The Reminiscences of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) Part 36

CHAPTER x.x.xIV.

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, a.s.suming the presiding Judge to be the person to determine it--it is absolutely essential that he should keep the whole of the circ.u.mstances in his mind and carefully weigh every fact which either forms an element in the const.i.tution 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 circ.u.mstances 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 inst.i.tuted. 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 s.p.a.ce 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 l.u.s.tful 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 a.s.size 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.