Coleridge failed, moreover, to convince anyone the whistle that the police produced was actually Edmund’s. When Coleridge handed Alice Durnford that whistle, she could only say it was “something like” the one Edmund had carried. When, moments later, Huddleston handed her another whistle—the one that Thomas Pook would claim to have found in Edmund’s drawer—Alice Durnford claimed that that one, too, was “something like.” A second whistle that Huddleston showed her, one made of bone, Durnford claimed she recognized as well, and noted that she had never mentioned that fact before. “At all events,” the solicitor general muttered sarcastically for the benefit of the chief justice, “the prosecution could not be accused of suppressing that piece of evidence.”
That, Bovill snapped back, “was most irregular and improper.”
*
Thomas Lazell’s testimony the next morning indeed proved to be lengthy. John Duke Coleridge would have preferred it be brief: enough time to impress upon the jury Lazell’s dead certainty that Edmund Pook had been the man he had passed within two or three inches of near Kidbrooke Lane—but not enough time to impress upon them the glaring difficulty with Lazell’s testimony, that is, his equally obdurate claim that he had seen Edmund Pook with “a pretty, good-looking young woman” at around 6:50 that evening, nearly two hours before the other Kidbrooke Lane witnesses saw what they saw, and only ten minutes after Fanny Hamilton claimed Jane left her in Deptford, more than three miles away. But of course it was that inconvenient claim and Lazell’s elaborate support for it that Huddleston did his best to bring out in cross-examination. And thus having established Lazell’s certainty to an impossibility, Huddleston set about discrediting Lazell as a witness altogether. He was of course assisted in this by Lazell’s usual tongue-tied nervousness:
“How often have you seen the prisoner before?”
“Twice, to be sure of.”
“The first time, how long ago?”
“Twelve months.”
“The second?”
“Eighteen months.”
Huddleston caught him out repeatedly with discrepancies from his earlier testimony. He noted contradictory claims about that evening that Lazell had made to others—others whom Huddleston intended to call for the defense. And it was in quizzing Lazell about one of these men, the cantankerous gentleman pensioner from Morden College, Charles Eicke, that Huddleston unexpectedly hit upon a subject that would pay massive dividends for Edmund’s defense.
Huddleston asked Lazell whether he had told Eicke that he had seen a laborer passing him at four in the morning after Jane’s murder. Lazell denied it. He had seen a laborer that morning, but at eight o’clock, not four. The farm laborer had showed him something he had picked up in Kidbrooke Lane: a blue pocket handkerchief or duster with blood upon it. He had told a police sergeant all about it.
The handkerchief—the duster—the rag: that evidence had never come up before coroner or magistrate. This was the first time that the chief justice had heard of it, and he was livid at this further instance of suppressed—and to his mind, crucial—evidence. “If the duster has been found with blood upon it, and the fact concealed from everyone, it is the most outrageous thing in the world.” And he vowed to get to the bottom of the matter immediately, ordering that every one of the sergeants of R Division, then waiting outside the courtroom, be ushered in. From them Lazell immediately picked out William Willis as the sergeant with whom he had spoken. Bovill ordered Willis into the witness box, where he admitted he had seen the duster at Lee station. It was still there, slate-colored and stained, but not, he thought, stained with blood. “Did you send it to Dr. Letheby?” Huddleston snapped at him. “I had nothing to do with that,” he replied.
Superintendent Griffin, recalled to the witness box, described the cloth as a “ragged dirty piece of rubbish” that the police had investigated and then rejected as being unconnected with the murder. The chief justice, as skeptical about this as he was about anything that came from the superintendent’s mouth, ordered the cloth sent for immediately, along with the haystack-maker who had found it. (“I have not the least idea who the stackmaker is, or where he is to be found,” Griffin told him.) Huddleston having thus—with the chief justice’s energetic cooperation—suggested that the police had suppressed valuable evidence that they had actually considered and deemed worthless, he then pressed Griffin about yet another matter of seemingly suppressed evidence: the mysterious PC Thomas Mortimer, who should have preceded PC Gunn on the Kidbrooke Lane beat, who had never appeared before either coroner or magistrate, and who surely had vital information to impart. Griffin tried to explain: from six until ten o’clock on the night of the attack, no one covered the Kidbrooke Lane beat; PC Mortimer, who usually covered that beat, instead was on duty at the Eltham station house. Again Bovill was skeptical; obviously Mortimer was a “most essential witness,” and “were I counsel for the defendant, I should certainly feel it be my duty to make strong observations on the fact that he was not called.” He ordered Griffin to fetch Mortimer and any relevant records as to his whereabouts, along with the cloth and the farm laborer.
