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because “she is simply sore at me”, and then told the tale of her becoming so wild at the party that he had tried to throw her out of the suite of rooms.
    The fact that everyone in any kind of authority seemed to believe Delmont was incredible given her history, and yet it was true; in spite of there being not a scrap of hard evidence against Roscoe Arbuckle and no witnesses to any crime, the police decided that he was indeed to blame for the death of Virginia Rappe, and charged the poor man with murder.
    “No man, whether he be Fatty Arbuckle or anyone else, can come into this city and commit that kind of an offence,” Captain of Detectives Duncan Matheson told waiting reporters. “The evidence showed that there was an attack made on the girl.” Except, of course, that there was no real evidence to show any kind of attack at all; and in fact doctors treating the woman had believed she was ill as a result of “natural causes”. Had there been an injury, they surely would have seen it at that time.
    Roscoe’s arrest seems to be mainly as a result of finger-pointing from Delmont and a comment by a nurse, Mrs Jameson, who had attended to Virginia Rappe before she died. According to Jameson, the actress told her several stories: the first was that after a few drinks she could remember nothing at all about the party. “She did not remember whether Arbuckle asked or pulled her into his room,” the nurse told police. The second story Rappe apparently told her was that Arbuckle was to blame for her illness; that he had attacked her. Then later she changed her mind once again and claimed that, no, she did not remember anything about what had happened that day.
    The reason for Rappe’s differing comments was very simple: as a result of high fever and infection, the actress was delirious and could not remember what had happened after she had become ill. However, while alone with the patient, Maude Delmont took the opportunity to feed the woman information of her own sordid account of what happened that afternoon, thus causing many false and misleading memories in the process. This would explain why Rappe’s story kept changing, and why she had such confusion about whether or not she remembered anything that had happened at all.
    Rappe was in no fit state to recall any event from the party; if she had been, she would have known that Arbuckle could not possibly have taken or pulled her into the room. There were witnesses in the reception room who had been talking to Roscoe during the time when Rappe disappeared; and since they were sitting just yards away from the bedroom door, it would have been impossible for them not to notice the actor forcibly pushing or pulling anybody into his room.
    The whole thing very quickly got out of hand and Arbuckle was horrified that he was now facing the death penalty for a crime he did not commit. He refused to give any kind of statement to the police and instead chose to remain silent, except to say a few words to the reporters who waited with baited breath and their notebooks poised. “Well,” he said with his shoulders sagging, “I guess you have enough for this time.”
    “Smile!” shouted photographers snapping his photograph, to which the distraught actor replied, “Not under circumstances like this.” Moments later he was led from the building, en route to the city jail, his request for bail denied.
    “It is not pleasant to take action like this,” the Assistant District Attorney told reporters, “but under the evidence it was the only thing we could do.”
    Newspapers went wild with accusations against the actor, none more so than papers owned by the Hearst Corporation in San Francisco. It quickly became apparent to them that the Arbuckle story was going to sell countless copies of their rags, and it has been said that they even resorted to faking pictures of the actor – drawing bars across his face to make it look as though they had exclusive access to him in prison.