that consummate hypocrisy which was part of the man, he had contrived to
enlist the sympathies of the Governor of the Dunedin Jail, who gave
him, on his departure, a suit of clothes and a small sum of money.
A detective of the name of Bain tried to find him employment. Butler
wished to adopt a literary career. He acted as a reporter on the Dunedin
Evening Star, and gave satisfaction to the editor of that newspaper. An
attempt to do some original work, in the shape of "Prison Sketches,"
for another newspaper, was less successful. Bain had arranged for the
publication of the articles in the Sunday Advertiser, but when the time
came to deliver his manuscript, Butler failed to appear. Bain, whose
duty it was to keep an eye on Butler, found him in the street looking
wild and haggard. He said that he had found the work "too much for his
head," that he had torn up what he had written, that he had nowhere to
go, and had been to the end of the jetty with the intention of drowning
himself. Bain replied somewhat caustically that he thought it a pity he
had not done so, as nothing would have given him greater joy than
going to the end of the jetty and identifying his body. "You speak
very plainly," said Butler. "Yes, and what is more, I mean what I say,"
replied Bain. Butler justified Bain's candour by saying that if he broke
out again, he would be worse than the most savage tiger ever let loose
on the community. As a means of obviating such an outbreak, Butler
suggested that, intellectual employment having failed, some form of
manual labour should be found him. Bain complied with Butler's request,
and got him a job at levelling reclaimed ground in the neighbourhood of
Dunedin. On Wednesday, March 10, Butler started work, but after three
hours of it relinquished the effort. Bain saw Butler again in Dunedin on
the evening of Saturday, March 13, and made an appointment to meet him
at half-past eight that night. Butler did not keep the appointment. Bain
searched the town for him, but he was nowhere to be found.
About the same time Butler had some talk with another member of the
Dunedin police force, Inspector Mallard. They discussed the crimes of
Charles Peace and other notable artists of that kind. Butler remarked to
Mallard how easy it would be to destroy all traces of a murder by fire,
and asked the inspector whether if he woke up one morning to find some
brutal murder had been committed, he would not put it down to him. "No,
Butler," replied the inspector, "the first thing I should do would be to
look for suspicious circumstances, and most undoubtedly, if they pointed
to you, you would be looked after."
In the early morning of this Saturday, March 13, the house of a Mr.
Stamper, a solicitor of Dunedin, had been broken into, and some articles
of value, among them a pair of opera glasses, stolen. The house had been
set on fire, and burned to the ground. On the morning of the following
day, Sunday, the 14th, Dunedin was horrified by the discovery of a far
more terrible crime, tigerish certainly in its apparent ferocity. In a
house in Cumberland Street, a young married couple and their little baby
were cruelly murdered and un{sic}{an??} unsuccessful attempt made to
fire the scene of the crime.
About half-past six on Sunday morning a man of the name of Robb, a
carpenter, on getting out of bed, noticed smoke coming from the house
of a neighbor of his, Mr. J. M. Dewar, who occupied a small one-floored
cottage standing by itself in Cumberland Street, a large and broad
thoroughfare on the outskirts of the town. Dewar was a butcher by trade,
a young man, some eighteen months married, and father of a baby girl.
Robb, on seeing smoke coming from Dewar's house, woke his son, who was
a member of the fire brigade. The latter got up, crossed the street,
and going round to the back door, which he found wide open, entered the
house. As he went along the passage that separated the two front rooms,
a bedroom and sitting-room, he called to the inmates to get up. He
received no answer, but as he neared the bedroom he heard a "gurgling"
sound. Crawling on his hands and knees he reached the bedroom door, and
two feet inside it his right hand touched something. It was the body of
a woman; she was still alive, but in a dying condition. Robb dragged
her across the passage into the sitting-room. He got some water, and
extinguished the fire in the bedroom. On the bed lay the body of Dewar.
