Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  But even if John Duke Coleridge had risen to the occasion and established convincingly the weaknesses of Edmund Pook’s alibi, he still would hardly have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Edmund Pook had murdered Jane Clouson: his own case for the prosecution, weakened by obvious false evidence, by ambiguity and contradiction, had by that time collapsed. The most thorough scrutiny of the evidence presented in R v. Pook will never satisfactorily answer the question of whether Edmund Pook killed Jane Clouson. To do that, we are forced to look beyond the trial, and to consider evidence not considered there: not simply the evidence actively excluded from the trial, but also the evidence ignored—ignored, because its incalculable value was lost in 1871 upon all of the trial’s major participants.

  *

  Of the evidence excluded at trial, the most compelling by far were the actions performed and the words spoken by Jane Clouson in the days leading up to her encounter on Kidbrooke Lane. Four women—Elizabeth and Charlotte Trott, Emily Wolledge, and Fanny Hamilton—were prepared to testify to these.*1 All of this evidence, however, Chief Justice Bovill deemed hearsay and absolutely refused to admit. In 1871, hearsay was generally inadmissible because it denied a defendant the possibility of cross-examination, and in particular denied defense counsel any opportunity of testing the veracity of the original speaker. But there were a number of exceptions to the hearsay rule, and underlying those exceptions lay two principles: necessity and probability of trustworthiness. Necessity, according to present-day legal scholar Adrian Zuckerman, occurs when “hearsay provides the only information and it is felt that admitting hearsay is preferable to foregoing the information altogether.” Probability of trustworthiness, Zuckerman further states, occurs when “a statement has been made under such circumstances that even a skeptical caution would look upon it as trustworthy.” Henry Pook, obviously fearful of what these four had to say, stridently (and surely misogynistically) dismissed their testimony in police court as “the idle tittle-tattle of one woman to another.” Chief Justice Bovill agreed. But a closer examination of this testimony than Henry Pook dared to give it, or William Bovill chose to, demonstrates its value, and Jane’s words and actions, stifled at trial, demand reconsideration.

  The necessity of this testimony is obvious and beyond question: through the Trotts, Wolledge, and Hamilton the police learned of the sexual relationship between Jane and Edmund, and learned that the two almost certainly met on the evening Jane was murdered. Without it, any sense of a motive on Edmund’s part disappears, which is exactly what happened at trial. And upon a fuller examination of this evidence, its general trustworthiness becomes clear as well.

  Perhaps the strongest indication that these women accurately remembered the gist of Jane’s words and actions lies in the fact that there were four of them, that their accounts for the most part accord, and that they often accord without any possibility of collusion. Nowhere is this clearer than in Jane’s words to her cousin Charlotte Trott on the Sunday before she disappeared, and her words to her landlady, Fanny Hamilton, two days later, just before she walked off to her death. According to cousin Charlotte, Jane said, “Charlotte, you must not be surprised if I am missing for some weeks, for Edmund says I must meet him at Shooter’s Hill either to-morrow night or on Tuesday night to arrange to go with him into the country. He says he will have such a deal to tell me, and we shall have to make all the arrangements.” According to Fanny Hamilton, Jane said, “I am going up to Croom-hill to see Mr. Edmund Pook. He has got a great deal to tell me this evening and I cannot stay any longer with you. I’m not going to work at the machine now for he is going to do something better for me.” Charlotte Trott and Fanny Hamilton separately shared what they knew when interviewed by the police on May 1, the day Jane’s body was identified. They certainly had not met each other between the time Jane had spoken with each of them and the time they spoke to the police; indeed, they had almost certainly never met. Even if they had any reason to invent their stories—and what possible reason could that be?—they had absolutely no opportunity to collaborate in that invention.

