Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

"At the proper psychological moment I called attention to the shape of the puncture in Walker's skull, and then dramatically sprang the bass and the marline-spike upon them unawares. After that, as the papers put it, 'there was applause in court, which was instantly suppressed.'"

"Oh, the conceit of the man," said O'Malley, laughing.

Grayson laughed too. "Well," he said, "I was younger then, and I suppose I was a trifle conceited. The Crown didn't throw up. But the jury chucked us a 'Not guilty' without leaving the box, and then leading counsel for the other side came across and congratulated me on having saved Guide from the gallows. 'Now I'd have bet anything on hanging that man,' said he."

SOME INCRIMINATING DOCUMENTS.

FACSIMILES OF FATAL WRITINGS.

Incrimination by handwriting, if not as old as crime itself, is at least, in all probability, as old as the art of writing. Whenever there exists a manual record of a misdeed, there is naturally always the risk of betrayal. In truth, there could be no safer motto for the criminal than the words of Napoleon to Fouché: "Certain people should _never write_; pen and ink are sure to undo them."

An illustrious example of incrimination by document has been recently furnished to the world by the Dreyfus case, with its subsequent complications, so that the present consideration of documents which have played an equally strong part in bringing evil-doers to justice cannot fail to be most interesting.

The public have, probably, not yet forgotten the unique circumstances of the Whalley will case.

It appears that sixteen or seventeen years ago an elderly gentleman named James Whalley was living at Leominster. He passed his days at the home of a man named Thomas, a petty municipal functionary, leading a decidedly frugal, not to say miserly, life. Whalley had two children, Emma and Henry Whalley Priestman, whom he educated and lived with until about the year 1877, when he quarrelled with his daughter and left her and her brother at Hereford, he himself going to live at Thomas's cottage at Leominster. On the seventh of May 1881, he died, leaving between fifty and sixty thousand pounds. A will was produced, bearing the old man's indubitable signature, as well as the signature of witnesses, in which the bulk of the fortune was left to Thomas, the son being cut off with £5,000. Everything seemed plain and above-board, but certain circumstances were suspicious, and the document was contested. This famous will, of which a photograph has been specially taken for the present article, was brought into court and submitted to the scrutiny of experts, accustomed to detect the most minute flaws in the work of the cleverest forger. They were obliged to give it as their opinion that the signatures were all genuine--the document itself being in the hand of one of the attesting witnesses. But when it came to examining the will carefully as a whole, it was found by one expert that there was cause for suspicion. The attesting clauses were rather curiously cramped at the side, giving from their position the idea to the expert's mind that they had been added subsequently, with a view to accommodating the signature. The signature itself, too, had a date under it, a peculiarity of the testator's in writing a letter, but never found elsewhere. The lines varied, too, as though the writer had begun in the belief that there had been ample room. Everything now seemed to point to the fact of a will written over and around a signature, and not to a signature naturally written at the bottom of a will. Meanwhile, there had appeared in different parts of the paper certain odd marks and formations. Early in the inquiry the will had been glazed and framed; and now left to itself the paper, as it were, began to speak and declare itself other than what it seemed. Soon these marks and formations took the shape of words and fragments of words, and by a powerful magnifying glass could even be read. It was now sufficiently clear for the expert to declare that these were hollows and shades caused by pencil marks made by one of the attesting witnesses and principal legatee, and afterwards rubbed out.

It is a well-known fact, in connection with palimpsests, that time will often recall a writing long believed to have been obliterated. Erase the writing as carefully as is possible, till all trace of pencil or pen has vanished, yet with most kinds of paper one will really only have erased the immediate marks of the plumbago or ink. The indentations on the paper will remain, merely filled up with the dust and surface of the material rubbed over them. This is what occurred here. The testator, it was proved at the subsequent trial, believing himself to be _in extremis_, desired the presence of his son. At his request the principal legatee had written for him the letter, taking the precaution of writing it in pencil--being equally careful, at the same time, that the signature should be in ink. The rest of the proceeding was simple: the pencil was rubbed out, and over the signature the will was written. It was proved that the will in which he left almost the whole of his property to his son was done away with, and Thomas and Nash were convicted.

The next document we present was produced by the public prosecutor in court at the trial of William Palmer, the poisoner, in 1856. It is a page from a diary discovered by the police among the guilty man's effects at Rugeley. In this diary each of Palmer's numerous murders was chronicled, together with most of the details of his personal association with his victims, of whom John Parsons Cook was the last. Having denied that he had been with Cook on the Sunday and Monday in question, this diary, in the murderer's own handwriting, were other evidences not forthcoming, convicted him of falsehood--and (on a post-mortem examination, first of one victim and then another) of murder. He expiated his crime at length on the scaffold.

But a more celebrated case than either of those we have yet mentioned was that surrounding the claimant to the Tichborne estates. It is almost needless to recapitulate the circumstances of this great action, in which Arthur Orton, a butcher's apprentice, sought to pass himself off as the long missing Roger Charles Tichborne. But throughout all the sophistries by which Orton sought to strengthen his case there were three documents which, in the jury's eyes, annulled all the efforts of his counsel. These three documents consist of, first, the handwriting of the real Sir Roger Charles Tichborne; second, of the man who claimed to be he; and third, of Arthur Orton. A moment's glance, even by those unpractised in the art of analysing and comparing handwriting, sufficed to show that the hand which had written the "Arthur Orton" letter was the same hand that had sent from the Metropolitan Hotel, Sydney, the affectionate letter to Lady Tichborne. But as to any real affinity between these letters and the admittedly genuine one signed by "Roger Charles Tichborne" in 1852, there is none whatever.

There are two cases of recent celebrity which relate to wilful murder, and in which documents played an important part. Few can have forgotten the trial and conviction of Thomas Neill Cream. We publish photographs of papers in the guilty man's handwriting which figured in that case. This wretched man seems to have murdered his victims in order to blackmail others for the crime. The first example is a letter to the deputy-coroner, which reads like the epistle of a madman, but which sheds considerable light on the methods Cream might adopt; the second is a specimen of Cream's "backhand," in which he identifies himself with the family of one of his victims.

The second of the two cases mentioned is that of James Canham Read. It will be recalled that in this murder trial a telegram was produced which clinched the evidence against the prisoner by destroying his contention of _alibi_. This telegram, which speaks for itself, is now in the possession of the Scotland Yard authorities.

What we know now as an impudent forgery, but what was then regarded by many as a terribly incriminating document, is the famous "Parnell letter," published by the _Times_ in 1888. It would seem that the very circumstance of the cramped writing at the bottom of the first page would have aroused suspicion. The signature is, of course, genuine, Mr. Parnell having written on a sheet of paper, without dreaming what use was to be made of it by unscrupulous parties.

A Tiny Shoe.