THE INTELLECTUAL DIFFICULTIES. OF A MURDERER.
NOTHING, after all, is so remarkable in the pitiless and scien- tific murder with which London has been startled this week, as the great skill which has been tasked and baffled in the effort to sever the close ties of connection between a man and the society in which he lives. It is like an attempt to cut out a living organ from a network of nerves without awakening consciousness in the system of which it is a part,—an operation which can only be performed with the aid of chloroform or some such anaesthetic. And there is no known chloroform for a civilized society ; you cannot lull to sleep the general framework of the social organism while you rupture any of its living ties. Never was the attempt more skilfully made than in the cab murder of the present week. If it failed, it was partly owing to the natural incapacity even of the most ingenious forethought to count up the numberless delicate ramifications of social restraints amidst which we live,—partly to the unexpected draft on the courage and resources of a weak nature when the moment came for acting out in minute detail the false story which he wished to substitute for the truth. It is clear that the murderer had reflected long and deeply on the great difficulty attending the concealment of any murder effected within the indefinitely multiplied and perpetually crossing and re-crossing tracks afforded by the neighbourhood of an English home, however humble, and however temporary. The problem with him was first to remove the scene of the crime from all connection with any recognized residence, to cut every thread of neighbourly or accidental rumour which might lead up to better clues. The second problem was, in case the victims should be identified, to connect their first disappearance with some other agency than his own. This double object he proposed to effect with no little subtlety. But the vital intellectual blunder in the whole conception was that these two schemes,—the outer and the inner lines of his defences,—were not entirely consistent with each other, and not equally well elaborated ; the one for destroying all identification of his wife and children demanding a decidedly different policy from the other for veiling his own identity as their murderer, should their corpses be identified. He was not equal to the effort of thinking out his scheme as a whole. Its parts were much more ingenious than coherent. The first plan was very boldly conceived; but in it he had grossly under-estimated the vigilant network of social observation in which all but the "dangerous claws " live. The second plan was, if anything, still more boldly conceived, but far less carefully elaborated, and it needed a still more audacious policy than that best adapted for the first plan. What was worse, it drew indefinitely upon the murderer's personal coolness and effrontery, not to say his dramatic power. Both lines of defences eventually failed him,—chiefly, however, because he did not know how toadjust their relation to each other. If he had been less subtle, and had concentrated his strength on one only, instead of two, he might possibly have for a time evaded that exposure of his guilt which Providence so rarely fails to extort directly, as in this case, out of the cowardly conscience of the murderer.
The murderer, S. H. Hunt, a herbalist, who had travelled and also acted as salesman for Messrs. McCulloch, the seedsmen, of Covent Garden, lived with his wife and two daughters in Welling- ton Road, Coldharbour Lane, Camberwell. His wife and he, we find, led a "cat and dog" life ; it is said that ho had previously attempted to poison her, and, in any case, he had been heard to make a threat, the publication of which was wholly inconsistent with his second line of defences, namely, of "doing for his wife and children." Of his little girls, one eight and the other four years old, he had always, it is rather inconsistently added, seemed very fond. If this were really so, he must have told himself that it was no great wrong to them to put them almost painlessly out of this world. At all events, he made up his mind that he could neither separate his wife from them without exciting her suspicions, nor permit them to survive her on his premeditated plan without exposing the whole plot. The man's trade as a herbalist had made him acquainted with various deadly vegetable poisons. But his first hope was to use his knowledge in a way that would never be connected with his own name or locality at all. His second hope was, even if that chance should fail him, to raise a strong presumption that a person admitted to be like himself, but yet circumstantially proved dis- tinct (whom, however, he himself intended to impersonate), was the true murderer. Yesterday week he asked his employers in Covent Garden for a holiday for Saturday, " to go down to Margate." He determined to give out that he had, as he supposed, sent off his wife and daughters elsewhere, before leaving himself for Margate,—to Southampton, he said eventually, to visit a mythical uncle ; but this was a grave blunder, as his second scheme for identi- fying their murderer with some other man required that she and the children should really have been expected somewhere where they did not arrive. At the same time, ho determined to circulate a rumour that he had had reason to suspect the propriety of his wife's conduct, for that the children had told him " they went out one day with their mother, and had met a gentleman who had taken them all in a cab, and that he was kind like me, and looked like me, only he had a moustache." Hunt intended himself to impersonate this seducer of his wife, and thought that, after de- stroying the only persons who could speak to his identity, he could, by the boldness of his own demeanour and certain minute bits of circumstantial evidence carefully arranged beforehand, raise a strong presumption that though like the murderer he was not the murderer, or in any way connected with the crime. The subtlety of the plan lay in his determination not to attempt too great a disguise,—to give out quite frankly that the " kind gentleman," of whom his children had told him, was "kind like me, and looked like me," except for the moustache. We shall see presently how he invented circumstantial evidence to raise a belief that this person was really distinct from himself.
