The apparent paltriness of evidence that day was partially the fault of a timid prosecutor. In England in 1871, prosecution of criminal cases by the state was not automatic. The state could intervene in cases of special importance and appoint a prosecutor. But that took time while the commissioner of police applied to the home secretary. This was certainly an important case, and if Commissioner Edmund Henderson had not yet applied to Home Secretary Henry Bruce, he soon would. More often than not, the police themselves handled prosecutions in police court, and Superintendent Griffin, who had a great deal of courtroom experience, was certainly willing to prosecute this case. But private prosecution—prosecution by the victim or, in this case, by the victim’s family—was an option as well, and it was this option that Jane Clouson’s family took, engaging a local solicitor by the name of John Lenton Pulling to prosecute*2—or, rather, to brief a barrister to prosecute. But since Pulling had agreed to take on the case that very morning, he had had no time to brief a barrister, and from the start he made it clear to the magistrate that he was unprepared and that he planned only to present just enough evidence to justify a remand.
Most of the testimony Pulling obtained from the witnesses that day had to do with Jane’s injuries, her agony, and her death. PC Gunn and Sergeant Haynes testified to finding the broken girl in Kidbrooke Lane, Thomas Brown about finding the bloody hammer; Michael Harris itemized Jane’s many injuries and revealed her pregnancy. None of this connected Edmund with the murder, although Pulling did try to make that connection, asking Harris whether the spots on Edmund’s clothing were blood. (Inspector Mulvany had shown him that clothing before the inquest.) But Harris could not say—not unless he examined the spots under a microscope. The magistrate quickly halted this line of questioning altogether, until an expert had had an opportunity to examine the stains.
When the several women in whom Jane had confided her relationship with Edmund came to the witness chair, John Lenton Pulling, reluctant to introduce anything that smacked of hearsay, did not know quite what to do with them. Therefore, they contributed little. Elizabeth Trott spoke of identifying Jane’s body. Her daughter Charlotte did not appear at all. Fanny Hamilton spoke of Jane’s leaving her on the night of the attack to go to Crooms Hill and meet Edmund. That prompted a sharp question from Henry Pook that forced Hamilton to qualify her statement: “She said she was going to Crooms Hill but I can’t say whether she went there or not.”
After Fanny Hamilton there appeared the first of many witnesses who came forward to the police in the wake of the discovery that the victim was Jane Clouson. Jane Prosser was a forty-eight-year-old charwoman and costermonger’s wife who occasionally worked for the Pooks, assisting Jane with heavy cleaning. She had gotten to know Jane intimately, she claimed to the police. And Jane, Prosser was ready to testify, had confided in her a startling revelation she had kept from everyone else. That revelation Prosser would disclose to the coroner’s jury two days later. But John Lenton Pulling was too timid to draw out that hearsay here; Prosser testified to nothing more than the fact that she and Jane were friends.
When John Mulvany took the witness chair, his evidence, which the day before had been strong enough to arrest Edmund Pook, now seemed weak. The stains on Edmund’s clothing might be blood; or they might not. And even if they were, they might have come from a scratch, as Edmund Pook had claimed. Mulvany’s questioning Edmund about writing a letter to Jane sounded, by Mulvany’s retelling, suspiciously like entrapment, especially after Mulvany admitted to Henry Pook that he had failed to caution Edmund against self-incrimination before questioning him. And Mulvany appeared to be holding back exculpatory evidence when, after he had sworn he had told all that he knew, Henry Pook forced him to reveal the Thomases’ failure to identify Edmund as the purchaser of the hammer. Mulvany did manage to contribute to the growing public revulsion against Edmund Pook simply by repeating Edmund’s cold-hearted response after hearing of Jane’s death: “She was a dirty girl, and left in consequence.” But callous insensitivity hardly proved Edmund Pook a murderer.*3
After the witnesses had testified, the magistrate could not hide his disappointment with their evidence. “There was no evidence whatever at present produced connecting the accused with the murder of the deceased,” he admitted. Henry Pook waxed indignant about the police arresting Edmund without basis: If they “had power to take anyone into custody in that manner,” he vociferated, “no one would be safe.” The magistrate trusted the Metropolitan Police more than the solicitor did, however. He turned to Detective Inspector Mulvany and asked if the police had further evidence. They should have other and stronger evidence within a week, Mulvany assured him. Maude gave them five days, remanding Edmund without the bail that Henry Pook demanded.
