Part 14

Mr. SERJEANT SHEE--And another bill of £500, which my friend stated and gave proof was not his mother’s signature. So that there was a bill for £500 not in her handwriting to which Cook was a party, for all of which Cook either in whole or in part, unless he rushed upon his own ruin, must provide; in respect of which, for the accommodation of Palmer or not, Palmer could go to Cook and say, “Now, Cook, it is true enough all these bills are for my accommodation, but what is the use of your making a fuss about that? If I cannot pay, you must, or your stud will be sold up; had you not better give your name to some more bills and make it easy?” If he put Cook to death that was gone. Again, in addition to the £500 bill, for which the bill of sale on “Syrius” and “Polestar” was given, the bill for £500 held by Herring was a forgery, according to their case, which there would be no excuse for not meeting; a £500 bill in the hands of a man who wants the money is not so easily put on; that £500 bill would very soon find its way to his mother. It would not have suited Palmer that his mother should know--his mother was a woman of large fortune, a respectable person I am told--she disliked his gambling propensities though she liked her son; neither did the excellent and most honourable man his brother, before me, who stands by him now, but who was estranged from him simply because he disapproved of his gambling, neither would he have given to him any countenance. If Palmer was pressed to pay that £500, and Cook was dead, there was nothing to save him from the exposure. Nothing! If you doubt what I say is the truth, look through the whole of the case--find me in any portion of this most voluminous evidence the slightest trace that there was a man in the world who would lend his name to Palmer to enable him to get money. Is not the fact that he forged, if he did forge, the name of his mother conclusive that he had no other resource? Is there the least trace of evidence that he had any other resource than the good nature, the easiness, perhaps the folly, of Cook, who could have renewed these bills for him--the three £200 bills and the £500--and put them on as they say? And was it not quite certain that if Cook, the acceptor of them, dropped, the claim would come upon Cook’s executors, and then the executors would ascertain all about it and sell him up? When you come to think of it, is it credible that the man under those circumstances should desire to bring not merely the creditors and executors of Cook--who might be supposed, though Mr. Stevens is not one of that class, to have some pity for Cook’s friend--but men of business, down upon him, who have no right to have any pity? A man dies, his affairs are put into the hands of solicitors; they have a plain duty to perform, they cannot be compassionate, they must be just; they must see the rights of their clients the executors established in due course of law, and compromise and arrangement with them is wholly out of the question. Can you find in any part of this case a single living person who was willing to have done for Palmer what Cook had been doing for him for two or three years? Does it appear that there was one? Does it appear that Cook was a close-fisted fellow, and did not care to do Palmer a turn? When Palmer needed the £200, which the harpy wanted from him, Cook at once wrote and said it is a matter of great importance to him as well as Palmer that this £200 should be paid; and he even risked the displeasure of Fisher in doing it. Then, again, Cook was in his senses perfectly on the Tuesday. He cannot have been very rich at that time. He gave him the cheque for £350. How is it possible to conceive that under those circumstances Palmer should have an interest in the death of Cook, and yet what is the theory of the Crown? That Palmer was convinced that he could settle his affairs as to Cook better with Mr. Stevens than he could with Cook himself--settle these word-of-honour transactions; these things, half of which would not bear inquiry in any way as reasonable business transactions, with a shrewd and probably a penurious man--deliberately thought that it would answer his purpose better to come in contact with his executor, Mr. Stevens, whom Mr. Jones might rush up to town and bring down with him. I submit to you with confidence, though what I say may be inconsistent with the views generally entertained by the public--the public, however, have never had an opportunity of looking at all these letters--but it seems to me as clear as anything can be, that it was the manifest interest of Palmer that Cook should live. But, in addition to its being his interest that he should live, was it safe for him that he should die? Palmer was a man who added to a shrewd knowledge of the world a knowledge of his profession, and, among other things, a knowledge of chemistry. Palmer knew perfectly well, and he had studied his profession sufficiently when he was a young man to know perfectly well, that, if strychnia was administered, it would in all probability throw the victim into horrible convulsions in a very short time, and in a way so striking as to be the talk of a small neighbourhood like Rugeley for a month or two, which would be time enough to alarm everybody, and to provoke inquiries into the circumstances of the death, which must certainly end, or in all probability end, if he was guilty, in his conviction. If that was so, was he so circumstanced at that time as to make it safe for him to run the risk of such suspicions? His brother, Walter Palmer, had died in the month of August, and his only hope, unless his mother forgave him or recognised those acceptances, his only hope of extrication from his difficulties was the getting the amount due by the Prince of Wales Insurance Company to him as the assignee of the policy on Walter Palmer’s life; that was his only chance. He had a chance that way, and it is plain that it was so good a chance, as I will show you presently, that he refused an offer of return of premium from the company; it does not appear what the amount was--and Pratt, who was his attorney, believed the chance to be so good that he had actually got the discounts of these large sums of money upon it, and had resolved, under the directions of Palmer, to put it in suit. It was really the only unpledged property he had, and how was he situated respecting it? It is plain from the letters which were put in yesterday, and it is further plain from a piece of evidence to which you will, I am sure, find it worth your while to pay great attention. We had Mr. Deane called yesterday, who is the attorney to the Prince of Wales insurance office; and for some time--though it had ceased just at that time--but for some time previously to this month of November, the insurance company, which, I believe, is not a very old insurance company, were annoyed at being called upon to pay so large a sum, and they determined to do all they could to resist it. They accordingly sent down Inspector Field to Stafford and his man Simpson to make inquiries, which he could not do without talking and insinuating suspicions and raising a cloud of doubt and conjecture about Palmer, and this had been going on for some considerable time. Now, observe the evidence of Deane, and you will see if it is not so. He says, “The name of my firm is Chubb, Deane & Chubb. I had been to Rugeley some time previously to the inquest. I know Field, the detective officer; we were solicitors to the Prince of Wales insurance office; it was in our employment that Field went to Rugeley; he was at Rugeley only a part of one day; he was at Stafford for three or four days altogether; he did not see the prisoner Palmer; this visit had been preceded by that of another officer named Simpson. Simpson went from Stafford to Rugeley with myself and Field; he told me he had seen Palmer; I think he went into Staffordshire in the first week in October.” Then my learned friend asked him what they went down for; he said that they went down to make inquiries as to the habits of life of Mr. Walter Palmer, of whose death the Prince of Wales insurance office had shortly before received notice; so that you see just before the death of Cook Palmer knew himself to be an object of suspicion, but he acted as if he thought it was the most unfounded and unwarrantable suspicion, putting the policy of insurance into the hands of an attorney to enforce payment of it, and the office meeting the claim by insinuations and inquiries which were of a nature to destroy his character and to bring around his head the suspicion of another murder.

[Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]

Gentlemen, that that was so I will show you by the letters which were put in yesterday. You see that the pressure by Pratt upon Palmer to meet the two £1000 bills never took place until the office disputed the payment of that policy. All went as smooth as possible so long as Pratt held what he believed to be a good security, the policy upon Walter Palmer’s life, who was dead; but when they began to dispute it, then you will find that Pratt writes to Palmer and tells him the situation of things is quite changed; he could manage the bills very well while that policy was undisputed; but now it is disputed that quite alters the state of things; he says, as he had somewhat anticipated, he finds they can do nothing till the 24th, that is nothing towards compelling the office to pay, because insurance offices generally take three months to pay; and then, stating some other circumstances, he says, “This you will observe quite alters the arrangement, and I therefore must request you to make preparations for meeting the two bills due at the end of this month”; that was where the difficulty was, that was where the pinch was. Then, he says, he shall not flag in his exertions, and so on, and he refers to the circumstances connected with the dispute; Mr. Pratt says--“You, Palmer, know whether they have any ground to dispute that policy upon your brother’s life; you are enforcing it, and if you have no right to do it it is at your peril.” That is what it means, and then he goes on to say, “We must try and make them pay”--that was the position in which Pratt, who was acting for him, stood as to this Prince of Wales insurance office. He says, “In any event, bear in mind that you must be prepared to cover your mother’s acceptances for the £4000 due at the end of the month”; there was the pinch, the office would not pay, the £4000 was becoming due, the holder of the bills saw he was without security, and if anything occurred to increase the suspicions of the insurance office, which was very reluctant to pay, the £13,000 was lost for ever, lost beyond hope. Gentlemen, that £13,000 is sure to be paid unless that man is convicted of murder; and that has a great deal to do with the clamour and alarm which have been excited. So sure as that man is saved, and saved I believe he will be, that £13,000 is paid; there is no defence, no pretence for a defence--the letters of the office make that plain; they took an enormous premium--knowing that the man was only thirty, they took a premium for a man of fifty.

