But there is another part of his conduct as throwing light upon this matter to which I cannot fail to refer. What has become of Cook’s betting book? What has been the conduct and the language of the prisoner with reference to it? On the night when Cook died, ere the breath had hardly passed from that poor man’s body, the prisoner at the bar was rummaging his pockets and searching under his pillow. That may have been for a perfectly legitimate purpose. But let us see what takes place. He calls to Mr. Jones, and he tells Mr. Jones that it is his duty, as the nearest friend of the dead man, to take possession of his effects, and Mr. Jones does take possession of his watch, and afterwards, at the suggestion of the prisoner, of his rings. At the same time Mr. Jones asks for the betting book. My learned friend endeavoured to explain away this most awkward part of the case by saying, “There were other persons who had access to the place. The undertaker came there with his men, the women came to lay out the dead body, and the servants were there; any one of those might have stolen the book.” But all this is met by the fact that, on that same night, before the women had had anything to do in the room—before they came to lay out the corpse—before anybody made their appearance—that very night, when Mr. Jones is seeking to gather up the effects of the dead man, he asks for the book. What is the answer? “Oh,” says Palmer, adopting the language which he afterwards repeated, “the betting book will be of no use to any one.” Does anybody doubt in his own mind where that betting book had gone to? The father-in-law came down on the Friday, and he begins to discourse about the affair, and he is not satisfied with the answers he gets. The day passes away. He says to Mr. Jones, “Be so good as to collect my son-in-law’s betting book and papers and bring them away.” Mr. Jones goes upstairs; he is immediately followed by the prisoner—up they go, but there is no betting book to be found. Down comes Mr. Jones, and says to Mr. Stevens, “We cannot find the betting book.” “Not find the betting book! surely you must be mistaken”; and, turning round, he says, “Why, Mr. Palmer, how is this?” Upon which Mr. Palmer says, “Oh, the betting book is of no use.” “No use! I am the best judge of that. I think it will be of a good deal of use.” The observation is again repeated, “It is of no use.” Mr. Stevens said, “Why?” “Because a dead man’s bets are void, and because he received the money himself upon the course at Shrewsbury.” A dead man’s bets are void! Yes, that is true; they are void, but not when they have been received in his lifetime. Who received the dead man’s bets? The prisoner at the bar. Who appropriated the proceeds of the dead man’s bets? The prisoner at the bar. Who was answerable for them? The prisoner at the bar. Who had an interest in concealing the fact that he had received them? He had. What was the best mode of doing it? The destruction of the betting book. What was the best mode of calming the determination of the man who was the executor of the dead man, when he wanted to know what he was entitled to receive and what he had received, and to see the record of his pecuniary transactions? Why, to tell him that the record, even if found, would be of no use, for a dead man was not entitled to any bets, he having died before they were received—yet at that very moment he had received the proceeds of the bets which he was representing as void, and was applying the proceeds to his own purpose. Does not that throw light upon the real nature of the transaction? What possible motive could he have for representing that the bets were void, having himself received them, unless he knew that he had received them fraudulently and wrongfully? See what would have taken place if the truth had come out. Mr. Stevens, if he had seen that book, would have seen that his stepson was entitled to receive £1020. He would have inquired who was his agent, to see whether by any possibility those debts could be realised; he would have learned what everybody knew, at least that portion of the turfites with whom Cook was in the habit of communicating, that Fisher was his agent. Fisher would have told him, “I ought to have received the money to repay myself £200, but Mr. Herring received the money.” He would have gone to Mr. Herring, and he would have found that every shilling of the money found its way into the prisoner’s pocket, and was appropriated for his own purposes. How was all this to be done? By the removal of Cook, and then by the destruction of the only record which could have afforded to his representative, who was entitled to stand in his place and realise his pecuniary rights, the information of the money having been received by a wrongdoer, by a man who had no right to it. Gentlemen, I submit these things to your consideration, but I submit them to you as leading, unhappily, but to one conclusion, and that the conclusion of the prisoner’s guilt.