To all appearances he had been killed in his sleep. By his side was
the body of the baby, suffocated by the smoke. Near the bed was an
axe belonging to Dewar, stained with blood. It was with this weapon,
apparently, that Mr. and Mrs. Dewar had been attacked. Under the bed was
a candlestick belonging also to the Dewars, which had been used by
the murderer in setting fire to the bed. The front window of the
sitting-room was open, there were marks of boot nails on the sill, and
on the grass in front of the window a knife was found. An attempt
had been made to ransack a chest of drawers in the bedroom, but some
articles of jewellery lying in one of the drawers, and a ring on the
dressing-table had been left untouched. As far as was known, Mr. and
Mrs. Dewar were a perfectly happy and united couple. Dewar had been last
seen alive about ten o'clock on the Saturday night getting off a car
near his home. At eleven a neighbour had noticed a light in the Dewars'
house. About five o'clock on the Sunday morning another neighbour
had been aroused from his sleep by the sound as of something falling
heavily. It was a wild and boisterous night. Thinking the noise might be
the slamming of his stable door, he got up and went out to see that
it was secure. He then noticed that a light was burning in the bedroom
window of the Dewars' cottage.
Nothing more was known of what had occurred that morning until at
half-past six Robb saw the smoke coming from Dewars' house. Mrs. Dewar,
who alone could have told something, never recovered consciousness
and died on the day following the crime. Three considerable wounds
sufficient to cause death had been inflicted on the unfortunate woman's
head, and five of a similar character on that of her husband. At the
head of the bed, which stood in the corner of the room, there was a
large smear of blood on the wall just above the door; there were spots
of blood all over the top of the bed, and some smaller ones that had to
all appearances spurted on to the panel of the door nearest to the bed.
The investigation of this shocking crime was placed in the hands of
Detective Bain, whose duty it had been to keep an eye on Robert Butler,
but he did not at first associate his interesting charge with the
commission of the murder. About half-past six on Sunday evening Bain
happened to go to a place called the Scotia Hotel, where the landlord
informed him that one of his servants, a girl named Sarah Gillespie, was
very anxious to see him. Her story was this: On the morning of Thursday,
March 11, Robert Butler had come to the hotel; he was wearing a dark
lavender check suit and carried a top coat and parcel. Butler had stayed
in the hotel all Thursday and slept there that night. He had not slept
in the hotel on the Friday night, and Sarah Gillespie had not seen him
again until he came into the house about five and twenty minutes to
seven on Sunday morning. The girl noticed that he was pale and excited,
seemed afraid and worried, as if someone were coming after him. After
giving her some money for the landlord, he went upstairs, fetched his
top coat, a muffler, and his parcel. Before leaving he said he would
have a pint of beer, as he had not breakfasted. He then left, presumably
to catch an early train.
Butler was next seen a few minutes later at a shop near the hotel, where
he bought five tins of salmon, and about the same time a milk-boy saw
him standing on the kerb in Cumberland Street in a stooping position,
his head turned in the direction of Dewars' house. A little after ten
the same night Butler entered a hotel at a place called Blueskin, some
twelve miles distant from Dunedin. He was wearing an overcoat and a
light muffler. He sat down at a table in the dining-room and seemed
weary and sleepy. Someone standing at the bar said "What a shocking
murder that was in Cumberland Street!" Butler started up, looked
steadily from one to the other of the two men who happened to be in the
room, then sat down again and, taking up a book, appeared to be reading.
More than once he put down the book and kept shifting uneasily in his
chair. After having some supper he got up, paid his reckoning, and left
the hotel.
At half-past three the following morning, about fifteen miles from
Dunedin, on the road to Waikouaiti, two constables met a man whom they
recognised as Butler from a description that had been circulated by the
police. The constables arrested and searched him. They found on him a
pair of opera glasses, the property of Mr. Stamper, whose house had been
burgled and burned down on the morning of the 13th. Of this crime Butler
acknowledged himself to be the perpetrator. Besides the opera glasses
the constables took from Butler two tins of salmon, a purse containing
four shillings and sixpence, a pocket knife, a box of matches, a piece
of candle, and a revolver and cartridges. The prisoner was carrying a
top coat, and was dressed in a dark coat and grey trousers, underneath
which he was wearing a white shirt, an under flannel and a Rob Roy
Crimean shirt. One of the constables noticed that there were marks of
blood on his shirt. Another singular feature in Butler's attire was the
fact that the outer soles of his boots had been recently removed. When
last seen in Dunedin Butler had been wearing a moustache; he was now
clean shaven.
