spent her family "fortune" and run out of money. She allowed herself to be lured into a sordid relationship with aging United States Senator William Sharon of Nevada, who happened to be San Francisco's richest man. When their relationship soured the following year, he threw her out on the street. Basing her claim on a scrap of paper which she claimed was a contract for a secret marriage, she had "the dear Senator" arrested for adultery, then sued him in state court for a divorce and a share of his vast fortune. He, in turn made a preemptive legal strike, suing her in federal court to have her marriage contract declared a forgery and threatened to have her sent to San Quentin as a forger and a perjurer. This is the story of the two trials in which she and he battled it out in the state and federal courts while San Francisco's carnivorous press had a field day exposing the latest titillating revelations that came to light in the all-too-public trials. It is also the story of the fatal attraction that developed between Allie and one of her lawyers, former California Supreme Court Justice David S. Terry. This book is based upon the transcripts and evidence contained in the California state archives and federal archives, as well as contemporaneous newspaper accounts.