TRUTH IN THE WITNESS-BOX.
WHEN the counsel for the prisoner in what has come to be known as the Camden Town murder case described the crime as "one of the most atrocious and skilful murders of modern times," he used no exaggerated language. The criminal remains at present undiscovered. He has been able to step clear away. But the skill with which the murder was committed has not as yet been the chief point which has been noticed. The case has excited a deep public interest which has had nothing, or almost nothing, to do with the hatefulness and brutality of the crime itself. The intense fascination has been the psychological and the intellectual problem. Was it possible for a man who, according to the account of witness after witness, was in most respects a normal human being, though not a man of high principle or good life, suddenly, for no apparent motive, to take the life of a fellow- creature in the most sordid and revolting fashion, and after taking it, to go about his ordinary work within a few hours without betraying the smallest change of demeanour to a living soul ? Apart from that psychological problem, was it intellectually credible that the prisoner could have been the murderer P The facts are few, simple, and ugly. A woman named Emily Dimmock, of the unfortunate class, on the morning of Thursday, September 12th, was found in her room at 29 St. Paul's Road, lying in bed with her throat cut. The doctor considered that she had been killed asleep about three o'clock in the morning. She had been seen with the prisoner, Robert Wood, a glass-work designer, in a public-house the night before, and a. postcard written by the prisoner was found in her room ; also, half burnt, a fragment of paper with his writing on it. Further to connect the prisoner with the crime, a witness deposed that he had seen, shortly before five on the morning of Septem- ber 12th, a man leaving the gate of 29 St. Paul's Road. He noticed'that be had a peculiar way of walking, and when the prisoner was paraded with other men at the Police Court, he picked him out by his walk. That was the sole evidence offered to show that the prisoner bad been at 29 St. Paul's
Road on the early morning of the 12th, but on the evidence as a whole the jury were asked to convict the prisoner. The defence was a complete denial. The prisoner's counsel submitted that there was not even a case to go to the jury. The evidence of identification was of the weakest description. There was no motive. No trace of blood was found on the prisoner, or on his clothing, or on any razor. The woman's rooms had been robbed of trinkets and money, and the keys were taken away. None of the stolen articles had been traced to the prisoner. Further, counsel proceeded to set up in defence a complete alibi, to be proved by the prisoner's father and attested by other witnesses ; and he decided, finally, to put the prisoner in the witness-box to give evidence on his own behalf. The result was an acquittal.
It was at the point where it was first announced that the prisoner would enter the witness-box that the case became so strangely complex. Here was a man accused of a deliberate murder who was prepared, as any innocent man would be prepared, to face the ordeal of an examination and cross- examination upon which his life would depend, and yet who, by his own action, could only enter the box as a tainted witness. He bad been proved to have lied at the outset, when suspicion first fell upon him, and lied, too, in a manner which would prejudice the most friendly mind against him. He had already made that worst mistake of all for accused men; be had begun by denying what was known to be true. What did he know to be true, and what was afterwards proved to be true, as regards his relations with the dead woman on the evening before she was found murdered ? He knew he had been with her in a public- house as late as eleven; and when the case came into the Coroner's Court, witnesses were called to prove that he bad been seen with the woman at that time in that public-house. Now, according to the theory of the prosecution, he had accompanied the woman home and murdered her. According to his own story (and in this part of it he never wavered), he reached home that evening before twelve, went to bed at once, after going into his father's room to fetch a clock, went to work again as usual the next morning, and did not realise until some days later that the woman with whom be had been talking in the public-house was the woman who had been found murdered. He did not realise, in fact, he stated, who the woman was until he saw a facsimile in the paper of a postcard which had been found in her room, and which he recognised as one which he had sent her some days before the murder, as a joke, at her request. And what did he do then ? He actually tried to induce, and up to a stage did induce, a girl of his acquaintance. Ruby Young, to agree to say that he had been in her company on the Wednesday evening from half-past six to half-past ten in another part of London. He tried, in fact, to establish an alibi up till midnight on Wednesday; whereas there was abundant proof that he was with Emily Dimmock for part of that evening, and, as it turned out, Ruby Young never gave the false evidence he asked her to give. Could anything on the part of a suspected man have been more incredibly foolish ? Surely an innocent man who was not a fool, as soon as be realised that he had been seen with the murdered woman shortly before her death, ought to have gone at once to the police and made a clean breast of his relations with her. There were other men whom the poor creature, in the exercise of her terrible calling, had met recently. They came forward and said what they knew of her ; Wood, the prisoner, tried to pretend he had not been with her that evening. And yet, astonishingly foolish as that pretence was, the very folly of it grew into a point in his favour. The alibi he tried to set up was useless. It only accounted for his actions up till midnight. The woman was murdered at three in the morning. Once more the case becomes topsy-turvy. If he was the guilty man, how could he have tried to set up so ridiculous an alibi ? With the woman's blood hardly washed off his hands, with the sight of her body still blotting his eyes, with the remembrance still vivid in his mind of walking out from that haunting room into the cool silence of an autumn morning, would a guilty man's mind work and puzzle over the harmless hours between six and eleven the night before ? Of course not. It would be the morning hours that would be crying out at him. He would be trying to get away from the dawn, not from the night.
