Bovill pounced upon the detective’s turn of phrase—understanding his “might” as suggesting skepticism about Edmund’s claim. Newton Crosland recorded the exchange:
The Judge (angrily): “Might have been! What do you mean by might have been? Was it not, Sir, his most direct road?”
Mr. Mulvany: “It was one of the roads. I am not minutely acquainted with the locality.”
The Judge (with solemn irritability): “You are giving your evidence very badly, Mr. Mulvany!”
“This unjust aspersion upon Mr. Mulvany soon became epidemic,” Crosland wrote. “‘Abusing the Police’ was at once ‘the mode.’ The game was started from the Bench, and the ‘tantivy’ and ‘tally-ho’ soon became fast and furious.”
If anything, Superintendent Griffin’s testimony drew Bovill’s greater wrath. In his testimony, Griffin several times made it clear that, when confronted, Edmund Pook had vehemently and constantly denied any involvement in Jane Clouson’s murder. But once, apparently, he slipped. Testifying that he had told Edmund that Jane had planned to meet him on Crooms Hill the evening of the attack, Griffin noted that Edmund “had made no reply.” John Huddleston, however, watching carefully for any deviation from Griffin’s testimony before the magistrate and the coroner, discerned one here: before the coroner, Huddleston asserted, Griffin had stated that Edmund had replied, and had denied meeting Jane. Huddleston demanded that Griffin explain the discrepancy. “I do not remember his saying ‘It is not true,’” said Griffin, adding, “I will not swear he did not, because his father and he, and me, and Mulvany, five or six of us, were all talking—he may have done so.” Huddleston then thrust the deposition into the officer’s hands. Griffin read and was baffled; he simply could not recall that Edmund had made any such denial.*3 But that was what was written, and that was what he had signed. Edmund must have said it, he admitted.
It was, at worst, a lapse of memory. But the chief justice, seeing Mont Blanc in that molehill, waxed apoplectic: Griffin, he was sure, was manipulating evidence—was lying—in order to ensure Edmund Pook’s conviction. “How could you possibly say upon your oath,” he scolded Griffin, “when you were examined in chief, that the prisoner made no reply? The answer you first gave you now admit was entirely false; and you must have been aware of the importance of the matter referred to.” The matter, as far as Bovill was concerned, was one of “life or death”—Edmund Pook’s life or death, of course, and not Jane Clouson’s.
And James Griffin, Bovill soon suggested, was guilty of more than this: he also had suppressed important evidence. When in his cross-examination Huddleston reintroduced the subject of the locket, the chief justice commandeered the questioning to badger Griffin:
The Chief Justice (to Witness): You are the principal officer charged with the conduct of this case?—Witness: Inspector Mulvany was sent down to take charge of the case.
The Chief Justice: But you are the principal officer in the district charged with the conduct of the case?—Witness: Yes.
The Chief Justice: And it would have been your duty to make inquiries into any facts that came within your knowledge?—Witness: That is so.
The Chief Justice: If a fact comes within your knowledge connected with the case it is a part of your duty to make enquiry.—Witness: I put most of these matters into Inspector Mulvany’s hands.
The Chief Justice: But it was your duty to investigate any facts?—Witness: Yes, and I did so in this case. I sent Sergeant Haynes with Mulvany to the shop about the locket.
The Chief Justice: It appears to me that it is the duty of the Crown to lay before the jury every fact whether it tells for or against the prisoner. In my humble opinion, it is the imperative duty of the police and of the inspectors to lay before the judge and jury every fact that has come within their knowledge.
Bovill’s humble opinion was a patent legal absurdity. He was not, after all, calling for the police and the Crown to disclose all relevant facts; rather, he was calling for disclosure of every fact. There has never existed, nor could there exist, any criminal trial in which the police laid before judge and jury every scrap of evidence, every rumor, every false lead and dead end, with which they had dealt in the course of an investigation. (Whether the evidence of the locket and Henry Humphreys was any one of these things, of course, is a different question altogether.) But as absurd as they were, Bovill’s words pleased the court immensely; the gallery burst into applause, applause that Bovill dutifully suppressed. To them, Bovill’s implication was clear: the investigation of Jane Clouson’s murder, by both police and Treasury, was rotten to the core. When Thomas Archibald—speaking for the prosecution since the solicitor general was at that moment outside the courtroom—had the temerity to argue that the Crown had considered the evidence of the locket immaterial, Bovill reiterated his charge: “I must say that Crown prosecutions ought not to be conducted in this manner.”
