TWO NOTABLE TRIALS
Trial of Brinkley--Trial of Robert Wood
The first occasion upon which scientific evidence as to the difference of
blue-black inks upon a document was given in a court of law in this
country was at the trial of Richard Brinkley at the Guildford Assizes in
July, 1907, for the murder of Mr. and Mrs. Beck.
Brinkley, at the time of his trial, was about fifty years of age. He was a
carpenter by trade, but in the course of his life had turned his hand to
many occupations, and for many months had been living upon the proceeds of
the property which he claimed to have inherited.
For some time prior to her death he had made himself indispensable to an
old lady named Blume, and when, early in 1906, she died, he produced a
will in which she had left him her house and money.
On the strength of this will, which he proved in the usual way, Brinkley
took possession of Mrs. Blume's house, much to the disgust of her daughter
and granddaughter, who had always resented his influence over the old
lady. They had no knowledge that anything was wrong with the will, but
they determined to test its validity, and accordingly a _caveat_ was
entered against it.
Brinkley had not anticipated that he would have to prove that it was a
genuine document, or that he would have to depend upon the testimony of
the men whose signatures as witnesses were present upon the will. He knew
that he could rely upon one of his witnesses, a man named Hird, who had
drawn up the will; but the other witness, Parker, refused to perjure
himself for Brinkley's benefit. He owned that he had signed a paper when
he had been out with Brinkley, but denied that he had ever seen or signed
a will.
As Parker's refusal to appear in court meant that the will would be
declared a forgery, Brinkley decided that he must be cleared from his
path.
He therefore obtained some prussic acid from a man who described himself
as "a friend of our dumb fellow-creatures," alleging that he needed it to
kill a dog, and this poison he introduced into a bottle of oatmeal stout,
which he took round to Parker's lodgings in Croydon, and placed in his
sitting-room.
Before Parker came home his landlady, Mrs. Beck, went into his room and
seeing the bottle of stout called her husband and daughter, and they all
drank the poisoned beer that had never been intended for them. Mr. and
Mrs. Beck died the same night, and their daughter, who had taken less of
the stout, was very ill, though she ultimately recovered.
Parker was immediately arrested, but being able to prove his innocence was
soon set free, and suspicion then fell upon Brinkley who, after the
coroner's inquest, was committed for trial on the charge of murdering the
Becks, the law being that if you deliberately intend to kill one person
and unintentionally kill another you are none the less guilty of murder.
On the way to the police station, after his arrest, Brinkley made the
significant statement: "If anyone says I put poison in stout, he's got to
prove it." Up to that moment there had been no mention of poisoned stout.
At the police court proceedings it was proved that the Becks had died from
the effects of prussic acid, that Brinkley had bought that poison, that he
had bought a bottle of stout in West Croydon, and that he had been seen on
the platform at Wandsworth waiting for the West Croydon train.
The motive of the crime was an important link in the chain of evidence,
but Brinkley held stoutly to his story that the will was signed by both
witnesses in the presence of Mrs. Blume.
Parker's version of his signature, the authenticity of which he did not
dispute, was that while he was out with Brinkley one evening the latter
asked him to sign his name upon a paper petitioning for an outing, and
that they had thereupon turned into a public-house, where he, Parker, had
written his name upon a sheet of paper, the upper part of which was folded
over.
In order to test the truth of Parker's statement the bottle of ink was
obtained from that public-house, and he was told to write his name upon a
sheet of paper in that ink, and this paper and the original will were
submitted to the present writer for examination.
By the aid of the methods described in the preceding pages it was found
that the ink of Parker's signature upon the will and that of the writing
upon the piece of paper were of the same kind--an ink readily recognisable
from its particularly brilliant blue pigment. In addition to this, three
distinct kinds of ink were present upon the will, the body of the
document and the signature of one witness being in one kind of ink, the
signature of the testatrix in another, and the signature of the other
witness in a third.
When the case came on at the Assizes at Guildford Mr. R. D. Muir appeared
for the prosecution, while the prisoner was very ably defended by Mr.
