Produced by Mike Lough
A BOOK OF REMARKABLE CRIMINALS
By H.B. Irving
TO MY FRIEND
E. V. LUCAS
"For violence and hurt tangle every man in their toils, and for the most
part fall on the head of him from whom they had their rise; nor is it
easy for one who by his act breaks the common pact of peace to lead a
calm and quiet life."
Lucretius on the Nature of Things.
Transcriber's Note:
The upper outside corner of page 15 and 16 has been torn from the
hardcopy. The spots are marked with?? and a best guess at missing words
is in brackets. Footnotes have been moved from end of page to end of
paragraph positions, sequentially numbered.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
THE LIFE OF CHARLES PEACE:
I. HIS EARLY YEARS
II. PEACE IN LONDON
III. HIS TRIAL AND EXECUTION
THE CAREER OF ROBERT BUTLER:
I. THE DUNEDIN MURDERS
II. THE TRIAL OF BUTLER
III. HIS DECLINE AND FALL
M. DERUES:
I. THE CLIMBING LITTLE GROCER
II. THE GAYE OF BLUFF
DR. CASTAING:
I. AN UNHAPPY COINCIDENCE
II. THE TRIAL OF DR. CASTAING
PROFESSOR WEBSTER
THE MYSTERIOUS MR. HOLMES:
I. HONOUR AMONGST THIEVES
II THE WANDERING ASSASSIN
PARTNERSHIP IN CRIME:
I. THE WIDOW GRAS
1. THE CHARMER
2. THE WOUNDED PIGEON
II. VITALIS AND MARIE BOYER
III. THE FENAYROU CASE
IV. EYRAUD AND BOMPARD
A BOOK OF REMARKABLE CRIMINALS
Introduction
"The silent workings, and still more the explosions, of human passion
which bring to light the darker elements of man's nature present to the
philosophical observer considerations of intrinsic interest; while
to the jurist, the study of human nature and human character with its
infinite varieties, especially as affecting the connection between
motive and action, between irregular desire or evil disposition and
crime itself, is equally indispensable and difficult."--_Wills on
Circumstantial Evidence_.
I REMEMBER my father telling me that sitting up late one night talking
with Tennyson, the latter remarked that he had not kept such late
hours since a recent visit of Jowett. On that occasion the poet and
the philosopher had talked together well into the small hours of the
morning. My father asked Tennyson what was the subject of conversation
that had so engrossed them. "Murders," replied Tennyson. It would have
been interesting to have heard Tennyson and Jowett discussing such a
theme. The fact is a tribute to the interest that crime has for many
men of intellect and imagination. Indeed, how could it be otherwise?
Rob history and fiction of crime, how tame and colourless would be the
residue! We who are living and enduring in the presence of one of the
greatest crimes on record, must realise that trying as this period of
the world's history is to those who are passing through it, in the hands
of some great historian it may make very good reading for posterity.
Perhaps we may find some little consolation in this fact, like the
unhappy victims of famous freebooters such as Jack Sheppard or Charley
Peace.
But do not let us flatter ourselves. Do not let us, in all the pomp and
circumstance of stately history, blind ourselves to the fact that the
crimes of Frederick, or Napoleon, or their successors, are in essence no
different from those of Sheppard or Peace. We must not imagine that
the bad man who happens to offend against those particular laws which
constitute the criminal code belongs to a peculiar or atavistic type,
that he is a man set apart from the rest of his fellow-men by mental or
physical peculiarities. That comforting theory of the Lombroso school
has been exploded, and the ordinary inmates of our prisons shown to be
only in a very slight degree below the average in mental and physical
fitness of the normal man, a difference easily explained by the
environment and conditions in which the ordinary criminal is bred.
A certain English judge, asked as to the general characteristics of the
prisoners tried before him, said: "They are just like other people;
in fact, I often think that, but for different opportunities and other
accidents, the prisoner and I might very well be in one another's
places." "Greed, love of pleasure," writes a French judge, "lust,
idleness, anger, hatred, revenge, these are the chief causes of crime.
These passions and desires are shared by rich and poor alike, by the
educated and uneducated. They are inherent in human nature; the germ is
in every man."
Convicts represent those wrong-doers who have taken to a particular form
of wrong-doing punishable by law. Of the larger army of bad men
they represent a minority, who have been found out in a peculiarly
unsatisfactory kind of misconduct. There are many men, some lying,
unscrupulous, dishonest, others cruel, selfish, vicious, who go through
life without ever doing anything that brings them within the scope of
the criminal code, for whose offences the laws of society provide no
punishment. And so it is with some of those heroes of history who have
been made the theme of fine writing by gifted historians.
Mr. Basil Thomson, the present head of the Criminal Investigation
Department, has said recently that a great deal of crime is due to a
spirit of "perverse adventure" on the part of the criminal. The same
might be said with equal justice of the exploits of Alexander the Great
and half the monarchs and conquerors of the world, whom we are taught
in our childhood's days to look up to as shining examples of all that a
great man should be. Because crimes are played on a great stage instead
of a small, that is no reason why our moral judgment should be suspended
or silenced. Class Machiavelli and Frederick the Great as a couple of
rascals fit to rank with Jonathan Wild, and we are getting nearer a
perception of what constitutes the real criminal. "If," said Frederick
the Great to his minister, Radziwill, "there is anything to be gained
by it, we will be honest; if deception is necessary, let us be cheats."
