Yours &c. WILLIAM GARDINER
Presumably it was not practicable, or deemed impolitic, to arrange the meeting, since a second letter followed in which Gardiner as good as said that, while he had no doubt of his own ability to bluff and brazen his way out of the predicament, he did not entertain such sanguine hopes about her capacities in such a direction, indeed he had reluctantly come to the conclusion that she would give the show away. To quote him:
Dear Rose,
I have broke the news to Mrs Gardiner this morning, she is awfully upset but she say she know it is wrong for I was at home from half past 9 o’clock so I could not possibly be with you an hour so she wont believe anything about it. I have asked Mr Burgess to ask those too [sic] Chaps to come to Chapel tonight and have it out there however they stand by such a tale I don’t know but I dont think God will forsake me now and if we put our trust in Him it will end right but its awfully hard work to have to face people when they are all suspicious of you but by God’s help whether they believe me or not I shall try to live it down and prove by my future conduct that its all false, I only wish I could take it to Court but I dont see a shadow of a chance to get the case as I dont think you would be strong enough to face a trial. Trusting that God will direct us and make the way clear, I remains
Yours in trouble, W. Gardiner
This strikes a much less confident note than the earlier letter. It is curious that Gardiner’s wife should be ready to supply him with some sort of alibi, but he was able to point out to her that Wright had been caught spying on her own brother some years earlier when her brother was courting in Wright’s mother’s orchard: perhaps it was a telling debating point. The meeting in the Doctor’s Chapel was to be admitted, but its duration was to be cut down, in order that an innocent explanation might be more readily accepted.
But whatever he may have felt of Rose’s shortcomings as a witness, it is known that Gardiner did consult a solicitor. The man of law certainly told him that, against penniless youths, he would not recover his costs and may have told him that to allege un-chastity against a man was actionable as slander only in rare cases, e.g., against a beneficed clergyman, and that Gardiner’s unpaid offices hardly brought him within the exceptions. However, the solicitor did write to Wright and Skinner on 15 May to threaten legal proceedings unless they apologized in writing within seven days: the bluff failed. There was no apology from either, nor was a writ ever issued. The matter was officially dropped and might, in time, have been completely forgotten. What is uncertain is whether the association between Gardiner and Rose now ceased.
It cannot have ended completely, as they must have met at choir practices during the week and at the Sunday services. It is, however, worthy of record that only one person subsequently alleged anything untoward between them, and that person was that bumbling busybody Henry Rouse who had been so largely responsible for the solemn Vehmgericht of the Sibton elders. Nine months after the original scandal, Rouse said he saw Gardiner and Rose walking down a lane at nine o’clock at night: he bade them good night but neither vouchsafed a reply. Nine days after that, he called Gardiner aside after a Wednesday prayer meeting and berated him for continuing an association which could only “do the chapel a great deal of harm”. If Rouse is to be believed (and Gardiner denied the conversation in its entirety) Gardiner expressed the hope that his wife would not be informed and, upon receipt of this assurance, undertook to refrain thenceforth from such nocturnal peripatetics.
A second incident, also denied by Gardiner, is said to have occurred a month or so later. Though improbable and seemingly senseless, there is contemporaneous evidence that, whether or not it was true, there was certainly a complaint about it. The redoubtable Rouse chanced to glance behind himself while ranting from the pulpit and was horrified to see Gardiner with his feet up on Rose’s lap. “You gentlemen,” said Rouse in the witness-box, “know what I mean by the lap of a person. I ceased to speak, with the intention of telling one of them to walk out of the chapel but something seemed to speak to me not to expose them there.” In the end Rouse did not speak to his colleague at all: instead, on 14 April, he dictated to his wife what was to be an anonymous letter to Gardiner, correctly assuming that her writing would not be recognized. Gardiner kept this letter and it was read at the trial:
Mr Gardiner,
I write to warn you of your conduct with that girl Rose, as I find when she come into the chapel she must place herself next to you, which keep the people’s minds still in the belief that you are a guilty man, and in that case you will drive many from the chapel, and those that will join the cause are kept away through it. We are told to shun the least appearance of evil. I do not wish you to leave God’s house, but there must be a difference before God’s cause can prosper, which I hope you will see to be right as people cannot hear when the enemy of souls bring this before them. I write to you as one that love your soul, and I hope you will have her sit in some other place and remove such feeling which for sake she will do [sic].
