Mulvany testified that, far from suppressing the evidence of the cloth, the police had informed the Treasury of its existence. An assistant solicitor to the Treasury, Augustus Keppel Stephenson, appeared after him to confirm that fact. But that hardly placated the chief justice. The police, Bovill proclaimed, only told the assistant about the cloth; he had not shown it to him. Worse than this, no one had shared this evidence with Edmund’s defense counsel, which therefore had no opportunity to investigate it. “That,” Bovill told Mulvany, “is where the injustice lies.” “It shows,” Huddleston remarked, “the necessity that exists for a public prosecutor.”*5 The stained cloth, then, worked neither to implicate nor to exculpate Edmund Pook. But the notion about it that Bovill promoted lingered: but for police incompetence, it could have proved valuable, likely to Edmund’s benefit. And in that way, the cloth actually did work to his benefit.
*
Edmund Pook, alternatively standing and sitting in the dock, always calm, always attentive, had surely found pleasure in repeatedly seeing his chief tormentors, James Griffin and John Mulvany, censured and vilified. Now he enjoyed a pleasure of a different kind: a parade of witnesses, the burghers of Greenwich, appearing to demonstrate their unqualified support for him and to extoll the excellences of his character. Well over a dozen appeared, among them friends and fellow Freemasons of Ebenezer Pook and members of the Greenwich vestry. Mr. Price, a schoolmaster and once probably Edmund’s, spoke first: he was astonished to see a young man of Edmund’s character in the dock at all. Mr. William Orchard, publican and his next-door neighbor: Edmund was “an exceedingly well-conducted man at all times.” Mr. Turner: “The accused had borne a character for everything that an Englishman could wish his son to bear.”
Huddleston intended these witnesses to be the last ones for the defense, and with them court adjourned for the night. The next morning, however, Saturday, July 15, yet one more witness for the defense appeared in a bid to kick away the last remaining prop to the Crown’s case: William Sparshott’s heretofore-unchallenged eyewitness testimony that placed Edmund on Deptford High Street the night the hammer was bought. Matthew Crawford, a pastry cook, had in April and May been next-door neighbor to the Sparshotts. (He had since moved from Deptford to become a near neighbor to the Pooks in Greenwich.) He had read an account of the trial in the newspapers, was stunned by Sparshott’s allegation that he had recognized Edmund Pook in his shop, and felt compelled to come forward to contradict him. Soon after Edmund Pook had been arrested, the two had had a conversation in which, Crawford claimed, Sparshott repeatedly told him that he would not be able to identify the man. Huddleston first recalled William Sparshott, who denied he had said this to Crawford and adamantly held fast to the claim that it was Edmund Pook he saw: “I could not alter my statement on any account; I consider my character is quite as much at stake as any man’s in the kingdom.” John Duke Coleridge, cross-examining Crawford, asked him why he had not come forward sooner, since he had read two months before that Sparshott had testified to identifying Pook. Crawford seemed stymied by the question, saying only that he didn’t want to be involved. And then the chief justice intervened to nudge him toward a more reasonable answer, with a dubious parsing of Sparshott’s testimony two months before. “Mr. Sparshott’s evidence before the magistrate was not positive. He said he ‘believed’ the prisoner was the man. That is what you read, I suppose?”
“Yes, sir,” Crawford replied. Why that should have prevented Crawford from coming forward was yet another question that Coleridge did not think to ask.
*
John Huddleston approached his closing argument with the spirit of a man with victory in his grasp, dismissing, point by point, the prosecution’s evidence, and fervidly denouncing the police. Then he laid his own trap for his opponent. He would “wait with anxiety,” he told the jury, to see whether the solicitor general, “having a father and uncle who presided with honor and dignity on the bench—would throw his aegis over the police to excuse them for cross-examining the accused before he was in custody, and suggesting facts for the purpose of entrapping him.” In other words Coleridge could either abandon the police to their disgrace, leaving his case irreparably tainted, or he could sully his own reputation by defending them.
