Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  The problem with all three of these witnesses, as well as with the eyewitness in the Thomases’ shop, James Conway, who also testified, was that even though Edmund Pook had now been in custody ten days, not one of them had yet been given the opportunity to identify Edmund Pook as the man they had seen. Griffin and Mulvany had intended to set up an identification when Edmund had returned to Greenwich five days before, and had gone so far as to call all of these witnesses to the station that morning. But for some reason the identification did not take place. Only one witness had actually seen Edmund Pook, and that was by accident: William Norton, waiting in the station yard, happened to look through a window into the courtroom and saw a man standing in the dock. That man, those around him told him, was Edmund Pook.

  Since Edmund Pook could not appear at the inquest, there was no possibility for any of these witnesses to point to him dramatically and identify him in the courtroom. The deputy coroner would have dearly appreciated that opportunity; he had gone so far as to petition the home secretary to allow Edmund Pook to be brought up from Maidstone to Southwark to attend his inquest. That petition had been denied. And so William Payne could only complain to his jury. “A great amount of difficulty might have been obviated had the witnesses been allowed to see the prisoner,” he told them. “As things stood, the evidence was worthless.” Later, he extracted from Inspector Mulvany the promise that he would make sure all witnesses had the opportunity to identify Edmund Pook before Payne’s jury reconvened.

  Before any of these witnesses testified, Henry Pook had recalled Thomas Lazell. Lazell apparently had no need to attempt to identify Pook as the man he had seen; he claimed to know Pook by sight, and the man he had seen, he was sure, was Edmund Pook. That made him a dangerous witness for the prosecution, and Henry Pook had, since the last meeting of the inquest, done a great deal of digging in order to discredit Lazell’s testimony. He thus subjected Lazell to a browbeating that soon checked the man’s giggling and had him trembling. Hadn’t he, Pook asked him, told three law clerks who had stopped by his cottage while making the pilgrimage to the site of martyrdom at Kidbrooke Lane, that he had seen no one in the lane that night? No, Lazell replied, his mother had said that, not he. Hadn’t he told some of his mates at the Barley Mow, a Greenwich public house, on the night after Edmund Pook had been arrested, that he would like to get into court and see the young man? To this, Lazell replied, in confusion, “No,” then “I don’t—I don’t believe I did” and then “I think I did.” Hadn’t he also told a man by the name of Charles Eicke that he had seen no one in the lane that night? (Henry Pook had made sure that Eicke, a notoriously cantankerous resident of Morden College, attended this inquest, and the old man now glowered at Lazell from across the room.) Lazell admitted that he had said that to Eicke. But he had been lying at the time. Now, he stood by his claim: he had seen Edmund Pook in the barn field by the lane. He was sure of it.

  John Mulvany and James Griffin were the last to testify that day. Both had come, as usual, to sit in the courtroom the whole day, to watch the case on behalf of the Metropolitan Police; that was a standard procedure for officers leading an investigation. But as far as Henry Pook was concerned, the two were simply witnesses for the prosecution, subjective and hostile to the defense. And so Henry Pook had, earlier that day, employed a tactic calculated to challenge any notion that they were disinterested: he had demanded that the two be ejected from the courtroom. And Deputy Coroner Payne had agreed, asking them to leave. It was a tactic that the solicitor employed repeatedly and successfully after that, in both Southwark and at Greenwich Police Court. To testify on this day, then, Mulvany and then Griffin had to be recalled to the courtroom.