And with that, Edmund Pook was removed from the courtroom, and later that day removed to one of Kent’s two county jails, the one at Maidstone, thirty miles, an hour and a half by train, away. Edmund Pook would make that journey from prison to police court, where his presence was mandatory, five times. He would grow to hate it. But because of his incarceration, he would not be able to attend a single sitting of the coroner’s inquest. His presence there was not required, as the inquest ostensibly focused upon the cause of Jane’s death and not the question of his culpability. In actuality, Edmund’s guilt or innocence became the central question of the inquest. Ebenezer Pook and Henry Pook would have to fight that battle without him.
*
The same evening that Edmund was removed to Maidstone jail, the police succeeded in tracking down the mysterious Mary Smith. Mary Smith’s friendship with Jane, her alleged intimacy with Edmund Pook, her curious disappearance at the same time Jane disappeared, and even the rumors that Jane had while at Guy’s Hospital uttered “Mary Smith knows all about it,” had led to police to expect that Smith would prove a powerful witness for the prosecution. Their expectations were quickly dashed. They discovered Smith in Tottenham, north of London. Her sudden disappearance, they learned, had nothing to do with Jane or with Edmund; she had simply tired of her place in Greenwich and had returned home. Smith denied she had ever been intimate with Edmund Pook and she was not aware of any intimacy between Pook and Jane Clouson. In short, she knew nothing and could testify to nothing. Mary Smith never appeared as a witness in the case.
As with Mary Smith, so with William Clark. His account of witnessing the fraternization between Edmund Pook, Jane Clouson, and Mary Smith completely lost its lurid suggestiveness with Smith’s denials. William Clark, too, never testified.
But if the police lost two witnesses, they gained three.
*
The approaches to Guy’s Hospital two days later, on May 4, might not have been as crowded with the curious and hostile as had the approaches to Greenwich Police Court. But the impromptu courtroom was crowded to overflowing, the public filling whatever seats were not taken by the doctors of Guy’s, whose curiosity in the case surpassed the strictly professional. The inquest began at noon, and Deputy Coroner John William Payne began it in the traditional way—with the focus squarely upon the victim. After swearing in the twenty-two members of the jury,*4 Payne led them out of the courtroom and down to the mortuary, where they gazed upon Jane Clouson’s beaten body. Once they had seen their fill, they left Jane’s body in the hands of undertaker William Billington, who set it in a small and ornately appointed elm coffin, sealed it, and conveyed it from Southwark to the Trotts’ little parlor in Deptford. Jane’s funeral was set for the following Monday.
As he had at police court, Henry Pook appeared in Edmund’s defense. John Lenton Pulling appeared for the prosecution. But Pulling now was silent; he had briefed a barrister to undertake the prosecution, and that barrister, William Willis, now took charge. Willis, a rising star who would become Queen’s counsel, a member of Parliament, and a county judge, was altogether more capable and comfortable in a courtroom than Pulling. And he had a reputation for partisan combativeness that Henry Pook surely respected.
Afte
r PC Gunn, Sergeant Haynes, and the physician Michael Harris repeated their police court testimony, the focus of the inquest turned to the suspect. Willis, unlike Pulling, had no qualms whatsoever about introducing the hearsay evidence against him. When Elizabeth Trott took the witness box, he lost no time in leading her to declare of Jane, “I have heard her say that she was keeping company with her young master, Mr. Edmund Walter Pook.” Her daughter Charlotte did testify this time, and expounded upon the elaborate promises of marriage and a trip to the countryside that Jane said Edmund had made to coax her to meet him. Fanny Hamilton repeated her conversation with Jane the evening the girl disappeared: Jane had told Hamilton that she was leaving to meet Edmund, and said, “I’m not going to work at the machine now, for he is going to do something better for me.” Beyond pressing these witnesses to admit that they had never actually seen Jane together with Edmund, Henry Pook allowed all of this testimony to pass. But then Jane Prosser took the witness box and disclosed her startling revelation: Jane, she claimed, had told her three months before that she was pregnant and that Edmund was the father.*5 To this Henry Pook objected passionately. Deputy Coroner Payne immediately overruled him. “When he makes a preconcerted arrangement,” Payne told Henry Pook, “it is evidence”—whether hearsay or not.
