Newton Crosland was a devoted spiritualist, an adherent to the movement that had spread to Britain from the United States some three decades before with the central precept that the dead could—and, with surprising regularity, did—communicate with the living. It was a movement that had launched thousands of séances and the careers of a multitude of mediums; and Newton Crosland had sat in on enough of the former and had dealt with enough of the latter to reach some firm conclusions about the other side. He was certain that spirits in the millions swarmed the metropolis—dead souls making the transition to a higher plane of existence, as well as angelic beings, guarding and guiding angels. Not being blessed with a medium’s powers, Crosland had never actually seen any of these. But he had heard them; at the properly conducted séances he had attended, he counted forty-two different spirits that had rapped out elaborate communiqués, all reiterating the living truths of the Bible. “To doubt the reality of these manifestations,” Crosland had written, “would be as ridiculous and foolish as to doubt the existence of the solar system.” His passionate devotion to spiritualism was matched by an equally passionate disdain for the strictly material: Newtonian physics Crosland thought “old-fashioned, clumsy, mechanical, vulgar”; the theories of Charles Darwin, whose monumental Descent of Man had just been published in February, were “the most colossal, dazzling, infidel mass of ignorance ever launched upon the world, and palmed off upon the credulity of mankind.” He was, in other words, the sort of man who would have heeded an astrologer before a scientist. And so he did take heed when an astrologer friend had written to him three weeks before to tell him of the position of the stars on the night of April 25, the night of the attack on Kidbrooke Lane. “They are certainly very curious,” he wrote to Crosland, “and I still cannot help thinking portend some evil to you.” Crosland thus had come to the Old Bailey on this day certain that Jane’s destiny and his own were somehow linked. And in this he was absolutely correct. Jane’s death and this trial were to bring him, as he later put it, “a great deal that was very unpleasant.”
Perhaps surprisingly, given his beliefs, Crosland sought to find out the truth about Jane’s murder not in the séance room but in the courtroom, and he put his faith, or at least his hope, in the several legal gentleman now assembling before him: Chief Justice William Bovill on the bench, flanked on this day by the Lord Mayor of London, there to lend proper gravity to the proceedings; and on the floor, the eleven lawyers: five for the defense, with John Huddleston leading and Henry Pook instructing, and six for the prosecution—four barristers, two solicitors. Among the latter group sat Harry Poland. But the sleuth-hound had already done the bulk of his work on this case and would absent himself often over the next four days in order to prosecute Flora Davy and Agnes Norman in the Old Bailey’s other courtrooms. In this case, solicitor general John Duke Coleridge would lead the prosecution, and would look for his second not to Poland but to Poland’s Treasury colleague, Thomas Dickson Archibald.
Coleridge knew that this would be a difficult case to win. No one had actually witnessed Edmund Pook attack Jane Clouson; no one actually saw—or remembered seeing—Pook buy the plasterer’s hammer from the Thomases’ shop. The police had managed to gather up an abundance of evidence: evidence suggesting that Edmund Pook and Jane Clouson were sexually intimate, that he was in Deptford on the night the murder weapon was purchased, that he had lured out Jane on the evening of the murder, had walked with her to Kidbrooke Lane, had bloodied his clothes and dropped a whistle there, and had slipped in the mud and dirtied his trousers while fleeing back to Greenwich. All of this evidence was circumstantial. All of it was disputable. And much of it was hearsay and therefore quite possibly inadmissible. Coleridge knew his only chance of obtaining a guilty verdict would be in presenting the evidence as a seamless whole, as totality of circumstances that, together, would lead the jury to the one inevitable conclusion that Edmund Pook was a killer. Every bit of evidence was crucial, including the hearsay testimony: the Trotts’ knowledge that Jane and Edmund were lovers; Fanny Hamilton’s hearing Jane say, on the night of the attack, that she was leaving to meet Edmund.*1 There were exceptions to the hearsay rule; with a fight, at least some of Jane’s utterances to others might be allowed as evidence. Coleridge and Archibald planned to make that fight.
Coleridge’s strategy dictated the defense’s—and John Huddleston’s—counter-strategy. Huddleston would do his best to render Coleridge’s seamless whole an out-and-out mess, disrupting witnesses and sowing doubt about their testimony. He would, in other words, adopt what had been Henry Pook’s strategy before the coroner and the magistrate. But Huddleston would also do what Henry Pook had carefully refrained from doing: he would finally bring forward witnesses for the defense, who could support Edmund’s alibis, contradict prosecution witnesses—and speak to Edmund’s good character.
Edmund Pook would not appear as a witness in his own defense; at that time, criminal defendants were legally prohibited from doing so. Nevertheless, he played his own part in convincing jury and spectators of his innocence. As Edmund was led up by underground passage and took his place in the prisoner’s dock, it was immediately clear to all that his unshakeable and well-publicized calm had not deserted him. Though prison-pale and tired, he had, according to one reporter, “nothing of the hang-dog, cowering look which the mere fact of being in the dock seems to impress upon so many faces”: the very last person in that courtroom that anybody would select as a brutal murderer “was the prisoner at the bar.”