  Henry Pook largely let Superintendent Griffin’s account of Edmund’s arrest pass. But not Inspector Mulvany’s. The solicitor hammered the detective with a number of questions that pointed to the officers’ misconduct in arresting Edmund. They had obviously attempted to entrap Edmund Pook by pretending that they possessed a letter he had written—the letter Jane Clouson apparently had destroyed. They had shown an unfair partisanship against Edmund Pook, withholding evidence both that Samuel and Jane Thomas had failed to identify Edmund Pook, and by dropping Ormond Yearsley—the witness who was sure that the man who bought the hammer on the twenty-first of April was not Edmund Pook—off their list of witnesses. They had inappropriately neglected to caution Edmund Pook before interrogating him. To emphasize this last point, Henry Pook cited a remark made just two days before by no less eminent a jurist than Alexander Cockburn, the Lord Chief Justice of England. Cockburn was that week presiding over a criminal trial—R v. Boulton and Others—that in its sensational fascination competed with the Pook case for the attention of the newspaper-reading public. The principal defendants in that trial, Thomas Boulton and Frederick Park, were well-known transvestites who had appeared often, both in public and on the stage; they were on trial for “conspiring and inciting persons to commit an unnatural offence.” When Cockburn learned that Griffin’s counterpart at E Division, Superintendent James Thomson, had interrogated Boulton and Park after arresting them, he attacked Thomson’s actions as illegal. “Do you interrogate prisoners then?” Cockburn chided Thomson. “Because we have not yet come to that, nor could it be authorized except by the Legislature.”*7 Henry Pook suggested that Griffin and Mulvany were guilty of similar misconduct because they neglected to caution Edmund Pook before they questioned him. The solicitor’s comparison might have had the benefit of timeliness, but it lacked entirely any legal foundation: while Thomson had interrogated Boulton and Park after they were arrested, Griffin and Mulvany had questioned Edmund Pook before arresting him. While Mulvany himself pointed this out to Henry Pook two days later, on this day Mulvany was at a loss for words. And that allowed Henry Pook to savage the police for overstepping their bounds. He hoped in the future that Mulvany and the police would remember Cockburn’s words.

  *

  In their Deptford shop the next evening, the Thomases, Samuel and Jane, once again pored over their sales ledger. Samuel had been called to Greenwich Police Court the next day, and he was, with the help of his wife, preparing to be absolutely accurate in his testimony. Once again, the two saw the entry, in Jane’s handwriting as usual, which had made them central to the case: one J Sorby #2 hammer, sold on Friday, April 21.

  And they read on.

  It was Jane who saw it first. Below the record of the sale of a pair of scissors and of a set of table legs, there it was, again in Jane Thomas’s handwriting: the record of the sale of yet another J Sorby #2 hammer—sold on Monday, April 24—sold, oddly, for two pence more than the usual price. Monday, April 24: one day before the murder.

  The two realized at that moment that the police contention that Edmund must have purchased the hammer on Friday was quite possibly wrong. And over the next few days, as customers returned to speak with them, alerted by ubiquitous police handbills seeking information about the sale, they realized that the police were certainly wrong in this contention. First, a man by the name of Thomas Wittard returned to remind them that he had purchased a hammer from the shop on April 15—a larger J Sorby #3 hammer. Samuel Thomas, speaking with him, began to remember: Ormond Yearsley, who claimed to have been in the shop on the twenty-first, had actually been there on the fifteenth, and witnessed Wittard’s purchase. And then, the purchaser of the J Sorby #2 on the twenty-first returned to the shop: he was an eighteen-year-old plasterer’s assistant by the name of William Elliott; he looked nothing like Edmund Pook. Elliot still had this hammer; it was not the one found at Morden College. Speaking with him also jogged Samuel Thomas’s memory: Elliott had bought the hammer around nine o’clock at night, and the shop was otherwise empty. James Conway might indeed have been in their shop that day, but he was not there then.

  The day after the Thomases made this crucial discovery, Samuel Thomas attended police court, ready to reveal it. But he was not called as a witness. And he failed to share it with the police. Rather, he an
d his wife kept the discovery to themselves while the police continued hotly to pursue their obviously false lead.

