[113] As proof that L’Angelier’s first illness could not have been on the night of the 19th and morning of the 20th, the Dean referred to the fact that “on the 21st he ordered of his butcher the largest piece of beef to be found in his pass-book (7lbs.), and had fresh herrings in such a quantity as to alarm his landlady, and a still more alarming quantity and variety of vegetables.” “There’s a dinner for a sick person!” He also said, “I give my learned friend the option of being impaled on one of the horns of the dilemma—I care not which. He was ill from arsenical poisoning on the morning of the 20th, or he was not. If he was, he received arsenic from other hands than the prisoner’s. If he was not, the foundation of the case was shaken.”
[114] “What is the evidence of Mrs. Jenkins on this point? She says he was in his usual condition on the 21st, when he made that celebrated dinner, and she thought he was making himself ill, and on that 21st he told her he should not leave the house all the following day—the Sunday. He had, therefore, I maintain, no appointment to keep, else he would never have made that statement. On the 22nd Mrs. Jenkins says she had no recollection of his going out. When he did go out at night, and came in late, what was his habit? Mrs. Jenkins says he never got into the house on those occasions except in one of two ways—either he asked her for a check key, and got one, or Thuau opened the door for him. He did not ask for a key that night, and Thuau says he certainly did not let him in.”—Speech of the Dean of Faculty for the defence.
[115] To the evidence for these statements, the Dean of Faculty objected that, though the guard of the train from Stirling was shown the photograph of L’Angelier, and identified him by it, the photo. was not shown to Ross—that Ross only spoke of him as a foreigner—that no one at the place where he had refreshments at Coatbridge was called to identify him—that the “foreigner” told Ross he had walked from Alloa (eight miles), and not from the Bridge of Allan, and that on the Friday or Saturday previous he had walked into Stirling to try and get a cheque cashed, and yet no attempt was made to show that he did so. The witnesses for the defence, on the contrary (Adams, Kirk, Dickson, druggists), were clear (Adams) that at half-past five on Sunday, the 22nd, a gentleman came to his shop for 25 drops of laudanum; Dickson, of Batherton, two miles from Coatbridge, that one whom he recognised as extremely like the photo. of L’Angelier came for a similar dose at 6.30 on a Sunday at the end of March, suffering from a bowel complaint; and Miss Kirk, of the Gallowgate, Glasgow, who remembered a gentleman, “as like as anything I ever saw” to the photo. of L’Angelier, came about 8 p.m. on a Sunday night at the end of March for a medicine, and got a white powder. [But it must be remarked that, weak as this evidence was, it was weakened by the admission of Adams that his customer did not complain of illness—by that of Dickson that it might have been in April, and by the inability of Miss Kirk to fix any date for the occurrence, or to state what the powder was, though she identified the purse from which the party took the money for the payment of it.]
[116] On the question whether this letter brought L’Angelier to Glasgow, the Dean referred to an expression in one of his letters to Thuau, that he did not know what “Mr. Mitchell could want with him,” and inferred that it might be to hear about this person that he hurried up to Glasgow and called on M’Alister, who probably might have given some information on this point had he been called. [If so, why was he not called for the defence?]
[117] “I have already shown,” said the Dean, “how constantly she repeated to him her warning that on no account he was to make the slightest noise of any kind. Therefore, without previous arrangement, it does not appear to me possible for these parties to have met on the occasion on which the prosecutor says they did. If I am right in reading that letter, she expected him on Saturday evening, and she waited and waited, as she had upon Thursday, but he did not come. On the Sunday evening she did not expect him. Why should she? When he did not come on Thursday evening, when he did not come on Saturday evening, why should she expect him on the following evening? Well, then, that is the state in which her expectations were on that occasion, and her conduct precisely squares with it. She is at home in the family. They are all at prayers at nine o’clock. The servants come up to attend prayers with the family. Mackenzie, the suitor of Haggart, remains below while the family are at prayers. The servants afterwards go down stairs to bed, as usual—one after the other. The family then retire to rest, and the prisoner, with her youngest sister, goes to her bedroom about half-past ten or eleven. They both get into bed about the same time; and, so far as human knowledge can go, that house is undisturbed and unapproached till the prisoner is lying in the morning side by side with her sister, as she had fallen asleep. The watchman was on his beat—he knew L’Angelier well—and he saw nothing.”