Newton Crosland, for one, did not join in the general approval for the chief justice’s condemnation. The trial had only reached the end of the first of four days, but already Crosland had lost any hope that the truth would come to light and that Jane Clouson would find justice in this courtroom. As Edmund Pook was removed to Newgate and the jury led to their sequestration in a local hotel, Crosland walked away from the Old Court in disgust. “I hope never again,” he later wrote, “to be a spectator of a trial in which the judge was so unjudicial and sensational, the witnesses were so random, the counsel so insulting, and the police so simple. A few more such exhibitions are calculated to lower the estimate of the administration of justice in this country.”*4
Crosland walked away and never returned to the Old Bailey. His involvement in the case, however, was far from finished.
*
The next morning, John Duke Coleridge, “deeply pained,” in his words, demanded he be given the opportunity to defend himself against the “perfectly intolerable” imputation that the chief justice had made in his absence. The first he had heard of the locket, he claimed, had been the day before. The police, he later learned, had dropped their inquiry into the locket when they had determined it had no connection to Edmund Pook. The locket, therefore, had never been mentioned in his brief. “I protest,” he concluded, “against the idea that evidence of any shape or form has been kept back in this case.”
“I did not intend to imply the slightest imputation upon you, Mr. Solicitor,” Bovill assuaged him. Thomas Archibald, too, he excused. The conduct of the police, on the other hand, he would not excuse. Apparently satisfied with this partial exoneration, Coleridge proceeded to call his witnesses for the day. There were fully thirty of these, all of them able to connect Edmund Pook in some way with the murder: purchasing of the hammer, walking with Jane on Kidbrooke Lane, hurriedly returning to Greenwich afterward. But only four could actually identify Edmund Pook as the person they had seen in an incriminating position. (Five more than this could identify him—but they had seen him in Greenwich, a fact that the defense did not dispute.) Two of these four crucial eyewitnesses, William Sparshott and Walter Perren, could place Edmund Pook on Deptford High Street on the evening before the murder, and two, William Cronk and Thomas Lazell, could place him at Kidbrooke Lane the next night. Sparshott, Perren, Cronk, Lazell: those were John Huddleston’s prime targets, and by discrediting their testimony he would damage irreparably what was left of the prosecution’s case after the rejection of hearsay and after the many intimations that police had suppressed evidence.
William Sparshott’s memory for detail, and his absolute certainty that he had seen Edmund in his shop and that he had directed him to the Thomases’, made him by far the prosecution’s strongest eyewitness, and Coleridge called him first. Again he identified Pook with assurance: “I have no doubt whatever that he is the man.” His testimony was remarkably consistent with his testimony before both magistrate and coroner. Short of a bit of quibbling about the clothes the man he saw had worn, John Huddleston in cross-examination could do little to shake his story. An
d so Huddleston challenged him instead upon the identification itself, compelling Sparshott to admit that he had seen a portrait of Edmund in the Illustrated Police News before identifying him. Huddleston then handed Sparshott a copy of that paper—the issue with the second, and much more accurate portrait of Edmund. Sparshott denied having seen that one, but the implication was as clear as it was unfair: the Illustrated Police News had tainted his identification. When the issue was passed up to the bench, the chief justice eyed it curiously. He asked whether it was an official police publication.
No, Huddleston told him; it was a “sort of sensational Newgate Calendar.”
“It was most improper that portraits should be given when a trial of this kind was pending,” he fumed: indeed, it was, he thought illegal—or at least should be. “The attention of the government ought to be called to the fact.” Coleridge, far less impressed with the danger that this penny newspaper posed to the state, blandly replied that “Her Majesty’s government are now engaged in very arduous duties.”