After Jane’s confidantes spoke, a nervously grinning young man took the witness chair. This was Thomas Lazell, the market gardener who lived in a cottage on Kidbrooke Lane, and who had on the morning after the attack stumbled upon the farm laborer with the stained cloth. At that time he thought he knew nothing about the murder. But the day before the inquest, after he had learned of Edmund Pook’s arrest, Lazell had come to the police with a stunning revelation: he could place Edmund Pook near Kidbrooke Lane on the evening of the murder. At about seven o’clock, as he was making his way from Kidbrooke to Greenwich and his father’s house, cutting through a barn field between the lane and Morden College, he passed them: a young couple, the man with his arm wrapped about the woman’s waist. They were heading toward Kidbrooke Lane. Lazell had spent a great deal of time in Greenwich, and he had seen Edmund Pook more than once emerging from his family’s printing shop: he knew Pook by name and by sight. And the man he passed in the barn field, he was positive, was Edmund Pook.
Thomas Lazell proved to be an atrocious witness. He was, for one thing, easily cowed by authority. And he was cursed by a defect of the lip that made him seem to speak with what one reporter called a “smirking sneer”; that, and a habit of chuckling while nervous, prompted William Payne to admonish him in the midst of his testimony: “Don’t laugh. It’s not a laughing matter.”
“It’s not a laugh,” William Willis interposed. “It’s his manner.”
In spite of its presentation, however, his revelation was “the most important evidence we have had,” according to the deputy coroner. Henry Pook was well aware of its danger. “You have the audacity to come here with this pretty tale,” he snarled at Lazell. He attacked him for waiting so long before going to the police and for presuming to be able to identify Edmund at all: he had only seen him “twice in a twelvemonth,” and had never spoken with him. For all of the solicitor’s bullying, however, Thomas Lazell remained adamant: the man he had seen that night was Edmund Pook.
Two other new witnesses testified after Lazell. Elizabeth Plane, a neighbor of the Pooks and the proprietress of a confectioners’ shop at the bottom of Royal Hill, had seen Edmund Pook, whom she knew well, enter her shop on an evening around the date of the murder; she was not sure about the exact day. Testifying after her was a young woman named Louisa Billington, who was also in the shop that evening. (By curious coincidence, Louisa Billington happened to be the daughter of William Billington, then undertaking the conveyance of Jane’s body to Deptford.) Louisa also knew Edmund Pook, and also wasn’t sure what night it was that she saw him. Edmund entered the shop panting for breath, excited. “You seem rather warm,” Mrs. Plane said to him. “I have run from the Lewisham Road,” he replied. He then asked for a clothes brush, which he used to brush his clothes, concentrating upon the mud on one of his trouser legs. He had little success, and told them he would wash off the rest with a sponge. Then he bought a bag of lozenges, offered them in vain to Louisa Billington, and left.
At the next sitting of the inquest at Guy’s Hospital, another witness, Julius Bendixen, who entered Mrs. Plane’s shop just as Edmund was leaving, would fix the time and date of this interaction to just after nine o’clock on the night of the murder. And two more witnesses—Louisa’s sister, Priscilla, and the gentleman, John Barr, with whom she was walking out—would later swear that between eight-thirty and nine that evening they saw Edmund running into Greenwich from the south, down Royal Hill. The police and the prosecution obviously introduced all of this evidence to establish a plausible timeline: Edmund Pook had a good two hours to meet Jane Clouson, walk with her to Kidbrooke Lane, kill her, and rush back to Greenwich. Beyond that, however, this was evidence of dubious value, for the evidence supported Edmund’s alibi—that he had been in Lewisham—as much as it supported the police’s theory. A man running from Lewisham to Greenwich would also quite possibly return via Royal Hill. True, the presence of mud on Edmund’s trousers might suggest that he came from perpetually muddy Kidbrooke Lane and not from Lewisham. But it would be nearly impossible to prove, a week and more after the fact, that the entire route from Lewisham to Greenwich had been bone dry.
