extraordinary means is that of the killing of Daniel Clarke by Eugene
Aram. The main facts of the case are so well known that it is scarcely
necessary to enter into them here. Aram, assisted by a man named Houseman,
it may be remembered, murdered Clarke for the sake of his wealth, and hid
the body in St Robert's cave, near Knaresborough. There it remained from
1745 till 1759, when it was accidentally discovered by a labourer. Close
examination led to the conclusion that the body, or rather the skeleton,
was that of a murdered man, and when the mysterious and almost forgotten
disappearance of Clarke was remembered, steps were taken to arrest his
quondam companions Aram and Houseman. The latter turned king's evidence,
and on his testimony Aram was executed, leaving a shady memory to be
invested with undeserved romance by a poet and a novelist of the following
century.
Researches into modern criminal records also reveal a number of
interesting cases similar to those cited above. A few years ago a Pole
named Lipski was convicted in London of the murder of a woman. Strenuous
efforts were made to obtain a pardon, on the ground that he had been
wrongly convicted, but the solitary fact on which the Home Secretary
decided to allow the law to take its course was that the door of the room
had been locked in which the woman was found murdered, with Lipski himself
hiding under the bed. And in tracing the Muswell Hill murder to its
authors, the police were aided in their endeavours by the discovery of a
common lantern which had been left on the scene of the crime. It was
supposed to belong to a relative of one of the suspected men, and in order
to verify this important link in the chain of evidence, a youthful agent
of the detective force was employed to spin his top in front of the
supposed owner's house, engage him in conversation if possible, and obtain
evidence of the ownership of the lantern. The result was completely
satisfactory; the suspicions of the police were confirmed, and the
murderers brought to justice, mainly, it may be said, through the
lantern's silent testimony.
Another case of murder, which occurred in 1806, was brought home in a
singular and complete manner. A Deptford gentleman, named Blight, was
killed by a pistol-shot, and Sir Astley Cooper, from an examination of the
victim's wounds and of the place of his murder, arrived at the opinion
that none other than a left-handed man could have committed the crime.
Acting on this conclusion the police arrested one Patch, who had been seen
in the locality. When Patch was asked to hold up his hand to plead the
indictment, he put up his left hand. The jury brought in a verdict of
guilty, and before execution the criminal made full confession of his
terrible deed.
Dreams also have played no inconsiderable part in the discovery of crime.
We have not space in the present article to notice all trials where
dream-evidence has been offered to the court; a brief notice of those
cases in which it has had an important bearing must suffice. The most
notorious instance, of course, is that of Maria Martin, the victim of the
Red Barn tragedy. After her departure from home, in order, as was
supposed, to many William Corder, nothing, either by way of letters, or
otherwise, was heard of her, except brief mention in Corder's
communications. Nearly twelve months passed, when Mrs. Martin was startled
and horrified by dreaming, on three successive nights, that Maria had been
murdered and buried in the Red Barn. After much persuasion her husband and
son consented to search the place, and there, in the exact spot indicated
by Mrs. Martin as having been pointed out in her dreams, was found the
body of her missing daughter, buried under the flooring in a sack.
Mention may also be made of the case of Ulick Maguire, an Irish farmer,
whose wife dreamed that her husband had been murdered by a disappointed
lover of hers, named O'Flanagan. A few days later an idiot boy, who lived
in the house, was heard shrieking in terror: "Shanus dhu more O'Flanagan
(big black James) has kilt Ulick, and buried him under the new ditch at
the back of the garden. I dhramed it last night, evry wurrd av it." The
singular coincidence of the lad's dream with her own excited Mrs.
Maguire's suspicions to the utmost, especially as her husband was away
from home at the time. She ordered a search at the particular spot
mentioned by the idiot boy, and there, to her horror, was found the body
of Ulick, with the skull cleft in twain. Immediate request was made for
"big black James." He had absconded and enlisted in the army, but on being
charged with the crime he admitted his guilt, and suffered the penalty of
death.
