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A Book of Remarkable Criminals

by H. B. Irving · English · Gutenberg #446 · 552,091 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Book of Remarkable Criminals

Author: H. B. Irving


        
Release date: February 1, 1996 [eBook #446]
                Most recently updated: February 11, 2020

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Mike Lough, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A BOOK OF REMARKABLE CRIMINALS ***




Produced by Mike Lough





A BOOK OF REMARKABLE CRIMINALS

By H.B. Irving


TO MY FRIEND

E. V. LUCAS



"For violence and hurt tangle every man in their toils, and for the most
part fall on the head of him from whom they had their rise; nor is it
easy for one who by his act breaks the common pact of peace to lead a
calm and quiet life."

Lucretius on the Nature of Things.


Transcriber's Note:

The upper outside corner of page 15 and 16 has been torn from the
hardcopy. The spots are marked with?? and a best guess at missing words
is in brackets. Footnotes have been moved from end of page to end of
paragraph positions, sequentially numbered.


Contents

     INTRODUCTION

     THE LIFE OF CHARLES PEACE:

     I. HIS EARLY YEARS
     II. PEACE IN LONDON
     III. HIS TRIAL AND EXECUTION

     THE CAREER OF ROBERT BUTLER:

     I. THE DUNEDIN MURDERS
     II. THE TRIAL OF BUTLER
     III. HIS DECLINE AND FALL

     M. DERUES:

     I. THE CLIMBING LITTLE GROCER
     II. THE GAYE OF BLUFF

     DR. CASTAING:

     I. AN UNHAPPY COINCIDENCE
     II. THE TRIAL OF DR. CASTAING

     PROFESSOR WEBSTER


     THE MYSTERIOUS MR. HOLMES:

     I. HONOUR AMONGST THIEVES
     II THE WANDERING ASSASSIN

     PARTNERSHIP IN CRIME:

     I. THE WIDOW GRAS
        1. THE CHARMER
        2. THE WOUNDED PIGEON
     II. VITALIS AND MARIE BOYER
     III. THE FENAYROU CASE
     IV. EYRAUD AND BOMPARD





A BOOK OF REMARKABLE CRIMINALS




Introduction

"The silent workings, and still more the explosions, of human passion
which bring to light the darker elements of man's nature present to the
philosophical observer considerations of intrinsic interest; while
to the jurist, the study of human nature and human character with its
infinite varieties, especially as affecting the connection between
motive and action, between irregular desire or evil disposition and
crime itself, is equally indispensable and difficult."--_Wills on
Circumstantial Evidence_.

I REMEMBER my father telling me that sitting up late one night talking
with Tennyson, the latter remarked that he had not kept such late
hours since a recent visit of Jowett. On that occasion the poet and
the philosopher had talked together well into the small hours of the
morning. My father asked Tennyson what was the subject of conversation
that had so engrossed them. "Murders," replied Tennyson. It would have
been interesting to have heard Tennyson and Jowett discussing such a
theme. The fact is a tribute to the interest that crime has for many
men of intellect and imagination. Indeed, how could it be otherwise?
Rob history and fiction of crime, how tame and colourless would be the
residue! We who are living and enduring in the presence of one of the
greatest crimes on record, must realise that trying as this period of
the world's history is to those who are passing through it, in the hands
of some great historian it may make very good reading for posterity.
Perhaps we may find some little consolation in this fact, like the
unhappy victims of famous freebooters such as Jack Sheppard or Charley
Peace.

But do not let us flatter ourselves. Do not let us, in all the pomp and
circumstance of stately history, blind ourselves to the fact that the
crimes of Frederick, or Napoleon, or their successors, are in essence no
different from those of Sheppard or Peace. We must not imagine that
the bad man who happens to offend against those particular laws which
constitute the criminal code belongs to a peculiar or atavistic type,
that he is a man set apart from the rest of his fellow-men by mental or
physical peculiarities. That comforting theory of the Lombroso school
has been exploded, and the ordinary inmates of our prisons shown to be
only in a very slight degree below the average in mental and physical
fitness of the normal man, a difference easily explained by the
environment and conditions in which the ordinary criminal is bred.

A certain English judge, asked as to the general characteristics of the
prisoners tried before him, said: "They are just like other people;
in fact, I often think that, but for different opportunities and other
accidents, the prisoner and I might very well be in one another's
places." "Greed, love of pleasure," writes a French judge, "lust,
idleness, anger, hatred, revenge, these are the chief causes of crime.
These passions and desires are shared by rich and poor alike, by the
educated and uneducated. They are inherent in human nature; the germ is
in every man."