  We cannot expect these women to have had an exact recollection of all that Jane said. When Charlotte remembered that Jane had told her Edmund had given her the locket, for example, she either misheard Jane or Jane misspoke. In either case, that assertion proved to be untrue, to the great embarrassment of the police. Nonetheless, it is clear that their testimony, when considered as a whole, offers a vivid account of the shifts in Jane’s mood during the weeks and days before the attack, and offers as well a highly credible explanation for those shifts. “Till within the last few weeks [she] was very cheerful,” Elizabeth Trott claimed at the inquest. But then—some time before her leaving the Pooks’ employ—she became despondent. By the time she moved in with her friend Emily Wolledge, she appeared “very low spirited,” according to Fanny Hamilton. Several days before she disappeared, her mood altered again, and when Charlotte saw her for the last time she observed that Jane was “happier than she had been during the last six or seven weeks.” Two days before this, Emily Wolledge witnessed what was almost certainly the cause of Jane’s elation: a letter came for Jane in that day’s post and Emily had handed it to her. She watched Jane read it, tear it to pieces, and burn it. Afterward, Jane wrote and posted a letter of her own. That Jane, without any obvious anger, so eagerly destroyed the letter strongly indicates that she was instructed to do so by her correspondent, and that in itself indicates the power her correspondent held over her. Emily Wolledge never knew for sure who had written that letter; of the four women who testified about Jane’s last conscious days, Emily Wolledge was the only one to whom Jane did not confide the fact that Edmund was her lover. Clearly, however, Edmund at some point had set up an assignation with Jane Clouson and, given the timing and the witnesses’ general recognition of Jane’s sudden happiness, it was that which Emily Wolledge observed.

  Although Emily Wolledge was a witness to hearsay evidence, incidentally, these particular observations of Jane and this letter were not hearsay at all, but eyewitness evidence perfectly admissible in a court of law—evidence that serves to point to the trustworthiness of the hearsay. John Duke Coleridge made a serious mistake in not introducing this hard evidence of a letter at Edmund Pook’s trial. Had he done so, he would at the very least have prevented Chief Justice Bovill’s unjust attack upon Inspector Mulvany for inventing the fact of a letter in order to entrap Edmund Pook.

  On the afternoon of April 25, Jane was “in good spirits,” according to Emily Wolledge; “much excited,” according to Fanny Hamilton, and she remained so until the moment she left Hamilton at the top of Deptford High Street to walk—eagerly, willingly, happily—to her assignation and to her death. Charlotte Trott and Fanny Hamilton both knew exactly where she was going, knew why she had once despaired, and knew why, on that evening, she was ecstatic. Edmund, Jane had told them—and had repeatedly told Charlotte’s mother, Elizabeth—was her lover. They both knew that there had been a domestic explosion between Jane and the Pooks that had caused Jane to flee. Although the Pooks swore that Jane’s poor hygiene had led to the breach, Jane’s words to her cousin suggested something deeper—something that had left Jane with a particular bitterness toward Mary Pook. “I told Edmund,” Jane had said, “that after I was married I should never speak to his mother.” Neither Charlotte nor Fanny knew that Jane was pregnant. But it later became clear that the rupture with the Pooks had occurred just around the time that the physiological evidence of her pregnancy would likely have become clear to Jane. Jane’s own awareness of her pregnancy further accounts for the depth of her despair as she left the Pooks. Pregnant and abandoned, Jane faced a Victorian woman’s worst nightmare: the stigma of a fallen woman and the bleak future that followed. With Edmund’s letter and his proposal, that nightmare dissipated instantly, supplanted by a Victorian working girl’s dream: respectable marriage, to a man whom Jane might have thought she loved, and hoped loved her, and the elevation to a higher social sph
ere. Her relief must have been as great as it was sudden; there could have been no stronger enticement to coax her to meet Edmund that night, and to stroll with him to Kidbrooke Lane. Jane, then, walked away from Fanny Hamilton that night blinded by this prospect of happiness. Had she been any less starry-eyed, she surely would have been troubled by the dark undertone of Edmund’s commands to her. He told her to burn his letter to her, and she had done so. He cautioned her to speak to no one and to prepare to cut herself off from everyone she knew. “I am not to tell anyone where I am going or write to anyone for some time, as he does not want anyone to know where I am,” she confided to Charlotte. By hindsight, no one can consider Jane’s words without intimating the impending horror of her murder. But Jane herself was, obviously, blissfully ignorant. And in her blind naïveté lies the strongest proof of her utter sincerity. She understood Edmund Pook to be her lover, her husband-to-be, her savior—not her murderer. The truth about Edmund Pook was beyond her understanding—and Jane simply could not have lied about that which she could not understand.