From one point of view it was perhaps in Wood's favour that throughout the trial he never seemed to realise that he was in danger. A guilty man could not be supposed to have such confidence. But what a curious, pitiful picture such a prisoner makes in the witness-box. Could anything be more &tilting to counsel than his short-sighted prevarications, his quibbles, his dramatic attitudes, his apparently complete inability to understand that he must, for his own sake, tell " the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth " ? At one time his concern seems to be to deny that he frequents public-houses, at another to repudiate acquaintances with loose women, at another to be unnecessarily polite ; but not, first and foremost, to blurt out the truth. "Did you kill Emily Dimmock P "—the blunt, straight-flung question demands a direct answer. " It's ridiculous," is the reply. "Is Crabtree's evidence true P "—" I ask God to destroy me this moment if I have ever been in the house with Crabtree." "Have you been in the habit of using the 'Rising Sun' ?"—"I hb.ve lived in the neighbourhood all my life, within a stone's throw of it. I may have gone there occasionally with a friend. I must be with a friend before I go into a public-house as a rule." He is unable to see, apparently, how little it matters in the urgent, present case, a case of murder, whether he goes alone into a public-house or with a friend, "as a rule." Pressed on the most important point of all, as to why he was so anxious to cover up hie doings on the Wednesday night, his reasons are more wrong-headed still. He had his people to consider ; he had himself to consider, he urges, unaware of the irony of the plea ; he knew the Rising Sun' had a rather bad reputation --be did not wish to hurt the proprietor's feelings in saying so—and he thought it would be very unpleasant to be assoeiated with such people. At intervals it is only with the ;neatest difficulty that be can be got to give a plain answer. He is shown a charred fragment of paper on which there are scraps of his writing. " It has the appearance of a copy," he assents, apparently thinking that his counsel does not wish him to own the writing. His counsel reassures him : "It is my handwriting," he admits. For a moment, apparently, he had thought it might be unsafe to tell the truth. Yet all the while he is an innocent man, he knows himself to be innocent, and cannot understand that only the truth will help him to prove his innocence.
It may be that the law which allows an accused man to give evidence on his own behalf has hanged as many criminals as it has helped. Bit what is unquestionable is that an innocent man determined to speak the absolute truth, concealing no single detail, even though this or that detail looks to him as if it were damning evidence against him, stands in an almost impregnable position. He may find himself making admission after admission which apparently tightens the rope round his neck ; his own story may seem so unlikely as to be incredible. But he will never be shaken out of his story ; and suddenly, perhaps by the oddest, most contradictory chance, light breaks in ; his seemingly wild contention becomes probable, possibly becomes established and tmqnestionable by means of one of the very admissions which seemed to him likely to tell most against him. An innocent man telling the truth, indeed, is like a man crossing a cataract by a bridge of which the wood is apparently rotten in places, but is in reality strengthened and ' secured by a core of steel. His only chance of getting to the other side is to go forward boldly. To distrust the planks is either to go back, or, in trying not to step on them, to slip into the river. In the case which has just ended there was more than one moment when the accused man looked like slipping ; his counsel held him on his way, and the steel took him over. He may not come out of the case with an increased respect for himself, but there is possibly no one who has followed the course of a very remarkable trial who has come out of it with a greater respect than he for the truth.
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