Convicts represent those wrong-doers who have taken to a particular form
of wrong-doing punishable by law. Of the larger army of bad men
they represent a minority, who have been found out in a peculiarly
unsatisfactory kind of misconduct. There are many men, some lying,
unscrupulous, dishonest, others cruel, selfish, vicious, who go through
life without ever doing anything that brings them within the scope of
the criminal code, for whose offences the laws of society provide no
punishment. And so it is with some of those heroes of history who have
been made the theme of fine writing by gifted historians.

Mr. Basil Thomson, the present head of the Criminal Investigation
Department, has said recently that a great deal of crime is due to a
spirit of "perverse adventure" on the part of the criminal. The same
might be said with equal justice of the exploits of Alexander the Great
and half the monarchs and conquerors of the world, whom we are taught
in our childhood's days to look up to as shining examples of all that a
great man should be. Because crimes are played on a great stage instead
of a small, that is no reason why our moral judgment should be suspended
or silenced. Class Machiavelli and Frederick the Great as a couple of
rascals fit to rank with Jonathan Wild, and we are getting nearer a
perception of what constitutes the real criminal. "If," said Frederick
the Great to his minister, Radziwill, "there is anything to be gained
by it, we will be honest; if deception is necessary, let us be cheats."
These are the very sentiments of Jonathan Wild.

Crime, broadly speaking, is the attempt by fraud or violence to possess
oneself of something belonging to another, and as such the cases of it
in history are as clear as those dealt with in criminal courts. Germany
to-day has been guilty of a perverse and criminal adventure, the outcome
of that false morality applied to historical transactions, of which
Carlyle's life of Frederick is a monumental example. In that book
we have a man whose instincts in more ways than one were those of a
criminal, held up for our admiration, in the same way that the same
writer fell into dithyrambic praise over a villain called Francia, a
former President of Paraguay. A most interesting work might be written
on the great criminals of history, and might do something towards
restoring that balance of moral judgment in historical transactions, for
the perversion of which we are suffering to-day.

In the meantime we must be content to study in the microcosm of ordinary
crime those instincts, selfish, greedy, brutal which, exploited often
by bad men in the so-called cause of nations, have wrought such havoc
to the happiness of mankind. It is not too much to say that in every
man there dwell the seeds of crime; whether they grow or are stifled
in their growth by the good that is in us is a chance mysteriously
determined. As children of nature we must not be surprised if our
instincts are not all that they should be. "In sober truth," writes
John Stuart Mill, "nearly all the things for which men are hanged or
imprisoned for doing to one another are nature's everyday performances,"
and in another passage: "The course of natural phenomena being replete
with everything which when committed by human beings is most worthy of
abhorrence, anyone who endeavoured in his actions to imitate the natural
course of things would be universally seen and acknowledged to be the
wickedest of men."

Here is explanation enough for the presence of evil in our natures, that
instinct to destroy which finds comparatively harmless expression in
certain forms of taking life, which is at its worst when we fall
to taking each other's. It is to check an inconvenient form of the
expression of this instinct that we punish murderers with death. We must
carry the definition of murder a step farther before we can count
on peace or happiness in this world. We must concentrate all our
strength on fighting criminal nature, both in ourselves and in the
world around us. With the destructive forces of nature we are waging a
perpetual struggle for our very existence. Why dissipate our strength by
fighting among ourselves? By enlarging our conception of crime we move
towards that end. What is anti-social, whether it be written in the
pages of the historian or those of the Newgate Calendar, must in the
future be regarded with equal abhorrence and subjected to equally sure
punishment. Every professor of history should now and then climb down
from the giddy heights of Thucydides and Gibbon and restore his moral
balance by comparing the acts of some of his puppets with those of their
less fortunate brethren who have dangled at the end of a rope. If this
war is to mean anything to posterity, the crime against humanity must be
judged in the future by the same rigid standard as the crime against the
person.

The individual criminals whose careers are given in this book have been
chosen from among their fellows for their pre-eminence in character or
achievement. Some of the cases, such as Butler, Castaing and Holmes, are
new to most English readers.