These are the very sentiments of Jonathan Wild.
Crime, broadly speaking, is the attempt by fraud or violence to possess
oneself of something belonging to another, and as such the cases of it
in history are as clear as those dealt with in criminal courts. Germany
to-day has been guilty of a perverse and criminal adventure, the outcome
of that false morality applied to historical transactions, of which
Carlyle's life of Frederick is a monumental example. In that book
we have a man whose instincts in more ways than one were those of a
criminal, held up for our admiration, in the same way that the same
writer fell into dithyrambic praise over a villain called Francia, a
former President of Paraguay. A most interesting work might be written
on the great criminals of history, and might do something towards
restoring that balance of moral judgment in historical transactions, for
the perversion of which we are suffering to-day.
In the meantime we must be content to study in the microcosm of ordinary
crime those instincts, selfish, greedy, brutal which, exploited often
by bad men in the so-called cause of nations, have wrought such havoc
to the happiness of mankind. It is not too much to say that in every
man there dwell the seeds of crime; whether they grow or are stifled
in their growth by the good that is in us is a chance mysteriously
determined. As children of nature we must not be surprised if our
instincts are not all that they should be. "In sober truth," writes
John Stuart Mill, "nearly all the things for which men are hanged or
imprisoned for doing to one another are nature's everyday performances,"
and in another passage: "The course of natural phenomena being replete
with everything which when committed by human beings is most worthy of
abhorrence, anyone who endeavoured in his actions to imitate the natural
course of things would be universally seen and acknowledged to be the
wickedest of men."
Here is explanation enough for the presence of evil in our natures, that
instinct to destroy which finds comparatively harmless expression in
certain forms of taking life, which is at its worst when we fall
to taking each other's. It is to check an inconvenient form of the
expression of this instinct that we punish murderers with death. We must
carry the definition of murder a step farther before we can count
on peace or happiness in this world. We must concentrate all our
strength on fighting criminal nature, both in ourselves and in the
world around us. With the destructive forces of nature we are waging a
perpetual struggle for our very existence. Why dissipate our strength by
fighting among ourselves? By enlarging our conception of crime we move
towards that end. What is anti-social, whether it be written in the
pages of the historian or those of the Newgate Calendar, must in the
future be regarded with equal abhorrence and subjected to equally sure
punishment. Every professor of history should now and then climb down
from the giddy heights of Thucydides and Gibbon and restore his moral
balance by comparing the acts of some of his puppets with those of their
less fortunate brethren who have dangled at the end of a rope. If this
war is to mean anything to posterity, the crime against humanity must be
judged in the future by the same rigid standard as the crime against the
person.
The individual criminals whose careers are given in this book have been
chosen from among their fellows for their pre-eminence in character or
achievement. Some of the cases, such as Butler, Castaing and Holmes, are
new to most English readers.
Charles Peace is the outstanding popular figure in nineteenth-century
crime. He is the type of the professional criminal who makes crime a
business and sets about it methodically and persistently to the end.
Here is a man, possessing many of those qualities which go to make the
successful man of action in all walks of life, driven by circumstances
to squander them on a criminal career. Yet it is a curious circumstance
that this determined and ruthless burglar should have suffered for what
would be classed in France as a "crime passionel." There is more than
a possibility that a French jury would have found extenuating circumstances in the murder of Dyson. The fate of Peace is only another instance of the wrecking a strong man's career by his passion for a woman. In Albert Butler we have the criminal by conviction, a conviction which finds the ground ready prepared
for its growth in the natural laziness and idleness of the man's
disposition. The desire to acquire things by a short cut, without taking
the trouble to work for them honestly, is perhaps the most fruitful of
all sources of crime. Butler, a bit of a pedant, is pleased to
justify his conduct by reason and philosophy--he finds in the acts of
unscrupulous monarchs an analogy to his own attitude towards life. What
is good enough for Caesar Borgia is good enough for Robert Butler. Like
Borgia he comes to grief; criminals succeed and criminals fail. In the
case of historical criminals their crimes are open; we can estimate the
successes and failures. With ordinary criminals, we know only those
who fail. The successful, the real geniuses in crime, those whose guilt
remains undiscovered, are for the most part unknown to us. Occasionally
in society a man or woman is pointed out as having once murdered
somebody or other, and at times, no doubt, with truth. But the matter
can only be referred to clandestinely; they are gazed at with awe or
curiosity, mute witnesses to their own achievement. Some years ago James
Payn, the novelist, hazarded the reckoning that one person in every five
hundred was an undiscovered murderer. This gives us all a hope, almost
a certainty, that we may reckon one such person at least among our
acquaintances.(1)
(1) The author was one of three men discussing this subject in a London
club. They were able to name six persons of their various acquaintance
who were, or had been, suspected of being successful murderers.