The next three witnesses—Sparshott’s wife, Elizabeth; his shopboy, Rowland Renneson; and his son, Alfred—partially supported Sparshott’s story. They, too, had seen a man in the shop that evening. They had not seen his face, but they did remember his clothes. “He had on a lightish pair of trousers,” Renneson claimed. “Light trousers; I remember that,” Alfred agreed. Before them, John Huddleston had questioned Sparshott as well about the color of the man’s trousers. In earlier testimony he, too, said the person he saw wore light trousers—but he was no longer sure. That all claimed that the man in the shop wore light trousers was a point Huddleston wished clearly to impress upon the jury. (Later, Olivia Cavell, the witness in the Thomases’ shop, also claimed the man she had seen had worn light trousers.) That a group of people, first questioned weeks after the fact about the apparel of a stranger they had only half noticed, in unremarkable circumstances, could have such a specific memory about the color of his trousers, was certainly remarkable—even suspicious. How many of us could specify with certainty the color of the trousers of a stranger we happened to have seen in a shop two weeks before? This remarkable claim, however, earned no remark whatsoever, from the judge, or from John Duke Coleridge.
Walter Perren, taking the witness box, did offer a very different recollection of the clothing of the man with whom he had spoken: he had worn dark trousers. Perren seemed to have an astounding memory for detail, and gave a precise if glibly delivered account of making his way to Deptford on the Monday evening, purchasing nails from Mrs. Thomas, meeting and chatting and offering to “liquor-up” with Pook, watching him enter the Thomases’ shop, and watching a hammer being retrieved from the shop window. His story buttressed the account that William Sparshott had given and would dovetail with the account Oliva Cavell was about to give. Nonetheless, Coleridge could only give Perren over to Huddleston’s cross-examination with a powerful sense of foreboding, the same feeling that Superintendent Griffin had had nearly three weeks before, when he discovered that the nails Perren had given him—the nails he said he had bought from Mrs. Thomas—were not nails that the Thomases carried in their shop. Griffin then, and Coleridge now, couldn’t help but wonder whether Perren had been feeding them a pack of lies.
John Huddleston confirmed those fears. He demolished Walter Perren as a witness.
Huddleston demonstrated that Perren’s claims about time, for one thing, did not match Sparshott’s and would not match Cavell’s. According to Perren’s own account, he was on a train to Sydenham by eight o’clock—but Sparshott claimed he saw Pook, and Olivia Cavell would claim she saw the man she saw, well after that time. Then there was Perren’s altogether dubious character. He admitted to having been before the magistrates twice: once for assaulting a man who had insulted his wife, and a second time for the mysterious reason, according to him, of “a young woman breaking her parasol over my head.” He may have been before the magistrate other times as well, but to that he refused to admit: “I won’t swear it, I might have been, I don’t know what my friend Mr. Pook has got up against me.” He admitted that he had been discharged by his employer at the Golden Lion Music Hall—for being a liar, Huddleston claimed—but that Perren denied. Perren attributed his offering to “liquor-up” with a virtual stranger to his celebrity (“there are a great many persons who know me in the concert business, and I don’t know them”). Huddleston then had a man brought into the courtroom. That man, Huddleston made clear, was prepared to testify that Perren told him he had never seen Pook in Deptford that night. Perren responded that he didn’t remember the man and didn’t remember saying any such thing. Perren admitted that the nails he claimed to have bought from Jane Thomas turned out to be nails that the Thomases never sold. When pressed as to whether he had read an account of the trial and of those nails that very morning, Perren’s memory failed him. When Huddleston persisted, Perren sputtered, “Well, I believe that I did. I think that I did, and I am sure that I did. Is that what you want?” He claimed to know Edmund Pook perfectly well by sight, but when asked why he then bothered to go through the charade of a police identification, he hedged; he had only seen him three or four times in three or four years. “It is a farce to ask you any more questions,” exclaimed Huddleston, triumphantly exasperated. And yet, he asked one more, about Perren’s attendance at Edmund’s examination before the magistrate. “Did you say to Mr. Field [Perren’s music-hall employer] that you had been for nearly three hours at the police court, and that you thought they had got him to rights then?” He could not remember saying that, Perren replied—but if he had, he had lied.
John Duke Coleridge, re-examining, attempted to prevent the jury from concluding Perren either an idiot or a liar or both by exhorting Perren to make some sense out of this nonsense. But Perren could not, and Coleridge gave up, telling him, “I have given you every opportunity of explaining yourself.”