Charles Peace is the outstanding popular figure in nineteenth-century
crime. He is the type of the professional criminal who makes crime a
business and sets about it methodically and persistently to the end.
Here is a man, possessing many of those qualities which go to make the
successful man of action in all walks of life, driven by circumstances
to squander them on a criminal career. Yet it is a curious circumstance
that this determined and ruthless burglar should have suffered for what
would be classed in France as a "crime passionel." There is more than
a possibility that a French jury would have found extenuating circumstances in the murder of Dyson. The fate of Peace is only another instance of the wrecking a strong man's career by his passion for a woman. In Albert Butler we have the criminal by conviction, a conviction which finds the ground ready prepared
for its growth in the natural laziness and idleness of the man's
disposition. The desire to acquire things by a short cut, without taking
the trouble to work for them honestly, is perhaps the most fruitful of
all sources of crime. Butler, a bit of a pedant, is pleased to
justify his conduct by reason and philosophy--he finds in the acts of
unscrupulous monarchs an analogy to his own attitude towards life. What
is good enough for Caesar Borgia is good enough for Robert Butler. Like
Borgia he comes to grief; criminals succeed and criminals fail. In the
case of historical criminals their crimes are open; we can estimate the
successes and failures. With ordinary criminals, we know only those
who fail. The successful, the real geniuses in crime, those whose guilt
remains undiscovered, are for the most part unknown to us. Occasionally
in society a man or woman is pointed out as having once murdered
somebody or other, and at times, no doubt, with truth. But the matter
can only be referred to clandestinely; they are gazed at with awe or
curiosity, mute witnesses to their own achievement. Some years ago James
Payn, the novelist, hazarded the reckoning that one person in every five
hundred was an undiscovered murderer. This gives us all a hope, almost
a certainty, that we may reckon one such person at least among our
acquaintances.(1)


     (1) The author was one of three men discussing this subject in a London
club. They were able to name six persons of their various acquaintance
who were, or had been, suspected of being successful murderers.


Derues is remarkable for the extent of his social ambition, the daring
and impudent character of his attempts to gratify it, the skill, the
consummate hypocrisy with which he played on the credulity of honest
folk, and his flagrant employment of that weapon known and recognised
to-day in the most exalted spheres by the expressive name of "bluff."
He is remarkable, too, for his mirth and high spirits, his genial
buffoonery; the merry murderer is a rare bird.

Professor Webster belongs to that order of criminal of which Eugene Aram
and the Rev. John Selby Watson are our English examples, men of culture
and studious habits who suddenly burst on the astonished gaze of
their fellowmen as murderers. The exact process of mind by which these
hitherto harmless citizens are converted into assassins is to a great
extent hidden from us.

Perhaps Webster's case is the clearest of the three. Here we have a
selfish, self-indulgent and spendthrift gentleman who has landed himself
in serious financial embarrassment, seeking by murder to escape from an
importunate and relentless creditor. He has not, apparently, the moral
courage to face the consequences of his own weakness. He forgets the
happiness of his home, the love of those dear to him, in the desire to
free himself from a disgrace insignificent{sic} in comparison with that
entailed by committing the highest of all crimes. One would wish to
believe that Webster's deed was unpremeditated, the result of a sudden
gust of passion caused by his victim's acrimonious pursuit of his
debtor. But there are circumstances in the case which tell powerfully
against such a view. The character of the murderer seems curiously
contradictory; both cunning and simplicity mark his proceedings; he
makes a determined attempt to escape from the horrors of his situation
and shows at the same time a curious insensibility to its real gravity.
Webster was a man of refined tastes and seemingly gentle character,
loved by those near to him, well liked by his friends.

The mystery that surrounds the real character of Eugene Aram is greater,
and we possess little or no means of solving it. From what motive this
silent, arrogant man, despising his ineffectual wife, this reserved and
moody scholar stooped to fraud and murder the facts of the case help us
little to determine. Was it the hope of leaving the narrow surroundings
of Knaresborough, his tiresome belongings, his own poor way of life,
and seeking a wider field for the exercise of those gifts of scholarship
which he undoubtedly possessed that drove him to commit fraud in company
with Clark and Houseman, and then, with the help of the latter,
murder the unsuspecting Clark? The fact of his humble origin makes
his association with so low a ruffian as Houseman the less remarkable.
Vanity in all probability played a considerable part in Aram's
disposition. He would seem to have thought himself a superior person,
above the laws that bind ordinary men. He showed at the end no
consciousness of his guilt. Being something of a philosopher, he had
no doubt constructed for himself a philosophy of life which served to
justify his own actions. He was a deist, believing in "one almighty
Being the God of Nature," to whom he recommended himself at the last in
the event of his "having done amiss." He emphasised the fact that his
life had been unpolluted and his morals irreproachable. But his views
as to the murder of Clark he left unexpressed. He suggested as
justification of it that Clark had carried on an intrigue with his
neglected wife, but he never urged this circumstance in his defence, and
beyond his own statement there is no evidence of such a connection.

