TWO TRAGEDIES.
[The _Daily Telegraph_, speaking of the necessity for Justice
sometimes "to strip the bandage from her eyes and look into the real
merits of a case, mentions the following case as showing Sir Henry's
unequalled knowledge of human nature and the sound equity of his
decrees:--
"A young, respectable woman had been led away by a villain, who was
already married, and under a promise of marriage had betrayed her. He
induced her to elope with him, and suggested that she should tear
a cheque out of her father's cheque-book and forge his name. So
completely was she under his influence that she did so. He sent her to
different banks to try and cash it, but it was not till she got to
a local bank, where she was known, that this was accomplished. The
cheque was for £200. But the seducer never obtained the money; the
girl was apprehended before she reached him.
"Sir Henry openly expressed his strong sympathy for the unhappy girl,
and ordered her to be bound over in her own recognizance of £20, to
come up for judgment when called upon."]
During the early years of my tenure of office as a criminal Judge I
became, and still am, firmly impressed with the belief that to enable
one filling that office to discharge the twofold duty attached to
it--namely, that of trying the issue whether the crime imputed to
the prisoner has been established by legal evidence, and if so,
what punishment ought to be imposed upon the prisoner, assuming the
presiding Judge to be the person to determine it--it is absolutely
essential that he should keep the whole of the circumstances in his
mind and carefully weigh every fact which either forms an element in
the constitution of the offence itself or has a substantial bearing as
affecting the aggravation or mitigation of the punishment; for it
is not only essential that these matters should be known to and
appreciated by the Judge who tried the case, but that they may be also
presented for the information of the Home Secretary, who ought to be
acquainted with them, so that he may form a satisfactory view of the
whole of the circumstances surrounding the case.
A strange story that will ever stand out in my memory as one of
the most dramatic of my life was that of a young lady who was a
professional nurse at the General Hospital at Liverpool. She was
young, clever, and, I believe, beautiful, as well as esteemed and
loved by all who knew her.
She had become engaged to an engineer, and it had been arranged that
she should pay a visit to her mother in Nottingham on a Friday, so as
to acquaint her with their engagement, the intended husband having
arranged to come on the following Monday.
The parents were poor, respectable people, and the girl herself
was poor, so that she had no change of attire, but went in her
professional nurse's dress. It was her intention, however, to buy an
ordinary dress at Nottingham.
There was a dressmaker in that city whom her mother knew, and
with whose children in their early days her daughter had played.
Accordingly in the evening the nurse with a younger sister went to the
cottage to make the necessary arrangements.
While she was there the son of the dressmaker came in, and was at once
attracted by the beauty and the manner of the girl. As they had known
one another in childhood, it was not surprising that they should talk
with more familiarity than would have been the case had they been
strangers.
When the nurse rose to go, the young man asked permission to accompany
her to her mother's. She declined, but he persisted in his request.
This man was a clever mechanic, and had invented a machine for making
chenille. Sad to say, this invention he used for the purpose of
inveigling the girl into his workshop, which was situated on the
second floor of an extensive range of warehouses in a yard at
Nottingham. He asked her to come on the Monday morning, and when
she informed him that her lover was to come by the 12.30 train at
Nottingham Station, he said if she came at eleven she would have
plenty of time to see his invention, and then meet him. She at last
consented.
I now come to a series of facts of a sensational character. On the
Monday morning she went, according to the appointment, and was seen to
go with this man up a flight of steps which led from the yard to the
first floor. The door opened on to the landing outwardly. In about a
quarter of an hour after she was seen staggering down the steps, and
crossing the yard in the direction of the street. In the street she
fell, and was conveyed to a neighbouring house. She was afterwards
taken to a hospital.
In the course of some minutes the man himself came down the steps,
and was informed that a girl had been seen coming out of his premises
bleeding, and had been taken to a cottage.
"Was there?" said he, and walked away.
In the afternoon he was apprehended. He said he was very sorry, but
that he was showing the girl a little toy pistol, and that it had gone
off: quite accidentally. He wished to be taken to the hospital where
she was.
The magistrate in the meanwhile had been informed of the occurrence,
and with his clerk attended at the hospital to take her dying
deposition.
There was an amount of skill and ability about the prisoner which was
somewhat surprising to me, who am seldom surprised at anything.