Attorney-General
But, gentlemen, the matter does not even rest here; there is more of the prisoner’s conduct yet to be commented upon, on which I must say a few words before I conclude. Mr. Stevens determined upon having a post-mortem examination. Let us watch the conduct of the prisoner in respect of that most important part of the history of this case. Dr. Harland comes over to perform this most important office; the prisoner is on the watch to see who comes; he meets him as he alights at the inn; he accompanies him to Dr. Bamford’s; they get into conversation about this death, and Dr. Harland says, naturally enough, speaking to a brother medical man who he supposed had been attendant upon the patient, “What is this case? I hear there is a suspicion of poisoning.” “Oh, no,” says Palmer, “not at all; no suspicion of poisoning; the man had two epileptic fits upon the Monday and Tuesday, and you will find old disease, both of the head and of the heart.” Well, there was no disease found of the head or of the heart, unless that very wise gentleman, whom I should have liked to have asked a few questions of to-day, was right about his story of angina pectoris, which I doubt was ever accompanied by tetanic symptoms in this world, or that any other man in the universe would declare that it was. “You will find disease of the head and the heart.” They opened him, and found neither. He said, “He had two epileptic fits on the Monday and Tuesday.” That very same man the day before had gone to Dr. Bamford, and asked Dr. Bamford to fill up the certificate, and Dr. Bamford said naturally enough, “He is your patient, not mine; I have only attended him at your request.” “No, I would rather you did.” He gets Dr. Bamford to fill in “apoplexy”; the next day he tells Dr. Harland that it is a case of epilepsy. This is not an ordinary individual, but a medical man, possessing full knowledge and information with regard to medical matters. However, the post-mortem examination took place; before they go to it there is some conversation with Newton which I will not again more particularly refer to; it is not satisfactory, nor does it show the state of mind in which you would expect to find a man whose friend had just died, from the way in which he speaks of the examination about to take place. Let us come to the examination itself. The stomach and its contents are, as we understood, removed; there is some story about his having pushed against the parties who were performing the examination; I think that is carrying the matter too far; it may have been an accident, and we will look at it in that light; at last the stomach, we say without its contents, and a portion of the intestines are put into a jar, and the jar is fastened with a parchment covering doubled over it; it is tied and sealed, and then it is placed upon a table while the post-mortem examination, with reference to other parts of the body, is made. Dr. Harland has this done; when Dr. Harland turns round he finds the jar removed; he immediately makes an outcry, and then at the other end of a long room, and at a door which was not the proper entrance, but a door which led into a different apartment, which apartment led into the passage, the prisoner was found with the jar in his hand, and when Dr. Harland exclaims, he says, “I thought it would have been more convenient to you when you were going out.” That might have been his motive, though it was an awkward circumstance that the jar containing the stomach should be in the hands of the man against whom there rested a suspicion of having deprived the deceased of life by unfair means. That is not all; two slits were found in the parchment cover when it was tied and sealed up; who could have made them except the prisoner? What did he do it for? There, again, we are lost in conjecture, but the only conclusion at which we can arrive is against the honesty of the purpose and the integrity of the transaction; whether it may have been for the purpose of introducing something which might be capable of neutralising the poison, I cannot tell you; all I know is the fact, and it is a fact of very significant importance in the consideration of the case.
It does not end there—we find that he is restless and uneasy as to what is going to be done with the jar, and objects to its being taken away; he remonstrates with Dr. Bamford at letting it go away, as if Dr. Bamford had any interest in the matter, and as if any one would suspect Dr. Bamford of having had any hand in the taking off of this poor man. The jar is taken away, and then that occurred which must have made a painful impression upon all who heard it in this Court—then comes the story of his going to the post boy, and asking him to upset the carriage which was conveying those who had possession of the jar to Stafford or London, for the purpose of its contents being analysed. My learned friend sought to give a comparatively innocent complexion to this transaction; he says that this bribe of £10 to upset the carriage arose simply out of resentment against the officious stepfather who had dared to interfere in this matter—to insist upon a searching investigation—he had been guilty, my learned friend says, in return for the civility, courtesy, and kindness with which he had been treated by the prisoner, of “prying, meddling, insolent curiosity.” A man who had seen his poor stepson, to whom he was tenderly attached, lying dead under circumstances which raised in his mind a suspicion—and I think I am fully justified, at all events, whatever may be the result of this inquiry, in saying that the very inquiry we are now upon—the gravity and importance of it—at least fully justify Mr. Stevens in the suspicions which he entertained for having insisted upon the inquiry, and that ought to have protected him against the suggestion of “insolent curiosity.” It was known that Mr. Stevens insisted upon inquiry—was it a reasonable motive operating upon this man’s mind that it should occasion such a sense of resentment and anger that he should desire the destruction or mutilation of this man, and offer £10 to the post boy to upset him upon the road? I believe the other to have been the true version—if you upset him you may break the jar, and then the contents never could be found, and there would be no danger of strychnia being discovered.
