THE MURDER AT FLORENCE.
THE Florence correspondent of the Morning Post sticks to the curious and grim story which he gave us many months ago concerning the picture of the murderer found on the retina of a murdered Florentine woman's eye,—and so found, as he says, five days before the arrest of the murderer, indeed five days before any clue had been discovered to the identity of the murderer. Our readers may remember that three women in Florence, all of them living alone, were murdered and robbed within four months, on the 14th of April, 2nd of June, and 22nd of August respec- tively, last year, and in precisely the same, and that a very peculiar and iirsome respects skilful manner, all having had their throats cut completely through while the body was in a stooping attitude—probably while their head and neck were compressed on the floor—so that no blood was spirted over the room or the dress of the murderer. This peculiarity had been noted in each case, and in each case all the money and valuables had disappeared ; nor was there the least trace of the murderer. One of the Florentine police,—so said the correspondent in question,—was in each case exceedingly anxious to have a photograph taken of the eye of the murdered woman, as he had atheory on the subject. But in both the first and second case the police authorities refused permission for this apparently idle performance. In the third case it was granted, and an eminent photographer, well known, says the correspondent tithe Morning Post, to all Florence, and especially to the writer, took a photograph of the retina of one eye of the last murdered woman, and then carefully enlarged the scale of the photograph. This was on the 24th August last year, five days before any trace of the murderer was found. The enlarged photograph, he says, brought out very distinctly the outline of a man's face, with a peculiar and striking mouth, chin, whisker, and neck, which was, it was said, shown to many before the murderer was even guessed at. On the 29th August the original of this portrait, Benjamin di Cosimi, was arrested, not on suspicion as a murderer, but on suspicion that he was a Papal spy, there being no evident source for his improved income, and he appearing to frequent the houses of reactionary priests and adherents of the old regime. On his arrest no proof of Papal agency was found, but on the other hand many of the articles taken from the apartments of the three murdered women were discovered, and letters from a woman at Ajaccio acknowledging money and jewels sent to her imme- diately after the first murder, a pair of earrings worn by his last victim, and of which the broken clasp had been left and found in her blood, and an almanack for 1864, in which the dates of the three murders, 14th April, 2nd June, and 22nd August, were each marked with the words "received money from my debtors." Other lonely Florentine women eligible for a like transaction were marked down in his book as " without husband." Di Cosimi's antecedents were as bad as the proofs of his guilt in this case were conclusive. He had been a murderer before, and condemned to the galleys for life at Civita Vecchia, whence he had escaped. On the whole, the evidence against him, of the ordinary kind, seems to have been' overwhelming, and to the extraordinary item of evidence no allusion whatever seems to have been made in the trial last week. The correspondent of the Morning Post repeats, however, " I have already communi- cated, with the greatest fulness of detail, the circumstances con- nected with the photographic experiments made on one of the eyes of the last of the three murdered women, though in doing so I had occasion to add that no importance whatever was attached to these experiments by the Florence law authorities in a criminal point of view, and that in all probability they would not be so much as referred to in the course of the trial. My sole motive for now recurring to this phase of the affair is simply to state (leaving each reader to draw his own conclusions) that the resemblance of the lower portion of the photographed profile to the actual mouth, chin, whiskers, and neck of Di Cosimi, as he sat in the criminal dock, was absolutely startling, and that any idea of connivance in a trick on the part of the photographer—an artist of the highest character—is quite disposed of by the fact that Di Cosimi was not even arrested at the moment when the photograph was taken ; indeed, he was not arrested until the 29th, seven days after the murder and five days after the experiment, and, strange to say, for reasons wholly unconnected with his real crimes." We are quite incompetent to discuss the scientific questions involved in this curious statement. That there is nothing physically impos- sible in the retina of the eye turning out to be a natural photo- graphic plate, on which the chemical changes caused by death might have the property of temporarily fixing the latest image, is, we suppose, indisputable. Art after all can do nothing which nature does not show us how to do, and it is a question for science and evidence, not to be decided by a priori assumption, whether under any conceivable physical conditions such a picture might be left visible, or capable of being rendered visible, on a glazed eye, or not. If the correspondent of the Morning Post has made no blunder in his investigation of the case, it would seem to have been one of putting a leading question to nature in consequence of some scientific ground for anticipating an affirmative answer, and actually getting such an answer. We should be very sorry to ground an opinion on such slender evidence ; but it is impossible not to speculate on the train of thought suggested by the mere surmise that a murderer may, involuntarily, and if he could be conscious of it, we may be sure we may say also very unwillingly, be compelled to leave his carte-de-visite on the glazing eye of his victim, and this even when he is most careful and most com-
petent to obliterate every other trace of his dangerous inter- view with the deceased. It would be odd indeed if it turned out to be true that nature even insists on this involuntary compliment, this reluctant leaving of his card, on the part of the assassin to his victim.