"Did you not think it was an accident?" he asked.
The dying girl answered, "Yes."
In re-examination by the magistrate's clerk at the end of the
business, the following answer was elicited,--
"I thought it was an accident before the second shot was fired."
The extraordinary part of this story, to my mind, is that the able
counsel--and able he indeed was who defended him--treated the matter
as the most frivolous prosecution that was ever instituted. I know
that he almost laughed at the idea of murder, and, further, that the
junior counsel for the prosecution treated the charge in the same
manner, and said that, in his opinion, there was no case.
The man was indicted for wilful murder, and I am bound to say, after
reading the depositions, I could come to no other conclusion than
that he was guilty of the most cruel and deliberate murder, if the
depositions were correct.
I went with the counsel on both sides to view the scene of the
tragedy, and it was agreed that the counsel for the prosecution should
indicate as well as he could the case for the Crown by merely stating
undisputed facts in connection with the premises.
The flight of steps, as I have said, led from the courtyard to the
first landing.
The door opened outwards, and the first visible piece of evidence was
that some violence had been exercised in forcing open the door on the
occasion of some one making his or her escape from the building, for
the staple into which the bolt of the lock had been thrust showed that
the door had been locked on the inside, and that the person coming
from the premises must have used considerable force in breaking
through.
The key was not in the lock, neither had it fallen out, or it would
have been found somewhere near. It had evidently been taken out and
secreted, because it was found at the bottom of a dustbin a long way
off from the staircase and in the room occupied by the prisoner.
There was one additional fact at this part of the view which I must
mention. A bullet was picked up near the door. It had struck the
opposite wall, and then glanced off and hit the other wall close to
the door.
The bullet had been fired from the landing above; this was indicated
by the direction as it glanced along the wall, and, further, by the
mark it had left of its line of flight from the landing above, for it
had struck against the low ceiling of that spot as though the person
firing had fired in a hurry and had not taken sufficient aim to avoid
it. It might be taken, therefore, that the person firing was not
used to firearms, or he would not have hit what might be called the
ceiling.
The bullet was produced by the chief constable.
On reaching the second landing, the mark of the bullet in the lintel
showed clearly that it had been fired in the direction of some object
below--some one, probably, descending the stairs.
On turning into the factory on this floor, which was quite empty, I
saw on the wall near the doorway the mark of another bullet which had
rested near and was found by the police. It was a bad aim, and showed,
therefore, that the person who fired it was unused to firearms.
We went to the next room, into which we ascended by six steps; it was
clear that it was from the head of these stairs that the course of the
bullet was directed; its elevated position and the angle of incidence
showed this. But as neither of these bullets had struck the deceased,
for there was no mark of any kind to prove it, there was another
bullet to be accounted for, and as the prisoner said that the pistol
went off by accident, two or three matters had to be considered. Where
was the spot where the accident occurred? and was aim actually taken?
The bullet had entered the hinder part of the neck, had taken a
downward direction, and lodged in the spine. It did not, therefore, go
off while he was explaining the pistol to her, otherwise it would have
struck her at any other place than where it did.
Moreover, she had run in a state of intense fright the moment she was
wounded--had commenced to run before, in fact, having escaped from the
clutches of her murderer, for the skirt of her dress was torn from the
gathers. It was proved that the prisoner had bought the pistol on the
Saturday night, that he was unused to firearms, for he had to ask
the man who sold it to explain the mode of using it. He was heard
practising with it on Sunday, and when the accident occurred it was
proved that the interval between the first and second shots exactly
accounted for the space which intervened between the respective spots
where the firing must have taken place.
Much was made of the fact that the poor girl had said she thought it
was an accident, but I had to call the learned counsel's attention
to the statement at the end of her examination, which was this: "I
thought at first it was an accident, for I could not believe he could
be so cruel, but after the _second shot_ I believed he meant to kill
me."
A somewhat novel incident occurred during the examination for the
prosecution.
A wire stand had been dressed with the girl's clothes to show where
the lower part of the dress had been torn from the gathers. It was
placed on the table, and no doubt exactly resembled the girl herself.
The prisoner was so much affected that he shuddered, and had to be
supported.
He was condemned to death.