Derues is remarkable for the extent of his social ambition, the daring
and impudent character of his attempts to gratify it, the skill, the
consummate hypocrisy with which he played on the credulity of honest
folk, and his flagrant employment of that weapon known and recognised
to-day in the most exalted spheres by the expressive name of "bluff."
He is remarkable, too, for his mirth and high spirits, his genial
buffoonery; the merry murderer is a rare bird.
Professor Webster belongs to that order of criminal of which Eugene Aram
and the Rev. John Selby Watson are our English examples, men of culture
and studious habits who suddenly burst on the astonished gaze of
their fellowmen as murderers. The exact process of mind by which these
hitherto harmless citizens are converted into assassins is to a great
extent hidden from us.
Perhaps Webster's case is the clearest of the three. Here we have a
selfish, self-indulgent and spendthrift gentleman who has landed himself
in serious financial embarrassment, seeking by murder to escape from an
importunate and relentless creditor. He has not, apparently, the moral
courage to face the consequences of his own weakness. He forgets the
happiness of his home, the love of those dear to him, in the desire to
free himself from a disgrace insignificent{sic} in comparison with that
entailed by committing the highest of all crimes. One would wish to
believe that Webster's deed was unpremeditated, the result of a sudden
gust of passion caused by his victim's acrimonious pursuit of his
debtor. But there are circumstances in the case which tell powerfully
against such a view. The character of the murderer seems curiously
contradictory; both cunning and simplicity mark his proceedings; he
makes a determined attempt to escape from the horrors of his situation
and shows at the same time a curious insensibility to its real gravity.
Webster was a man of refined tastes and seemingly gentle character,
loved by those near to him, well liked by his friends.
The mystery that surrounds the real character of Eugene Aram is greater,
and we possess little or no means of solving it. From what motive this
silent, arrogant man, despising his ineffectual wife, this reserved and
moody scholar stooped to fraud and murder the facts of the case help us
little to determine. Was it the hope of leaving the narrow surroundings
of Knaresborough, his tiresome belongings, his own poor way of life,
and seeking a wider field for the exercise of those gifts of scholarship
which he undoubtedly possessed that drove him to commit fraud in company
with Clark and Houseman, and then, with the help of the latter,
murder the unsuspecting Clark? The fact of his humble origin makes
his association with so low a ruffian as Houseman the less remarkable.
Vanity in all probability played a considerable part in Aram's
disposition. He would seem to have thought himself a superior person,
above the laws that bind ordinary men. He showed at the end no
consciousness of his guilt. Being something of a philosopher, he had
no doubt constructed for himself a philosophy of life which served to
justify his own actions. He was a deist, believing in "one almighty
Being the God of Nature," to whom he recommended himself at the last in
the event of his "having done amiss." He emphasised the fact that his
life had been unpolluted and his morals irreproachable. But his views
as to the murder of Clark he left unexpressed. He suggested as
justification of it that Clark had carried on an intrigue with his
neglected wife, but he never urged this circumstance in his defence, and
beyond his own statement there is no evidence of such a connection.
The Revd. John Selby Watson, headmaster of the Stockwell Grammar School,
at the age of sixty-five killed his wife in his library one Sunday
afternoon. Things had been going badly with the unfortunate man. After
more than twenty-five years' service as headmaster of the school at a
meagre salary of L400 a year, he was about to be dismissed; the
number of scholars had been declining steadily and a change in the
headmastership thought necessary; there was no suggestion of his
receiving any kind of pension. The future for a man of his years
was dark enough. The author of several learned books, painstaking,
scholarly, dull, he could hope to make but little money from literary
work. Under a cold, reserved and silent exterior, Selby Watson concealed
a violence of temper which he sought diligently to repress. His wife's
temper was none of the best. Worried, depressed, hopeless of his future,
he in all probability killed his wife in a sudden access of rage,
provoked by some taunt or reproach on her part, and then, instead of
calling in a policeman and telling him what he had done, made clumsy and
ineffectual efforts to conceal his crime. Medical opinion was divided as
to his mental condition. Those doctors called for the prosecution could
find no trace of insanity about him, those called for the defence said
that he was suffering from melancholia. The unhappy man would appear
hardly to have realised the gravity of his situation. To a friend who
visited him in prison he said: "Here's a man who can write Latin, which
the Bishop of Winchester would commend, shut up in a place like this."
Coming from a man who had spent all his life buried in books and knowing
little of the world the remark is not so greatly to be wondered at.
Profound scholars are apt to be impatient of mundane things. Professor
Webster showed a similar want of appreciation of the circumstances of a
person charged with wilful murder. Selby Watson was convicted of murder
and sentenced to death. The sentence was afterwards commuted to one of
penal servitude for life, the Home Secretary of the day showing by
his decision that, though not satisfied of the prisoner's insanity, he
recognised certain extenuating circumstances in his guilt.(2)
(2) Selby Watson was tried at the Central Criminal Court January, 1872.