The Revd. John Selby Watson, headmaster of the Stockwell Grammar School,
at the age of sixty-five killed his wife in his library one Sunday
afternoon. Things had been going badly with the unfortunate man. After
more than twenty-five years' service as headmaster of the school at a
meagre salary of L400 a year, he was about to be dismissed; the
number of scholars had been declining steadily and a change in the
headmastership thought necessary; there was no suggestion of his
receiving any kind of pension. The future for a man of his years
was dark enough. The author of several learned books, painstaking,
scholarly, dull, he could hope to make but little money from literary
work. Under a cold, reserved and silent exterior, Selby Watson concealed
a violence of temper which he sought diligently to repress. His wife's
temper was none of the best. Worried, depressed, hopeless of his future,
he in all probability killed his wife in a sudden access of rage,
provoked by some taunt or reproach on her part, and then, instead of
calling in a policeman and telling him what he had done, made clumsy and
ineffectual efforts to conceal his crime. Medical opinion was divided as
to his mental condition. Those doctors called for the prosecution could
find no trace of insanity about him, those called for the defence said
that he was suffering from melancholia. The unhappy man would appear
hardly to have realised the gravity of his situation. To a friend who
visited him in prison he said: "Here's a man who can write Latin, which
the Bishop of Winchester would commend, shut up in a place like this."
Coming from a man who had spent all his life buried in books and knowing
little of the world the remark is not so greatly to be wondered at.
Profound scholars are apt to be impatient of mundane things. Professor
Webster showed a similar want of appreciation of the circumstances of a
person charged with wilful murder. Selby Watson was convicted of murder
and sentenced to death. The sentence was afterwards commuted to one of
penal servitude for life, the Home Secretary of the day showing by
his decision that, though not satisfied of the prisoner's insanity, he
recognised certain extenuating circumstances in his guilt.(2)


     (2) Selby Watson was tried at the Central Criminal Court January, 1872.


In Castaing much ingenuity is shown in the conception of the crime,
but the man is weak and timid; he is not the stuff of which the great
criminal is made; Holmes is cast in the true mould of the instinctive
murderer. Castaing is a man of sensibility, capable of domestic
affection; Holmes completely insensible to all feelings of humanity.
Taking life is a mere incident in the accomplishment of his schemes;
men, women and children are sacrificed with equal mercilessness to the
necessary end. A consummate liar and hypocrite, he has that strange
power of fascination over others, women in particular, which is often
independent altogether of moral or even physical attractiveness. We
are accustomed to look for a certain vastness, grandeur of scale in the
achievements of America. A study of American crime will show that it
does not disappoint us in this expectation. The extent and audacity of
the crimes of Holmes are proof of it.

To find a counterpart in imaginative literature to the complete criminal
of the Holmes type we must turn to the pages of Shakespeare. In the
number of his victims, the cruelty and insensibility with which he
attains his ends, his unblushing hypocrisy, the fascination he can
exercise at will over others, the Richard III. of Shakespeare shows how
clearly the poet understood the instinctive criminal of real life. The
Richard of history was no doubt less instinctively and deliberately an
assassin than the Richard of Shakespeare. In the former we can trace
the gradual temptation to crime to which circumstances provoke him. The
murder of the Princes, if, as one writer contends, it was not the work
of Henry VII.--in which case that monarch deserves to be hailed as
one of the most consummate criminals that ever breathed and the worthy
father of a criminal son--was no doubt forced to a certain extent on
Richard by the exigencies of his situation, one of those crimes to which
bad men are driven in order to secure the fruits of other crimes. But
the Richard of Shakespeare is no child of circumstance. He espouses
deliberately a career of crime, as deliberately as Peace or Holmes or
Butler; he sets out "determined to prove a villain," to be "subtle,
false and treacherous," to employ to gain his ends "stern murder in the
dir'st degree." The character is sometimes criticised as being overdrawn
and unreal. It may not be true to the Richard of history, but it is very
true to crime, and to the historical criminal of the Borgian or Prussian
type, in which fraud and violence are made part of a deliberate system
of so-called statecraft.