[118] Regarding this third charge in the light of probabilities, the Dean said:—“If you believe the evidence of the Crown, he suspected the prisoner of having tried to poison him. But my learned friend says his suspicions were then lulled—she had become more kind to him before he left town. I thought my learned friend said he was brooding over it when in Edinburgh, and spoke of it in a serious tone to the Towerses. That was on the 16th of March, after which date he had nothing to change his mind in the shape of kindness from the prisoner, and therefore if he did once entertain the suspicion, however unfounded, there was nothing to remove it from his mind anterior to the 22nd of March. A man, whose suspicions are excited against a particular person, is not very likely to take poison at that person’s hand; and yet, what are we asked to believe that he took from her hand that night? That he took from her hand a poisoned cup, in which there lurked such a quantity of arsenic as was sufficient to leave in his stomach after death 82 grains; such a dose indicating the administration of at least double—aye, I think Dr. Christison said the administration of at least half an ounce (240 grains)—and that he took it that evening from the hand of the prisoner, with all his previous suspicions that she was practising on him. It is a dose which, as far as experience goes, was never successfully administered by a murderer. There is not a case on record in which it has ever been shown that a person administering poison to another ever succeeded in persuading him to swallow such a quantity.” [But note as to confidence after suspicion, that of Cook in Palmer, after the suspicious illness at Shrewsbury.—See Palmer’s Case, ante; and as to quantity administered by murderers, note ante, p. 319, and Appendix B., p. 358.]
[119] Christina Haggart, if she was to be believed, appears to contradict this assertion. On re-examination she said that between a month and two before her apprehension Miss Smith asked her to leave the back gate into the lane open after ten at night, and stay in the kitchen a little, as she was to see her friend. When she did so she saw no one in the lane, but as she went into the kitchen, which was in front of the house, she met Miss Smith going towards the back door. She heard footsteps coming through the gate—that she stayed in the kitchen till she heard Miss Smith go to her own room. She stayed about half an hour. “Charlotte Maclean, the cook, stayed in the kitchen with me at my request.” In this she was confirmed by Maclean, but she could not say she heard Miss Smith in the passage, though she heard her afterwards go to her bedroom. Miss Smith’s statement to Dr. Meau is true, if the meeting took place only at the back gate. The Lord Justice Clerk, however, spoke of this evidence as proving that L’Angelier was in the house in Blythswood Square.
[120] In a letter with post-mark September 18, 1855, she alludes to some such threat, “Beloved, you are young, you ought to desire life.” In another with post-mark October 19, 1855, she writes, “‘Before long,’ you say, ‘I shall rid you and all the world of my presence.’ God forbid that you should do this.” “This,” said the Judge, “was a common enough mode of influencing females; and if such was his design, he seemed to have succeeded.”
[121] As to the evidence for the defence, that L’Angelier had on one occasion threatened to throw himself out of the window at the “Rainbow” Tavern, his lordship observed, “As the witness was in bed at the time the deceased had ample opportunity to have thrown himself over, if he had been so inclined, before the witness could interfere; and the jury would consider whether, when going about the room in that excited state, he had only thrown open the window to get air. As to the other stories that he would drown himself, if jilted, they did not amount to much, as on one occasion he had been jilted, and had not drowned himself. You will consider whether all this is merely the vapouring of a loose, talkative man, fond of awakening an interest in the minds of others about himself, or whether it affords any indication that he was likely to commit suicide. As to the evidence about giving arsenic to horses in France, which would be useless unless given constantly, he did not see its importance. If he was in the habit of taking it in small quantities, he knew its qualities, and therefore this did not aid the notion that he took an immense quantity on the 22nd to destroy himself. No doubt the prisoner was not bound to prove that he poisoned himself, but it was a hazardous thing to set up a defence that L’Angelier went out that night carrying such a quantity of arsenic in his pocket, and that he swallowed it, how, when, and where, no human being could conceive.”
[122] “It is very difficult,” said the learned Judge, “to say what the exasperated feelings of a female placed in such a situation as this woman was might not lead her to do. And here it is that the correspondence becomes of the utmost importance, as shewing what feelings she cherished about that time, what state and disposition of mind she was in, and whether there was any trace of moral sense or propriety to be found in her letters, or whether they did not exhibit such a degree of ill-regulated, disordered, distempered, and licentious feelings, as shew that the writer was quite capable of compassing any end by which she could avoid exposure and disgrace, and of cherishing any feeling of revenge which such treatment might excite in her mind, driven nearly to madness by the thought of what might follow the revelation of this correspondence. We have heard a good deal said by the Dean of Faculty as to the character of this person: we have no evidence on the subject, except what these letters exhibit, and no witness to character is brought; and certainly these letters exhibit as extraordinary a frame of mind and of passion as perhaps ever appeared in a court of justice. Can you be surprised, that after such letters as those of the 29th April and 3rd May (inviting him in very plain terms to meet her for that purpose at the garden gate of the country house), that on the 6th May, three days afterwards, he got possession of her person? On the 7th she again writes, and in that letter is there the slightest appearance of grief, of repentance, of remorse? It is the letter of a girl rejoicing in what had passed, and alluding to it particularly in terms which I will not read, for perhaps they were never previously committed to paper, as having passed between man and woman. There could be no doubt of the state of degraded and unholy feeling into which she had sunk, probably not the less so if it was produced by his undermining and corruption.”