After seething about the evidence the prosecution and the police did not present, Chief Justice Bovill then derided the evidence they next did present: Mary Ann Love’s and Alice Langley’s testimony about walking with Edmund Pook and a cousin to Kidbrooke Lane two days before the attack. Any notion that their ramble might have been some sort of dress rehearsal for the murder Bovill dismissed outright. “To what does this all tend?” he scoffed in the midst of Miss Love’s testimony. “Is it competent to show that a man who knows his way from St. Paul’s to the Thames Embankment is guilty of a murder that is committed on the Embankment?”
Dr. Henry Letheby, the Crown’s final witness, then testified, repeating his certainty that there was blood on Edmund’s trousers, his shirt, and his hat—and that these bloodstains were recent. Moreover, he was sure that the hair taken from Edmund’s trousers, those cut from Jane’s head, and those found on the plasterer’s hammer were alike both in color and in structure. But under John Huddleston’s cross-examination, Letheby’s uncertainties overshadowed these certainties. The blood, he admitted, could have come from any human being or any vertebrate animal. And while Letheby initially claimed that the blood could not have been on the clothes for more than two weeks before his analysis, Huddleston compelled him to revise his estimate to a month or more—an important distinction, as Huddleston planned to introduce evidence that Edmund Pook had suffered an epileptic seizure and had bled on his clothes near the beginning of April. The chief justice, in examining the holes Letheby had cut in Edmund’s trousers to analyze spots of blood, was astounded: “Two of the holes are hardly perceptible unless the trousers are viewed by a glass. They are only about the size of a pin’s head.” To him, obviously, minuteness connoted insignificance. As for the hair, Letheby admitted that the fact they were alike hardly meant they came from the same head, and “structure” at that time meant very little more than generally similar appearance. That fact Bovill hammered home by positing to Letheby, “I suppose these points of similarity might occur in the hair of five thousand people?”
“No doubt, my lord,” Letheby replied.
The solicitor general soon afterward rested for the prosecution, fully aware that the seamless case that he had hoped to present now lay in tatters.
*
John Huddleston rose for the defense confidently expecting that his opening speech alone would secure Edmund Pook’s acquittal. He reminded the jury that it was in their power “at any time to get up and say they were satisfied that the prisoner was not guilty.” And he proceeded to argue why they should do exactly that: the prosecution and their many witnesses had succeeded in proving nothing whatsoever against Edmund Pook. They had, for one thing, failed entirely at proving any sort of motive. The insinuation that he had been Jane’s lover and the father of the child she carried was not supported by a tittle of evidence. Their eyewitnesses proved nothing: Cro
nk had only identified Pook by his back; Lazell had offered up a mass of contradictions, and his timing was impossible; Sparshott was simply wrong; and as for Walter Perren—
A jury in 1871 had every right to interrupt a trial at any time, and the jury here interrupted. The foreman stopped Huddleston, consulted with his fellows, and then announced to the chief justice that they had rejected Perren’s testimony as entirely false: “I felt sure I should have the sanction of my brethren in saying that Perren and his testimony shall be, as far as we are concerned, among things forgotten.”
The rest of the evidence, Huddleston argued, proved nothing. Certainly, the prosecution had hardly established its contention that the attack occurred in the evening and not late at night—and if that was true, the Crown’s case “crumbled to nothing.” The copious amount of blood that must have flowed from Jane Clouson when attacked would surely have saturated her attacker. If Edmund Pook had killed Jane Clouson, he should have been reeking with blood. But instead there was a tiny amount of blood on his clothes—blood for which Edmund Pook had perfectly reasonable explanations.