Shakespeare got nearer to what we may term the domestic as opposed to
the political criminal when he created Iago. In their envy and dislike
of their fellowmen, their contempt for humanity in general, their
callousness to the ordinary sympathies of human nature, Robert Butler,
Lacenaire, Ruloff are witnesses to the poet's fidelity to criminal
character in his drawing of the Ancient. But there is a weakness in
the character of Iago regarded as a purely instinctive and malignant
criminal; indeed it is a weakness in the consistency of the play. On two
occasions Iago states explicitly that Othello is more than suspected of
having committed adultery with his wife, Emilia, and that therefore he
has a strong and justifiable motive for being revenged on the Moor.
The thought of it he describes as "gnawing his inwards." Emilia's
conversation with Desdemona in the last act lends some colour to the
correctness of Iago's belief. If this belief be well-founded it
must greatly modify his character as a purely wanton and mischievous
criminal, a supreme villain, and lower correspondingly the character
of Othello as an honourable and high-minded man. If it be a morbid
suspicion, having no ground in fact, a mental obsession, then Iago
becomes abnormal and consequently more or less irresponsible. But this
suggestion of Emilia's faithlessness made in the early part of the play
is never followed up by the dramatist, and the spectator is left in
complete uncertainty as to whether there be any truth or not in
Iago's suspicion. If Othello has played his Ancient false, that is an
extenuating circumstance in the otherwise extraordinary guilt of Iago,
and would no doubt be accorded to him as such, were he on trial before a
French jury.

The most successful, and therefore perhaps the greatest, criminal in
Shakespeare is King Claudius of Denmark. His murder of his brother by
pouring a deadly poison into his ear while sleeping, is so skilfully
perpetrated as to leave no suspicion of foul play. But for a
supernatural intervention, a contingency against which no murderer could
be expected to have provided, the crime of Claudius would never have
been discovered. Smiling, jovial, genial as M. Derues or Dr. Palmer,
King Claudius might have gone down to his grave in peace as the bluff
hearty man of action, while his introspective nephew would in all
probability have ended his days in the cloister, regarded with amiable
contempt by his bustling fellowmen. How Claudius got over the great
difficulty of all poisoners, that of procuring the necessary poison
without detection, we are not told; by what means he distilled the
"juice of cursed hebenon"; how the strange appearance of the late
King's body, which "an instant tetter" had barked about with "vile and
loathsome crust," was explained to the multitude we are left to imagine.
There is no real evidence to show that Queen Gertrude was her lover's
accomplice in her husband's murder. If that had been so, she would
no doubt have been of considerable assistance to Claudius in the
preparation of the crime. But in the absence of more definite proof
we must assume Claudius' murder of his brother to have been a solitary
achievement, skilfully carried out by one whose genial good-fellowship
and convivial habits gave the lie to any suggestion of criminality.
Whatever may have been his inward feelings of remorse or self-reproach,
Claudius masked them successfully from the eyes of all. Hamlet's
instinctive dislike of his uncle was not shared by the members of the
Danish court. The "witchcraft of his wit," his "traitorous gifts,"
were powerful aids to Claudius, not only in the seduction of his
sister-in-law, but the perpetration of secret murder.