Frampton. Every day the judge, counsel on both sides, the prisoner, and
many of the witnesses went down to Guildford by a train in the morning and
returned to London again in the evening.
Each morning the prisoner when he entered the court appeared quite
unconcerned, and chatted with the warders. As is so often the case, he did
not seem to realise the gravity of his position.
It was shown in the evidence that he had some knowledge of poisons, and
that he had selected one that would disappear more or less rapidly from
the body after death. The chemical evidence as to the presence of prussic
acid in the bodies was given by Dr. Stevenson and Mr. Bodmer, and was not
called in question by the defence.
Evidence was also given by the writer with regard to the inks upon the
will, and this, too, was not disputed. In fact, Brinkley, who went into
the witness-box, when asked how he explained the fact of three kinds of
ink being on the will replied that Mrs. Blume had three different sorts in
the house.
He was then asked what had become of two of them, since only one bottle of
ink was discovered when the house was searched, and to this his answer was
that he had given these to a little girl.
Throughout the trial Brinkley's explanations of damning facts were never
supported by any evidence, while for every statement of Parker there was
abundant corroboration.
The scene in court on the opening day of the trial will probably never be
forgotten by anyone present. A heavy thunderstorm passed over Guildford,
and for some minutes such blackness filled the interior of the hall where
the Assizes were held that it was barely possible to distinguish the faces
of those who were trying a man for his life, excepting when they were lit
up by the vivid flashes of lightning. Throughout the storm Mr. Muir
continued, in clear incisive tones, which could be plainly heard across
the noise of the thunder, to marshal the array of deadly facts, from which
there could be no escape for the prisoner sitting motionless in the dock.
To the journalist nothing that means "copy" is sacred, and the
representative of one leading London paper whispered to another sitting
just behind the writer, "What a pity this couldn't happen while the
sentence of death was being passed!"
Mr. Frampton in his speech for the defence dwelt principally upon other
possible explanations of evidence, which, as he urged, was entirely
circumstantial in character, but he was unable to produce any witnesses to
support the assertions of Brinkley.
After a trial which lasted four days, the judge (Sir John Bigham) summed
up, and the jury, after a short retirement, found the prisoner guilty.
Until the end he protested his innocence.
The most sensational trial that has taken place in this country for many
years was that of Robert Wood, a young artist, in 1907, on the charge of
murdering a woman.
The story of the crime itself is a particularly sordid one, but the
behaviour of the prisoner in court, and the excited state of public
feeling upon the subject gave a profound psychological interest to the
trial.
A woman had been found brutally murdered in her lodgings in a small house
in Camden Town, and no trace could be found of the murderer.
In the fire-grate, however, had been found some charred fragments of a
letter, while in the chest of drawers a post card that had escaped notice
had been discovered.
A reproduction of this post card was posted up at the police-stations and
published in the papers, and was soon recognised by several people as
being in the handwriting of Robert Wood.
In the meantime, Wood, finding that suspicion was likely to attach to him,
persuaded a girl of his acquaintance, named Ruby Young, to promise to
support his statement that he had been with her upon the evening when the
murder took place.
A day or two later Ruby Young became uneasy as to the effect her promise
was likely to produce, and asked the advice of a journalist as to what
would be the best thing to do, putting the case as a hypothetical one. The
man, however, at once saw to what she alluded, and immediately telephoned
to the police, and this led to the arrest of Robert Wood.
At the police court proceedings an expert opinion was given that the
fragments of charred paper found in the grate of the dead woman, were in
the handwriting of Wood, and evidence was also given by the present writer
that the pigment in which the characters were written was identical with
that of a marking-ink pencil found upon the prisoner.
For a long time Wood denied that he had had anything to do with these
fragments. Subsequently, at the beginning of the trial at the Old Bailey,
he admitted that he had written them, though to the end he strenuously
refused to admit that the words had the meaning which they appeared to
suggest.
He denied that they referred to any appointment made with the dead woman
for the day upon which she was murdered.
The proof of the fact that these bits of charred paper had really been
written by Wood brought him very close to the scene of the crime, and his
attempt to create a false alibi and to get Ruby Young to bear this out
still further strengthened the suspicion against him.