In Castaing much ingenuity is shown in the conception of the crime,
but the man is weak and timid; he is not the stuff of which the great
criminal is made; Holmes is cast in the true mould of the instinctive
murderer. Castaing is a man of sensibility, capable of domestic
affection; Holmes completely insensible to all feelings of humanity.
Taking life is a mere incident in the accomplishment of his schemes;
men, women and children are sacrificed with equal mercilessness to the
necessary end. A consummate liar and hypocrite, he has that strange
power of fascination over others, women in particular, which is often
independent altogether of moral or even physical attractiveness. We
are accustomed to look for a certain vastness, grandeur of scale in the
achievements of America. A study of American crime will show that it
does not disappoint us in this expectation. The extent and audacity of
the crimes of Holmes are proof of it.
To find a counterpart in imaginative literature to the complete criminal
of the Holmes type we must turn to the pages of Shakespeare. In the
number of his victims, the cruelty and insensibility with which he
attains his ends, his unblushing hypocrisy, the fascination he can
exercise at will over others, the Richard III. of Shakespeare shows how
clearly the poet understood the instinctive criminal of real life. The
Richard of history was no doubt less instinctively and deliberately an
assassin than the Richard of Shakespeare. In the former we can trace
the gradual temptation to crime to which circumstances provoke him. The
murder of the Princes, if, as one writer contends, it was not the work
of Henry VII.--in which case that monarch deserves to be hailed as
one of the most consummate criminals that ever breathed and the worthy
father of a criminal son--was no doubt forced to a certain extent on
Richard by the exigencies of his situation, one of those crimes to which
bad men are driven in order to secure the fruits of other crimes. But
the Richard of Shakespeare is no child of circumstance. He espouses
deliberately a career of crime, as deliberately as Peace or Holmes or
Butler; he sets out "determined to prove a villain," to be "subtle,
false and treacherous," to employ to gain his ends "stern murder in the
dir'st degree." The character is sometimes criticised as being overdrawn
and unreal. It may not be true to the Richard of history, but it is very
true to crime, and to the historical criminal of the Borgian or Prussian
type, in which fraud and violence are made part of a deliberate system
of so-called statecraft.
Shakespeare got nearer to what we may term the domestic as opposed to
the political criminal when he created Iago. In their envy and dislike
of their fellowmen, their contempt for humanity in general, their
callousness to the ordinary sympathies of human nature, Robert Butler,
Lacenaire, Ruloff are witnesses to the poet's fidelity to criminal
character in his drawing of the Ancient. But there is a weakness in
the character of Iago regarded as a purely instinctive and malignant
criminal; indeed it is a weakness in the consistency of the play. On two
occasions Iago states explicitly that Othello is more than suspected of
having committed adultery with his wife, Emilia, and that therefore he
has a strong and justifiable motive for being revenged on the Moor.
The thought of it he describes as "gnawing his inwards." Emilia's
conversation with Desdemona in the last act lends some colour to the
correctness of Iago's belief. If this belief be well-founded it
must greatly modify his character as a purely wanton and mischievous
criminal, a supreme villain, and lower correspondingly the character
of Othello as an honourable and high-minded man. If it be a morbid
suspicion, having no ground in fact, a mental obsession, then Iago
becomes abnormal and consequently more or less irresponsible. But this
suggestion of Emilia's faithlessness made in the early part of the play
is never followed up by the dramatist, and the spectator is left in
complete uncertainty as to whether there be any truth or not in
Iago's suspicion. If Othello has played his Ancient false, that is an
extenuating circumstance in the otherwise extraordinary guilt of Iago,
and would no doubt be accorded to him as such, were he on trial before a
French jury.
The most successful, and therefore perhaps the greatest, criminal in
Shakespeare is King Claudius of Denmark. His murder of his brother by
pouring a deadly poison into his ear while sleeping, is so skilfully
perpetrated as to leave no suspicion of foul play. But for a
supernatural intervention, a contingency against which no murderer could
be expected to have provided, the crime of Claudius would never have
been discovered. Smiling, jovial, genial as M. Derues or Dr. Palmer,
King Claudius might have gone down to his grave in peace as the bluff
hearty man of action, while his introspective nephew would in all
probability have ended his days in the cloister, regarded with amiable
contempt by his bustling fellowmen. How Claudius got over the great
difficulty of all poisoners, that of procuring the necessary poison
without detection, we are not told; by what means he distilled the
"juice of cursed hebenon"; how the strange appearance of the late
King's body, which "an instant tetter" had barked about with "vile and
loathsome crust," was explained to the multitude we are left to imagine.
There is no real evidence to show that Queen Gertrude was her lover's
accomplice in her husband's murder. If that had been so, she would
no doubt have been of considerable assistance to Claudius in the
preparation of the crime. But in the absence of more definite proof
we must assume Claudius' murder of his brother to have been a solitary
achievement, skilfully carried out by one whose genial good-fellowship
and convivial habits gave the lie to any suggestion of criminality.