In one instance, by far the most wonderful of its kind, the victim of a
murder has appeared in successive dreams, and played the part of detective
with admirable skill and effectiveness. A Grub Street victualler, named
Stockton, was murdered towards the close of the seventeenth century. Three
men were suspected of the crime, but neither of them could be discovered,
and the affair seemed likely to become one of the mysteries of crime, when
a Mrs. Greenwood dreamed that Stockton, who had been a neighbour during
life, had taken her to a house in Thomas Street, telling her that his
murderer was inside. On going to the house in person Mrs. Greenwood was
told that Maynard, one of the suspected men, had gone abroad. The
following night Stockton appeared and showed her the features of Maynard,
and gave her such particulars of the man's habits and resorts that he was
captured within a few hours. From Maynard the names of his partners in
guilt, Bevel and Marsh, were obtained, but again the authorities were at
fault, until Stockton indicated the house where Marsh visited, and the
yard (afterwards discovered to be the yard of Marshalsea Prison) in which
Bevel would be found. From a crowd of other prisoners Mrs. Greenwood
identified Bevel, and shortly afterwards, through her strange testimony,
Marsh also was arrested. Then, as an old chronicle of the case affirms,
Stockton appeared for the last time, and thanked her for her good offices.
We have given the story as it has come down through two centuries; a whole
body of clergymen attested its accuracy at the time, and present-day
enquirers would have great difficulty, we imagine, in conclusively proving
that the murder of Stockton was traced by other and less extraordinary
means.
Closely allied to the evidence furnished by dreams, and indeed, as in the
foregoing case of Stockton, sometimes barely distinguishable from it, is
that offered by ghosts, actually seen by witnesses in a waking, but
hallucinatory, state. Such evidence would scarcely be admissable in
modern courts of law, but in past ages it was freely employed, and has
served to bring criminals to the gallows. It must be admitted that the
other testimony against the accused was strong, but in numerous instances
ghosts have been instrumental in putting the officials on to a clue or
track which they would most likely never have discovered by their own
unaided efforts. In his "History of Durham," Surtees mentions the case of
Anne Walker, who lived in 1630, and had become engaged in an intrigue with
a relative of the same name. The girl was placed for a time under the care
of a friend in a neighbouring village, but one night she was removed from
there by Walker and a man named Sharp. From that date no one saw her
alive. A fortnight afterwards, Graime, a fuller, was terrified by the
appearance in his mill of Anne Walker's ghost, "dishevelled,
blood-stained, and with five wounds in her head." She told him the whole
story of her murder; how Sharp had killed her with a collier's pick, and
then thrown her body down a shaft. Graime hesitated to use this strangely
acquired information. Apparently incensed at his delay, Anne Walker
repeatedly appeared, and in order to rid himself of these visitations,
the frightened fuller at length acquainted the authorities with his story.
Immediate enquiry confirmed his statements in every particular. Walker and
Sharp were arrested, charged with the murder of the girl, found guilty,
and executed, though to the last they maintained their innocence of the
crime.
A case, somewhat similar, has occurred even in the present century, and in
matter-of-fact, new world Australia, where visions might be expected to be
few and far between. The friends of a well-to-do settler near Sydney were
surprised to hear from his steward that he had been suddenly called to
England on important legal business. Remembering the vast wealth of the
man, and the necessity for precautions in regard to it, they accepted the
statement, and also recognised the steward's control of the estate during
his master's absence. What was the astonishment, however, of one of these
friends, when on riding over the estate he saw the owner, whom he thought
to be in England, sitting on a neighbouring stile? The figure looked at
him silently and sorrowfully, then walked towards a pond and disappeared.
Drags were procured and the water searched, when the body of the absent
owner was brought to the surface. Confronted with the corpse the steward
confessed that he had murdered his master at the identical stile on which
the ghost had sat.