Coleridge, in his turn, lashed back at Huddleston for taking the unusual course of making his advocacy “rather a personal matter.” He argued that the police had not entrapped Edmund at all. And he deplored the way the trial had descended to an out-and-out assault upon the police; “Policemen,” he protested, “were not to be set up in the box like schoolboys’ cockshies, for every imputation to be levied against them.” But for all his celebrated oratorical ability, Coleridge’s speech was, in all, subdued and defensive, words spoken in defeat. When he discussed the Lewisham alibi witnesses, for example, he simply left it up to the jury to decide whether they were credible, and weakly allowed that if they believed them, “there was an end of the case, and the prisoner ought to be acquitted.” His strongest emotion and highest rhetoric he expended in a final desperate bid to return the focus of the case to the girl horribly disfigured and left to die in the mud of Kidbrooke Lane. “Outrages of this description,” he concluded, “could not go unrevenged. The interests of society, and of poor girls, and the fathers and mothers of poor girls, demanded that a right and proper verdict should be returned.”
His appeal fell flat. After four days of emphasis upon police persecution of Edmund Pook, Jane Clouson’s agony seemed little more than a distant troubled dream. The young man in the dock was the true victim in this trial. And by now, no one doubted that the right and proper verdict would be in his favor. The jury could simply end the proceedings here and declare Edmund Pook not guilty, saving Chief Justice Bovill the trouble of summing up the case. But when Coleridge finished, they remained silent.
William Bovill likely preferred it that way, for his six-and-a-half-hour summing-up allowed him to purge the anger and frustration that had swollen within him over the past four days: anger at the prosecution and its shoddy case, even greater anger at a mistake-prone and overzealous police force, and the greatest anger of all directed at two officers in particular, John Mulvany and James Griffin, whose misrepresentations and evasions might have forced a horrible miscarriage of justice.
Chief among the offenses of the prosecution was its introduction of false witnesses to make its case. Bovill named two: James Conway and Walter Perren. The jury could not have been surprised to hear Bovill denounce Perren as “deliberately and willfully false,” but his denunciation of Conway came to them as a complete surprise. For James Conway did not testify at trial; when, two months before, it became clear that Conway had mistakenly identified Edmund Pook as being in the Thomases’ shop on the Saturday rather than the Monday before the attack, the police and prosecution had dropped him. But now Bovill resurrected him, paired him with Perren, and directed the jury to judge all of the prosecution’s evidence very narrowly because of these two. He also recommended her Majesty’s government prosecute both Conway and Perren for perjury.
The police, Bovill declaimed, with their fixation upon Edmund Pook’s guilt and their obsession to secure a conviction, had botched the case by chasing any evidence that suggested his guilt and by disregarding any that might have proven his innocence. The cloth, the bloody stones by the brook, the locket, the footprints at the scene—all were ignored or suppressed. In an attempt to correct the errors Bovill was sure the police had made, he re-examined the evidence at length, disparaging the prosecution’s case at every turn. According to Bovill, the amount of blood on Edmund’s clothes was hardly enough to connect him with a vicious attack. The evidence of PC Gunn and the witnesses at Kidbrooke Lane strongly led one to believe that Jane had been killed late at night—when Edmund was proven to be home in bed—and not in the evening, as police and prosecution contended. While Bovill proclaimed that the “bloody” cloth that the police had ignored might have been crucial evidence, he dismissed the whistle
and the hair found on Edmund’s trousers as insignificant. And while he belittled the testimony of every eyewitness who positively connected Edmund with the murder weapon or with Kidbrooke Lane, he commended as sound the testimony of every eyewitness who supported Edmund’s alibi. Fixing upon William Cronk’s statement that he had seen Pook on Kidbrooke Lane at 8:45, and statements by several witnesses on Royal Hill that they had seen him before nine, Bovill suggested that Edmund Pook could not possibly have run from Kidbrooke Lane to Greenwich that evening. (Other eyewitness accounts gave him more than enough time to do this.) Finally, having successfully excluded from the trial any evidence pointing to a motive, Bovill contended that there was no evidence for a motive, and indeed, that there was no motive for Edmund Pook to kill Jane Clouson. And if there was no motive, he instructed the jury, “then they were left in doubt, and being in doubt, it would be their duty to acquit the prisoner of the charge.”