Whatever may have been his inward feelings of remorse or self-reproach,
Claudius masked them successfully from the eyes of all. Hamlet's
instinctive dislike of his uncle was not shared by the members of the
Danish court. The "witchcraft of his wit," his "traitorous gifts,"
were powerful aids to Claudius, not only in the seduction of his
sister-in-law, but the perpetration of secret murder.
The case of the murder of King Duncan of Scotland by Macbeth and his
wife belongs to a different class of crime. It is a striking example of
dual crime, four instances of which are given towards the end of this
book. An Italian advocate, Scipio Sighele, has devoted a monograph to
the subject of dual crime, in which he examines a number of cases in
which two persons have jointly committed heinous crimes.(3) He finds
that in couples of this kind there is usually an incubus and a succubus,
the one who suggests the crime, the other on whom the suggestion works
until he or she becomes the accomplice or instrument of the stronger
will; "the one playing the Mephistophelian part of tempter, preaching
evil, urging to crime, the other allowing himself to be overcome by his
evil genius." In some cases these two roles are clearly differentiated;
it is easy, as in the case of Iago and Othello, Cassius and Brutus, to
say who prompted the crime. In others the guilt seems equally divided
and the original suggestion of crime to spring from a mutual tendency
towards the adoption of such an expedient. In Macbeth and his wife we
have a perfect instance of the latter class. No sooner have the witches
prophesied that Macbeth shall be a king than the "horrid image" of
the suggestion to murder Duncan presents itself to his mind, and, on
returning to his wife, he answers her question as to when Duncan is
to leave their house by the significant remark, "To-morrow--as he
proposes." To Lady Macbeth from the moment she has received her
husband's letter telling of the prophecy of the weird sisters, murder
occurs as a means of accomplishing their prediction. In the minds
of Macbeth and his wife the suggestion of murder is originally an
auto-suggestion, coming to them independently of each other as soon as
they learn from the witches that Macbeth is one day to be a king. To
Banquo a somewhat similar intimation is given, but no foul thought of
crime suggests itself for an instant to his loyal nature. What Macbeth
and his wife lack at first as thorough-going murderers is that complete
insensibility to taking human life that marks the really ruthless
assassin. Lady Macbeth has the stronger will of the two for the
commission of the deed. It is doubtful whether without her help Macbeth
would ever have undertaken it. But even she, when her husband hesitates
to strike, cannot bring herself to murder the aged Duncan with her own
hands because of his resemblance as he sleeps to her father. It is only
after a deal of boggling and at serious risk of untimely interruption
that the two contrive to do the murder, and plaster with blood the
"surfeited grooms." In thus putting suspicion on the servants of Duncan
the assassins cunningly avert suspicion from themselves, and Macbeth's
killing of the unfortunate men in seeming indignation at the discovery
of their crime is a master-stroke of ingenuity. "Who," he asks in a
splendid burst of feigned horror, "can be wise, amazed, temperate and
furious, loyal and natural in a moment?" At the same time Lady Macbeth
affects to swoon away in the presence of so awful a crime. For the time
all suspicion of guilt, except in the mind of Banquo, is averted from
the real murderers. But, like so many criminals, Macbeth finds it
impossible to rest on his first success in crime. His sensibility grows
dulled; he "forgets the taste of fear"; the murder of Banquo and his
son is diabolically planned, and that is soon followed by the outrageous
slaughter of the wife and children of Macduff. Ferri, the Italian writer
on crime, describes the psychical condition favourable to the commission
of murder as an absence of both moral repugnance to the crime itself and
the fear of the consequences following it. In the murder of Duncan, it
is the first of these two states of mind to which Macbeth and his wife
have only partially attained. The moral repugnance stronger in the
man has not been wholly lost by the woman. But as soon as the crime is
successfully accomplished, this repugnance begins to wear off until the
King and Queen are able calmly and deliberately to contemplate those
further crimes necessary to their peace of mind. But now Macbeth, at
first the more compunctious of the two, has become the more ruthless;
the germ of crime, developed by suggestion, has spread through his whole
being; he has begun to acquire that indifference to human suffering with
which Richard III. and Iago were gifted from the first. In both
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth the germ of crime was latent; they wanted only
favourable circumstances to convert them into one of those criminal
couples who are the more dangerous for the fact that the temptation
to crime has come to each spontaneously and grown and been fostered by
mutual understanding, an elective affinity for evil. Such couples are
frequent in the history of crime. Eyraud and Bompard, Mr. and Mrs.
Manning, Burke and Hare, the Peltzer brothers, Barre and Lebiez, are
instances of those collaborations in crime which find their counterpart
in history, literature, drama and business. Antoninus and Aurelius,
Ferdinand and Isabella, the De Goncourt brothers, Besant and Rice,
Gilbert and Sullivan, Swan and Edgar leap to the memory.
(3) "Le Crime a Deux," by Scipio Sighele (translated from the Italian),
Lyons, 1893.