With Pook in place, the trial began; the jurors’ names were read over*2 and Pook calmly but emphatically pleaded that he was not guilty. John Duke Coleridge then delivered the opening speech for the prosecution—and his silver tongue, for the most part, failed him. Because he felt compelled to refrain from even mentioning the hearsay evidence until he was certain it would be admitted, he was hamstrung from the start, and his attempts to connect Edmund Pook with Jane’s murder were hesitant, awkward, and incomplete. When, for example, he told the jury of Jane’s parting from Fanny Hamilton as she walked off to her death, he did not tell them that Jane told Hamilton that she was meeting Edmund Pook; he could only say that “some observations were made by Jane Clouson... which at the present moment I abstain from stating to you, because, though I believe they are receivable in evidence, they may be objected to.” That sort of evasiveness was sure to confuse any jury.
Coleridge was more successful in at least beginning to strip away at the aura of innocence that emanated from the prisoner in the dock. By detailing Edmund Pook’s several affairs, some serious and some flirtations, with a number of young women, Coleridge anticipated and countered a central contention of Edmund’s defense: that he had not the character—nor, being carefully watched, the opportunity—to engage in sexual relations with his servant. Two letters Coleridge read in court demonstrated that Edmund was at the same time deeply involved with two young women. The first, written to Edmund from Wales by an aunt, made it clear that Edmund was actively proposing marriage to one of his cousins. The second letter—from Edmund himself, written to Alice Durnford soon after he was arrested—suggested his equal interest in her. That letter in particular told against Edmund’s character with its flippancy in the face of Jane’s brutal murder, and at least hinted that his unshakeable calm might instead be sheer callousness. “If I am remanded,” Edmund had written to Alice, “of course I must ‘grin and bear it.’” Coleridge noted Edmund’s insensitivity, as well, in his response to Griffin and Mulvany when they first told him that Jane Clouson was dead: Edmund then told them that she was “dirty in her habits” and had in consequence left his father’s service. Coleridge vowed to defend Jane Clouson from that particular slur: he would, he told the jury, call witnesses to testify that the girl was clean and respectable. Finally, Coleridge revealed that Edmund was a liar, having falsely told two girls, Mary Ann Love and Alice Langley, that he could not meet them on the night Jane Clouson was murdered because he was engaged to perform i
n London.
But here the chief justice interrupted Coleridge for the first—and far from the last—time. Perhaps, Bovill pointed out, this was not a lie; perhaps Edmund intended to go to London and changed his mind afterward.
That, Coleridge responded, was for the jury to determine.
Having thus provided these hints of Edmund’s malevolence, Coleridge called three witnesses to fix the jury’s attention upon Jane Clouson’s horrible death. PC Donald Gunn and Sergeant Frederick Haynes described finding her, broken and degraded, wishing only to die; physician Michael Harris offered a chilling catalog of her injuries and disclosed the fact of the dead and corrupting being in her womb. John Huddleston, in cross-examination, did his best to wrest the jury’s attention away from Jane, and fix it instead upon the police and their relentless bungling. In questioning Gunn, Huddleston emphasized the curious fact that he had not discovered Jane until dawn, even though—according to the theory of the police—she had been attacked a good seven or eight hours before, and even though Gunn had twice passed the spot by 2:15. (Lord Chief Bovill had introduced this subject by asking Gunn why his predecessor on the Kidbrooke beat—an officer named Mortimer—had not discovered Jane earlier. “I don’t think he was on duty up to ten o’clock,” Gunn had answered.) Gunn now admitted to Huddleston that on that night he had, for the first part of the night, walked an entirely different beat. “So that this lonely place is left without a policeman till a quarter-past two?” the chief justice interrupted. “Yes,” admitted Gunn. And Gunn admitted as well to a badly missed opportunity: neither he nor anyone else in his presence had taken a single step to preserve or to measure any of the many footprints found by the girl’s body.
Sergeant Haynes, as well, admitted a missed opportunity: he had failed to take into evidence the bloody stone he (and he alone) had spotted hundreds of yards from the scene of the attack. Huddleston then pressed Haynes to reveal an even more egregious omission on the part of the police: the knowledge they had of the existence of another possible suitor for Jane. The police had originally thought that the locket found upon Jane’s body had been given to her by Edmund; Jane’s cousin Charlotte had told them so. But Haynes admitted that in May Henry Humphreys, the middle-aged and married former assistant in the Pooks’ shop, had come forward and told police he had given the locket to Jane, and that the jeweler who had sold the locket had verified that fact. Haynes also admitted that Humphreys had never appeared before the magistrate or coroner. Although this revelation of Mr. Humphreys was hardly new—it had been reported widely in the newspapers two months before, as Huddleston was well aware—the fact that Humphreys’s existence had been kept out of evidence by police and prosecution until this moment surely smacked to the jury of deliberate suppression.
Michael Harris’s shocking yet clinical description of Jane’s wounds and her death, on the other hand, left nothing to the imagination. But Huddleston was able to use the very grievousness of Jane’s wounds to deflect suspicion from Edmund. “Where there are such wounds as these, I should expect blood to spurt forth,” Harris testified. And yet only a tiny amount of blood had been discovered on Edmund Pook’s clothing.