Pierre le Loyer, a French writer on law and the supernatural, mentions in
his "Discours des Spectres," the case of a man who mysteriously vanished,
having, as was supposed, been murdered. A few weeks later the ghost of the
absentee appeared to his brother, took him to a lonely spot, and there
pointed out where he had been murdered and buried by his own wife and her
lover. Enraged at this domestic perfidy and wickedness the brother
denounced his sister-in-law, and on his testimony she was condemned to be
strangled and her body afterwards burned.
About half a century ago a peculiar case of fraud was disclosed by
remarkable means during the hearing of a law-suit in Tuscany. The decision
of the court turned on the point whether a certain word had been erased
from a particular document of importance. Chemical processes were alleged
to have been employed, and acting on scientific knowledge one of the
lawyers proposed that the document should be heated, as thereby a slight
difference of shade or colouring between the paper and the letters
supposed to have been removed might become visible. Permission was given
to try the experiment, and on the application of heat the important word
in question immediately appeared, and the court gave a verdict in
accordance with this ingeniously devised testimony.
Since that time the progress and development of science have enabled
criminal investigation to be conducted by methods which would otherwise be
impossible, and with almost unerring certainty and decision. The
microscope and the spectroscope have been employed in numerous cases of
murder and forgery where less subtle means of discovery would have proved
useless; chemical analysis has become an important agent of detection,
while photography has also rendered signal service in the cause of
justice. We may not have concerned ourselves with the numerous methods by
which bank-note forgeries are detected; hitherto our references have been
mainly to the more serious crime of murder, and with a few instances of
this character brought to light through modern science our list must
close.
Although, generally speaking, the microscope cannot discern any difference
between the blood of man and that of other mammalia, yet the merest
examination suffices to show the difference between mammalian blood and
that of birds, reptiles, or fishes. In the one case the red blood
corpuscles are round, and without a nucleus; in the other they are oval
and nucleated. On this fact the evidence for a prisoner at Chelmsford
charged with murder was completely rebutted. Blood stains had been found
on his clothes, which, according to his counsel, had been caused by
chicken's blood. But the prosecution brought forward a microscopist, who
stated that the blood stains were mammalian, and on this testimony the
plea of the prisoner was rejected. In the following year, and at the same
assizes, the testimony against a man charged with murder was strengthened
by the microscopical discovery of cotton fibres on a certain weapon, which
he was said to have used, while the murderers of a man who had been kicked
to death were convicted on the evidence of two doctors, who found on the
boots of the accused a number of hairs corresponding with the hair on the
head of the victim. Evidence of this kind is becoming of extreme
importance. Hardly a serious crime is investigated without the application
of one or other of these scientific methods of detection, and with each
success the career of the criminal becomes increasingly difficult and
arduous, and his chances of success more remote. Of remarkable discoveries
of crime the microscope, the camera, and the spectroscope furnish the most
subtle instances, and it is quite possible that before long other methods
of investigation, founded on the most recent scientific achievements, will
also be brought into operation. The phonograph and the Roentgen rays are
only waiting their turn to serve in the cause of justice.
Post-Mortem Trials.
BY GEORGE NEILSON.
It might be thought that a man's death made an end of him, and that his
mere body had no rights or duties except that of getting decently buried.
The middle age had other ideas. The dead still had status and duties.
Continental laws recognised acts of renunciation in which a widow laid the
keys on her husband's corpse, or tapped his grave with the point of a
halberd. The body of a murdered person, or, it might be his hand merely,
might be carried before the judge to demand vengeance.[18] By English
thirteenth century law[19] legal possession of real estate was thought to
remain in a man, not until he died, but until his body was borne forth to
burial. The dead might be a very potent witness, as shewn by the ordeal of
bier-right,[20] a practice founded on the belief that the murderer's
touch would cause the victim's wounds to bleed afresh. Thus variously
qualified to act as witness or prosecutor as occasion required, it is not
surprising to find the dead as defendant also.