Whether it be so, however, or not, even if this curious story prove, as is likely enough, to have arisen in error or some deception, or to draw its inference from an insignificant and accidental coincidence, instead of from any real photographic correspondence between the supposed picture and the convicted murderer, it is in any case only an exaggeration of the visible tendency of all scientific discovery to render it nearly impossible for a man to obliterate the traces of what he has done, and place any gulf im- passable for the rest of the world between his present and his past actions. Every fresh generation finds it a problem of greater and greater difficulty to annihilate the infinite number of involun- tary fibres of connection by which the different actions of the same man's life are drawn together into organic relation. Even if it be false that you leave a physical likeness of yourself painted on the very eye of death, it is certainly true that no problem is now more difficult, and usually impossible, than to prevent leaving some cipher, legible as you suppose only to yourself, but, as it generally proves, decipherable, whenever it is worth while, by others, on every action of your life, however carefully you may prepare to break the scent, and throw off those bloodhounds of science, cause and effect, by constantly crossing and recrossing the streams of ordinary habit. Every poison, however subtle, is now a most efficient detective in the hands of men of science, and is at least as likely to discover the poisoner as to destroy the victim. The only cases in which there has been any success in throwing the public off the track, are those in which there was no elaborate attempt to cut the connection of cause and effect at all, and the only art consisted in calmly awaiting the certain onset of suspicion. Miss Constance Kent escaped where the much more elaborate schemes of the man who murdered his wife and children in a cab, and the doctor who gave poison to produce the symptoms of a natural disease, were immediately and easily traced. Now and then, when great simplicity of design is combined with the absence of all possibility of gaining by such an action, except in some invisible emotion, and of all attempt to escape, it may be impossible in the present state of science to trace the doer. But the higher the art displayed in any secret action, the more rapidly do traces accumulate of its real origin. If the foot or the fingers leave no trace of themselves, if the photographic story be a myth, if no tangible trophies capable of bearing evidence be carried off, it is yet nearly impossible not to leave the impress of a personal method on any unusual undertaking. Even Di Cosimi increased the weight of the evidence against him- self by the care he took to succeed in each individual murder. His inquiries were so constantly directed to ascertain the loneliness of the Florentine lodging-housekeepers, that a number of witnesses to his careful investigations on this head afterwards turned up against him, and it is not very creditable to the intelligence of the Florentine police, that having once ascertained to their own satisfaction that the three murders were all one man's plan- ning, they did not at once inquire amongst the lonely women, and discover how the way had been already paved to many other like murders by the same hand. Indeed, even if it be true that we may leave with the dead almost as good a testimony to our personal identity as we do with the living, if the robber's maxim that " dead men tell no tales " be utterly falsified, it would be no very great additional weight in the scales against the chances of a murderer's escape,—so ramified, and delicate, and beyond the power of any foresight to command are the threads of evidence which science is every day adding to the machinery for discriminating the various personal agencies at work amongst men.
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