THE RICHMOND MURDER.
THE verdict of the Jury in the Richmond murder was justi- fied before the jurymen had quitted the Court. There never was, from the first, any reasonable doubt that the victim, Mrs. Thomas, had come unfairly by her death, and it can only have been in the hope of catching some obstinate juryman that so much was made by counsel of the point. That part of the body had been boiled after death—that is, after the head had been separated from it—was beyond .question, on the medical evidence ; and the chance that any human being not a murderer would boil a dead body, or could have a motive for so disgusting an attempt to dispose of a corpse, was too remote to deserve serious consideration. There was, of course, the possibility that some one else committed the crime ; but the prisoner herself, who suggested that defence, directed suspicion at two men who, whatever they may have been guilty of, certainly never were near Mrs. Thomas until she WM dead. That came out irresisti- bly, in spite of the suspicion excited by Church's unexplained fencing with counsels' questions as to his antecedents. On the other hand, Kate Webster was in the house, knew the murdered woman's affairs, was in possession of her effects, tried to sell her furni- ture, personated her after death, and the moment she was alarmed by a caution given to the furniture-broker, fled to Ireland, with the intention of passing over to America. Those . suppositions being disproved, and. these facts proved, there could be little doubt as to the verdict of the jury ; and as we have said, the correctness of the verdict was almost immediately demonstrated. The wretched woman, callous as she had shown herself throughout the commission of the crime, and cruel as she had been in her imputations on Church and Porter, retained enough of feeling to be sorry that in making those imputations she had been uselessly criminal, and her speech exonerating them is an admission almost in terms that she was herself the murderess. It is true, that like all wrongdoers of the weaker kind, she still tried to throw the burden of guilt on .others, and declared that she had been instigated by some un- named offender, but still an instigated murderess is none the less a woman who has committed murder. The statement in palliation may be true or false, but in either case it is no legal palliation, even if the testimony of a woman who has committed a callous murder for money, and who has then thrown suspicion on the innocent, were not too utterly worthless to be even mentally received. The verdict is just, and there is nothing to say, except that for once the police appear to have inquired into a murder case with great skill, and a perseverance, due, we imagine, to the fact that they had what they often have not—an hypothesis as to the murder, at once definite and well founded. Policemen are supposed in all novels to hunt well in the dark, but experience shows, we think, that, like all other hunters, they are most successful when the prey is in sight, or they are guided by some perceptible trail. In the present instance, they took great trouble, refused to be deceived by well-constructed false trails, and pieced together an irresistible body of circumstantial evidence.
The conviction will, we trust, relieve that portion of the pub- lic which appears to have felt so very strongly the danger of old ladies living alone in houses with only one servant. An alarm of this kind always arises after every great murder, and sometimes rises to singular proportions. All England, He Quincey declares, felt insecure after the murders in Ratcliffe Highway, and certainly all railway travellers did after the murder of Mr. Briggs by Muller. For months after that event railway-guards had the greatest difficulty in inducing old gen- ii inen to travel alone on lines they had traversed every day for years, and comical stories were told of the terrible effects of false alarms, and of the desperate exertions made to pro- cure reassuring company. It is probable, in fact, that there is a great deal of secret fear of murder, and that it influences many minds sufficiently to alter their domestic arrangements. This present " scare " is, however, excep- tionally ridiculous. It arises mainly from the fact that three old ladies have recently been murdered under cir- cumstances which threw suspicion on female servants, and that up to Tuesday last no one had been convicted. It was presumed, therefore, that there was a mania among female domestics for murder and robbery, and that no feeble person living alone with a servant ought to be considered safe. As a matter of fact, however, servants very rarely commit murder, their comfortable lives not developing either the desire or the nerve for such crimes; and thousands of old ladies are attended for years by single servants whose peccadilloes are, at the worst, limited to petty thefts, minute impositions, and very numerous small tyrannies and exhibitions of jealousy. In two of the three cases, again, the victims, though no doubt