*
Would-be witnesses flowed into the police station on Greenwich’s Blackheath Road that first week of May in numbers that Superintendent Griffin would later declare “overwhelmed” R Division. And on May 5 Deptford ironmonger William Sparshott became one of the many, approaching the officer on duty hesitantly, not at all sure whether what he had witnessed was important or not. Sparshott was Samuel Thomas’s colleague and rival, his own shop located just fifty yards up Deptford High Street from Thomas’s. At around eight-thirty on the evening of Monday, April 24—the night before Jane was attacked—Sparshott was standing in his shop doorway when a young man wearing a black coat and a low-crowned hat approached from the south. He told Sparshott that he was a performer at the nearby Deptford Literary Institution, and that he needed a little axe as a prop for a performance. They went into the shop; Sparshott consulted with his wife, and she went to a drawer behind the counter, from which she pulled out a little cook’s chopper. The young man looked it over and decided it would not do; it was too expensive at two shillings and sixpence, and besides it was not an axe at all. Sparshott walked with the young man to the door, suggested that he try Thomas’s shop, and pointed it out. The young man set off in that direction. It was dark outside at the time, but Sparshott’s gaslights were lit and were bright, and he had had an excellent look at the young man’s face. He thought that he could identify the man who came into his shop, if given the chance.
But he was not given the chance. The officer on duty who listened to this tale must have been impressed by Sparshott’s power of recollection, so antithetical to those of the muddleheaded Thomases. But for all its specificity, his information was worthless, the officer knew: the murder weapon, the police were sure, had not been purchased on that Monday night, but three days before. Mrs. Thomas, for all her forgetfulness, had clearly recorded Friday, April 21, as the date of its sale. More than this, another witness had come forward to corroborate that the hammer was sold on the Friday. James Conway, a young boilermaker from Deptford, claimed that he had been at Samuel Thomas’s shop on the twenty-first. Both Samuel and Jane Thomas were there at the time, he had said, and Conway had then seen a young man—“something like a gentleman,” not a laborer—in a bluish coat and a low-crowned hat, perusing, testing a hammer. He had not remained in the shop to see whether the man bought that hammer. But he had gotten close to the man, had brushed up against him. And he did get a glimpse of the man’s face, from the side. He might be able to identify him.
James Conway corroborated the sale: he was an important witness.
William Sparshott was not. James Conway had been ordered to return to the station the next day to try to identify Edmund Pook when he came up from Maidstone for the resumption of his examination. William Sparshott, on the other hand, was thanked and sent on his way.
Meanwhile, across the Thames and across the metropolis, in his home laboratory at the edge of Regent’s Park, Dr. Henry Letheby scrutinized Edmund Pook’s clothing. Two days before, Inspector Mulvany had personally knocked on Letheby’s door bearing in a parcel Edmund’s trousers, shirt, hat, and coat; yesterday Mulvany returned with his boots, the clothes brush from Mrs. Plane’s that he had used to wipe his trousers, the J Sorby hammer, and two items the coroner had ordered sent from Guy’s Hospital: a little packet containing a lock of Jane’s hair, and, in a white jar sealed and wrapped in paper, Jane’s uterus, from which the fetus had been removed.
Letheby was a natural choice to perform the analysis of the spots on Edmund’s clothing. He was the chair of chemistry at London Hospital, Medical Officer of Health for the City of London, and a highly reputed expert witness, having appeared in dozens of criminal trials over the last quarter century. Letheby’s forensic expertise extended to poison as well as to blood, and if there was any hint that poison was involved in this case, he would certainly have paid a great deal more attention to Jane’s uterus. As it was, he simply gave it a cursory glance, noted signs of previous pregnancy and present decomposition, and set it aside. He took up Edmund’s trousers and saw on them what the police had seen: a number of spots, most of them clustered on the lower front part of the left leg. He cut from the trousers seven of these and examined each one under a microscope. They appeared as a dried jelly clinging to the mesh of the fabric. If this was blood, it had, with smearing or with time, lost its corpuscular structure. He might be looking not at blood, but at rust, spores, fruit stains: any number of substances. He had a surer test for blood than this, one so innovative in 1871 that few had either the equipment or the experience to conduct it: spectroscopic analysis.
Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane Page 7