Mr. ATTORNEY-GENERAL--That is not in evidence; do you mean to prove that?

Mr. SERJEANT SHEE--I do not know whether I can show that to be the actual premium, but the letters which were put in show that the premium was enormous; and I say that as sure as he is saved that £13,000 is good for him, and will pay all his creditors.

Now, observe the position in which he was at the moment--all the correspondence turns upon that. This correspondence saves the prisoner, if there is common sense in man.

[Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]

Now, observe, there is another letter from Pratt containing this passage, “I have your note, acknowledging receipt by your mother of the £2000 acceptance, due the 2nd of October; why not let her acknowledge it herself? You must really not fail to come up at once, if it be for the purpose of arranging for the payment of the two bills at the end of the month; remember I can make no terms for their renewal, and they must be paid. I will, of course, hold the policy for as much as it is worth,” and so on. At this time Simpson and Field were making inquiries how a young man of thirty had died, who had had delirium tremens three times, as their own physician, Dr. Hastings, and Mr. Wardell had informed them. Then in a postscript he says he “casts no doubt upon the capability of the company to pay, but that in the nature of things, with so large an amount in question, it is not surprising that, if they think they have grounds for resisting, they should temporise by delay.” Does not that show that at that date at least, the 6th of October, suspicions were hanging in menacing meteors about Palmer’s head, which would come down with irresistible momentum and crush him upon suspicion of a sudden death by murder? Do you believe that a man who wrote what the effects of strychnia were in his manual would risk such a scene as a deathbed by strychnia, in the presence of the dearest and best friend of Cook--a man whom he could not influence, a medical man, who liked him and loved him well enough when he knew he was ill to sleep with him in the same room that he might be ready to attend to him in case he wanted assistance during the night? Is that common sense; are you going to endorse such a theory as that upon the suggestion of Dr. Alfred Taylor about the effects that strychnia produced upon his five rabbits? Impossible, perfectly impossible! as I submit to you. But to proceed--I will prove to you, most clearly, the position in which he was. On the other side of the letter of the 10th of October Mr. Pratt writes, “Copy of solicitors’ reply”; that is, the solicitors to the Prince of Wales insurance office. He says, “I may add that I hear the office have been making inquiries in every direction.” To be sure, Field was employed; he is not now in the police, but he is employed as a detective officer; he was at Stafford, and was at Rugeley, and was making inquiries in all directions; inquiries could be made at Stafford as well as Rugeley, and all that had taken place at Rugeley just as easily ascertained there as at Rugeley itself; whatever had taken place there would be known. He says they have been making inquiries in all directions. It is plain, then, that he knew that suspicions were then rife, or that they were endeavouring to create suspicions, against him about the policy on the life of Walter Palmer. Here is the very letter which the company wrote in answer to the claim, dated 8th of October, 1855; it is from Messrs. Chubb, Deane & Chubb, the solicitors to the office, addressed to Thomas Pratt, Esq., acknowledging the application; and shortly afterwards Messrs. Chubb send a reply to the application--there is no date to it, but it is enclosed in a letter of the 18th of October from Pratt to Palmer. After apologising for not answering the letter of the 16th instant, owing to the absence of Mr. Deane, they refer to the “local investigation having been made, and decline to pay the claim upon the ground that the facts disclosed in the course of the inquiry are such as fully to warrant them in doing so.” These are letters which my learned friend thought it right to put in yesterday; they are evidence for the Crown, and what is the inference from them? Judge, if you please, from some of the letters to Pratt, and the one which I read first from Pratt to Palmer. Palmer determined that the policy should be paid; he took the advice of Sir Fitzroy Kelly. I see here it is said, “The case will be laid before Kelly to-morrow.” This letter came just before the end of the long vacation; the time to take proceedings had only just commenced, in any event, because the three months had only just expired. But so sure as anything happened by foul play to Cook, he had no more chance of getting the £13,000 than £130,000 from the Prince of Wales insurance office--none whatever. That was the only means he had at that time of extricating himself from those incumbrances.

[Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]

Gentlemen, I have detained you a long time upon this, but not, I trust, too long, if the view I have submitted be one worthy of your consideration. I infer from all this that Palmer had no interest whatever to put Cook to death; that it was contrary to his interest in a pecuniary point of view, and brought claims upon him, some of them small, others of a larger amount, of which he might have shared the liability with Cook, if not have thrown it entirely upon Cook; that it forced an immediate settlement of the affairs of Cook, not with Cook himself, who was an easy man--it is plain he was--and probably their solicitors, and that therefore in a pecuniary sense he had every motive of interest to desire that Cook should live; and further, he had no chance of getting a ready payment from these documents--but with hard and exacting executors of the £13,000, no chance of the sudden death of Cook passing without suspicion and inquiry, and therefore he could not think it safe for him that he should die.

I cannot, I think, be so much mistaken as that a considerable portion of these observations is not well worthy your attention. I humbly contend that the suggested motive altogether fails; and I conclude that head of the observations which I have to address to you by saying that I submit respectfully to you, to the Court, and to my learned friends that that portion of this case has failed. It could not be the interest of Palmer that Cook should die.

I now proceed to the next head, and it is impossible in dealing with this evidence to observe altogether the order of date. I must group the facts as well as I can in order to deal with the whole of the evidence. The question is whether the symptoms of Cook before his death and the appearance presented by his body after death were consistent with the theory of his having died by strychnia poison, and inconsistent with the theory of his having died from other and natural causes. It is under this head, gentlemen, that I shall discuss, I hope not at undue length, the medical evidence in this cause, and present to you such observations as occur to me upon the witnesses who have been called to support the view which the Crown takes of the effect of that medical evidence.

[Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]

For this purpose let us briefly, in a sentence or two, run over the facts. Cook died on Wednesday morning, the 21st of November, at one o’clock, in violent convulsions; he died in the presence of Mr. Jones. It was no sooner light than Jones posted up to town to see Cook’s stepfather and executor, Mr. Stevens, who came down, and was introduced to Palmer. Palmer took him up to the corpse, and uncovered the corpse to the thighs--brave man he must have been, if he was a murderer, to do that--uncovered the corpse to the thighs before him. Stevens observed the body, and wondered he could have died, he looked so calm, so composed, so well, so little emaciated; he observed, indeed, some slight rigidity about the muscles. I refer to his deposition. I am not sure whether Stevens’ deposition was read--but it is evidence supplied to us. He took his hand, and wondered that he should have died; his suspicions were immediately aroused. He dined that day at Rugeley, and asked Palmer to dinner with him, and questioned him about the betting-book; got angry that it was not produced, dissembled with Palmer, cross-examined him, went up to town, met him afterwards at the station at Euston Square, afterwards at Rugby, afterwards at Wolverton, again at Rugeley, and at last threw off the mask, and, addressing him in a tone to which I shall call your attention presently, gave Palmer clearly to understand that he suspected him, and intended to probe the whole matter to the very core. He resolved upon a post-mortem examination, and a post-mortem examination took place. The appearances which were presented at the death of Cook were such as might have been expected by those who had been acquainted with his course of life and his general health, his pursuits--it is a pity to say anything hard of him--his vices--I will not say more than this--his vices, and the company, the drinking, idle, racing company which he kept. His father had died at the age of thirty, his mother about the same age, a year or two after she had married Mr. Stevens; his brother was delicate, his sister was delicate; he was believed by his physicians to have something of a pulmonary complaint, and, when his body was opened, his lungs were found to be emphysematous, that is, their air vessels were distended with air. On further inquiry, for I take both the examinations together, it was found that for a length of time he had been troubled with a very ugly sore throat--a sore throat bad enough to render it necessary that it should be constantly touched with caustic, as well as his tongue; he would not have been able to swallow without it. The tonsils of his throat were at the very time he left for Shrewsbury races, though much better than they had been, sore and inflamed--one of them was very nearly gone, the other was very much reduced in size; and he knew so much better about himself and the cause of it all probably than his medical adviser, that he very much preferred mercury to any other specific for his complaint. He had, besides that, traces about his person which have been so often referred to, the result of disease, that they need not be more particularly mentioned than they have been already, as to the extent of which and the character of which some little doubt exists; but they did not come by an ordinary and chaste mode of life, you may depend upon it; and altogether, as far as it went, he seems to have been about as loose a young man as one is in the habit of meeting, without being utterly lost to all sense of honour and propriety, which I do not mean to suggest that he was.

[Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]