Attorney-General
But it does not stop even there; the inquiry takes place, and the post-mortem examination having been made, a coroner’s inquest is insisted upon and becomes inevitable, and then we have the prisoner seeking to tamper with the administration of a most important office; sending presents to the coroner at the time the inquest was sitting; presents, unquestionably, of game and things of that description, and if the evidence does not very much mislead us a present of money also. For what purpose was all that done? We find him, with uneasy restlessness, obtaining through Cheshire information of what is taking place between the professional man who was employed to analyse the contents of the stomach and the attorney at Rugeley who was instructed on behalf of Mr. Stevens; is that the conduct of innocence or of guilt? Why should he be desirous of knowing whether strychnia, above all other things, should be found in the intestines of the deceased? Let me call your attention to the letter which he writes to the coroner—“I am sorry to tell you that I am still confined to my bed; I do not think it was mentioned at the inquest yesterday that Cook was taken ill on Sunday and on Monday night in the same way that he was on Tuesday night when he died; the chambermaid at the Crown Hotel can prove this; I believe a man of the name of Fisher is coming down to prove that he received some money at Shrewsbury; now, here he can only pay Smith £10 out of £41 he owed him. “Does he tell what had become of the rest of the money that the man had at Shrewsbury? “Had you not better call Smith,” that is, Mr. Jeremiah Smith whom we saw here to-day, “to prove this?” What a witness Jeremiah Smith would have been in the hands of the coroner, Mr. Ward, the friendly coroner of Staffordshire! And, again, “Whatever Professor Taylor may say to-morrow, he wrote from London last Tuesday night to Gardner to say, we (that is, Dr. Taylor and Dr. Rees) have this day finished our analysis, and find no traces of either strychnia, prussic acid, or opium; what can beat this from a man like Taylor, if he says what he has already said of Dr. Harland’s evidence? Mind you, I know it, I saw in black and white what Taylor said to Gardner; but this is strictly private and confidential, but it is true. As regards his betting book, I know nothing of it, and it is of no good to any one”; the repetition of the same story. “I hope the verdict to-morrow will be that he died of natural causes, and thus end it”; but the verdict was not so, and it did not end it; and it is for you to say whether upon a review of the whole of this evidence you can come to any other conclusion than that of the prisoner’s guilt. Look at his restless anxiety; it may possibly, it is true, be compatible with innocence, but I think on the other hand it must be admitted that it bears strongly the aspect of guilt; if it stood alone, I would not ask you upon that to come to a conclusion adverse to the prisoner, but it is one of a series of things, small perhaps, each individually in themselves, but, taken as a whole, as I submit to you, leading irresistibly to the conclusion of the guilt of this man.
Attorney-General
Now, gentlemen, the whole case is before you. It will be for you to determine it. You have, on the one hand, a man overwhelmed by a pressure almost unparalleled and unexampled of pecuniary liabilities which he is utterly unable to meet involving the penalties of the law, which must bring disaster and ruin upon him. His only mode of averting those consequences is by obtaining money; and, under those circumstances, with a bad man, a small amount, if that amount will meet the exigencies of the moment and avert the impending catastrophe and ruin, will operate with immense power. Then you find that he has access to the bedside of the man whose death we are now inquiring into; that he has the means of administering poison to him, and you find that, within eight-and-forty hours, he has twice acquired possession of the very poison, the traces of which are found in the death, and after the death; and then you have the death itself in its terrible and revolting circumstances, all of which are characteristic only of death by that poison and of no other. You have then the fact that, to the uttermost of his ability, he realises the purpose for which it is suggested to you the death was accomplished. You have all those facts, and the undoubted and undisputed fact, that a subsidiary poison was also used, of which traces have been found in the man’s body, although no traces may have been found, for the reasons and from the causes I have suggested, of the principal poison, whose possession by the prisoner we have traced, and whose presence we show in the symptoms which accompanied the death of the deceased. It is for you to take all those circumstances into your consideration.
Gentlemen, you have, indeed, had introduced into this case one other element which I own I think would have been better omitted. You have had from my learned friend the unusual, and I think I may say unprecedented, assurance of his conviction of his client’s innocence.
Mr. Serjeant Shee—Not unprecedented.