CHAPTER XL.
DR. LAMSON[A]—A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY—A WILL CASE.
[Footnote A: In this and one or two other cases I am pleased to acknowledge my thanks to my esteemed friend Mr. Charles W. Mathews, the distinguished advocate, for refreshing my memory with the incidents.]
One of the most diabolical cases which came before me while a Judge was one which, although it occupied several days, can be told in the course of a few minutes. I mention it, moreover, not so much on account of its inhuman features as the fact that, in my opinion, Dr. Lamson led the prosecutors—that is, the Government solicitors—into a theory which was calculated by that cunning murderer to save him from a conviction, and it nearly did so.
The story is this:—There was in the year 1873 a family of five children, one of whom died that year and another in 1879, leaving two daughters and a poor cripple boy of eighteen. He was partially paralyzed, and had a malformation of the spine, so that he was an object of great commiseration. He was of a kind and cheerful disposition, and, excepting his spinal affliction, in good health. He seems to have been loved by everybody. His playmates wheeled him about in his chair so that he might enjoy their pastimes, and even carried him up and down stairs. One of this boy's sisters married a Mr. Chapman; the other married a man who was a doctor, or passed as one, of the name of Lamson. He was a man of idle habits, luxurious tastes, and a wicked heart. He was in debt, had fraudulently drawn cheques when he had nothing at the bank to meet them, and was so reduced to poverty that he had pawned his watch and his case of surgical instruments.
By the death of the brother in 1879, the two sisters received each a sum of £800. This boy, Percy, received the like amount, and if he should live to come of age would have a further sum of £3,000; but if he died before that period, one-half would go to Mrs. Chapman and the other half to Mrs. Lamson, the doctor's wife.
Lamson had bought a medical practice at Bournemouth in 1880, but very soon after writs and executions were issued against him.
For three years before Percy's death he had been at school at Blenheim
House, Wimbledon.
It appeared from his statement while dying that he felt just "the same as I did once before, when I was at Shanklin with my brother-in-law," the doctor, "after he had given me a quinine pill." "My throat is burning, and my skin feels all drawn up." This pill, however, did not kill him, but it showed, as subsequent events proved, the murderous design of Dr. Lamson.
On December 3 the boy, being still at school and in good health, was amusing himself with his schoolfellows when his brother-in-law, the prisoner, called. Percy was taken into the room to see him. "Well, Percy, old boy," said the doctor, "how fat you are looking!" The doctor sat down, and Percy was seated near him. The visitor then took out of a little bag a Dundee cake and some sweets, and cut a small slice of the cake with his penknife. About fifteen minutes afterwards he said to Mr. Bedbury, the master, "I did not forget you and your boys: these capsules will be nice for them to take nauseous medicines in;" and he took several boxes of capsules from the bag and placed them on the table. One box he pushed towards Mr. Bedbury, asking him to try them.
No one had seen Lamson take a capsule out of the box, but he was seen to fill one with sugar and give it to the boy, saying, "Here, Percy, you are a swell pill-taker." Within five minutes after that the doctor excused himself for going so soon, saying if he did not he would lose his train.
Not long after his departure—that is, between eight and nine—the boy was taken ill and put into bed with all the violent symptoms which are invariably produced by that most deadly of vegetable poisons, aconitine, and he died at twenty minutes past eleven the same night.
Aconitine was found in the stomach; aconitine had been purchased by the doctor before the boy's death, and being well and having been well, the brother-in-law gave him the last thing he swallowed before the dreadful symptoms of the poison betrayed its presence. At that time no chemical test could be applied to aconitine, any more than it could to strychnine in the time of Palmer. But its symptoms were, in the one case as well as in the other, unmistakable, and such as no other cause of illness would produce.
Two pills were found in the boy's play-box, one of which was said to contain aconitine.
Such was the simple case which occupied six days to try. The jury were not long in coming to a conclusion, and returned into court with a verdict of "Guilty."
My awful duty was soon concluded. I told the prisoner the law compelled me to pass upon him the sentence of death; but gave him, both by voice and manner, to understand that in this world there could be no hope for such a criminal. I said, as I thought it right to say, that it was no part of my duty to admonish him as to how he was to meet the dread doom that awaited him, but nevertheless I entreated him to seek for pardon of his great sin from the Almighty. It was my opinion, and I believe that of the counsel for the defence, that, although so much stress was laid upon the capsule and the administration of the poison by that means, it was not so administered, but that the capsule was an artifice, designed to hoodwink the doctors and Treasury solicitors.
To have poisoned the boy in such a manner would have been a clumsy device for so keen and artful a criminal as Lamson; and I knew it was conveyed in another manner. It should be stated that in Lamson's pocket-book were found memoranda as to the symptoms and effect of aconitine, and as to there being no test for its discovery. Lamson therefore had made the poisoning of this boy a careful and particular study. He was not such a clumsy operator as to administer it in the way suggested. The openness of that proceeding was to blind the eyes of detectives and lawyers alike; the aconitine was conveyed to the lad's stomach by means of a raisin in the piece of Dundee cake which Lamson cut with his penknife and handed to him. He knew, of course, the part of the cake where it was.