The most telling evidence, however, was the statement of a carman, who
had, he asserted, seen a man leave the house of the murdered woman at five
o'clock in the morning. He had not seen the face of the man, but had
noticed that he had a characteristic swinging walk, and when taken to the
police station had identified the prisoner among a number of other men,
who had been made to walk round the yard, as the man that he had seen
coming down the steps of the house.
Other evidence was given as to Wood's having been seen in the company of
the deceased woman on several occasions in the past, although he asserted
that he had only known her a few days and had seen her only once or twice.
The bad reputation of most of these witnesses detracted from the value of
their evidence.
Mr. Marshall Hall, who conducted Wood's defence, made a very brilliant
speech, in which he laid stress upon the weak points in the case for the
prosecution--the evidence that had been gathered from a tainted source,
the complete absence of any motive for the crime, and the fact that the
jury were trying the prisoner for murder and not for immorality or lying.
He urged that the keynote in this case was that Wood, who had a great deal
of vanity, could not take upon himself the responsibility of admitting
what would cause him to occupy a lower position in the estimation of those
who had given him their undivided respect and affection.
What, he asked, was the evidence of murder? The only iota of evidence that
turned the scale against Wood was that of the man McGowan, who stated that
he had seen the prisoner leaving the house, and had afterwards recognised
him by an alleged peculiarity in his gait.
Two months after the arrest of her lover, Ruby Young, for the first time,
had said that he had a peculiar gait similar to that described by McGowan,
and so far as she was concerned this, said counsel, was a gross and
vindictive lie.
The chief evidence called for the defence was that of Wood's father and
brother, who stated that he was at home on the night of the murder, and of
a neighbour who had lived beneath them, who had seen Wood come home that
evening.
A ticket collector named Westcott, employed at King's Cross station,
stated that he lived in the same road, and that on the early morning, when
Wood was stated to have been seen, he left his house at five minutes to
five. He was then wearing a loose overcoat. Westcott was a
broad-shouldered man, and a boxer, and had a brisk swinging walk. It was
this man, it was suggested, whom McGowan had mistaken for Wood.
Wood, himself, was put into the box and gave his evidence in a low, and at
times, nearly inaudible voice, though he showed not a sign of nervousness.
He gave emphatic denials to the questions put to him in cross-examination
by Sir Charles Matthews, but he admitted having lied in the matter of the
false alibi that he had attempted to set up. He was, he said, in a tight
corner, and any man would have done the same if placed in the same
conditions.
With reference to the fragments of paper on which were words in his
handwriting he denied that they were part of a letter, and suggested that
it might have been some scrap of writing taken from his pocket by the dead
woman. The theory of its referring to an assignation was, he suggested, an
act of imagination upon the part of the prosecuting counsel.
The judge, Sir William Grantham, in summing up the case, pointed out that
had it not been for the conduct of Wood himself in telling lies and
keeping back what he knew, there would have been no justification for
such a lengthy trial.
The evidence of McGowan was, he said, open to a certain amount of doubt,
owing to the fact that the witness had not mentioned at once about having
noticed a peculiarity in the walk of the man he saw leaving the house in
St. Paul's Road, just before five o'clock on the morning of September
12th.
Then the statements of Ruby Young did not bring the crime home to the
prisoner at all. That was a remarkable feature in the case. A number of
witnesses for the Crown did not directly connect the prisoner with the
crime.
The inference, in view of the evidence of other witnesses, was that Wood
in his evidence had been lying all through. But the jury could not convict
him because he was a liar. It was mainly in consequence of Wood's own
false statements that the prosecution were bound to rely upon the evidence
of the other witnesses who had come forward.
"Although," said the judge in concluding his address to the jury, "it is
my duty to do all I can to further the interests of justice, it is also my
duty to inform the jury that they must not find a man guilty unless no
loophole is left by which he can escape. In my judgment, strong as is the
suspicion in this case, I don't think the prosecution have brought the
case near enough home to the prisoner--with the exception of the evidence
of McGowan. That evidence, if implicitly relied upon, would justify you in
finding him guilty; but that evidence is considerably controverted. I
don't think the identification, even if true, is sufficient to justify
you in finding this man guilty. Therefore, although it is a matter for you
alone, it is my duty to point out the effect of the evidence, and it is my
duty to point out that unless the effect of the evidence is so conclusive
that there can be no doubt in anyone's mind, you should give the prisoner
the benefit of the doubt, and say you don't think he is guilty."