It is thus clear enough that Gardiner, in spite of the scandal, was not averse to sitting beside the girl in the choir. Such conduct was incautious, to say the least, and the more unfortunate when it is realized that, at about the end of the previous November, Rose had had intercourse with some man that had resulted in pregnancy. She seems to have kept her condition secret as long as she could, but her situation was not one that permitted indefinite concealment. She borrowed a book on abortion from the obliging youth next door who had previously supplied her literary desiderata, but her pregnancy continued uninterrupted. About the middle of May, she was taxed with her condition by her mistress, Mrs Crisp: she denied it, but obviously the time was coming when she would have to follow her domestic predecessor into retirement. In such circumstances, she could do only one thing, to seek assistance from the man, whoever he was, who was responsible for her impending motherhood. In view of her secrecy in the matter, one assumes that this man was unable to marry her because he already had a wife: an unmarried man would have been jostled to the altar by the mere weight of local opinion. And so, at the end of May, there was a married man in Peasenhall, on the verge of exposure and, if he held any position of respect, of shattering disgrace.
At twenty past eight on the morning of 1 June, Rose’s father called at Providence House to bring his daughter her laundry. It was a Sunday and the previous night had been marked by a heavy thunderstorm. Old Harsent was surprised to find the back door open: he went into the kitchen, to find his daughter dead on the floor. Her body was in a pitiful condition, turned towards the wall of a room only ten feet six by eight feet six inch with its head towards the staircase. Rose had been wearing stockings and a nightdress but some paraffin had been spilt and an attempt made to burn the body which had consumed most of the nightdress while merely charring her arms and lower part of the body. The fire was not the cause of death, as there was a wound in the chest which a medical expert later said had been made with an upward thrust: her throat had been cut twice, practically from ear to ear and with such force as to sever the windpipe. Some blood had spurted towards the staircase, and there was a large pool of blood between her head and the wall. There were no footmarks in the blood, and therefore no reason to assume that the murderer had been stained. Although it should have been obvious that the unhappy girl had been suddenly struck down by the blow to the chest, turned over to the wall so that the blood would spurt away, and then despatched with no more ceremony than a sheep or goat, such was not the original police theory.
Harsent covered his daughter’s body with a rug but otherwise moved nothing except the metal top portion of a broken lamp that was lying beside her. As he was doing so, Crisp’s brother came to the door followed by other villagers, for bad news never takes long to circulate. Someone sent for the village constable and this worthy, Eli Nunn, arrived at twenty minutes to nine. The briefest of conversations with the Crisps, the most cursory examination of the almost naked body, must have told him that Rose was we
ll advanced in pregnancy. But, in the absence of bloody footprints, Nunn decided that this was a case of suicide. The local police have been rightly ridiculed for holding such an opinion, even momentarily, but it is quite wrong to suggest, as has been so often done, that the delay enabled the murderer to destroy incriminating evidence. Nunn did not know of the crime until just before nine o’clock and we shall see what Gardiner had been doing as early as eight o’clock that morning.
In any event, it is doubtful if the suicide theory was held for long. By the body was another source of paraffin in addition to the broken lamp, a smashed bottle that had recently held paraffin but which had once held medicine: nor was there any doubt as to its ownership as it still bore the label For Mrs Gardiner’s chdn. There was also a charred piece of newspaper, with which the fire had been started: it came from a 30 May copy of the East Anglian Daily Times, a paper not taken by the Crisps although delivered daily to Gardiner at the works, curiously enough by Rose’s fourteen-year-old brother. A search of her bedroom proved more interesting still, revealing as it did not only Gardiner’s two letters about the torrid interchange in the Doctor’s Chapel but also a third note in what looked remarkably like the same handwriting. With it was an envelope, postmarked 31 May: the letter was an assignation for midnight on the night of the murder and was couched in the following terms:
ED R,
I will try to see you tonight at 12 o’clock at your Place if you Put a light in your window at 10 o’clock for about 10 minutes then you can take it out again, dont have a light in your Room at 12 as I will come round to the back.