The same evening a remarkable interview took place in the lock-up at
Waikouaiti between Butler and Inspector Mallard. Mallard, who had some
reason for suspecting Butler, bearing in mind their recent conversation,
told the prisoner that he would be charged with the murder in Cumberland
Street. For a few seconds, according to Mallard, the prisoner seemed
terribly agitated and appeared to be choking. Recovering himself
somewhat, he said, "If for that, you can get no evidence against me; and
if I am hanged for it, I shall be an innocent man, whatever other crimes
I may have committed." Mallard replied, "There is evidence to convict
you--the fire was put out." Butler than{sic} said that he would ask
Mallard a question, but, after a pause, decided not to do so. Mallard,
after examining Butler's clothes, told him that those were not the
clothes in which he had left the Scotia Hotel. Butler admitted it, and
said he had thrown those away in the North East Valley. Mallard alluded
to the disappearance of the prisoner's moustache. Butler replied that he
had cut it off on the road. Mallard noticed then the backs of Butler's
hands were scratched, as if by contact with bushes. Butler seemed often
on the point of asking questions, but would then stop and say "No, I
won't ask you anything." To the constables who had arrested him Butler
remarked, "You ought to remember me, because I could have shot you if I
had wished." When Mallard later in the evening visited Butler again, the
prisoner who was then lying down said, "I want to speak to you. I want
to ask the press not to publish my career. Give me fair play. I suppose
I shall be convicted and you will see I can die like a man."
A few days after Butler's arrest a ranger on the Town Belt, a hill
overlooking Dunedin, found a coat, a hat and silk striped cravat, and
a few days later a pair of trousers folded up and placed under a bush.
These articles of clothing were identified as those which Butler
had been seen wearing on the Saturday and Sunday morning. They were
examined. There were a number of bloodstains on them, not one of them
larger in size than a pea, some almost invisible. On the front of the
trousers about the level of the groin there were blood spots on both
sides. There was blood on the fold of the left breast of the coat and on
the lining of the cuff of the right arm. The shirt Butler was wearing
at the time of his arrest was examined also. There were small spots of
blood, about fourteen altogether, on the neck and shoulder bands, the
right armpit, the left sleeve, and on both wristbands. Besides the
clothes, a salmon tin was found on the Town Belt, and behind a seat in
the Botanical Gardens, from which a partial view of the Dewars' house
in Cumberland Street could be obtained, two more salmon tins were found,
all three similar to the five purchased by Butler on the Sunday morning,
two of which had been in his possession at the time of his arrest.
Such were the main facts of the case which Butler had to answer when,
a few weeks later, he was put on his trial before the Supreme Court at
Dunedin. The presiding judge was Mr. Justice Williams, afterwards Sir
Joshua Williams and a member of the Privy Council. The Crown Prosecutor,
Mr. Haggitt, conducted the case for the Crown, and Butler defended
himself.
II
THE TRIAL OF BUTLER
To a man of Butler's egregious vanity his trial was a glorious
opportunity for displaying his intellectual gifts, such as they were.
One who had known him in prison about this time describes him as a
strange compound of vanity and envy, blind to his own faults and envious
of the material advantages enjoyed by others. Self-willed and arrogant,
he could bully or whine with equal effect. Despising men, he believed
that if a man did not possess some requisite quality, he had only to ape
it, as few would distinguish between the real and the sham.
But with all these advantages in the struggle for life, it is certain
that Butler's defence would have been far less effective had be{sic}
been denied all professional aid. As a matter of fact, throughout his
trial Butler was being advised by three distinguished members of the New
Zealand bar, now judges of the Supreme Court, who though not appearing
for him in court, gave him the full benefit of their assistance
outside it. At the same time Butler carried off the thing well. Where
imagination was required, Butler broke down; he could not write sketches
of life in prison; that was too much for his pedestrian intellect. But
given the facts of a case, dealing with a transaction of which he alone
knew the real truth, and aided by the advice and guidance of trained
intellects, Butler was unquestionably clever and shrewd enough to make
the best use of such advantages in meeting the case against him.
Thus equipped for the coming struggle, this high-browed ruffian, with
his semi-intellectual cast of countenance, his jerky restless posturing,
his splay-footed waddle, "like a lame Muscovy duck," in the graphic
words of his gaol companion, stood up to plead for his life before the
Supreme Court at Dunedin.