After the police and the doctor, Coleridge called the three witnesses whose most powerful evidence by far consisted of Jane Clouson’s words to them: Elizabeth Trott, her daughter, Charlotte, and Fanny Hamilton. With the first two, Coleridge refrained altogether from touching upon hearsay. He might have been waiting to test the admissibility of Fanny Hamilton’s hearsay evidence before he tested theirs; he might have lost his nerve and concluded that their hearsay would never be admitted. In any case, with both Elizabeth and Charlotte Trott he limited his questioning to Jane’s character alone, to counter Edmund’s assertion that Jane was filthy to the point of impropriety. “She was not dirty, quite different to that altogether; a very clean, respectable young woman, and a hard-working industrious one, too,” Elizabeth Trott testified, and her daughter agreed.
It was with Fanny Hamilton and her hearsay that John Duke Coleridge determined to make his stand. When she and Jane parted in Deptford at exactly 6:40, Hamilton testified, “she told me where she was going.”
“What did she say to you?” Coleridge asked her.
Huddleston objected immediately, citing the then-standard argument against hearsay: because Jane Clouson was dead and could not be cross-examined, anything that she might have said was now inadmissible as evidence. Coleridge countered that Jane’s declaration to Fanny Hamilton accompanied an act, and was indeed so much a part of that act that it ought to be admitted as evidence. Coleridge, in other words, argued for what was known then as the res gestae exception to the hearsay rule. Res gestae statements—from the Latin for “things done”—are those uttered spontaneously concerning an event by a person caught up entirely in the excitement of that event. Such statements, it was believed, were spoken without reflection and therefore without guile or equivocation. They were, in other words, likely to be truthful explanations, and not likely to be misremembered or misrepresented by anyone hearing them. Of all Jane’s words spoken in the days before her death, Coleridge and the Crown had concluded that Jane’s words to Fanny Hamilton were the most likely to be admitted as res gestae evidence. For she excitedly, spontaneously spoke those words at the very moment of her departure from Hamilton, and her words explained her reason for departing: she was going to meet Edmund; they had much to talk about; he had made great promises to her. Her words, then, both accompanied and qualified the act of her departure; they deserved consideration in court as a part of that act.
Coleridge argued the point as if his case depended upon it, citing a host of precedents for admitting this evidence. He then turned to his second, Thomas Archibald, to bolster his argument. But Archibald added little. Newton Crosland, in the gallery, was unimpressed: “the question,” he noted, “was not ably argued.” And on the bench Chief Justice Bovill was equally dismissive, holding, remarkably, that Jane’s words—even though they connected her with Edmund Pook on the night of the murder—suggested nothing at all about the murder. “It seems to me,” he ruled, “that the question asked, and the evidence which it is intended to elicit, is entirely irrelevant to the issue, and not sustainable on any of the grounds which have been urged on behalf of the Crown. I know of no precedent for its admission, and I am unwilling to create one. It is inadmissible.”
It was a devastating blow for the prosecution. In that instant, any hope they had of demonstrating a motive on Edmund Pook’s part for killing Jane—their sexual involvement and the fact that she likely was pregnant by him—were dashed. All that was left to suggest any sort of motivation was meager at best: nothing more than the fact that the two had lived in the same house for nearly two years. The damage done to their case by the complete exclusion of Jane’s words from trial became glaringly evident that afternoon, when, after several witnesses appeared to testify to the finding of the hammer at Morden College, Detective Inspector Mulvany and then Superintendent Griffin took the witness box to give detailed accounts of their confrontation with and arrest of Edmund Pook. Since the Trotts and Fanny Hamilton could not provide any basis for the allegations the officers leveled against Edmund Pook on that day, their allegations could only appear to be absolutely baseless—mere stabs in the dark, blind attempts to entrap the young man. In cross-examination, John Huddleston elicited from both officers Edmund Pook’s and his father’s fervent denials that the young man had had anything to do with Jane’s death, denials that now must have seemed more convincing to the jury than Mulvany’s and Griffin’s seemingly invented allegations. On the very first day of Edmund’s trial, then, John Huddleston succeeded in altering the roles of wrongdoer and victim altogether. Edmund had come into the courtroom the alleged predator, Jane of course his victim. But now, the police began to take on the role of predators, and the young man in the dock the role of their victim.
Certainly, Chief Justice Bovill saw things that way. And when John Mulvany and James Griffin testifie
d, Bovill proved a valuable ally to John Huddleston in effecting this shift.
All that day Newton Crosland, observing from the gallery, had harbored suspicions against William Bovill’s fitness as a judge. “He seemed,” Crosland later wrote, “out of condition, irritable, nervous, and disposed to quarrel with anyone who gave him a chance.” Mulvany and Griffin gave him that chance. Bovill lashed out at John Mulvany when the detective described Edmund’s alibi for the evening of the murder—walking to Lewisham, standing outside his lady-friend’s home, and returning to Greenwich via Royal Hill. That might have been the way Edmund had come, Mulvany added, suggesting simply that he might have come home by other streets as well—South Street or Crooms Hill, for example.
Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane Page 14