The police, he contended, were entirely responsible for this travesty of a case. “Like dogs after game,” he declared, the police had set out with an erroneous and fixed idea, and pursued it with blind zeal, disregarding any evidence—the locket and Henry Humphreys, the bloody duster—that might have led them to the actual murderer. More than simply suppressing evidence, they had manufactured it. As proof, Huddleston cited not the whistle but the letter Griffin and Mulvany claimed Edmund had written Jane, setting up an assignation. That letter, Huddleston claimed, they invented in an effort to entrap Edmund. In short, they had employed methods “only known to the inquisitions of old.” But they had failed, and Huddleston demanded the jury give the defense the victory it deserved. “It is the life of this young man,” he perorated. “Victory to me, professionally, is nothing. Victory to me is rescuing you from the chance of acting contrary to the spirit of the Constitution in sacrificing the innocent. Victory to me is preventing you from imbruing your hands in the blood of a fellow creature.”
The applause naturally followed, as did the chief justice’s dutiful suppression of it.
This was the moment for the jury to declare themselves satisfied that Edmund Pook was innocent. But they failed to do that. And so John Huddleston proceeded to call the witnesses for the defense. There were more than two dozen of these. And since Henry Pook had wisely refrained from calling any one of them before the magistrate, every single one of them was in a sense a surprise to the prosecution. Coleridge could not catch them in discrepancies as John Huddleston had repeatedly caught the prosecution witnesses, and without investigating their claims, he could do little to rebut them.
Edmund’s family members were the first to appear—father, mother, brother Thomas, and cousin Harriet. All four were emphatic that Edmund Pook would never, could never, carry on an improper intimacy with a servant. He was a “quiet, well-conducted man,” said Ebenezer. In defending his son’s character, Ebenezer managed to besmirch Jane’s, restating the family’s claim that she was disreputably filthy: “If I had any one call in the evening I always made it a rule to take any thing from her because she was not fit to be seen and I used to complain about her to my wife repeatedly.” “I kept proper order in my house,” Mary Pook proclaimed with a righteous class consciousness; “the prisoner never spoke with the girl; certainly not once a week.” Besides, she added, offering up a defense and not a motive for her son,“he disliked the girl.” Both parents professed to be constantly anxious about Edmund because of his epilepsy. When he went out, he was always accompanied, and in their small house—where they could always hear the slightest noise—they constantly listened for him: “even if he was in his bedroom a minute or two longer than he ought to have been,” claimed Ebenezer, “inquiries were always made about him.” Cousin Harriet, who shared a bedroom with Jane Clouson, was positive: “if there had been any intimacy I should certainly have discovered it at once.” Even George Collins, an assistant working in the printing shop, felt confident enough about his knowledge of the Pooks’ domestic comings and goings to say of Jane Clouson, “If there had been any familiarity between the prisoner and the girl, I must have seen it.”
Given the hypervigilance toward Edmund that his parents professed, it is striking that neither of them offered any evidence concerning his whereabouts either on the Monday, when the hammer was purchased, or on the Tuesday, when Jane was attacked. Cousin Harriet did testify about Edmund’s movements on both nights, but according to her testimony Edmund was away from home for a good hour on the Monday, and for more than two hours—from around seven o’clock until nine-thirty—on the Tuesday. The only member of the family to fully support any of Edmund’s alibis was his brother, Thomas. Thomas Pook supported, it seemed, all of Edmund’s alibis and explanations, and did so with a profusion of detail. He and Edmund, Thomas claimed, had spent most of Monday evening together, strolling about Greenwich, stopping in at the Greenwich Lecture Hall, drinking a glass of ale at the Globe Tavern. “We were not separated for five minutes,” he stated. As for the Tuesday, Thomas claimed that Edmund left the house between 7:20 and 7:25, and returned at 9:05—easily enough time to go to and return from Lewisham, but barely enough time for the six-mile round-trip to Kidbrooke. As for the blood on Edmund’s clothing, Thomas offered no fewer than three possible explanations. Edmund, he remembered, had suffered an epileptic fit, biting his tongue and bleeding, on the sixth of April. He had as well, on the fourteenth of that month, cut his own finger in the shop and had bled copiously; a week later an assistant in the shop had scraped the flesh off the back of his knuckles and Edmund had bound up his wounds.