  *

  On the morning of May 13, fresh from another harrowing journey from Maidstone and smarting from the taunts of the mob and the machinations of the porters and stationmasters, Edmund Pook was marched into the yard of Greenwich police station and placed in a line with twenty or so plain-clothed officers; Detective Mulvany had kept his promise to Deputy Coroner Payne and had set up an identification. As Mulvany and Superintendent Griffin stood to the side observing, William Norton, Louisa Putman, Thomas Lazell, James Conway, and William Cronk were one by one led into the yard, instructed, if they recognized the man they had seen, to touch him. William Norton failed to recognize Pook—even though he had just days before seen him through the courtroom window. Louisa Putman failed as well. Thomas Lazell, on the other hand, walked into the yard, recognized Pook immediately, and touched him on the shoulder. That came as no surprise to anyone, since Lazell claimed that he knew Pook by sight long before he saw him in Kidbrooke Lane. His positive identification now seemed to verify that claim, at least. James Conway, too, also touched Pook as the man he had seen in Samuel Thomas’s shop.

  Since William Cronk had claimed to have seen the man on Kidbrooke Lane mostly from his back, the police made a special accommodation for his identification. Before he stepped into the yard, either Griffin or Mulvany had ordered the men in the line to turn to the wall. Cronk then scrutinized the twenty men’s backs. Based upon that alone, he strode up to and put a hand on Edmund Pook.

  Three of these witnesses testified in court that day. Norton and Putman admitted their failure to identify Pook, and Cronk told of his success. Henry Pook immediately undercut it. “Can you say any person in court was the man you picked out from several others this morning?”

  “I cannot,” Cronk replied—not unless everyone turned their backs to him. Amidst the startled murmurs of spectators, Henry Pook “warmly protested” against “the most extraordinary kind of identification he had ever heard of.”

  The key evidence introduced this day was Dr. Henry Letheby’s analysis of Edmund Pook’s bloody clothing. Henry Pook did his best to minimize its importance. When Inspector Mulvany again testified, this time to describe his delivering Edmund’s clothing to Letheby’s home, Henry Pook hounded him, accusing him of leaving Edmund’s clothing fully exposed in a room of the station where officers ate their meals and through which they passed on the way to the courtroom. Mulvany swore they had been tied up in a paper parcel, and Pook countered that he had himself seen the clothing, lying open. Those clothes were hopelessly contaminated, the solicitor concluded, before Letheby had the opportunity to analyze them. He taunted Harry Poland, making play of one of Letheby’s discoveries: “If that was all the learned counsel could produce he might say that the case against the prisoner was hanging by a single hair.”

  Despite his ridicule, Henry Pook was well aware of the threat Letheby’s testimony posed. The fact of blood-spattered clothing was in itself inflammatory. But more than this, the strength and authority of the testimony of a strong expert medical witness—and Letheby was one of the best—could go far in swaying a magistrate, and later in swaying a coroner’s jury. Henry Pook therefore prepared for his confrontation with Letheby carefully, combing the medical literature on the subject. After demonstrating his own knowledge of the subject by peppering the doctor with a host of questions about the chemical composition of blood, Henry Pook forced from Letheby the crucial admission that the blood on Edmund’s clothing could have come from any human being, or from any number of creatures: that blood was “common to all animals, with few exceptions, that suckle their young.” The solicitor then took up the Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, the standard text on forensic medicine at the time, written, as it happens, by a lecturer at Guy’s Hospital, Alfred Swain Taylor. Henry Pook challenged Letheby with passages from that text explaining that it was easy to confuse tobacco stains, or the pulp of lemon or orange exposed to air, for blood. Letheby brushed this off. Taylor’s claims were dated; now, “such a fallacy would only be occasioned by a superficial examination of the spots, without submitting them to a microscopical or spectroscopical investigation.” He was positive about the stains in this case: “They were blood.”

  But, Pook asked Letheby, “Wouldn’t you expect to see the clothes of a person who inflicted such fearful wounds as those we have heard described completely saturated with blood?”

  “It so happens,” Letheby replied, “that if the temple artery is cut through it does not bleed.” But, he told the solicitor, since he had not examined Jane Clouson’s wounds, he could not say for sure. Michael Harris could better answer these questions.

  And then Henry Pook raised what had now become the central contention of Edmund’s defense concerning the blood on his clothes. Wouldn’t blood from a tongue bitten during an epileptic fit, he asked the doctor, be “similar in quality to that found?”