alone for a few minutes, as every one occasionally must be, were in no sense lonely women. Mrs. Samuels had sons in London, a lodger in the house, and people calling on her at all hours, and lived in Burton Crescent, one of the best known streets in London, a place where a scream would have brought dozens of witnesses in a moment. As to Miss Hacker, she lived in a house which a policeman would have declared as little likely to be the scene of a murder as any in London, in one of the noisiest and most frequented of squares, and a house where one would have supposed solitude impossible. No sensational novelist would dream of fixing on Euston Square as the scene of a violent murder, with a body hidden away for months ; nor could any one, however timid, have dreamt that in her own bed-room, in a frequented lodging-house in the heart of London life, and within sight of policemen, she was in greater danger than in any lonely farm-house in a remote county. In the latest New York murder case, one which has made the city frantic with alarm and suspicion, a doctor's wife was strangled and her face burned, in her own bed, in her own house, in a respectable street, and with her hus- band and servants sleeping in the rooms around her. It turned out that a negro had noticed her ornaments, broke into the house to obtain them, and on her threatening to cry out, flung her eau d.e cologne over her face, and then strangled her in the bed-clothes. Striking a match to help Slim to secure his booty, he looked at her face to see if she was dead, and ignited the can de cologne. The man was arrested, confessed at once, and will be sentenced to death, and as he is a negro, the sentence will of course be executed. The girl murdered by Wainwright was always in company, and though alone with him for a moment, had every reason to believe herself as secure as in the street, where, again, repeated murders have from time to time been committed. It is true that a murderer, living in the same house with the victim, has to calculate on the concealment of the body, which is more difficult if there are many eyes about; but most murders are committed from the outside, or are followed by instant flight, the permanent obstacle to murder, the difficulty of securely disposing of the body, proving insuperable. Con- sidering the extreme rarity of the occurrence, the excessive risk, and the combination of qualities and circumstances which a successful murder requires, the thousands of old ladies tended by respectable serving-women, and alone with them perhaps for some hours in each day, may, we think, lay aside their fears. They are in at least as much danger from houses falling, from strokes of lightning, or from being run over in the street.
Whether they would be if the penalty of death were abolished, is another question. We doubt it more and more, with every recurrence of a case in which that penalty has been risked.
Nothing strikes us 80 strongly as the criminal record unrolls itself year after year as the utter inadequacy of the motive for
which murder is committed, the readiness, so to speak, with which a certain kind of criminal will commit it, unless it be the in- tensity of fear exhibited afterwards, and the extent of the effort made by all, public as well as police, to ascertain the facts. Half the murders committed are cool murders by callous persons anxious to obtain small sums, or to get rid of claims, or to gratify small enmities, and but for the fear of death they would be as numerous as burglaries. It is usual to say there is, even with the criminal class, an instinctive horror of murder ; but we do not find that in countries where execution is un- certain, and are strongly tempted to believe that the horror is partly a horror of the penalty, and partly a special horror of the crime, only produced by the knowledge that the world retains for it its last dread sentence. We doubt if the horror would last if the sentence were no heavier than it is for burglary, any more than the horror of burglary does. And we feel quite sure that trials for murder would and more often in acquittals, and not, as is usually thought, in sentences. The police would take less pains in the collection of evidence, and the public would not take any. It is usual, and perhaps convenient, to Suppose that the elaborate care displayed in investigating and trying capital cases is due to hatred of murder, as a crime ; but a large part is clue to the feeling that a human life is at stake, and that the truth therefore ought to be placed beyond a doubt. Very careless and unimaginative people, who do not realise to themselves what imprisonment for life is, will exert themselves very strenuously to avoid feeling that they are guilty of suffer- ing a fellow-creature to die unjustly, or to justify the law when it takes life. The result of the care taken is not acquittal, but conviction, and death is therefore the most inevitable, as well as the most dreaded, of all forms of retribution for crime.
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