More than simply supporting his brother’s alibis, Thomas Pook introduced the specter of another possible lover, and possible murderer, for Jane, repeating his claim that Edmund had told him that he had seen Jane walking out with a “swell.” And it was Thomas to whom Edmund had written from Maidstone jail, and who had then rummaged through Edmund’s drawer to find his metal and his bone whistles.
Thomas Pook was thus his brother’s best alibi witness. But he was not the only one. There were also three neighbors of Edmund’s Lewisham lady friend, Alice Durnford: Joseph and Mary Anne Eagles, and their lodger, William Douglas. All three testified to seeing a man on a bridge near their house, a man whom, eleven weeks later, they identified as Edmund Pook from the photograph albums that Henry Pook showed them. Most striking about their testimony is not that two of them remembered seeing Edmund Pook in their neighborhood—after all, Edmund was a frequent visitor to the area, and Mary Anne Eagles acknowledged seeing him walking with Alice Durnford—but rather that all three were certain that they saw him on that particular evening. Joseph Eagles did offer a curious and illogical reason for connecting the sight with that date: he had obtained lotion to treat his partially blind eye earlier that day. In cross-examination the solicitor general was able to tease out some inconsistencies between their accounts. But Coleridge did little to draw the jury’s attention to the implausibility of their precise recollections or cast suspicion on Henry Pook’s photo identification.
Yet another witness appeared to support Edmund’s alibi. Eliza Ann Merrett lived in Lewisham but had before that lived in Greenwich. She knew Edmund Pook well—indeed, she claimed, had “always” known him—and swore that Edmund had passed her that evening, about five minutes away from the bridge, walking slowly. “I thought he was waiting for somebody,” she testified.
Soon after Merrett testified, Superintendent Griffin returned to court from Eltham with the mysterious cloth in his hands and with PC Mortimer in tow; the defense paused as Bovill allowed Mortimer to appear for the prosecution. Mortimer quickly dispelled any mystery about his whereabouts on the night of the attack. He acknowledged that while he regularly walked the Kidbrooke beat, that night he had not done so after six o’clock, instead serving as duty officer at the Eltham station. He was suppressing nothin
g because he knew nothing. That seemed to satisfy both Bovill and Huddleston; in any case, neither mentioned PC Mortimer again.
The supposedly bloody rag, however, was another matter. Superintendent Griffin again appeared in order to enter into evidence the cloth, which one reporter described as “a piece of lining full of holes, and having a number of reddish stains on it.” Why, Huddleston asked him, hadn’t he submitted the cloth to Dr. Letheby for analysis? Why, Bovill asked him, had he put the cloth in a cupboard in the station and said nothing about it to a Treasury solicitor? Griffin tried to explain that the cloth was insignificant: “Gypsies throw away rags, and, as it was found in a field so far away from the scene of the murder, it was thought it had nothing to do with it.” Moreover, the police had not kept the cloth a secret: “the police and more than twenty people knew of it,” and the newspapers had reported its finding at the time. Bovill did not accept Griffin’s claim that the cloth was irrelevant. “All I can say is this,” Bovill harangued him, “that you seem to have taken upon yourself a strong measure of responsibility.” The chief justice was certain that the rag was a crucial link in a chain of evidence that, if pursued, might have led to the actual murderer. The police “ought to have investigated into the circumstance, whether it might tell for or against the prisoner, and not to have exercised their judgement as to whether it ought or ought not to be produced.” Applause followed on the heels of his righteous outburst—applause that Bovill suppressed, concluding, “I cannot express my disapprobation of this conduct too strongly, and I trust that a matter of this sort will never occur again.”
Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane Page 16