In the midst of his summation Bovill’s volatile words appeared to take on physical form when, after a short recess, the courtroom reeked with the powerful odor of gas. Bovill contributed greatly to the general consternation by nervously pointing out that a small amount of gas could “produce an explosion and blow them all up.” The gas, it was discovered, had been flowing through a number of unlit jets. They were lit, windows were opened, the odor dissipated, and Bovill recommenced.
He concluded with his harshest attack of all—a lambasting of Mulvany and Griffin, who, he claimed, had tainted the case, both in their manipulation of the evidence, and in their language; they always, claimed the chief justice, gave a “tinge” to their words, in a way that was “never in favour of the accused.” Mulvany, he argued, had spoken falsely in inventing a letter in order to entrap Edmund. And Griffin had suspiciously and conveniently forgotten, in recounting his questioning Edmund, that Edmund had denied meeting Jane at Crooms Hill the night she was attacked. By neglecting to mention this, Bovill contended, Griffin had suggested that Edmund tacitly admitted meeting her—creating a misimpression that might have led to disaster. “You and I,” he angrily told the jury, “would have been made instruments in fixing guilt upon the prisoner by reason of a misstatement of the police—a direct, positive misstatement of the man himself.”
“Sensation” enveloped the courtroom, according to one reporter. “It is cruel indeed,” Bovill continued, “to those who have to administer justice, that the police should be in a condition to make such statements, to mislead judges and juries—although they did not do it intentionally—and to make them instruments perhaps in sacrificing the life of an innocent man.” The applause that naturally followed, Bovill dutifully if proudly suppressed. The foreman quickly rose to acknowledge the jury’s complete sympathy with his sentiments.
Bovill’s passionate denunciation of James Griffin so strongly implied Edmund Pook’s innocence that even if he was not quite directing the jury’s verdict, they could certainly be excused for thinking that he was. When Bovill left the case in their hands, the only apparent question that remained was whether they need retire from the courtroom at all to consider that verdict. Surprisingly, they did. It was then 8:40 on that Saturday evening. Edmund Pook slipped to the back of the prisoner’s dock, where for a few minutes he chatted with his guards, and was seen to smile. Then he sat in the chair provided him, rocked quietly, and waited anxiously for the entire mess to be done with.
The jury returned twenty minutes later, to finally speak the words everyone expected: not guilty. The courtroom burst into applause—applause that the chief justice was entirely unable to suppress. Bovill thanked the jury, which, before leaving, could not resist a parting shot at the police, the foreman voicing their dissatisfaction with the “loose manner” in which they had presented their case. Edmund Pook, freed from the dock, rushed to embrace his family. For him, for them all, the nightmare at the Old Bailey was over.
But in Greenwich it was just beginning.
*1 Jane Prosser’s stunning revelation of Jane’s pregnancy and Edmund’s paternity, on the other hand, would not be a part of the prosecution’s evidence. Either because the Treasury had found cause to discount her claims, or because they had decided that no judge would admit them, they had dropped Jane Prosser from their list of witnesses.
*2 To encourage a fair verdict, and because of the civil split the case had provoked south of the Thames, no one from either Kent or Surrey was allowed to sit on this jury. [T July 13, 11.]
*3 Griffin’s bafflement was very likely justified, for his testimony at the inquest may have been mistranscribed. According to the Telegraph’s transcripts of Griffin’s testimony at Jane Clouson’s inquest, Griffin did not claim that Edmund said “It is not true”; rather, he stated much the same thing he did at trial: “he made no answer.” [T May 12, 1871, 3.]
*4 Crosland did make one “striking” exception: “The Solicitor-General was equal to the occasion, and worthy of his high vocation. He was dignified, fair, and able.”
*5 In 1871 there was in England no public prosecutor with personal power to take on fully the investigation and prosecution of important criminal cases—although the Treasury solicitor did, at least partially, take on that role. Efforts to create a public prosecutor had long been afoot and were given impetus by cases such as this one. The office of Director of Public Prosecutions was created in 1879. [Kurland and Waters 550, 570.]