The case of the murder of King Duncan of Scotland by Macbeth and his
wife belongs to a different class of crime. It is a striking example of
dual crime, four instances of which are given towards the end of this
book. An Italian advocate, Scipio Sighele, has devoted a monograph to
the subject of dual crime, in which he examines a number of cases in
which two persons have jointly committed heinous crimes.(3) He finds
that in couples of this kind there is usually an incubus and a succubus,
the one who suggests the crime, the other on whom the suggestion works
until he or she becomes the accomplice or instrument of the stronger
will; "the one playing the Mephistophelian part of tempter, preaching
evil, urging to crime, the other allowing himself to be overcome by his
evil genius." In some cases these two roles are clearly differentiated;
it is easy, as in the case of Iago and Othello, Cassius and Brutus, to
say who prompted the crime. In others the guilt seems equally divided
and the original suggestion of crime to spring from a mutual tendency
towards the adoption of such an expedient. In Macbeth and his wife we
have a perfect instance of the latter class. No sooner have the witches
prophesied that Macbeth shall be a king than the "horrid image" of
the suggestion to murder Duncan presents itself to his mind, and, on
returning to his wife, he answers her question as to when Duncan is
to leave their house by the significant remark, "To-morrow--as he
proposes." To Lady Macbeth from the moment she has received her
husband's letter telling of the prophecy of the weird sisters, murder
occurs as a means of accomplishing their prediction. In the minds
of Macbeth and his wife the suggestion of murder is originally an
auto-suggestion, coming to them independently of each other as soon as
they learn from the witches that Macbeth is one day to be a king. To
Banquo a somewhat similar intimation is given, but no foul thought of
crime suggests itself for an instant to his loyal nature. What Macbeth
and his wife lack at first as thorough-going murderers is that complete
insensibility to taking human life that marks the really ruthless
assassin. Lady Macbeth has the stronger will of the two for the
commission of the deed. It is doubtful whether without her help Macbeth
would ever have undertaken it. But even she, when her husband hesitates
to strike, cannot bring herself to murder the aged Duncan with her own
hands because of his resemblance as he sleeps to her father. It is only
after a deal of boggling and at serious risk of untimely interruption
that the two contrive to do the murder, and plaster with blood the
"surfeited grooms." In thus putting suspicion on the servants of Duncan
the assassins cunningly avert suspicion from themselves, and Macbeth's
killing of the unfortunate men in seeming indignation at the discovery
of their crime is a master-stroke of ingenuity. "Who," he asks in a
splendid burst of feigned horror, "can be wise, amazed, temperate and
furious, loyal and natural in a moment?" At the same time Lady Macbeth
affects to swoon away in the presence of so awful a crime. For the time
all suspicion of guilt, except in the mind of Banquo, is averted from
the real murderers. But, like so many criminals, Macbeth finds it
impossible to rest on his first success in crime. His sensibility grows
dulled; he "forgets the taste of fear"; the murder of Banquo and his
son is diabolically planned, and that is soon followed by the outrageous
slaughter of the wife and children of Macduff. Ferri, the Italian writer
on crime, describes the psychical condition favourable to the commission
of murder as an absence of both moral repugnance to the crime itself and
the fear of the consequences following it. In the murder of Duncan, it
is the first of these two states of mind to which Macbeth and his wife
have only partially attained. The moral repugnance stronger in the
man has not been wholly lost by the woman. But as soon as the crime is
successfully accomplished, this repugnance begins to wear off until the
King and Queen are able calmly and deliberately to contemplate those
further crimes necessary to their peace of mind. But now Macbeth, at
first the more compunctious of the two, has become the more ruthless;
the germ of crime, developed by suggestion, has spread through his whole
being; he has begun to acquire that indifference to human suffering with
which Richard III. and Iago were gifted from the first. In both
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth the germ of crime was latent; they wanted only
favourable circumstances to convert them into one of those criminal
couples who are the more dangerous for the fact that the temptation
to crime has come to each spontaneously and grown and been fostered by
mutual understanding, an elective affinity for evil. Such couples are
frequent in the history of crime. Eyraud and Bompard, Mr. and Mrs.
Manning, Burke and Hare, the Peltzer brothers, Barre and Lebiez, are
instances of those collaborations in crime which find their counterpart
in history, literature, drama and business. Antoninus and Aurelius,
Ferdinand and Isabella, the De Goncourt brothers, Besant and Rice,
Gilbert and Sullivan, Swan and Edgar leap to the memory.


     (3) "Le Crime a Deux," by Scipio Sighele (translated from the Italian),
Lyons, 1893.

In the cases of Eyraud and Bompard, both man and woman are idle, vicious
criminals by instinct. They come together, lead an abandoned life,
sinking lower and lower in moral degradation. In the hour of need, crime
presents itself as a simple expedient for which neither of them has any
natural aversion. The repugnance to evil, if they ever felt it, has
long since disappeared from their natures. The man is serious, the woman
frivolous, but the criminal tendency in both cases is the same; each
performs his or her part in the crime with characteristic aptitude.
Mrs. Manning was a creature of much firmer character than her husband,
a woman of strong passions, a redoubtable murderess. Without her
dominating force Manning might never have committed murder. But he was a
criminal before the crime, more than suspected as a railway official of
complicity in a considerable train robbery; in his case the suggestion
of murder involved only the taking of a step farther in a criminal
career. Manning suffered from nerves almost as badly as Macbeth; after
the deed he sought to drown the prickings of terror and remorse by heavy
drinking Mrs. Manning was never troubled with any feelings of this kind;
after the murder of O'Connor the gratification of her sexual passion
seemed uppermost in her mind; and she met the consequences of her crime
fearlessly. Burke and Hare were a couple of ruffians, tempted by what
must have seemed almost fabulous wealth to men of their wretched
poverty to commit a series of cruel murders. Hare, with his queer,
Mephistophelian countenance, was the wickeder of the two. Burke became
haunted as time went on and flew to drink to banish horror, but Hare
would seem to have been free from such "compunctious visitings of
Nature." He kept his head and turned King's evidence.