  “It would, decidedly,” Letheby replied.

  Now it was the prosecutor’s turn to feel the danger of an expert witness’s testimony, and Harry Poland did his best to nip in the bud the theory that the blood came from Edmund’s tongue. He would not expect, Letheby stated in answer to Poland’s question, “blood from a self-inflicted wound to appear on the hat of the patient.”

  *

  At the resumption of the inquest at Guy’s Hospital three days later, on May 16, patient, meticulous Harry Poland, sleuth-hound of the Treasury, and a man who did not like surprises, was stunned and then enraged by the third witness he questioned. His mood could not have been helped by the first two witnesses, either: William Norton and Louisa Putman were both recalled by Henry Pook to describe their absolute failure to pick out Edmund Pook at the police identification. But it was not until Samuel Thomas took the witness chair and informed the court that the murder weapon had been sold on Monday the twenty-fourth and not on Friday the twenty-first that Poland lost his usual self-control. He turned on Thomas, alternatively hounding him to reveal details about the sale and threatening him. “I want some further particulars about this hammer sold on the Monday, and I will advise you to be careful,” Poland barked at the trembling man; “the police have been put upon a wrong scent by nothing having been said to them about the hammer sold on the Monday till yesterday.” Samuel Thomas only made Poland angrier when it became clear that his newfound ability to provide minute details about the sale of the hammer on Friday did not carry over to the sale of the hammer on Monday; about that, Thomas remained completely in the dark. Poland persisted, asking Thomas why he would have sold the hammer on Monday for two pence more than usual. That must have been a mistake, Thomas told him. But Poland had other ideas. “Is it not a fact that you would sell it twopence cheaper to a plasterer than to any one else not in the trade—a gentleman in a black coat, and so on?” Thomas denied that he set price by means of a customer’s social standing.

  Thomas did give a possible explanation for not remembering the sale on Monday: more than likely, his wife, Jane, and not he had sold the hammer. Hearing that, Poland immediately pressed the deputy coroner send officers to Deptford to retrieve Jane Thomas to testify. Poland further requested that the Thomases be kept apart until Jane Thomas appeared. As far as Harry Poland was concerned, the Thomases were obviously keeping back information they both knew, knowingly obstructing the police investigation.

  While the jury waited for Mrs. Thomas to be fetched, James Conway took the witness chair in order to explain what clearly had been a false identification of Edmund Pook. Conway remained adamant on one point: he had been in Thomas’s shop that day. But as to his positive identification of Edmund Pook, Conway now backtracked. He admitted now that he had not actually seen the face of the man in the shop. He only picked out Edmund Pook because his shoulders looked like those of that man. Upon consideration, however, he now fancied that there was a difference between the shoulders of the two, as well as a difference in hair color. Henr
y Pook dismissed him as a false witness, pure and simple, who had lied under oath for money. He forced Conway to admit that he had contacted Edmund’s brother, Thomas. But Conway denied that he had said to Thomas Pook, “If I could get a few pence to get away to the north, I would not come to the inquest.” On top of this, Conway disclosed he had been paid by the police—as was commonly done at the time—to appear as a witness: three shillings and sixpence a day.

  Conway, thus having tainted both the investigation and the prosecution, stepped down. He would never testify in the case again.

  Jane Thomas, who had arrived at court under police escort with her two eldest sons in tow, then took the witness chair, and soon quailed under Harry Poland’s wrath, as, with the deputy coroner’s encouragement, he repeatedly demanded that she reveal what she knew about the sale and disdained her claims that she knew nothing. Henry Pook, genuinely outraged at Poland’s rough and “un-English” interrogation, objected: “Because the learned counsel cannot get the answers he requires he begins to browbeat the witness.” But William Payne had little sympathy for Mrs. Thomas, and he overruled the solicitor. The woman was obviously keeping something back, Payne explained; she was therefore a hostile witness, and Harry Poland’s aggressive, even brutal questioning was appropriate. Several members of the jury immediately concurred with the deputy coroner.