  *

  Jane’s speech and her actions point to Edmund Pook as her murderer. But they are not alone in this. The blood on Edmund’s clothing, too, demonstrates his guilt. The hard evidence of that blood was, unlike Jane’s words, most certainly admissible at Edmund’s trial—and it was admitted. But in 1871, that evidence spoke in a language that no one could quite understand, although two men, Newton Crosland and Harry Poland, came close. Dr. Henry Letheby could only conclude that the stains were blood—mammalian blood—and that they were relatively fresh. This conclusion held some value at the inquest and magistrate’s examination: it allowed Harry Poland to refute Henry Pook’s contentions that the stains might be potash, or tobacco, or lemon juice. But it did nothing to shake Edmund’s or his family’s claims that the blood was not from Jane but from Edmund or a shopboy’s cut finger, or from Edmund’s tongue, spit out during an epileptic seizure. Since Edmund’s clothing has long disappeared, there is nothing whatsoever that can be done to advance Letheby’s chemical analysis of the blood beyond the limits of 1871 science. But very full descriptions of those stains, by Dr. Letheby and others, do survive, and so a physical analysis of the bloodstain patterns is certainly possible. A thorough analysis of the spatter on Edmund’s hat, his shirt, and his trousers puts to the lie every pretext given by Edmund and his family for the blood on Edmund’s clothing and strongly supports the contention that the blood was indeed Jane’s, shed during the attack on Kidbrooke Lane onto the clothes of her attacker.

  The most striking feature about the blood on Edmund’s clothing to most who saw it at the time was its minuteness, both in terms of overall quantity and in the size of the individual spots. It was a “trifling and insignificant” amount, John Huddleston declared; much more should have been found on Jane’s murderer. All the blood on his trousers, Edmund later testified, was enough “to cover a threepenny bit.” “The spots on his hat were so small as to be almost imperceptible,” according to Inspector Griffin: Griffin remarked to Inspector Mulvany that he expected to find more there. Although Griffin described the stain on Edmund’s right shirt-cuff to be more of a splotch, Henry Letheby, upon closer examination, corrected him: there were six distinct spots there. The coroner at Jane’s inquest noted their “minuteness,” and a member of his jury exclaimed with surprise that “they could hardly be spots at all, they were so slight, they looked like touches of a rusty iron.” Of the many spots on the lower left leg of Edmund’s trousers, Chief Justice Bovill scoffed that some of those Letheby had cut out were “the size of pin’s heads.”

  John Huddleston, Chief Justice Bovill, and even, for at least a moment, Superintendent Griffin equated minuteness of the blood with its insignificance. Newton Crosland knew better. “The minute spots of blood on clothes,” he wrote, “are sometimes more suggestive than a casual observer would be apt to imagine; their smallness and position may give them additional importance. They may appear not like those drops which fall from a wound caused by an accident to oneself, but rather like particles darted or propelled from a neighboring object—blood sparks struck and scattered from a bloody anvil!” In other words, Crosland understood the distinction between the larger drops of blood that fell directly from a wound and the smaller droplets sprayed from a wound upon contact with another object. The stains on Edmund’s clothing could not have been passive blood flow; they were active spatter. Spots of that minuteness simply could not have dripped from Edmund’s or a shopboy’s cut finger.