6
Rough Music
The cheering inside Old Court carried through corridors and windows to the crowd that had been gathering outside the Old Bailey since that morning, knowing the verdict was coming, and now several hundred strong. Although they may have passed the hours betting with one another upon Edmund Pook’s guilt or innocence, they all knew what they wanted that verdict to be.
Over the next few days a flood of editorials appearing in newspapers across the nation lashed out at the “stupid” and “reprehensible” police who had suppressed and falsified evidence and had brought forward their miserable, perjuring witnesses, in a deplorable effort to convict an innocent man. In doing so, the police had surely allowed Jane Clouson’s murderer to escape justice. Griffin, Mulvany, and the police of R Division had, the editorials proclaimed in choral unanimity, overstepped their proper bounds; they had become prosecutors rather than investigators. The Pook trial, then, had exposed serious flaws of English criminal justice. “It would, indeed, be hardly possible to have a more striking instance of the deficiencies of our present system,” the Times thundered. The editorials one and all called out for the establishment in England of a public prosecutor’s office to match the one that already existed in Scotland: an office with clear authority and full oversight of police investigations of serious crime. The Treasury Department—which largely held that authority—had proved itself woefully inadequate in that role during this fiasco of a trial, the newspapers agreed.
And while this crowd might not have understood, without the benefit of those coming editorials, the full extent of this broken system, they, too, had been following the progress of the case carefully from the start, and they, too, were now convinced that Edmund Pook was the victim of persecution, first by the police, and then by the Crown. They expected, they demanded, his acquittal. And when the cheers erupted from within the courtroom, they knew that acquittal had come. They burst into sustained and raucous celebration. Edmund Pook, emerging from the Old Bailey with family and solicitor after eleven weeks’ imprisonment, surely paused to revel in their joy before walking away from prison and courthouse and returning home.
For two women who had also been tried that day and who were now sitting hard by the Old Bailey in their Newgate cells, the muffled sounds of celebration—celebration for someone else—must only have twitted them with their own misery. They, too, had been tried on this day; they had both been found guilty. They both realized that they would not walk away from prison for many years to come. If the law had failed in Edmund Pook’s case, it had succeeded in theirs—at least partially.
Flora Da
vy could find some solace in having escaped the gallows, thanks to the grand jury. That body had in its wisdom ignored the bill for murder against her and had returned only a true bill for manslaughter. Proving manslaughter rather than murder—proving that Davy had been instrumental in killing Frederick Moon, whether or not she intended to kill him—turned out to be a relatively simple task for the Crown and its principal prosecutor, Hardinge Giffard (with Harry Poland’s assistance). Giffard had a host of witnesses at his disposal—police, servants, Mrs. Davy’s companion Mrs. Toynbee, her attending physicians, the two young ladies who had been visiting her—to establish beyond doubt that Davy had quarreled with Moon that evening, that she had picked up the poultry knife and rushed at him, that they had struggled before he fell dying—and that afterward, covered in Moon’s blood, she had repeatedly stated, “I fear I did it.”
Davy’s lead counsel, John Humffreys Parry, could offer no eyewitness testimony to counter any of this. But since not one of these prosecution witnesses had actually seen Flora Davy stab Frederick Moon, Parry based his entire defense upon the possibility that his death came not at Flora Davy’s hands but at his own: that he somehow managed to stab himself to death. Hardinge Giffard and the prosecution had anticipated this strategy and had called as expert witnesses no fewer than five physicians, all of whom had examined Moon’s body, to testify that Moon had almost certainly been stabbed by another person. Parry, however, succeeded in coaxing several of these physicians to admit it at least possible that Moon died from falling upon the knife. Then Parry called as witnesses four more physicians to claim that Moon’s death was likely accidental. All four of these physicians were men of stellar reputation, but not one of them had actually examined Moon. And the accident these physicians surmised did not have Frederick Moon simply and haplessly falling over and impaling himself upon the poultry knife, but rather had him struggling with Flora Davy for the knife, and equally haplessly plunging it into his own heart. That in itself, Harding Giffard argued, was enough to establish Davy’s guilt: “Life in this country would not be safe if that were not manslaughter,” he warned the jury.
Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane Page 17