The Bellamy trial

by Frances Noyes Hart

“If, later, you say to one another and to yourselves, ‘The old man is prejudiced in her favour; we must take that into account,’ I say to you, ‘And so you must—and so you must—well into account.’ I am prejudiced because I have known her since she was so small that she did not come to my knee; because I have watched her with unvarying wonder and devotion from the days that she used to cling to me, weeping because her black kitten had hurt its paw, or radiant because there was a new daisy in her garden; because I have watched her from those bright, joyous days to these dark and terrible ones, and never once have I found a trace of alloy in her gold. I have found united in her the traits we seek in many different forms—all the gallantry and honesty of a little boy, all the gaiety and grace of a little girl, all the loyalty and courage of a man, all the tenderness and beauty of a woman. If you think I am prejudiced in her favour you will be right, gentlemen. And if that fact prejudices me in your eyes, make the most of it.

“Of Stephen Bellamy I will say only this: If I had a daughter I would ask nothing more of destiny than that such a man should seek her for his wife—and you may make the most of that too.

“On this subject I will not touch again, I promise. It is not part and parcel of the speech of counsel for the defense to the jury in a murder trial to touch on his feeling toward his clients. I am grateful for the indulgence of both the Court and the prosecution in permitting me to dwell on them at some length. During the course of Mrs. Ives’s examination something as to our relation was inadvertently disclosed. In any case, I should have considered it my duty to inform you of it, as well as of every other fact in this case. I have now done so.

“A few days ago I said to you that Susan Ives was rich in many things. When I said that I was not thinking of money; I was referring to things that are the treasured possessions, the precious heritage, of many a humble and modest soul. Love, peace, beauty, security, serenity, health—these the least of us may have. As I have said, I am pretty close to being an old man now, and in my time I have heard much talk of class feeling and class hatred. I have even been told that it is difficult to get justice for the rich from the poor or mercy for the poor from the rich. I believe both these statements to be equally vile and baseless slanders.

“In this great country of which you and I are proud and privileged citizens, we are all rich—rich in opportunity and in liberty—and there is no room in our hearts for grudging envy, for warped malice. We do not say, ‘This woman is rich; she has breeding; she has intelligence and culture and position, therefore she is guilty.’ We do not say, ‘This man is a graduate of one of our greatest universities. Five generations of his ancestors have owned land in this country, and have lived on it honourably and decently, gentlefolk of repute and power in their communities; he is the possessor of a distinguished name and a distinguished record, therefore he is a murderer!’ We do not say that. No; you and I and the man in the street say, ‘It is impossible that two people with this life behind them and a richer and finer one before them should stoop to so low and foul a weapon as an assassin’s knife and a coward’s blow in the dark.’

“But even in the strictly material sense of wealth, Mrs. Ives is not a wealthy woman. I should like, in the simple interests of truth, to dispel the legends of a marble heart moving through marble halls that has been growing about her. She has lived for several happy years in what you have heard described to you as a farm house—a simple, unpretentious place that she made lovely with bright hangings and open fires and books and prints and flowers. If you had rung her doorbell before that fatal day in June, no powdered flunky would have opened it to you. It might have been opened by Mrs. Ives herself, or by Mr. Ives’s mother, or by a little maid in a neat dark frock and a white apron. Whoever had opened it to you, you would have found within a charming and friendly simplicity that might well cause you a little legitimate envy; you would have found nothing more.

“Sue Ives had what all your wives have, I hope—flowers in her garden, babies in her nursery, sunshine in her windows. With these any woman is rich, and so was she. As for Stephen Bellamy, he had no more than any good clerk or mechanic—a little house, a little car, a little maid of all work to help his pretty wife. That much for the legend of pride and pomp and power and uncounted millions that has grown up about these two. In the public press this legend has flourished extravagantly; it is of little concern to you or to any of us, save in so far as the preservation of truth is the concern of every one of us.

“The story that you have heard from the lips of Mrs. Ives and Mr. Bellamy is a refutation of every charge that has been brought against them. It is a fearless, straightforward, circumstantial and coherent account of their every action on the evening of that terrible and momentous night. Granted that every witness produced by the state here in order to confound and confuse them has spoken the absolute and exact truth—a somewhat extravagant claim, some of you may feel—granted even that, however, still you will find not one word of their testimony that is not perfectly consistent with the explanation of their actions that evening offered you by the defendants.

“Not only does the state’s testimony not conflict with ours—it corroborates it. The overheard telephone conversation, the knife from the study, the stained flannel coat, the visit to Stephen Bellamy’s house, the tire tracks in the mud outside the cottage, the fingerprints on the lamp within—there is the state’s case, and there also, gentlemen, is ours. These sinister facts, impressive and terrible weapons in the state’s hands, under the clear white light of truth become a very simple, reasonable and inevitable set of circumstances, fully explained and fully accounted for. The more squarely you look at them, the more harmless they become. I ask you to subject them to the most careful and severe scrutiny, entirely confident as to the result.

“The state will tell you, undoubtedly, that in spite of what you have heard, the fact remains that Susan Ives and Stephen Bellamy had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to commit this crime. It is our contention that they had nothing of the kind. No weapon has been traced to either of them; it would have been to all intents and purposes physically impossible for them to reach the gardener’s cottage, execute this murder and return to Stephen Bellamy’s house between the time that the gasoline vender saw them leave Lakedale and the time that Orsini saw them arrive at Mr. Bellamy’s home—a scant forty minutes, according to the outside figures of their own witnesses; not quite twenty-five according to ours.