My attention was directed to the artifice employed by Lamson, by the shallowness of the stratagem, and by the one circumstance that almost escaped notice—namely, the Dundee cake and the curious desire of the man to offer the boy a piece in so unusual a manner. So eager was he to give him a taste that he must needs cut it with his penknife. I was sure, and am sure now, although there is no evidence but that which common sense, acting on circumstances, suggested, that the aconitine was conveyed to the deceased by means of the piece of cake which Lamson gave him, and being carefully placed in the interior of the raisin, would not operate until the skin had had time to digest, and he the opportunity of getting on his journey to Paris, whither he was bound that night, to await, no doubt, the news of the boy's illness and death.
If the poison had been conveyed in the capsule, its operation would have been almost immediate, and so would the detection of the aconitine. As I have said, the contrivance would have been too clumsy for so crafty a mind. A detective would not expect to find the secret design so foolishly exposed any more than a spectator would expect to see the actual trick of a conjurer in the manner of its performance.
I was not able to bring the artifice before the jury; the Crown had not discovered it, and Lamson's deep-laid scheme was nearly successful. His plan, of course, was to lead the prosecution to maintain that he gave the poison in the capsule, and then to compel them to show that there was no evidence of it. The jury were satisfied that the boy was poisoned by Lamson, and little troubled themselves about the way in which it was done.
A singular case of mistaken identity came under my notice during the trial of a serious charge of wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm. Five men were charged, and the evidence showed that a most brutal mutilation of a gamekeeper's hand had been inflicted. The men were notorious poachers, and were engaged in a poaching expedition when the crime was committed. One of the accused was a young man, scarcely more than a youth, but I had no doubt that he was the cleverest of the gang. The men were convicted, but this young man vehemently protested his innocence, and declared that he was not with the gang that night. His manner impressed me so much that I began to doubt whether some mistake had not been made. The injured keeper, however, whose honesty I had no reason to doubt, declared that this youth was really the man who knelt on his breast and inflicted the grievous injury to his hand by nearly severing the thumb. He swore that he had every opportunity of seeing him while he was committing the deed, as his face was close to his own, and their eyes met.
Moreover, the young man's cap was found close by the spot where the assault took place. About this there was no dispute and could be no mistake, for the prisoner confessed that the cap was his, adding, however, that he had lent it on that night to one of the other prisoners. The youth vehemently protested his innocence after the verdict was given.
So far as he was concerned I was not satisfied with the conviction. "Is it possible," I asked myself, "that there can have been a mistake?" I did not think that in the excitement of such a moment, and during so fearful a struggle with his antagonist, with their faces so close together that they stared into each other's eyes, there was such an opportunity of seeing the youth's face as to make it clear beyond any doubt that he was the man who committed the crime. The jury, I thought, had judged too hastily from appearances—a mistake always to be guarded against.
I invited the prosecuting counsel to come to my room, and asked him, "Are you satisfied with that verdict so far as the youngest prisoner is concerned?"
"Yes," he said; "the jury found him 'Guilty,' and I think the evidence was enough to justify the verdict."
"I do not," I said, "and shall try him again on another indictment."
There was another involving the same evidence.
I considered the matter very carefully during the night, and weighed every particle of evidence with every probability, and the more I thought of it the more convinced I was that injustice had been done.
First of all, to prevent the men who I was convinced were rightly convicted from entertaining any doubt about the result of their conviction, I sentenced them to penal servitude.
I then undertook to watch the case on behalf of the young man myself, and did not, as I might have done, assign him counsel.
The prisoner was put up for trial, and the second inquiry commenced. It had struck me during the night that there was a point in the case which had been taken for granted by the counsel on both sides, and that that point was the one on which the verdict had gone wrong. As I have said, I did not doubt the honest belief of the keeper, but I doubted, and, in fact, disbelieved altogether in, the power of any man to identify the face of another when their eyes were close together, as he had no ordinary but a distorted view of the features. In order to test my theory on this matter, I took the real point in the case, as it afterwards turned out to be. It was this: Five men were taken for granted to have been in the gang and in the field on that occasion. The difficulty was to prove that there were only four, and then to show that the young man was not one of the four. These two difficulties lay before me, but I resolved to test them to the utmost of my ability. The Crown was against me and the Treasury counsel.
I knew pretty well where to begin—which is a great point, I think, in advocacy—and began in the right place. I must repeat that the prisoner boldly asserted, when the evidence was given as to the finding of his cap close to the spot where the outrage was committed, that it was his cap, but that he had not worn it on that night, having lent it to one of the other men, whom he then named. This was, to my mind, a very important point in this second trial, and I made a note of it to assist me at a later period of the case. If this was true, the strong corroboration of the keeper's evidence of identity was gone. Indeed, it went a good deal further in its value than that, for it may have been the finding of the prisoner's cap that induced the belief that the man whose face he saw was the prisoner's!