English history[21] remembers the strange scene enacted in the monastery
of Caen in 1087, when William the Conqueror lay dead there, and the
ceremonials of his interment were interrupted by a weird appeal. Ascelin,
the son of Arthur, loudly claimed as his, neither sold nor given, the land
on which the church stood, and, forbidding the burial, he appealed to the
dead to do him justice. More than one[22] old English poem turned its plot
round the ancient canon law, by which a burial might be delayed for debt.
The dead was arrestable: a law afterwards set aside, "for death dissolved
all things." But in more codes than one death did not dissolve liability
for the consequences of high treason.
In Scotland,[23] in the year 1320, at the "black parliament" of Scone,
several Scotsmen were convicted of conspiracy against King Robert the
Bruce. Most of them were drawn, hanged, and beheaded. But a Scottish
historian of the time tells us that Roger of Mowbray, one of the accused,
having died before his trial, "his body was carried to the place,
convicted of conspiracy, and condemned to be drawn by horses, hung on the
gallows, and beheaded." It is to the credit of Bruce that he did not allow
the corporal part of the sentence to be carried out, although many entries
in the charter rolls[24] shew that the consequent escheats of the
traitor's lands served to reward the loyalty of others. His body convicted
of conspiracy! How came this singular procedure into Scottish practice?
In England, towards the close of the fourteenth century, although escheats
were not less keenly looked after than in Scotland--and that sometimes in
cases[25] where men had died unconvicted,--the purpose of attainder
appears to have been effected without the expedient of calling the dead to
the bar. The dead, however, was convicted. In the case of Robert
Plesyngton,[26] for instance, in 1397, the judgment of Parliament bore an
express conviction of treason, "_noun-obstant la mort de dit Roberd_." In
1400, John, Earl of Salisbury, challenged for treason by Lord Morley, was
killed before the day appointed for the duel. The court not only adjudged
him a traitor,[27] but on grounds eked out by Roman law subjected his
sureties in costs to his accuser--said costs including the handsome fee of
100s. and twelve yards of scarlet cloth to the lawyer Adam of Usk.[28]
In all features save perhaps that of the actual presence of the body in
the trial, warrant can be found for the Scottish practice in Roman law.
The offence of "majesty," or high treason, formed an exception to the
great humane general rule that responsibility for crime ended with the
criminal's breath. Under the Lex Julia[29] death was no defence to a
charge of "majesty;" proceedings could be raised to stamp the dead man's
name with the brand of treason; his kinsmen might if they chose deny and
defend; but if they failed to clear him his goods were confiscated and his
memory damned. There is in the annals of Rome at least one instance[30] of
a death-sentence of this sort pronounced after the accused was in his
grave. Nor was its scope confined absolutely to high treason. The Church
had a quiet way of appropriating tit-bits of barbaric policy for pious
uses. The Emperor Theodosius[31] said that the inquisition for heresy
ought to extend to death itself; and as in the crime of majesty, so in
cases of heresy, it should be lawful to accuse the memory of the dead. The
Popes endorsed the analogy,[32] for heretics had goods, which sometimes
were worth forfeiting. The spiritual authority however was of more moment.
The Church claimed the power to bind and loose even after death,[33] and a
Welsh twelfth century bishop did not stand alone when he carried it so far
as to scourge the body of a king who had died excommunicate.[34] On the
same principle dead heretics--dead before sentence of heresy--were
burnt.[35]
It was by a close following up of Roman jurisprudence, with, peradventure,
some added light from the law and practice of the Church, that the French
devised their _proces au cadavre_,[36] by which the memory of a dead
traitor was attacked. Its special application was to lesemajesty described
as divine and human, the former an elastic term covering offences against
God and religion. Allied to this latter category, though not exactly of
it, was the mortal sin of suicide. Self-slaughter was so deeply abhorrent
to mediaeval thought as not only to be reckoned more culpable, but to call
for more shameful punishment, than almost any other crime. So coupling the
traitor and the self-slayer in the same detestation, the law assailed both
by the same strange post-mortem process, and (by methods of reasoning
which Voltaire was one of the first to ridicule) consigned their souls to
perdition, their memories to infamy, and their bodies to the gibbet.[37]
The treatment of the suicide was peculiar in its refinements of symbolic
shame. The body was, by the customary law (for example, of Beaumont[38]),
to be drawn to the gibbet as cruelly as possible, _pour monstrer
l'experience aux aultres_. The very door-step of the house in which he lay
was to be torn up, for the dead man was not worthy to pass over it.