In the cases of Eyraud and Bompard, both man and woman are idle, vicious
criminals by instinct. They come together, lead an abandoned life,
sinking lower and lower in moral degradation. In the hour of need, crime
presents itself as a simple expedient for which neither of them has any
natural aversion. The repugnance to evil, if they ever felt it, has
long since disappeared from their natures. The man is serious, the woman
frivolous, but the criminal tendency in both cases is the same; each
performs his or her part in the crime with characteristic aptitude.
Mrs. Manning was a creature of much firmer character than her husband,
a woman of strong passions, a redoubtable murderess. Without her
dominating force Manning might never have committed murder. But he was a
criminal before the crime, more than suspected as a railway official of
complicity in a considerable train robbery; in his case the suggestion
of murder involved only the taking of a step farther in a criminal
career. Manning suffered from nerves almost as badly as Macbeth; after
the deed he sought to drown the prickings of terror and remorse by heavy
drinking Mrs. Manning was never troubled with any feelings of this kind;
after the murder of O'Connor the gratification of her sexual passion
seemed uppermost in her mind; and she met the consequences of her crime
fearlessly. Burke and Hare were a couple of ruffians, tempted by what
must have seemed almost fabulous wealth to men of their wretched
poverty to commit a series of cruel murders. Hare, with his queer,
Mephistophelian countenance, was the wickeder of the two. Burke became
haunted as time went on and flew to drink to banish horror, but Hare
would seem to have been free from such "compunctious visitings of
Nature." He kept his head and turned King's evidence.
In the case of the Peltzer brothers we have a man who is of good social
position, falling desperately in love with the wife of a successful
barrister. The wife, though unhappy in her domestic life, refuses to
become her lover's mistress; marriage is the only way to secure her. So
Armand Peltzer plots to murder the husband. For this purpose he calls in
the help of a brother, a ne'er-do-well, who has left his native country
under a cloud. He sends for this dubious person to Europe, and there
between them they plan the murder of the inconvenient husband. Though
the idea of the crime comes from the one brother, the other receives the
idea without repugnance and enters wholeheartedly into the commission of
the murder. The ascendency of the one is evident, but he knows his
man, is sure that he will have no difficulty in securing the other's
co-operation in his felonious purpose. Armand Peltzer should have lived
in the Italy of the Renaissance.
The crime was cunningly devised, and methodically and successfully
accomplished. Only an over-anxiety to secure the fruits of it led to its
detection. Barre and Lebiez are a perfect criminal couple, both young
men of good education, trained to better things, but the one idle,
greedy and vicious, the other cynical, indifferent, inclined at best to
a lazy sentimentalism. Barre is a needy stockbroker at the end of his
tether, desperate to find an expedient for raising the wind, Lebiez
a medical student who writes morbid verses to a skull and lectures on
Darwinism. To Barre belongs the original suggestion to murder an old
woman who sells milk and is reputed to have savings. But his friend
and former schoolfellow, Lebiez, accepts the suggestion placidly, and
reconciles himself to the murder of an unnecessary old woman by the
same argument as that used by Raskolnikoff in "Crime and Punishment" to
justify the killing of his victim.
In all the cases here quoted the couples are essentially criminal
couples. From whichever of the two comes the first suggestion of crime,
it falls on soil already prepared to receive it; the response to the
suggestion is immediate. In degree of guilt there is little or nothing
to choose between them. But the more interesting instances of dual crime
are those in which one innocent hitherto of crime, to whom it is morally
repugnant, is persuaded by another to the commission of a criminal act,
as Cassius persuades Brutus; Iago, Othello. Cassius is a criminal
by instinct. Placed in a social position which removes him from the
temptation to ordinary crime, circumstances combine in his case to bring
out the criminal tendency and give it free play in the projected murder
of Caesar. Sour, envious, unscrupulous, the suggestion to kill Caesar
under the guise of the public weal is in reality a gratification
to Cassius of his own ignoble instincts, and the deliberate
unscrupulousness with which he seeks to corrupt the honourable metal,
seduce the noble mind of his friend, is typical of the man's innate
dishonesty. Cassius belongs to that particular type of the envious
nature which Shakespeare is fond of exemplifying with more or less
degree of villainy in such characters as Iago, Edmund, and Don John,
of which Robert Butler, whose career is given in this book, is a living
instance. Cassius on public grounds tempts Brutus to crime as subtly as
on private grounds Iago tempts Othello, and with something of the same
malicious satisfaction; the soliloquy of Cassius at the end of the
second scene of the first act is that of a bad man and a false friend.
Indeed, the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius after the murder of
Caesar loses much of its sincerity and pathos unless we can forget for
the moment the real character of Cassius. But the interest in the cases
of Cassius and Brutus, Iago and Othello, lies not so much in the
nature of the prompter of the crime. The instances in which an honest,
honourable man is by force of another's suggestion converted into a
criminal are psychologically remarkable. It is to be expected that we
should look in the annals of real crime for confirmation of the truth to
life of stories such as these, told in fiction or drama.
