“But take the absolute substantiated forty-minute limit—from 9:15 to 9:55. You are asked to believe that in that time they hurled themselves in a small rickety car over ten miles, possibly more, of unfamiliar roads in total darkness, took a rough dirt cut-off, groped their way through the back gates of the Thorne place to the little road that led to the cottage, got out, entered the cottage, became involved in a bitter and violent scene with Mimi Bellamy which culminated in her death by murder; remained there long enough to map out a campaign which involved removing her jewels from her dead body, while fabricating an elaborate alibi—and also long enough to permit Mr. Thorne, who has arrived on the piazza, ample time to get well on his way; came out, got back into the invisible automobile and arrived at Mr. Bellamy’s house, three miles away, at five minutes to ten. Gentlemen, does this seem to you credible? I confess that it seems to me so incredible—so fantastically, so grotesquely incredible—that I am greatly inclined to offer you an apology for going into it at such length. So much for the means, so much for the opportunity; now for the motive.
“There, I think, we touch the weakest point in the state’s case against these two. That the state itself fully grasps its weakness, I submit, is adduced from the fact that not one witness they have put on the stand has been asked a single question that would tend to establish either of the motives ascribed to them by the state—widely differing motives, alike only in their monstrous absurdity. It is the state’s contention, if it still cleaves to the theory originally advanced, that Madeleine Bellamy was murdered by Susan Ives because she feared poverty, and that she was aided and abetted by Stephen Bellamy in this bloody business because he was crazed by jealousy.
“I ask you to consider these two propositions with more gravity and concentration than they actually merit, because on your acceptance or rejection of them depends your acceptance or rejection of the guilt of these two. You cannot dismiss them as too absurd for any earthly consideration. You cannot say, ‘Oh, of course that wasn’t the reason they killed her, but that’s not our concern; there may have been another reason that we don’t know anything about.’ No, fortunately for us, you cannot do that.
“These, preposterous as they are, are the only motives suggested; they are the least preposterous ones that the state could find to submit to you. If you are not able to accept them the state’s case crumbles to pieces before your eyes. If you look at it attentively for as much as thirty seconds, I believe that you will see it crumbling. What you are asked to believe is this: That for the most sordid, base, mercenary and calculating motives—the desire to protect her financial future from possible hazard—Susan Ives committed a cruel, wicked, and bloody murder.
“For two hours you listened to Susan Ives speaking to you from that witness box. If you can believe that she is sordid, base, calculating, mercenary, cruel, and bloody, I congratulate you. Such power of credulity emerges from the ranks of mere talent into those of sheer genius.
“Stephen Bellamy, you are told, was her accomplice—driven stark, staring, raving mad by the most bestial, despicable, and cowardly form of jealousy. You have heard Stephen Bellamy, too, from that witness box, telling you of the anguish of despair that filled him when he thought that harm had befallen his beloved—if you can believe that he is despicable, cowardly, bestial, and mad, then undoubtedly you are still able to believe in a world tenanted by giants and fairies and ogres and witches and dragons. Not one of them would be so strange a phenomenon as the transformation of this adoring, chivalrous, and restrained gentleman into the base villain that you are asked to accept.
“The state’s case, gentlemen! It crumbles, does it not? It crumbles before your eyes. Means, motives, opportunity—look at them steadily and clearly and they vanish into thin air.
“If means, motives, and opportunity constitute a basis for an accusation of murder, this trial might well end in several arrests that would be as fully justified as the arrests of Susan Ives and Stephen Bellamy. I make no such accusations; I am strong and sure and safe enough in the proved innocence of these two to feel no need of summoning others to the bar of justice. That is neither my duty nor my desire, but it would be incompatible with the desire for abstract truth not to point out that far stronger hypothetical cases might be made out against several whose paths also have crossed the path of the ill-starred girl who died in that cottage.
“We come as close to establishing as perfect an alibi as it is likely that innocent people, little suspecting that one will be called for, would be able to establish. What alibi had practically anyone who has appeared against these two for that night? The knife that Dr. Stanley described to you might have been one of various types—such a knife as might have been well discovered in a tool chest, in a kitchen drawer, in the equipment of a sportsman.
“You have analyzed the motives ascribed to the defendants. I submit that, taken at random, three somewhat solider motives might be robbery or blackmail or drunken jealousy. When one possible witness removes himself to Canada, when another takes his life—they are safely out of reach of our jurisdiction, but not beyond the scope of our speculations. I submit that these specifications are at least fruitful of interest. Abandoning them, however, I suggest to you that that girl, young, beautiful, fragile, and unprotected in that isolated cottage with jewels at her throat and on her fingers, was the natural prey of any nameless beast roving in the neighbourhood—one who had possibly stalked her from the time that she left her house, one who had possibly been prowling through the grounds of this deserted estate on some business, sinister or harmless. Ostensibly this was a case of murder for robbery; it remains still the simplest and most natural explanation—too simple and too natural by half for a brilliant prosecutor, an ambitious police force, and frenzied public, all clamouring for a victim.