Impalement, transfixture by a stake, though well enough known on the
continent as a punishment of the living, became there and in England
alike, the special doom of the suicide. Yet the _proces au cadavre_ had no
footing in English law, and although it was already in 1320 received in
Scotland, we shall find reason for thinking it not wholly welcome.
After the trial in 1320 before alluded to, the records in Scotland are
silent for over two centuries, and it is not until 1540 that the process
is heard of again. In that year[39] the heirs of one Robert Leslie were
summoned to the court of parliament to hear his name and memory "delete
and extinct," for certain points and crimes of lesemajesty, and his lands
and goods forfeited to the king. Legal authorities,[40] obviously
forgetful of the fourteenth century instance, follow one another in the
mistake of regarding Leslie's as the first of its kind. The legality of
the procedure was called in question at the time. Indeed, so loud was the
murmur that it can still be heard in the act passed to put it to silence.
"It is murmurit," says the enactment, "that it is ane noveltie to rais
summondis and move sic ane actioun aganis ane persoun that is deide,
howbeit the commoun law directly providis the samin."[41] The three
estates of parliament therefore on the motion of the lord advocate,
declared unanimously "all in ane voce, but[42] variance or discrepance,"
that the cause was just and conform to common law. In another case of the
following year[43] the charge and judgment were enrolled in the Acts of
Parliament. The widow and the heir of the late James Colville were
summoned "to see and hear that the said deceased James, whilst he lived
had committed the crime of lesemajesty." The deliverance of parliament as
tribunal was by its terms an actual sentence upon the dead--that the
deceased James "hes incurrit the panis of crime of lesemajeste" for which
causes the court decerned "the memoure of the said umquhile James to be
deleit," and his possessions confiscated to the crown.
Parliament which had unanimously voted the procedure well based in law,
found that it was dangerous. It was necessary to restrict its scope. In
1542, it is on parliamentary record[44] that "the lordis thinkis the said
act [_i.e._, of 1540], ower generale and prejudiciale to all the barions
of this realme." This would never do:--an act prejudicial to the barons!
So it became statute law in 1542, that it should apply only to cases of
grave treason, public and notorious during the offender's life, and that
prosecution for the future must be raised within five years after the
traitor's death. It was a reasonable restraint, not always observed.
During the reigns of Mary and James VI. a number of trials occurred in
which this singular process was resorted to, and in some, if not all, of
which the body of the dead appeared at the bar. Occasionally it was
embalmed for the purpose.[45] It had been a part of the border code,
prevalent on the marches of England and Scotland, that an accused should,
although dead, be brought to the place of judgment in person. In 1249, the
marchmen of both realms had declared the law in that sense. They said
that, in any plea touching life and limb, if the defendant died the body
of him should be carried to the march on the day and to the place fixed
between the parties, because--concludes this remarkable provision[46]--"no
man can excuse himself by death." And in the end of the sixteenth century
the borderers had not forgotten the tradition their forefathers had
inherited in the thirteenth, for in 1597, when Scotsmen and Englishmen
were in fulfilment of their treaty obligations presenting their promised
pledges, the custom was scrupulously observed on the English side. All
were there,--all, though all included one that was no more.[47] "Thoughe
one of the nomber were dead, yet was he brought and presented at this
place." They evidently believed on the borders, which Sir Robert Cary with
some reason called[48] an "uncristned cuntry," that a man could best prove
that he was dead by attendance in person.