In the case of the Peltzer brothers we have a man who is of good social
position, falling desperately in love with the wife of a successful
barrister. The wife, though unhappy in her domestic life, refuses to
become her lover's mistress; marriage is the only way to secure her. So
Armand Peltzer plots to murder the husband. For this purpose he calls in
the help of a brother, a ne'er-do-well, who has left his native country
under a cloud. He sends for this dubious person to Europe, and there
between them they plan the murder of the inconvenient husband. Though
the idea of the crime comes from the one brother, the other receives the
idea without repugnance and enters wholeheartedly into the commission of
the murder. The ascendency of the one is evident, but he knows his
man, is sure that he will have no difficulty in securing the other's
co-operation in his felonious purpose. Armand Peltzer should have lived
in the Italy of the Renaissance.

The crime was cunningly devised, and methodically and successfully
accomplished. Only an over-anxiety to secure the fruits of it led to its
detection. Barre and Lebiez are a perfect criminal couple, both young
men of good education, trained to better things, but the one idle,
greedy and vicious, the other cynical, indifferent, inclined at best to
a lazy sentimentalism. Barre is a needy stockbroker at the end of his
tether, desperate to find an expedient for raising the wind, Lebiez
a medical student who writes morbid verses to a skull and lectures on
Darwinism. To Barre belongs the original suggestion to murder an old
woman who sells milk and is reputed to have savings. But his friend
and former schoolfellow, Lebiez, accepts the suggestion placidly, and
reconciles himself to the murder of an unnecessary old woman by the
same argument as that used by Raskolnikoff in "Crime and Punishment" to
justify the killing of his victim.

In all the cases here quoted the couples are essentially criminal
couples. From whichever of the two comes the first suggestion of crime,
it falls on soil already prepared to receive it; the response to the
suggestion is immediate. In degree of guilt there is little or nothing
to choose between them. But the more interesting instances of dual crime
are those in which one innocent hitherto of crime, to whom it is morally
repugnant, is persuaded by another to the commission of a criminal act,
as Cassius persuades Brutus; Iago, Othello. Cassius is a criminal
by instinct. Placed in a social position which removes him from the
temptation to ordinary crime, circumstances combine in his case to bring
out the criminal tendency and give it free play in the projected murder
of Caesar. Sour, envious, unscrupulous, the suggestion to kill Caesar
under the guise of the public weal is in reality a gratification
to Cassius of his own ignoble instincts, and the deliberate
unscrupulousness with which he seeks to corrupt the honourable metal,
seduce the noble mind of his friend, is typical of the man's innate
dishonesty. Cassius belongs to that particular type of the envious
nature which Shakespeare is fond of exemplifying with more or less
degree of villainy in such characters as Iago, Edmund, and Don John,
of which Robert Butler, whose career is given in this book, is a living
instance. Cassius on public grounds tempts Brutus to crime as subtly as
on private grounds Iago tempts Othello, and with something of the same
malicious satisfaction; the soliloquy of Cassius at the end of the
second scene of the first act is that of a bad man and a false friend.
Indeed, the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius after the murder of
Caesar loses much of its sincerity and pathos unless we can forget for
the moment the real character of Cassius. But the interest in the cases
of Cassius and Brutus, Iago and Othello, lies not so much in the
nature of the prompter of the crime. The instances in which an honest,
honourable man is by force of another's suggestion converted into a
criminal are psychologically remarkable. It is to be expected that we
should look in the annals of real crime for confirmation of the truth to
life of stories such as these, told in fiction or drama.

The strongest influence, under which the naturally non-criminal person
may be tempted in violation of instinct and better nature to the
commission of a crime, is that of love or passion. Examples of this kind
are frequent in the annals of crime. There is none more striking than
that of the Widow Gras and Natalis Gaudry. Here a man, brave, honest, of
hitherto irreproachable character, is tempted by a woman to commit the
most cruel and infamous of crimes. At first he repels the suggestion;
at last, when his senses have been excited, his passion inflamed by the
cunning of the woman, as the jealous passion of Othello is played on and
excited by Iago, the patriotism of Brutus artfully exploited by Cassius,
he yields to the repeated solicitation and does a deed in every way
repugnant to his normal character. Nothing seems so blinding in its
effect on the moral sense as passion. It obscures all sense of humour,
proportion, congruity; the murder of the man or woman who stands in
the way of its full enjoyment becomes an act of inverted justice to
the perpetrators; they reconcile themselves to it by the most perverse
reasoning until they come to regard it as an act, in which they may
justifiably invoke the help of God; eroticism and religion are often
jumbled up together in this strange medley of conflicting emotions.