“I think he has been shown the consequences of this evidence,” the chief justice added. “Ample opportunity has been given him to reconsider it.”
Perren then slipped away, leaving the prosecution’s case sullied by the taint of an obviously false witness. Without his corroboration, Olivia Cavell’s testimony about the man she saw in the Thomases’ shop weakened considerably; she, after all, never saw the face to which Perren had falsely given an identity. (She had, however, remembered his clothing: a dark coat, a low, round hat—and light trousers.)
Jane Thomas, called to appear after her, was as oblivious as ever as to the identity of the person who bought the hammer from her that night. Mrs. Thomas, attacked by Harry Poland at the inquest for withholding evidence and vilified by the townspeople of Deptford for her dogged refusal to name Edmund Pook as the hammer’s purchaser, now found vindication. After again declaring she could not identify Edmund Pook as the man in her shop, she burst into tears. She had received two venomous letters attacking her for her obstinacy, she told the chief justice, and now she handed these to him. “I thought,” she said, “if I brought it before you it might be the means of clearing our character.” The courtroom by its applause suggested that she had succeeded. Bovill was all kindness and consideration to Mrs. Thomas, and annoyed at the police for not assisting her: “All I can say is the detectives would be doing good service to society by finding out who sends these letters.” He advised Mrs. Thomas in future to have her husband open her mail. She left the witness box weeping bitterly.
After calling several witnesses to establish that the hammer purchased from the Thomases’ shop almost certainly was the murder weapon, Coleridge turned to the witnesses at Kidbrooke Lane: William Norton, Louisa Putman, and William Cronk. Their testimony fell flat. Neither Norton nor Putman could swear to seeing Pook or Clouson that night; as far as they were concerned, they had witnessed nothing that had to do with Jane’s murder. The screams they had heard were “of a person in fun, and not in pain or anguish,” William Norton testified. Neither had been alarmed by the running man. And when they had walked on, tow
ard Eltham—toward the scream—they saw nothing. They had passed another couple during their walk, but that meant little: the couple they had passed north of the brook; the scream and the running man had come from the south.
William Cronk, in spite of his identification of Edmund Pook as the man he saw arguing with a woman on the lane, proved to be a stronger witness for the defense than for the prosecution. The identification itself was weak: “I do not speak to his face,” he admitted to Coleridge; he could only identify Edmund Pook by his back. That he had, based upon that alone, picked out Pook from fifteen or twenty other men at Greenwich police station could only raise doubts about the soundness of police procedure. Far more compelling was his evidence that pointed away from Edmund Pook’s guilt. “I thought she addressed the man by the Christian name of Charley,” he told Huddleston, “and I think so now.”
After Cronk, Thomas Lazell was called—but here the chief justice and counsel conferred, agreed that Lazell’s testimony would be lengthy, and postponed his appearance until the next morning. Instead, Coleridge called five police officers, an assistant solicitor to the Treasury, and Edmund Pook’s lady friend, Alice Durnford, to detail the progress of the dog whistle the police had found, from the mud of Kidbrooke Lane into the hands of Detective Inspector Mulvany, and to suggest that the whistle was the one that Edmund had used to summon Miss Durnford from her house. But Coleridge’s attempt to demonstrate the police’s careful handling of this evidence failed completely. The whistle might, as the police testified, have been found in the mud and then passed up the chain of command. Or it might not have. Among their many evasions and excuses in response to Huddleston’s cross-examination, the officers made it clear that not a single one of them had bothered to note the finding or the existence of the whistle in the station’s evidence book. And because they did not, there existed absolutely no official record of the whistle until fully three weeks after PC Ovens purportedly pulled it from the mud. Given the depths to which the reputation of the police had fallen during this trial, this discrepancy gave rise to a possibility that John Huddleston now harped upon forcefully: that in their blind zeal to secure Edmund Pook’s conviction, they had simply manufactured that evidence. Even the appearance of Dolly Williamson, head of the Detective Department at Scotland Yard, to testify that he had seen the whistle in Mulvany’s hands soon after the attack, could do little to scrub away this suspicion.
Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane Page 15