THE YALDING MURDER.
IT is strange that just when the public have been excited about murder by means of a poison which was supposed to be almost beyond discovery, and which yet yielded in the end all the evidence that was needed to make conviction certain, another trial should have shown that a murder com- mitted under the most common-place circumstances may baffle all the detective skill that can be brought to bear on it. It would have been thought quite impossible before hand that a woman should walk away with a child, in broad daylight, and in a busy part of London, 'should take her by train into the country, strangle her, and then throw the body into the Medway, and throughout it all escape identification. Yet this is what has happened, in the murder of Georgina Moore. The whole history of the crime is clearly traced out. We see the child walking with a woman in Pimlico in the afternoon, leaving a country station with her an hour or two later, making her way, still in the woman's company, along country roads, stopping at a road-side inn, too tired to eat, but not seemingly alarmed at the unaccustomed journey she was taking, until in the end we almost hear her last cry on the river-bank. All these stages come out clearly enough in the evidence, but in them all there is wanting an essential con- dition of detection. The woman is seen at one point after another, but those who see her are never quite able to identify her with the woman who was tried for her life last week. It is this circumstance that makes the case worthless as an argu-
ment against circumstantial evidence. Doubtless, so far as the evidence went, it was all circumstantial ; but then, so far as it went, it was very good evidence. The weak point in it was, that it only went to show how the murder had been committed, and proved nothing at all as to the woman by whom it had been committed. By one witness after another, every step almost in the last even- ing of the child's life has been carefully pieced together; and if it had been of any use to ask the jury to find that she had been taken by a woman from Pimlico to Paddock Wood on December 20th, that from thence she had been taken by a circuitous route to Yalding, that there she had been strangled, and then or at some later time thrown into the river, they would have had no difficulty in returning such a verdict. But when these facts had been proved, the gulf between the prisoner and conviction had only been narrowed. In point of depth, it remained unchanged. The murder had certainly been com- mitted with the knowledge of a woman, and almost certainly by a woman,—so much was proved by circumstantial evidence. But there was no circumstantial evidence to show who this woman was, and so the case broke down. The flaw was not in the nature of the evidence, but in the absence of evidence in reference to one essential point.
The nearest approach to identification was at the earliest link of the chain. A boy who had been at school with the child in the morning saw her with the prisoner in Pimlico the same afternoon. At least, he thought it was with the prisoner, and he had picked her out at the police-station. But when examined before the police-magistrate he had not been quite positive as to the identity of the prisoner with the woman he saw, and any way, it was perfectly possible that the child .might have met the prisoner in the street early in the after- noon, and yet have been taken into the country by another woman. No evidence was produced as to the journey by train, but a flyman at Paddock Wood remembered being asked, "one afternoon about Christmas time," by a woman who had a child with her, what the fare was to Yalding. She was not willing to pay the price asked-4s.—but she also said that she did not want to go by train, though the fare was only 3d. He could not say, however, whether it was the prisoner he saw, or even whether the child was a girl. A man who was at a public-house near the station in the week before Christmas Day saw a woman with a child about a. quarter past four in the afternoon, going towards "Judd's Corner." The woman's face seemed familiar to him, and he " had an opinion " it was the prisoner (whom he had formerly known), but he " was not positive." A little later, a woman and child were seen at "Judd's Corner " by a labourer, but when he was taken to the prison and shown a dozen women, he picked out one who was not the prisoner. Another witness saw a woman and child on the road, but when shown the prisoner and some other
women in the gaol, "she looked so bold, that he thought she could not be the woman ;" and he identified another as the one he had seen. At the trial, indeed, he returned to his original belief, and said he was sure the prisoner was the woman, but his testimony was evidently worth very little. At another public-house on the road to Yalding, a woman was seen by the landlady and by a man in the house, and two other men saw a woman and child leaving the house and going towards Yalding. But not one of them was able to identify the prisoner as the woman he had seen. At another public-house, a somewhat nearer approach to the required evidence was made. The landlord, on a night which he was able to fix as that of December 20th, had served a woman, whom he believed to be the prisoner, with some whiskey, and a child, whom, when shown a photograph, he said he believed to be Georgina Moore, with biscuits. But he had not thought about the matter till three months later, when a police serjeant had asked him whether he remembered a woman and child coming to his house ; and though he said in Court that he believed the prisoner was the woman, there was plainly a possibility, at this distance of time, that he might be mistaken. The last link was supplied by a labourer living in a cottage about 200 yards from the spot where the body was found. He heard a cry on the evening of December 20th, and got up and went outside, to make out where it came from. But he saw nothing, and in cross- examination he said that he was not quite sure whether he had heard it on the night of the 20th, or on some later night. There was some further evidence, going to show that the prisoner had been seen on the morning of the 21st, at Yald- ing Station, with her mother, who lives near. But the father and mother swore that they had not seen their daughter after the August Bank Holiday, till January 28th ; and the mother swore that from December 15th to the 26th she was too ill to leave the house, her husband and three of her children giving confirmatory testimony to the same effect. Beyond this, there was really no evidence against the prisoner, except the fact that she had given an incorrect account of her movements on the evening of December 20th.
It is plain, therefore, that the Jury had no choice but to find a verdict of acquittal. The only thing that could be said to be completely established against the prisoner was that her relations with Moore, the father of the murdered child, made it not improbable that she might wish to be revenged on him. But even here the case broke down, for it came out, in the cross-examination of Moore, that there were several other women who had precisely similar cause for wishing to be re- venged on him. It is a very great misfortune that an excep- tionally cold-blooded murder should go unpunished ; but, whatever the Jury may have thought of the probabilities of the case, they would have been confounding probabilities with certainties if they had found the prisoner guilty.
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