But his first object, naturally, though not very astutely, was to avoid if possible all identification of his wife and children,—for- getting that the gossips of any neighbourhood whatever where a woman and two little daughters bad resided for a time and recently disappeared would immediately begin to guess as soon as they saw the description of their persons in the newspapers. Had the sole object been to gain time for escape, this difficulty thrown in the way of identification might, indeed, have been enough. But Hunt clearly did not contemplate escape ;—and, therefore, his true course, as we shall see, would have been, if really intending to fall back on his second lino of defences, to have identified his wife and children himself on seeing the account in the newspapers, and stated where ho professed to have parted from them, and whither they were then going. No doubt this would have required an immense audacity,—but the scheme he had worked out in case of the identification of the bodies did require an immense audacity,— and he should have seen from the first that the identification of the bodies within a day or two was absolutely inevitable. His choice lay between instant flight before the clue to their identity was found, and an eagerness in impersonating the part he had chosen which might have misled everybody. Ile halted between these courses, and so failed.
But to return to the narrative. in his anxiety to carry out his first idea of rendering the identification of the bodies impossible,
Hunt had prevented his wife and children, how we can scarcely
imagine, from taking with them a single properly marked article of clothing on their departure from home,—and this, too, though, like tradespeople anxious to secure warmth and economize luggage, their underlinen was, at least in part, worn double. The only marked things, a pockethandkorchief and the lining of one of the children's shoes, were marked with wrong initials and name. This being premised, we gather that either on Friday night or Saturday morning Hunt had left home, promising his wife and children to treat them to a holiday on Sunday, and directing them, if he did not return in time, to take a cab about seven in the evening of Saturday, and drive towards the Shoreditch Station till he met them. This they did ; the lady telling him, the cabman says, she would " hold the check-string," as she expected she should have to stop him ; and they met the murderer within three hundred yards of the stand from which Mrs. Hunt had called the cab. On being told the cab was full, Mr. Hunt said " he had friends [he did not say his own family] in the cab whom he wanted to join." And now it appears that he wore a moustache, although all his neighbours agree that for two years before his upper lip had been clean shaved. Doubtless, to his wife, he represented it as a holiday costume for his evening's and Sunday's amusement. In this cab,—evidently impersonating the " kind gentleman like himself but for a moustache,"—he drove to the Shoreditch Station, probably missing a train on purpose. At a later hour, between eight and nine on the same evening, Hunt called a second cab, coming from the "departure" side of the Shoreditch Station, as though he had missed a train, and put into it his wife and two children. He told the cabman to drive to the Royl Oak, Westbourne Grove, but to go by the City. Stopping the cabman at the Green Dragon, Bishopsgate Street, he ordered a pint of half-and-half, and told the cabman to get what he liked for himself,—a request the cabman complied with by consuming gin at his horse's head while the half-and-half was consumed inside. No doubt Hunt drank first, then stooping, managed to pour in a powerful dose of prussic acid, and gave it to his wife and children successively,—then, when they must have been already dying, the children being first perhaps, for a moment, sick, calmly handed out the inverted pot to the cabman, who heard some liquid fall in the street, but noticed nothing special in the passengers. Down Cornhill, Cheapside, Newgate Street, and Snow Hill, Hunt must have been employed in assuring himself of the utter extinction of life in his victims, and satisfying himself that nothing remained to identify their bodies,—in examining the pockets, turning over his children's figs and biscuits in the hat-box, looking to sec the clothes were those which he knew to have no marks on them,—or, perhaps, forgetful of all these things, only vacantly conscious of asking himself how murdered children looked, and whether their corpses were stimulating company to their father and murderer. At Furnival's Inn, however, he was, at all events, himself again,—for here he called out cheerfully, "Hold hard, cabby,"—let himself out of the cab,—shut in his corpses,—and quietly asked the fare,—giving the man sixpence over, and directing him with a grim smile to be sure and drive fast to the Royal Oak. " He did not say Good bye " to the inside passengers, says the cabman. We almost wonder he did not ;—but, perhaps, he could not get over a dread lest the corpses should reply in chorus.