  Harry Poland understood this early on in the investigation, and before the magistrate at Greenwich Police Court he argued that the blood pattern on Edmund’s clothing allowed a reconstruction of the crime. Poland noted a curious fact: there were a multitude of droplets on the left leg of Edmund’s trousers, and perhaps only a single droplet on the right. That, he claimed, demonstrated that the blood had fallen upon Edmund as he assumed the stance of an attacker, holding a hammer or an axe: “A person standing and striking at the deceased,” Poland declared, “would have the left leg in a forward state, and consequently there would be more blood on the left than the right leg.” Two facts bolster Poland’s hypothesis. Henry Letheby later determined that there were no bloodstains on Edmund’s right leg, and many on his left. And all of the bloodstains on Edmund’s shirt were on the right cuff—none on the left. Edmund was, of course, right-handed. Together, the blood evidence compellingly supports the case that Edmund bloodied himself during the attack on Kidbrooke Lane. But it was a case that John Duke Coleridge, lacking either the will or the imagination, completely failed to make at Edmund’s trial.

  More than this, the evidence of the blood on Edmund’s clothing does not at all support the one explanation that Edmund offered, excluding all other explanations, when he took the witness chair in the libel action against Newton Crosland. There Edmund asserted that at some point during the month of April—when, exactly, he could not remember—he suffered a grand mal (or, as it is more commonly termed today, a tonic-clonic) epileptic seizure in the family’s sitting room. He had bitten his tongue and bled on his clothing; his brother, Thomas, had attended to him.*2 Edmund’s prosecutors, both Poland and Coleridge, had always been deeply suspicious of this explanation—incredulous, in particular, about the notion that he could have bled upward and onto the upper brim of his hat during a seizure. In response, Edmund Pook claimed that the hat had been knocked off at the commencement of his fit, and that he then bled on it. But given the physiological process of a tonic-clonic epileptic seizure, that explanation is dubious as well. At the commencement of such a seizure, the body stiffens as all muscles contract: the head generally tips back and the body generally falls backward. A hat worn during such a fall would almost certainly fall off—but would not likely fall to a position directly in front of one’s face. And even if this had happened in Edmund’s case, Edmund most certainly did not spurt blood onto it: in order to do that, Edmund would have had to have bitten through his tongue to the lingual artery, nearly severing his tongue from his head; in that case he would have saturated the hat with blood, leaving much more than four tiny spots. There is only one possible way that tiny droplets, rather than drops or splashes, could have gotten onto Edmund’s hat during a seizure: Edmund would have had to have bitten his tongue, bled into his mouth, and then expirated that blood—expelled blood mixed with saliva upon the current of his breath. Blood expirated in this way is generally the same size as impact blood spatter; even today the two can easily be mistaken for each other. But it would have been impossible for Edmund to have breathed directly toward the hat and left the four spots in the configuration discovered by Henry Letheby. Letheby made it clear in testimony that those spots were evenly distributed around the crown of the hat—both in the front and in the back. Edmund could have left spots in that configuration only if he had been lying on his back and expirating upward, droplets of blood flowing with the breath in an arc, up and then down, a trajectory that likely would have given one of
the stains—the one on the vertical plane of the hatband—a distinctive tadpole-tailed shape. No one who described the stains on the hat described any such thing.

  Though it is unlikely that Edmund expirated blood onto his hat in this way, it is possible. On the other hand, it was simply not possible for Edmund to have expirated the blood found on his trousers during a tonic-clonic seizure. During the first, or tonic, phase of this type of seizure, as muscles stiffen and the body falls and as the head and chin generally tip upward, the legs stretch outward, away from the head. And during the second, or clonic, phase, the body’s muscles repeatedly relax and contract, leading to rhythmic jerking movements. In order to expirate blood to the bottom of his trousers during a seizure, Edmund would have had, in his unconsciousness, to turn his face toward his legs, nearly touching his chin to his chest. With the repeated tensing of neck muscles during the clonic phase of a seizure, that posture is absolutely impossible to assume.*3

  Every explanation, then, that Edmund and his family offered for the blood on his clothing falls to the ground. On the other hand, the blood evidence—what there was of it—is consistent with the prosecution’s claim that it was Jane’s, shed during the attack. But there was so little blood, and that in itself seemed to argue against the prosecution’s claim. If Edmund had so brutally attacked Jane with a plasterer’s hammer, shouldn’t he have been saturated by her blood? That was what Henry Pook and John Huddleston argued; that is what Chief Justice Bovill and eventually the jury believed. Where, then, was all that blood?