It was a quarter to eight in the evening when the jury retired to consider
their verdict, and before eight had struck they were back again in court,
and had pronounced their verdict of "Not guilty."
Cheer on cheer swept through the court, and for some minutes it was
impossible for the judge and the court officers to obtain silence. Men and
women thronged round the dock eager to grasp the hand which Robert Wood
held out to them over the rail.
Outside, in the street, the dense mob that thronged up to the very doors
of the court, took up the cry, and yelled itself hoarse with the words
"Not guilty. Not guilty."
The public had long before this decided that Wood was innocent, and the
orgies of wild enthusiasm that followed upon the announcement of the
verdict were some indication of the tense excitement that had been pent up
for so many days. Robert Wood had become the popular hero of the hour.
It is difficult now to account for this hero-worship of a man who had done
nothing to justify such worship, except upon the theory of an emotional
infection that had destroyed the balance of collective judgment. This want
of proportion reached its limit perhaps in an article written for a Sunday
paper by one of the best known actresses. After describing the emotional
stress through which she had passed while waiting for the jury to give
their verdict she mentioned that she had gone into the hall. There she had
noticed a forlorn little figure of a girl wandering listlessly up and
down. Someone told her that this was Ruby Young, and for a moment she had
felt an impulse to go and speak to her, for she pitied her from the bottom
of her heart. And as she looked at her, with tears welling up in her eyes,
she thought of Peter when he had gone out and wept bitterly!
It was a matter of the greatest difficulty for those connected with the
case to force a way through the surging crowd that was waiting to give a
boisterous welcome to the acquitted artist and his solicitor and counsel,
and to vent their disapproval upon witnesses who had dared to give
evidence against him, and particularly Ruby Young.
For hours she waited, trembling, within the building, for it was not
thought prudent to allow her to venture outside; and it was quite late at
night before, disguised as a charwoman, she was able to make her escape
through a small door that had not attracted the notice of the mob.
This was the climax of one of the most unpleasant features of the trial,
in the course of which several of the witnesses had complained to the
judge of the attempts that had been made to intimidate them from giving
their evidence.
Another memorable feature in the trial was the behaviour of the accused.
Throughout his ordeal Wood seemed to be more concerned about the
impression he was making upon the spectators in court than about the
necessity of accounting satisfactorily for many suspicious circumstances
that told against him.
So well did he appear to be able to control his emotions that, as he
himself wrote afterwards, he could notice whether one of the actresses who
attended the trial day by day, smiled upon him.
Never for one moment did he lose this self-control or appear otherwise
than an unconcerned witness of the events upon which his life depended.
This absence of nerves in the accused is what struck most people as one of
the strangest features in a strange trial, and caused Mr. Hall Caine, who
was present in the court throughout the whole time, to write of him: "That
he felt nothing I will not dare to say, that his mental processes were not
frequently stirred to such pain as comes of baffling difficulties, but
that the ordeal of his trial was a terrible one to him I absolutely refuse
to believe. Robert Wood, innocent of the murder of Emily Dimmock, is yet
the most remarkable man alive."
In what trial upon a charge of murder has there ever been witnessed the
sight of the prisoner, whose life was hanging in the balance, laughing and
chatting with his friends, and making sketches of the judge, the counsel,
and the witnesses? Even at the most crucial moment of the trial, when the
jury had withdrawn to consider their verdict he exhibited no trace of
anxiety, but until called below sat calmly sketching, while he waited for
their return.
And thus Mr. Hall Caine wondered, as he got the prisoner to sign his name
upon the back of a copy of the charred fragments of the letter, whether
"with all his mental alertness, his intellectual activity, his
temperamental composure, this was not one of those men, the rare and
mysterious men, who lack some necessary quality on the moral side of their
nature."