It was not signed, so it is evident that the writer knew that his hand would be recognized. It was equally clear that the writer lived in Peasenhall if he was able to see the warning signal. It was unfortunate for Gardiner that the similarity of writing was immediately detected and also that his home should be only 208 yards away from Providence House with a clear view of Rose’s bedroom from his front doorstep: he also not infrequently returned home at about ten o’clock and his route from the works passed Providence House. From the outset he was the obvious suspect, and such he has remained.
Since Gardiner had left his home at nine o’clock to take his children to Sunday school, it was some time before he was told of the violent death of his favourite chorister. He was told at eleven o’clock and evinced no surprise whatsoever: as he had known her since childhood and had been meeting her twice a week at least for choral reasons at Sibton chapel, it was felt that he should have been more shocked than he appeared to be. And it is hard to believe that a bearded elder would fail to expatiate on such a death unless he was singularly preoccupied.
The case was handed over to Superintendent Staunton who, on the Monday morning,29 called on Gardiner at the Drill Works and taxed him with writing the letter of assignation: Gardiner denied it, but conceded that the writing was remarkably like his own. During the lunch interval, Gardiner left the works and did not thereafter return: in modern parlance, he was assisting the police with their inquiries. Meanwhile a significant additional piece of information had come to light: Burgess, a bricklayer, remembered chatting with Gardiner outside his house for a quarter of an hour at about ten o’clock on the night of the murder, and also recalled noticing a light at the top of Providence House when he walked away. The inference that Gardiner was watching for the signal was almost irresistible. On the Tuesday evening, after the coroner had opened his investigation, William George Gardiner found himself taken into custody and formally charged with murder: for the purposes of completeness, it should be recorded that he denied the charge.
Subsequent to his arrest, further evidence came to light to suggest that no mistake had been made. A gamekeeper named James Morriss, whose detective instincts were acutely developed, said that he had been walking along Peasenhall’s main street at five o’clock in the morning and had seen a single set of footprints in the mud left by the rain leading from Gardiner’s house to Providence House and back again. Being aware of the Harsent scandal—his superior gamekeeper’s brother was Wright’s landlord—he was interested and mentioned the matter to his superior when he met him, about two and a half hours before the murder was even discovered: at half-past eleven, he heard of the murder and realized its importance. Before the coroner he stated that he would be able to describe the sole marks and, since he was a gamekeeper, his evidence should have been reliable: a juror drew a blank sole on a piece of paper and passed it to Morriss, who proceeded to draw two parallel bars across it. The evidence was not particularly helpful to the police at this stage: they had collected all of Gardiner’s known clothing from his wife in the hope of finding something incriminating but they had found no such shoes. But, on June 6th, a policeman called on Mrs Gardiner to ask if she had any India-rubber-soled shoes: she then produced a pair that she said had been given her by her brother when up in London during the week previous to the murder. The markings coincided with Morriss’s drawing.