The strongest influence, under which the naturally non-criminal person
may be tempted in violation of instinct and better nature to the
commission of a crime, is that of love or passion. Examples of this kind
are frequent in the annals of crime. There is none more striking than
that of the Widow Gras and Natalis Gaudry. Here a man, brave, honest, of
hitherto irreproachable character, is tempted by a woman to commit the
most cruel and infamous of crimes. At first he repels the suggestion;
at last, when his senses have been excited, his passion inflamed by the
cunning of the woman, as the jealous passion of Othello is played on and
excited by Iago, the patriotism of Brutus artfully exploited by Cassius,
he yields to the repeated solicitation and does a deed in every way
repugnant to his normal character. Nothing seems so blinding in its
effect on the moral sense as passion. It obscures all sense of humour,
proportion, congruity; the murder of the man or woman who stands in
the way of its full enjoyment becomes an act of inverted justice to
the perpetrators; they reconcile themselves to it by the most perverse
reasoning until they come to regard it as an act, in which they may
justifiably invoke the help of God; eroticism and religion are often
jumbled up together in this strange medley of conflicting emotions.
A woman, urging her lover to the murder of her husband, writes of the
roses that are to deck the path of the lovers as soon as the crime is
accomplished; she sends him flowers and in the same letter asks if he
has got the necessary cartridges. Her husband has been ill; she hopes
that it is God helping them to the desired end; she burns a candle
on the altar of a saint for the success of their murderous plan.(4) A
jealous husband setting out to kill his wife carries in his pockets,
beside a knife and a service revolver, a rosary, a medal of the Virgin
and a holy image.(5) Marie Boyer in the blindness of her passion and
jealousy believes God to be helping her to get rid of her mother.
(4) Case of Garnier and the woman Aveline, 1884.
(5) Case of the Comte
de Cornulier: "Un An de Justice," Henri Varennes, 1901.
A lover persuades the wife to get rid of her husband. For a whole year
he instils the poison into her soul until she can struggle no longer
against the obsession; he offers to do the deed, but she writes that she
would rather suffer all the risks and consequences herself. "How many
times," she writes, "have I wished to go away, leave home, but it meant
leaving my children, losing them for ever.. that made my lover jealous,
he believed that I could not bring myself to leave my husband. But if my
husband were out of the way then I would keep my children, and my
lover would see in my crime a striking proof of my devotion." A curious
farrago of slavish passion, motherly love and murder.(6)
(6) Case of Madame Weiss and the engineer Roques. If I may be permitted
the reference, there is an account of this case and that of Barre and
Lebiez in my book "French Criminals of the Nineteenth Century."
There are some women such as Marie Boyer and Gabrielle Fenayrou, who may
be described as passively criminal, chameleon-like, taking colour from
their surroundings. By the force of a man's influence they commit a
dreadful crime, in the one instance it is matricide, in the other the
murder of a former lover, but neither of the women is profoundly vicious
or criminal in her instincts. In prison they become exemplary, their
crime a thing of the past.
Gabrielle Fenayrou during her imprisonment, having won the confidence
of the religious sisters in charge of the convicts, is appointed head
of one of the workshops. Marie Boyer is so contrite, exemplary in her
behaviour that she is released after fifteen years' imprisonment. In
some ways, perhaps, these malleable types of women, "soft paste" as one
authority has described them, "effacees" in the words of another, are
the most dangerous material of all for the commission of crime, their
obedience is so complete, so cold and relentless.
There are cases into which no element of passion enters, in which one
will stronger than the other can so influence, so dominate the weaker as
to persuade the individual against his or her better inclination to an
act of crime, just as in the relations of ordinary life we see a man
or woman led and controlled for good or ill by one stronger than
themselves. There is no more extraordinary instance of this than the
case of Catherine Hayes, immortalised by Thackeray, which occurred
as long ago as the year 1726. This singular woman by her artful
insinuations, by representing her husband as an atheist and a murderer,
persuaded a young man of the name of Wood, of hitherto exemplary
character, to assist her in murdering him. It was unquestionably the
sinister influence of Captain Cranstoun that later in the same century
persuaded the respectable Miss Mary Blandy to the murder of her father.
The assassin of an old woman in Paris recounts thus the arguments used
by his mistress to induce him to commit the crime: "She began by telling
me about the money and jewellery in the old woman's possession which
could no longer be of any use to her"--the argument of Raskolnikoff--"I
resisted, but next day she began again, pointing out that one killed
people in war, which was not considered a crime, and therefore one
should not be afraid to kill a miserable old woman. I urged that the old
woman had done us no harm, and that I did not see why one should kill
her; she reproached me for my weakness and said that, had she been
strong enough, she would soon have done this abominable deed herself.
'God,' she added, 'will forgive us because He knows how poor we are.'"
When he came to do the murder, this determined woman plied her lover
with brandy and put rouge on his cheeks lest his pallor should betray
him.(7)
(7) Case of Albert and the woman Lavoitte, Paris, 1877.
There are occasions when those feelings of compunction which troubled
Macbeth and his wife are wellnigh proof against the utmost powers of
suggestion, or, as in the case of Hubert and Prince Arthur, compel the
criminal to desist from his enterprise.