It may be said at the outset that Butler profited greatly by the
scrupulous fairness shown by the Crown Prosecutor. Mr. Haggitt extended
to the prisoner a degree of consideration and forbearance, justified
undoubtedly towards an undefended prisoner. But, as we have seen, Butler
was not in reality undefended. At every moment of the trial he was in
communication with his legal advisers, and being instructed by them how
to meet the evidence given against him. Under these circumstances the
unfailing consideration shown him by the Crown Prosecutor seems almost
excessive. From the first moment of the trial Butler was fully alive
to the necessities of his situation. He refrained from including in his
challenges of the jury the gentleman who was afterwards foreman; he knew
he was all right, he said, because he parted his hair in the middle, a
"softy," in fact. He did not know in all probability that one gentleman
on the jury had a rooted conviction that the murder of the Dewars was
the work of a criminal lunatic. There was certainly nothing in Butler's
demeanour or behaviour to suggest homicidal mania.
The case against Butler rested on purely circumstantial evidence.
No new facts of importance were adduced at the trial. The stealing
of Dewar's wages, which had been paid to him on the Saturday, was the
motive for the murder suggested by the Crown. The chief facts pointing
to Butler's guilt were: his conversation with Mallard and Bain previous
to the crime; his demeanour after it; his departure from Dunedin; the
removal of his moustache and the soles of his boots; his change of
clothes and the bloodstains found upon them, added to which was
his apparent inability to account for his movements on the night in
question.
Such as the evidence was, Butler did little to shake it in
cross-examination. His questions were many of them skilful and pointed,
but on more than one occasion the judge intervened to save him from the
danger common to all amateur cross-examiners, of not knowing when to
stop. He was most successful in dealing with the medical witnesses.
Butler had explained the bloodstains on his clothes as smears that had
come from scratches on his hands, caused by contact with bushes. This
explanation the medical gentlemen with good reason rejected. But they
went further, and said that these stains might well have been caused by
the spurting and spraying of blood on to the murderer as he struck his
victims. Butler was able to show by the position of the bloodstains on
the clothes that such an explanation was open to considerable doubt.
Butler's speech in his defence lasted six hours, and was a creditable
performance. Its arrangement is somewhat confused and repetitious, some
points are over-elaborated, but on the whole he deals very successfully
with most of the evidence given against him and exposes the
unquestionable weakness of the Crown case. At the outset he declared
that he had taken his innocence for his defence. "I was not willing,"
he said, "to leave my life in the hands of a stranger. I was willing to
incur all the disadvantages which the knowledge of the law might bring
upon me. I was willing, also, to enter on this case without
any experience whatever of that peculiarly acquired art of
cross-examination. I fear I have done wrong. If I had had the assistance
of able counsel, much more light would have been thrown on this case
than has been." As we have seen, Butler enjoyed throughout his trial the
informal assistance of three of the most able counsel in New Zealand, so
that this heroic attitude of conscious innocence braving all dangers
loses most of its force. Without such assistance his danger might have
been very real.
A great deal of the evidence as to his conduct and demeanour at the time
of the murder Butler met by acknowledging that it was he who had broken
into Mr. Stamper's house on the Saturday morning, burgled it and set it
on fire. His consciousness of guilt in this respect was, he said, quite
sufficient to account for anything strange or furtive in his manner
at that time. He was already known to the police; meeting Bain on the
Saturday night, he felt more than ever sure that he was susspected{sic}
of the robbery at Mr. Stamper's; he therefore decided to leave Dunedin
as soon as possible. That night, he said, he spent wandering about the
streets half drunk, taking occasional shelter from the pouring rain,
until six o'clock on the Sunday morning, when he went to the Scotia
Hotel. A more detailed account of his movements on the night of the
Dewars' murder he did not, or would not, give.
When he comes to the facts of the murder and his theories as to the
nature and motive of the crime--theories which he developed at rather
unnecessary length for the purpose of his own defence--his speech is
interesting. It will be recollected that on the discovery of the murder,
a knife was found on the grass outside the house. This knife was not
the property of the Dewars. In Butler's speech he emphasised the opinion
that this knife had been brought there by the murderer: "Horrible though
it may be, my conclusion is that he brought it with the intention of
cutting the throats of his victims, and that, finding they lay in rather
an untoward position, he changed his mind, and, having carried out the
object with which he entered the house, left the knife and, going back,
brought the axe with which he effected his purpose. What was the purpose
of the murderer? Was it the robbery of Dewar's paltry wages? Was it
the act of a tiger broken loose on the community? An act of pure wanton
devilry? or was there some more reasonable explanation of this most
atrocious crime?"
