Gentlemen, that that was so I will show you by the letters which were put in yesterday. You see that the pressure by Pratt upon Palmer to meet the two £1000 bills never took place until the office disputed the payment of that policy. All went as smooth as possible so long as Pratt held what he believed to be a good security, the policy upon Walter Palmer’s life, who was dead; but when they began to dispute it, then you will find that Pratt writes to Palmer and tells him the situation of things is quite changed; he could manage the bills very well while that policy was undisputed; but now it is disputed that quite alters the state of things; he says, as he had somewhat anticipated, he finds they can do nothing till the 24th, that is nothing towards compelling the office to pay, because insurance offices generally take three months to pay; and then, stating some other circumstances, he says, “This you will observe quite alters the arrangement, and I therefore must request you to make preparations for meeting the two bills due at the end of this month”; that was where the difficulty was, that was where the pinch was. Then, he says, he shall not flag in his exertions, and so on, and he refers to the circumstances connected with the dispute; Mr. Pratt says—“You, Palmer, know whether they have any ground to dispute that policy upon your brother’s life; you are enforcing it, and if you have no right to do it it is at your peril.” That is what it means, and then he goes on to say, “We must try and make them pay”—that was the position in which Pratt, who was acting for him, stood as to this Prince of Wales insurance office. He says, “In any event, bear in mind that you must be prepared to cover your mother’s acceptances for the £4000 due at the end of the month”; there was the pinch, the office would not pay, the £4000 was becoming due, the holder of the bills saw he was without security, and if anything occurred to increase the suspicions of the insurance office, which was very reluctant to pay, the £13,000 was lost for ever, lost beyond hope. Gentlemen, that £13,000 is sure to be paid unless that man is convicted of murder; and that has a great deal to do with the clamour and alarm which have been excited. So sure as that man is saved, and saved I believe he will be, that £13,000 is paid; there is no defence, no pretence for a defence—the letters of the office make that plain; they took an enormous premium—knowing that the man was only thirty, they took a premium for a man of fifty.
Mr. Attorney-General—That is not in evidence; do you mean to prove that?
Mr. Serjeant Shee—I do not know whether I can show that to be the actual premium, but the letters which were put in show that the premium was enormous; and I say that as sure as he is saved that £13,000 is good for him, and will pay all his creditors.
Now, observe the position in which he was at the moment—all the correspondence turns upon that. This correspondence saves the prisoner, if there is common sense in man.
Serjeant Shee
Now, observe, there is another letter from Pratt containing this passage, “I have your note, acknowledging receipt by your mother of the £2000 acceptance, due the 2nd of October; why not let her acknowledge it herself? You must really not fail to come up at once, if it be for the purpose of arranging for the payment of the two bills at the end of the month; remember I can make no terms for their renewal, and they must be paid. I will, of course, hold the policy for as much as it is worth,” and so on. At this time Simpson and Field were making inquiries how a young man of thirty had died, who had had delirium tremens three times, as their own physician, Dr. Hastings, and Mr. Wardell had informed them. Then in a postscript he says he “casts no doubt upon the capability of the company to pay, but that in the nature of things, with so large an amount in question, it is not surprising that, if they think they have grounds for resisting, they should temporise by delay.” Does not that show that at that date at least, the 6th of October, suspicions were hanging in menacing meteors about Palmer’s head, which would come down with irresistible momentum and crush him upon suspicion of a sudden death by murder? Do you believe that a man who wrote what the effects of strychnia were in his manual would risk such a scene as a deathbed by strychnia, in the presence of the dearest and best friend of Cook—a man whom he could not influence, a medical man, who liked him and loved him well enough when he knew he was ill to sleep with him in the same room that he might be ready to attend to him in case he wanted assistance during the night? Is that common sense; are you going to endorse such a theory as that upon the suggestion of Dr. Alfred Taylor about the effects that strychnia produced upon his five rabbits? Impossible, perfectly impossible! as I submit to you. But to proceed—I will prove to you, most clearly, the position in which he was. On the other side of the letter of the 10th of October Mr. Pratt writes, “Copy of solicitors’ reply”; that is, the solicitors to the Prince of Wales insurance office. He says, “I may add that I hear the office have been making inquiries in every direction.” To be sure, Field was employed; he is not now in the police, but he is employed as a detective officer; he was at Stafford, and was at Rugeley, and was making inquiries in all directions; inquiries could be made at Stafford as well as Rugeley, and all that had taken place at Rugeley just as easily ascertained there as at Rugeley itself; whatever had taken place there would be known. He says they have been making inquiries in all directions. It is plain, then, that he knew that suspicions were then rife, or that they were endeavouring to create suspicions, against him about the policy on the life of Walter Palmer. Here is the very letter which the company wrote in answer to the claim, dated 8th of October, 1855; it is from Messrs. Chubb, Deane & Chubb, the solicitors to the office, addressed to Thomas Pratt, Esq., acknowledging the application; and shortly afterwards Messrs. Chubb send a reply to the application—there is no date to it, but it is enclosed in a letter of the 18th of October from Pratt to Palmer. After apologising for not answering the letter of the 16th instant, owing to the absence of Mr. Deane, they refer to the “local investigation having been made, and decline to pay the claim upon the ground that the facts disclosed in the course of the inquiry are such as fully to warrant them in doing so.” These are letters which my learned friend thought it right to put in yesterday; they are evidence for the Crown, and what is the inference from them? Judge, if you please, from some of the letters to Pratt, and the one which I read first from Pratt to Palmer. Palmer determined that the policy should be paid; he took the advice of Sir Fitzroy Kelly. I see here it is said, “The case will be laid before Kelly to-morrow.” This letter came just before the end of the long vacation; the time to take proceedings had only just commenced, in any event, because the three months had only just expired. But so sure as anything happened by foul play to Cook, he had no more chance of getting the £13,000 than £130,000 from the Prince of Wales insurance office—none whatever. That was the only means he had at that time of extricating himself from those incumbrances.
Serjeant Shee
Gentlemen, I have detained you a long time upon this, but not, I trust, too long, if the view I have submitted be one worthy of your consideration. I infer from all this that Palmer had no interest whatever to put Cook to death; that it was contrary to his interest in a pecuniary point of view, and brought claims upon him, some of them small, others of a larger amount, of which he might have shared the liability with Cook, if not have thrown it entirely upon Cook; that it forced an immediate settlement of the affairs of Cook, not with Cook himself, who was an easy man—it is plain he was—and probably their solicitors, and that therefore in a pecuniary sense he had every motive of interest to desire that Cook should live; and further, he had no chance of getting a ready payment from these documents—but with hard and exacting executors of the £13,000, no chance of the sudden death of Cook passing without suspicion and inquiry, and therefore he could not think it safe for him that he should die.
I cannot, I think, be so much mistaken as that a considerable portion of these observations is not well worthy your attention. I humbly contend that the suggested motive altogether fails; and I conclude that head of the observations which I have to address to you by saying that I submit respectfully to you, to the Court, and to my learned friends that that portion of this case has failed. It could not be the interest of Palmer that Cook should die.
I now proceed to the next head, and it is impossible in dealing with this evidence to observe altogether the order of date. I must group the facts as well as I can in order to deal with the whole of the evidence. The question is whether the symptoms of Cook before his death and the appearance presented by his body after death were consistent with the theory of his having died by strychnia poison, and inconsistent with the theory of his having died from other and natural causes. It is under this head, gentlemen, that I shall discuss, I hope not at undue length, the medical evidence in this cause, and present to you such observations as occur to me upon the witnesses who have been called to support the view which the Crown takes of the effect of that medical evidence.