THE CAMBERLEY POISONING CASE.
WE are as convinced as any one can be of the necessity of distinguishing between a criminal trial as it is heard by the jury, and a criminal trial as it is read by the public. The demeanour of the witnesses has, and rightly has, a very great influence upon those who listen to their evidence. Shades of hesitation, or unwillingness, or over-eagerness, which escape notice in a newspaper report, may go far with the spectators to establish a prisoner's guilt, though there may be large gaps in the actual chain of testimony. Again, the summing-up of the Judge may read quite differently from what it sounded. To the listener the real current of the Judge's thoughts may be apparent underneath his words, and when seen may point to a different conclusion from that which they suggested.
Ordinarily speaking, these are amply sufficient reasons against attempting to interfere with a sentence. It is the joint work of a Judge and a jury, and no one else can have equally good means of getting at the truth about the case. There are exceptions, however, even to so salutary and con- venient a rule as this, and the recent trial of Henry Bowles for murdering his "wife "—she was so called at the trial by everybody except the Judge, but she was only his mistress—is one of them. There can be no harm in finding fault with the verdict of a jury when that jury has itself supplied a reason which suggests censure. The jury, we are told, retired to consider their verdict at 7 o'clock yesterday week. "At five minutes past 9 they returned into Court, and the foreman said there was not the slightest chance of their agreeing upon a verdict. They were about equally divided." The Judge thereupon sent them back to discuss the matter further, and in some forty minutes they again came into Court, and this time with a verdict of "Guilty." Probably almost every one in Court believed that the result of the second deliberation would be an acquittal. It is quite intel- ligible that six men should hold out all night rather than see a man of whose guilt they are not satisfied sent to the gallows. But that six men should be so eager to give murder its due as in less than an hour to convince six others who for two long hours have stuck to their conviction of his innocence, is wonderful indeed. The result does great credit to the moiety of the jury who succeeded so triumphantly in impressing the harsher view of the case on the moiety who began by rejecting it. When six men think a man guilty, and another six think him innocent, we naturally expect that, if either side converts the other, the victory will lie with the latter. They must have thought that there was a doubt, or the division would not have been so equal ; and in the presence of a doubt, it is the accused person that ordinarily gets the benefit of it. In this instance, however, it was the hangman who was favoured. Probably Mr. Justice Charles was as much surprised at the conclusion to which they came as any one. The report of what he said when he sent them out of Court the second time certainly points in this direction. Knowing that about half of them thought the evidence insufficient for a conviction, he still impressed on them that to justify a verdict adverse to the prisoner, they "must be satisfied beyond reason- able doubt that guilt was brought home to the prisoner." The summing-up of the Judge seems no less to have pointed to an acquittal, than his remarks on sending out the jury a second time. Mr. Justice Charles enlarged on the inadequacy of mere suspicion as support for a verdict of "Guilty," and as if anticipating the perplexity in which some at least of the jury would be placed, he warned them that if they could not make up their minds, it was their duty to acquit the prisoner. Those of the jury who found themselves in this position apparently took the Judge's words in a contrary sense. They could not make up their minds—that much is shown by the fact that at the end of two hours there seemed not the slightest chance of their agreeing to find Bowles guilty—but they thought it their duty to convict him.
When we turn to the evidence, we find abundant reason alike for the tone of the summing-up and for the long hesitation of one-half of the jurymen. There is no question that the woman died, and though Bowles was only charged with murdering her, he might with equal justice have been charged with murdering his son. Moreover, both the woman and her son died from the same cause, and that cause, poisoning by strychnine. Dr. Stevenson, the official analyst to the Home Office, is clear that both must have taken a fatal dose. But it is not usually held sufficient to show that a woman and her son died by poison in order to saddle the father with the guilt of administering it. Something more than this is demanded as justification of a verdict of "Guilty "—something that shall connect him with the poison, or at least suggest a motive for his using it in this way. Nothing of the kind was present here. The Judge was careful to point out that the possession of strychnine was not in any way traced to the prisoner. No strychnine was found in the house ; nor anything that pointed that way except a pill-box, which might have contained strychnine pills, had it not been empty. The only evidence, however, that went to show that it had contained them was the fact that it was labelled " Antibilious Pills," and that Dr. Stevenson found, on experiment, that pills containing fatal doses of strychnine would be about the size of an antibilious pill. Then, as to motive, there is not a trace of it. Bowles lived on fairly good terms with his mistress, whom, as the Judge said, he could have dis- missed at any moment, and seems to have been fond of his son. Only one reason for getting rid of the dead woman was put forward by the Crown counsel, and this completely broke down on examination. Bowles had asked after a housemaid who had
been an old fellow-servant of his, had said he loved her, but "that the worst of it was he had an old housekeeper." The theory of the prosecution was that, in his desire to marry this house- maid, he had put the housekeeper out of the way. Passion had driven him into crime. But the statement which has just been made—and it is the only one that could be found to sustain this view—seems much more the language of jest than of passion. Supposing that Bowles had met the housemaid in question, instead of sending a message to her, and had said, Well, Betsy, my girl, I'd marry thee if it warn't for the old woman at home,' would that have implied any design to murder the "old woman at home "? Hardly.
Then why should the expression be more damning when some one else is asked to convey it ? Moreover, this housemaid was hardly of an age to awaken an overmastering passion. She was forty-nine, an age at which a woman, unless she is a Ninon de l'Enclos, is more likely to be made love to in vulgar jest than in criminal earnest.
The result of all this is that, beyond the fact that the woman and the son were poisoned, there is absolutely nothing to in- criminate Bowles. The prisoner said that "Mrs. Bowles" had at one time had some strychnine pills by her for poisoning rats, and we know from Dr. Stevenson's evidence that these pills and the ordinary antibilious pills might be very much alike. If we sup- pose, then, that these strychnine pills had been put away in a box that had once held antibilious pills, and had been for- gotten, and that the woman, wanting some ordinary medicine for herself and her son, had found a box with the right label, and what looked like the right pills in it,—we get, to our minds, a far more probable explanation of how the strychnine
came to be found in the two bodies than the explanation suggested by the Crown counsel and, in our judgment, most un-
fortunately adopted, first by half the jury, and then by the whole. We cannot suppose that there is any chance of the sentence in this case being carried out. Mr. Justice Charles had no choice but to pass it ; but Mr. Secretary Matthews has full choice whether the penalty shall actually be inflicted. What that choice will be is open, we feel sure, to no question whatever. The prerogative of mercy can never be better employed than in averting what, as the facts stand, would undoubtedly be an unjust execution, and if the facts are as they appear to be, in issuing a free pardon. Even if Bowles was guilty, which we disbelieve, the evidence against him, if reported aright, was utterly insufficient for conviction.
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