In the House of Commons and out of it sympathy was, of course,
aroused, not for the unhappy girl who had been sent suddenly to her
account, but for the lustful brute who had murdered her. A question
was asked of the Secretary of State for the Home Department as to the
prisoner being insane, and whether there was not abundant evidence of
insanity at the trial.
The counsel for the prosecution wrote to the Home Secretary and
requested him to lay his letter before the prisoner's counsel to
ascertain whether he agreed with it. The letter was to this effect:
"Not only was there no evidence of insanity, but the prisoner's
counsel based his defence entirely upon the fact that there was no
suggestion that the man was or ever had been insane. He must have been
insane, argued the counsel, if he had committed a brutal murder of
that kind; there was no insanity, and therefore it was an accident."
The humane questioner of the Home Secretary left the prisoner after
that statement to his well-deserved fate.
* * * * *
I recollect at one Gloucester Assize a man was tried before me for the
murder of a woman near Bristol.
The prisoner had given his account of the tragedy, and said he had
made up his mind to kill the first woman he met alone and unprotected;
that is to say, he had made up his mind to kill somebody when there
was no witness of the deed. Humanitarians for murderers might call
this insanity.
He went forth on his mission, and saw a woman coming towards him with
a baby.
He instantly resolved to kill both, and probably would have done so
but for the fact that some one was seen coming towards him in the
distance.
The woman and child therefore escaped, the person he had seen in the
distance also passed by, and then he waited in the lane alone. In a
little time a poor woman came along.
The ruffian instantly seized her, cut her throat, and killed her on
the spot.
No sooner had he accomplished his purpose than a young farmer drove
along in his cart, and seeing the dead body in the road, and the
murderer a little way off, jumped out of his cart and arrested him.
A little farther on the road there was a labouring man, who had not
been visible up to this moment, breaking stones.
"Look after this man," said the farmer; "he has committed murder. Keep
him safe while I go to the village and get a constable."
"All right," said the labourer; "I'll keep un."
As soon as the farmer was gone the labourer and the murderer got into
conversation, for they had to while away the time until the farmer had
procured the constable.
"Why," asked the stone-breaker, "what have you been a-doin' of?"
"Killin' a woman," answered the murderer.
"Killin' a woman!" said the mason. "Why, what did you want to kill a
woman for? She warn't your wife, was she?"
"Nay," answered the murderer, "or I should ha' killed her afore."
The want of motive is always a strong argument with humanitarians, who
pity the murderer and not the victim. I heard no particle of sympathy
expressed for the poor woman, but there was abundance of commiseration
for the fiend who had perpetrated the terrible deed.
There never was any _adequate_ motive for murder, but there was never
a deed committed or any act performed without motive.
Insanity on the ground of absence of motive was set up as a matter of
course, but insanity should be based on proof apart from the cruelty
of the act itself. It was a premeditated crime, a bloodthirsty desire
to wreak his malice on some one; but beyond the act, beyond the
malignant disposition of the man, there was no evidence whatever of
insanity.
I refused to recommend him to the Royal clemency on that ground, or on
any ground, for there was not the smallest pretence for saying it was
not a deliberate cold-blooded murder. And the man was rightly hanged.
Society should be protected from murderers. This may be hard dealing
with the enemies of society, but it is just to society itself. I was
never hard on a prisoner. The least circumstance in mitigation found
in me a hearty reception, but cruelty in man or woman an unflinching
Judge.
Take another case. In Gloucestershire a man was convicted of killing a
girl by stabbing her in no less than thirty-eight places.
Again the humanitarians besieged the Home Secretary. "No man in his
senses would have been so cruel; and there was his conduct in the
dock: he was so wild, so incoherent. There was also his conduct in the
field where he had committed the deed: he called the attention of the
passers-by to his having killed her." And, last of all, "there was the
doctor whom the Home Secretary had consulted after the trial."
I was appealed to, and stated my opinion honestly: that I had closely
watched the man at the trial, and was satisfied that he was shamming
insanity.
And he shammed it so awkwardly that there was no doubt whatever that
he was sane.
Another Judge was asked about the case who saw only the evidence, and
he came to the same conclusion; and I was compelled to report that the
doctor who certified that he was insane did so _without having seen
him_ as the doctors for the prosecution had at the trial and before.
He was hanged.