I asked the accused if he would like the other men called to prove his statements, warning him at the same time that it was upon his own evidence that they had been arrested, and pointing out the risk he ran from their ill-will.
"My lord," said he, "they will owe me no ill-will, and they will not deny what I say. It's true; I'm one of 'em, and I know they won't deny it."
Without discarding this evidence I let the case proceed. I asked the policeman when he came into the witness-box if he examined carefully the footprints at the gate where the men entered. He said he had, and was quite positive that there were the footprints of four men only, and further, that these prints corresponded with the shoes of the four men who had been sentenced, and not with those of the prisoner.
It shows how fatal it may be in Judge, counsel, or jury to take anything for granted in a criminal charge. It had been taken for granted at the former trial that five men had entered the field, and how the counsel for the defence could have done so I am at a loss to conceive. It was further ascertained that the same number and the same footprints marked the steps of those coming out of the field. It went even further, for it was proved that no footprints of a fifth man were anywhere visible on any other part of the field, although the most careful search had been made.
If this was established, as I think it was beyond all controversy, it clearly proved that only four men were in the field when the injuries were inflicted. But it might, nevertheless, be that the young man identified was one of the four. Whether he was or not was now the question at issue; it was reduced to that one point. To disprove this the prisoner said he would like the men to be called. I cautioned him again as to the danger of the course he proposed, feeling that he was pretty safe as it was in the hands of the jury. They could hardly convict under my ruling in the circumstances.
"No, my lord," he said; "I am sure they will speak the truth about it. They will not swear falsely against me to save themselves."
The man who was alleged to have borrowed the cap was then brought up, and I asked him if it was true that he wore the prisoner's cap on the night of the outrage. He said, "It is true, my lord; I borrowed it."
"Then are you the man who inflicted the injury on the keeper?"
His answer was, "Unhappily, my lord, I am, and I am heartily sorry for it."
When asked, "Was this young man with you that night?"
"No, my lord," was the answer.
The jury at once said they would not trouble me to sum up the case; they were perfectly satisfied that the prisoner was not guilty, and that what he said was true—that he was not in the field that night. They accordingly acquitted him, to my perfect satisfaction.
Of course, I instantly wrote to the Home Secretary, Mr. H. Matthews (now Viscount Llandaff), who at once procured a free pardon on the former conviction, and the prisoner was restored to liberty.
This case strikingly points to the imperative demand of justice that every case shall be investigated in its minutest detail. The broad features are not by any means sufficient to fix guilt on any one accused, and it is in such cases that circumstantial evidence is often brought in question, while, indeed, the real circumstances are too often not brought to light. Circumstantial evidence can seldom fail if the real circumstances are brought out. Nobody had thought of raising a doubt as to there being five persons in the field.
Upon such small points the great issue of a case often depends.
Another curious case came before me on the Western Circuit. A solicitor was charged with forging the will of a lady, which devised to him a considerable amount of her property; but as the case proceeded it became clear to me that the will was signed after the lady's death, and then with a dry pen held in the hand of the deceased, by the accused himself whilst he guided it over a signature which he had craftily forged. A woman was present when this was done, and as she had attested the execution of the will, she was a necessary witness for the prisoner, and in examination-in-chief she was very clear indeed that it was by the hand of the deceased that the will was signed, and that she herself had seen the deceased sign it. Suspicion only existed as to what the real facts were until this woman went into the box, and then a scene, highly dramatic, occurred in the course of her cross-examination by Mr. Charles Mathews, who held the brief for the prosecution.
The woman positively swore that she saw the testatrix sign the will with her own hand, and no amount of the rough-and-ready, inartistic, and disingenuous "Will you swear this?" and "Are you prepared to swear that?" would have been of any avail. She had sworn it, and was prepared to swear it, in her own way, any number of times that any counsel might desire.
The only mode of dealing with her was adopted. She was asked,—
"Where was the will signed?"
"On the bed."
"Was any one near?"
"Yes, the prisoner."
"How near?"
"Quite close."
"So that he could hand the ink if necessary?"
"Oh yes."
"And the pen?"
"Oh yes."
"Did he hand the pen?"
"He did."
"And the ink?"
"Yes."
"There was no one else to do so except you?"
"No."
"Did he put the pen into her hand?"
"Yes."
"And assist her while she signed the will?"
"Yes."
"How did he assist her?"
"By raising her in the bed and supporting her when he had raised her."
"Did he guide her hand?"
"No."
"Did he touch her hand at all?"
"I think he did just touch her hand."
"When he did touch her hand was she dead?"
At this last question the woman turned terribly pale, was seen to falter, and fell in a swoon on the ground, and so revealed the truth which she had come to deny.