Butler rejected altogether the theory of ordinary theft. No thief
of ambitious views, he said, would pitch upon the house of a poor
journeyman butcher. The killing of the family appeared to him to be
the motive: "an enemy hath done this." The murderer seems to have had a
knowledge of the premises; he enters the house and does his work swiftly
and promptly, and is gone. "We cannot know," Butler continues, "all the
passages in the lives of the murdered man or woman. What can we know of
the hundred spites and jealousies or other causes of malice which might
have caused the crime? If you say some obscure quarrel, some spite or
jealousy is not likely to have been the cause of so dreadful a murder,
you cannot revert to the robbery theory without admitting a motive much
weaker in all its utter needlessness and vagueness. The prominent
feature of the murder, indeed the only feature, is its ruthless,
unrelenting, determined vindictiveness. Every blow seemed to say, 'You
shall die you shall not live.'"
Whether Butler were the murderer of the Dewars or not, the theory that
represented them as having been killed for the purpose of robbery
has its weak side all the weaker if Butler, a practical and ambitious
criminal, were the guilty man.
In 1882, two years after Butler's trial, there appeared in a New Zealand
newspaper, Society, published in Christchurch, a series of Prison
"Portraits," written evidently by one who had himself undergone a term
of imprisonment. One of the "Portraits" was devoted to an account of
Butler. The writer had known Butler in prison. According to the story
told him by Butler, the latter had arrived in Dunedin with a quantity of
jewellery he had stolen in Australia. This jewellery he entrusted to a
young woman for safe keeping. After serving his first term of two years'
imprisonment in Dunedin, Butler found on his release that the young
woman had married a man of the name of Dewar. Butler went to Mrs. Dewar
and asked for the return of his jewellery; she refused to give it up. On
the night of the murder he called at the house in Cumberland Street and
made a last appeal to her, but in vain. He determined on revenge. During
his visit to Mrs. Dewar he had had an opportunity of seeing the axe and
observing the best way to break into the house. He watched the husband's
return, and decided to kill him as well as his wife on the chance of
obtaining his week's wages. With the help of the knife which he had
found in the backyard of a hotel he opened the window. The husband he
killed in his sleep, the woman waked with the first blow he struck her.
He found the jewellery in a drawer rolled up in a pair of stockings.
He afterwards hid it in a well-marked spot some half-hour before his
arrest.
A few years after its appearance in Society, this account of Butler was
reproduced in an Auckland newspaper. Bain, the detective, wrote a letter
questioning the truth of the writer's statements. He pointed out
that when Butler first came to Dunedin he had been at liberty only a
fortnight before serving his first term of imprisonment, very little
time in which to make the acquaintance of a woman and dispose of the
stolen jewellery. He asked why, if Butler had hidden the jewellery just
before his arrest, he had not also hidden the opera-glasses which he
had stolen from Mr. Stamper's house. Neither of these comments is very
convincing. A fortnight seems time enough in which a man of Butler's
character might get to know a woman and dispose of some jewellery;
while, if Butler were the murderer of Mr. Dewar as well as the burglar
who had broken into Stamper's house, it was part of his plan to
acknowledge himself guilty of the latter crime and use it to justify his
movements before and after the murder. Bain is more convincing when he
states at the conclusion of his letter that he had known Mrs. Dewar from
childhood as a "thoroughly good and true woman," who, as far as he knew,
had never in her life had any acquaintance with Butler.
At the same time, the account given by Butler's fellow-prisoner, in
which the conduct of the murdered woman is represented as constituting
the provocation for the subsequent crime, explains one peculiar
circumstance in connection with the tragedy, the selection of this
journeyman butcher and his wife as the victims of the murderer. It
explains the theory, urged so persistently by Butler in his speech to
the jury, that the crime was the work of an enemy of the Dewars, the
outcome of some hidden spite, or obscure quarrel; it explains the
apparent ferocity of the murder, and the improbability of a practical
thief selecting such an unprofitable couple as his prey. The rummaged
chest of drawers and the fact that some trifling articles of jewellery
were left untouched on the top of them, are consistent with an eager
search by the murderer for some particular object. Against this theory
of revenge is the fact that Butler was a malignant ruffian and liar in
any case, that, having realised very little in cash by the burglary at
Stamper's house, he would not be particular as to where he might get a
few shillings more, that he had threatened to do a tigerish deed, and
that it is characteristic of his vanity to try to impute to his crime a
higher motive than mere greed or necessity.