After this we apprehend Hunt's presence of mind somewhat gave way. He did not try to escape, and he had not properly prepared his line of defence in the event of the bodies' identification. He wished it to be supposed that he believed his wife and children to be somewhere away from home, with relatives of their own, while he himself was supposed to be at Margate ; yet he went home to Cam- berwell, and was seen going in and out of his house alone on Sun- day, and he could not make up his mind where to locate his wife and children; indeed, he probably discovered that it was a fatal error not to have arranged with some third party to be expecting them. On the Monday the murder was in the papers, with a full descrip- tion of the victims, and he himself, being at his work as usual in Covent Garden, was asked if he had read it, but made no reply,
and became sulky, probably realizing for the first time that if he had really wished it to be believed that he was innocent, but yet had cause for jealousy concerning some man "like himself, except for a moustache," that he ought at once to demand anxiously to see the bodies and, after identifying them, denounce the murderer as the seducer of his wife who, during his absence, had arrested her proposed journey to her relatives, and had finally rid himself of her and the children by poison.
It is wonderful that, seeing how incomplete his scheme for defence was, he did not now attempt to escape. On the Monday night he must have perceived his omissions. He could, indeed, have proved that the man who joined his 'wife and children in Camberwell Road was not with them at first,—was, on the contrary, lurking about on the road, as if to keep an appointment with his wife,—and wore a moustache, which he himself had never done. But he must have seen that he could not prove where he really believed his wife and children to be,—he could not show why he had been so easy in mind after reading the particulars of the murder of three people so like his wife and daughters by a man so like the man of whom he professed to be jealous. In short, he could not assign a natural motive for his own Monday's conduct.
And yet he went home as usual, and read " Tom Brown at Oxford " in bed (with aconite beside him), and when the police came to his house at ten o'clock he took poison to evade a part for which he felt unequal. But the curious thing is that, to the last, he tried to sustain it,—insisting upon speaking to the police as if he did not know whether the murdered trio were his wife and children or not,—mentioning the gentleman in the moustache who had made him jealous,—imploring the police to take charge of his money for his wife, " if she were yet alive,"— writing an order on his employer for an imaginary arrear of his salary, to be paid to his children, "if they were yet alive,"—and even affecting doubt as to the poison he had himself taken,—suggesting that he had taken it by accident when intending to drink out of one of his wife's spirit-bottles. Though conscious his scheme had been too imperfectly worked out to give him any chance of an acquittal, he certainly carried out his own rehearsed part in the extreme moments, his very last words being dramatic : "I have had the most beautiful dreams. I am dying, and before I die I want to write,"—and then writing down, but forgetting to sign, a theatrical piece of paternal solicitude for his children's pecuniary interests " if yet alive."
No crime has ever shown with so much force how difficult it is for the criminal imagination to think out on all sides the situation with which it has to deal. This man had partially realized the arduousness of evading detection in the midst of any neighbour- hood where either he or his family were known even by sight. He must have been deeply impressed with the great number and great delicacy of the clues which a resident in any locality leaves. The other side of his scheme, for impersonating another man "like himself," but with subtle circumstantial differences, was,—taken alone,—equally acute. But the two parts remained parts,—were never properly thought out into a whole. Hunt's ideas were brilliant, if he could but have been as logical and consistent as the Providence who defeated him. He successfully transferred the scene of his crime to an unattached moving atom of London life, where there could be no connecting threads with the author's home. He impersonated not unsuccessfully an imaginary stranger on whom he might throw the guilt. But he had not been equal to conceiving the whole. There were exposed points he had forgotten. He became nervous, and threw up the game in despair. Murderers forget that they need not only the foresight and the composure of Providence, but also the theatrical power of pagan divinities, to enable them in every emergency to act what they are not,—that they must be something more than Providence, in order to defeat Providence.
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