But what the police proved incapable of discovering was the time at which Rose had been killed. The doctor judged, from the state of rigor mortis, that she had died between half-past twelve and half-past six, with the probabilities in favour of half-past four. The police preferred to link the crime with the time given in the assignation, i.e., midnight. The Crisps admitted to having been awakened by the storm, whereupon Mrs Crisp had come downstairs to make sure the rain was not coming in: they were later reawakened by a scream and a thud which the Deacon refused to permit his consort to investigate, pointing out that Rose had been told that, if ever she was nervous, she could come to their bedroom. Mrs Crisp told the coroner on 3 June, and again on 16 June, that the scream had occurred between one and two o’clock, but it later transpired that she had not looked at a clock in making this guess. All that can be said for certain about the time factor is this: the girl expected a caller at midnight, by which time a storm was raging and continued to rage for at least an hour and a half longer. The rain had ceased by four o’clock. We know that Rose expected him to come, as her bed had not been slept in: presumably she did not wish to fall asleep as she had to let him in when he arrived. She would not have expected him until the storm had died down: the nature of the visit was presumably intended, at least by her, to discuss her future, now that her mistress’s suspicions were aroused, rather than for further trysting.
On other aspects of the case, the police had some tenuous technical evidence available. A handwriting expert’s conclusions were damning to Gardiner. And, although no bloodstains were to be found on any of his clothes, a penknife of his which, in the view of a medical expert, could have inflicted the fatal injuries, proved to have been newly sharpened and had been scraped inside, but even so there was some blood inside the hinge. Gardiner explained this by saying that he had been hulking (vernacular for disembowelling) a rabbit and since the expert was able to say no more than that the blood was not more than a month old and mammalian, his explanation was not wholly unsatisfactory.30 There was also a small piece of woollen material found by Rose’s body which, it was assumed, might have been torn off in the fatal scuffle, but hopes of matching it with the arrested man’s clothing had failed. On the other hand, the envelope containing the assignation note proved to be identical with those used at Gardiner’s place of employment. Though not an especially strong chain of circumstantial evidence, it was thought sufficient to justify sending him for trial. It is worth noting that, at this stage of the case, that over-observant elder, Henry Rouse, had not given evidence, either before the coroner or before the bench, and that there was no evidence of any association between the accused and his alleged victim during the year that followed the episode in the Doctor’s Chapel.
Since the strength of the prosecution’s case would lie in Gardiner’s motive, it had become essential to show that Wright and Skinner were witnesses of truth. And so, on 28 July, Constable Nunn went to the chapel with Burgess and the two youths and re-enacted the amatory vignette that they claimed to have overheard: acou
stically speaking, it was not impossible. And shortly before the opening of the Ipswich Assizes, the police became aware of an important witness who had not so far seen fit to reveal himself. This person was Herbert Stammers and his house overlooked the yard at the back of Gardiner’s home: he claimed that, at half-past seven on the Sunday morning, over an hour before the murder had been discovered, Gardiner had gone to the wash-house and lit a large fire. The inference was that he had been burning incriminating clothing, since it was not the practice to light fires of that size on a Sunday morning: I should add that, oddly enough, Gardiner claimed to be in possession of only two shirts at the time of the crime.
Gardiner’s trial took place on 6, 7, 9 and 10 November 1902: the intervening day was a Sunday and the jury protested at the proposal to keep them cooped up in Ipswich, pointing out that it would be more pleasant to spend the weekend at Felixstowe, even though out of the season; the judge arranged for them to spend the day at the seaside under supervision, but they had to return to Ipswich for the night. The judge was Mr Justice Grantham, a popular foxhunting squire but an indifferent lawyer and all too liable to make up his mind at an early stage of the proceedings that he was called upon to try: as he was not particularly adept in concealing his prejudices, he was not the most suitable judge for a case where the balance of evidence was so evenly poised. The prosecution was in the hands of Mr H. F. (later Sir Henry) Dickens, a son of the novelist and a conspicuously fair man: the defence was led by Mr E. E. (later Sir Ernest) Wild who established his reputation by his conduct of the case. Both were to end their days as contemporary Old Bailey judges, the one as Common Serjeant and the other as Recorder. That Wild’s efforts on behalf of his client were magnificent cannot be gainsaid, but he showed unwarranted irascibility with witnesses, with Dickens (even descending to personalities), and, in the subsequent trial, with the judge: he drew inferences against witnesses that lacked justification: with greater justification he muddled the jury with several choice red herrings.
The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes Page 53