A man desires to get rid of his father and mother-in-law. By means of
threats, reproaches and inducements he persuades another man to commit
the crime. Taking a gun, the latter sets out to do the deed; but he
realises the heinousness of it and turns back. "The next day," he says,
"at four o'clock in the morning I started again. I passed the village
church. At the sight of the place where I had celebrated my first
communion I was filled with remorse. I knelt down and prayed to God to
make me good. But some unknown force urged me to the crime. I started
again--ten times I turned back, but the more I hesitated the stronger
was the desire to go on." At length the faltering assassin arrived at
the house, and in his painful anxiety of mind shot a servant instead of
the intended victims.(8)
(8) Case of Porcher and Hardouin cited in Despine. "Psychologie
Naturelle."
In a town in Austria there dwelt a happy and contented married couple,
poor and hard-working. A charming young lady, a rich relation and an
orphan, comes to live with them. She brings to their modest home wealth
and comfort. But as time goes on, it is likely that the young lady will
fall in love and marry. What then? Her hosts will have to return
to their original poverty. The idea of how to secure to himself the
advantages of his young kinswoman's fortune takes possession of the
husband's mind. He revolves all manner of means, and gradually murder
presents itself as the only way. The horrid suggestion fixes itself
in his mind, and at last he communicates it to his wife. At first she
resists, then yields to the temptation. The plan is ingenious. The wife
is to disappear to America and be given out as dead. The husband will
then marry his attractive kinswoman, persuade her to make a will in his
favour, poison her and, the fortune secured, rejoin his wife. As if
to help this cruel plan, the young lady has developed a sentimental
affection for her relative. The wife goes to America, the husband
marries the young lady. He commences to poison her, but, in the presence
of her youth, beauty and affection for him, relents, hesitates to commit
a possibly unnecessary crime. He decides to forget and ignore utterly
his wife who is waiting patiently in America. A year passes. The
expectant wife gets no sign of her husband's existence. She comes back
to Europe, visits under a false name the town in which her faithless
husband and his bride are living, discovers the truth and divulges the
intended crime to the authorities. A sentence of penal servitude for
life rewards this perfidious criminal.(9)
(9) Case of the Scheffer couple at Linz, cited by Sighele.
Derues said to a man who was looking at a picture in the Palais de
Justice: "Why study copies of Nature when you can look at such a
remarkable original as I?" A judge once told the present writer that he
did not go often to the theatre because none of the dramas which he saw
on the stage, seemed to him equal in intensity to those of real life
which came before him in the course of his duties. The saying that truth
is stranger than fiction applies more forcibly to crime than to
anything else. But the ordinary man and woman prefer to take their crime
romanticised, as it is administered to them in novel or play. The true
stories told in this book represent the raw material from which works
of art have been and may be yet created. The murder of Mr. Arden of
Faversham inspired an Elizabethan tragedy attributed by some critics
to Shakespeare. The Peltzer trial helped to inspire Paul Bourget's
remarkable novel, "Andre Cornelis." To Italian crime we owe Shelley's
"Cenci" and Browning's "The Ring and the Book." Mrs. Manning was the
original of the maid Hortense in "Bleak House." Jonathan Wild, Eugene
Aram, Deacon Brodie, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright have all been made
the heroes of books or plays of varying merit. But it is not only in its
stories that crime has served to inspire romance. In the investigation
of crime, especially on the broader lines of Continental procedure, we
can track to the source the springs of conduct and character, and come
near to solving as far as is humanly possible the mystery of human
motive. There is always and must be in every crime a terra incognita
which, unless we could enter into the very soul of a man, we cannot hope
to reach. Thus far may we go, no farther. It is rarely indeed that a man
lays bare his whole soul, and even when he does we can never be quite
sure that he is telling us all the truth, that he is not keeping back
some vital secret. It is no doubt better so, and that it should be left
to the writer of imagination to picture for us a man's inmost soul. The
study of crime will help him to that end. It will help us also in the
ethical appreciation of good and evil in individual conduct, about which
our notions have been somewhat obscured by too narrow a definition
of what constitutes crime. These themes, touched on but lightly and
imperfectly in these pages, are rich in human interest.
And so it is hardly a matter for surprise that the poet and the
philosopher sat up late one night talking about murders.
The Life of Charles Peace
"Charles Peace, or the Adventures of a Notorious Burglar," a large
volume published at the time of his death, gives a full and accurate
account of the career of Peace side by side with a story of the Family
Herald type, of which he is made the hero. "The Life and Trial of
Charles Peace" (Sheffield, 1879), "The Romantic Career of a Great
Criminal" (by N. Kynaston Gaskell, London 1906), and "The Master
Criminal," published recently in London give useful information. I have
also consulted some of the newspapers of the time. There is a delightful
sketch of Peace in Mr. Charles Whibley's "Book of Scoundrels."
I
HIS EARLY YEARS
Charles Peace told a clergyman who had an interview with him in prison
shortly before his execution that he hoped that, after he was gone, he
would be entirely forgotten by everybody and his name never mentioned
again.