A woman, urging her lover to the murder of her husband, writes of the
roses that are to deck the path of the lovers as soon as the crime is
accomplished; she sends him flowers and in the same letter asks if he
has got the necessary cartridges. Her husband has been ill; she hopes
that it is God helping them to the desired end; she burns a candle
on the altar of a saint for the success of their murderous plan.(4) A
jealous husband setting out to kill his wife carries in his pockets,
beside a knife and a service revolver, a rosary, a medal of the Virgin
and a holy image.(5) Marie Boyer in the blindness of her passion and
jealousy believes God to be helping her to get rid of her mother.


     (4) Case of Garnier and the woman Aveline, 1884.

     (5) Case of the Comte
de Cornulier: "Un An de Justice," Henri Varennes, 1901.


A lover persuades the wife to get rid of her husband. For a whole year
he instils the poison into her soul until she can struggle no longer
against the obsession; he offers to do the deed, but she writes that she
would rather suffer all the risks and consequences herself. "How many
times," she writes, "have I wished to go away, leave home, but it meant
leaving my children, losing them for ever.. that made my lover jealous,
he believed that I could not bring myself to leave my husband. But if my
husband were out of the way then I would keep my children, and my
lover would see in my crime a striking proof of my devotion." A curious
farrago of slavish passion, motherly love and murder.(6)


     (6) Case of Madame Weiss and the engineer Roques. If I may be permitted
the reference, there is an account of this case and that of Barre and
Lebiez in my book "French Criminals of the Nineteenth Century."


There are some women such as Marie Boyer and Gabrielle Fenayrou, who may
be described as passively criminal, chameleon-like, taking colour from
their surroundings. By the force of a man's influence they commit a
dreadful crime, in the one instance it is matricide, in the other the
murder of a former lover, but neither of the women is profoundly vicious
or criminal in her instincts. In prison they become exemplary, their
crime a thing of the past.

Gabrielle Fenayrou during her imprisonment, having won the confidence
of the religious sisters in charge of the convicts, is appointed head
of one of the workshops. Marie Boyer is so contrite, exemplary in her
behaviour that she is released after fifteen years' imprisonment. In
some ways, perhaps, these malleable types of women, "soft paste" as one
authority has described them, "effacees" in the words of another, are
the most dangerous material of all for the commission of crime, their
obedience is so complete, so cold and relentless.

There are cases into which no element of passion enters, in which one
will stronger than the other can so influence, so dominate the weaker as
to persuade the individual against his or her better inclination to an
act of crime, just as in the relations of ordinary life we see a man
or woman led and controlled for good or ill by one stronger than
themselves. There is no more extraordinary instance of this than the
case of Catherine Hayes, immortalised by Thackeray, which occurred
as long ago as the year 1726. This singular woman by her artful
insinuations, by representing her husband as an atheist and a murderer,
persuaded a young man of the name of Wood, of hitherto exemplary
character, to assist her in murdering him. It was unquestionably the
sinister influence of Captain Cranstoun that later in the same century
persuaded the respectable Miss Mary Blandy to the murder of her father.
The assassin of an old woman in Paris recounts thus the arguments used
by his mistress to induce him to commit the crime: "She began by telling
me about the money and jewellery in the old woman's possession which
could no longer be of any use to her"--the argument of Raskolnikoff--"I
resisted, but next day she began again, pointing out that one killed
people in war, which was not considered a crime, and therefore one
should not be afraid to kill a miserable old woman. I urged that the old
woman had done us no harm, and that I did not see why one should kill
her; she reproached me for my weakness and said that, had she been
strong enough, she would soon have done this abominable deed herself.
'God,' she added, 'will forgive us because He knows how poor we are.'"
When he came to do the murder, this determined woman plied her lover
with brandy and put rouge on his cheeks lest his pallor should betray
him.(7)


     (7) Case of Albert and the woman Lavoitte, Paris, 1877.


There are occasions when those feelings of compunction which troubled
Macbeth and his wife are wellnigh proof against the utmost powers of
suggestion, or, as in the case of Hubert and Prince Arthur, compel the
criminal to desist from his enterprise.

A man desires to get rid of his father and mother-in-law. By means of
threats, reproaches and inducements he persuades another man to commit
the crime. Taking a gun, the latter sets out to do the deed; but he
realises the heinousness of it and turns back. "The next day," he says,
"at four o'clock in the morning I started again. I passed the village
church. At the sight of the place where I had celebrated my first
communion I was filled with remorse. I knelt down and prayed to God to
make me good. But some unknown force urged me to the crime. I started
again--ten times I turned back, but the more I hesitated the stronger
was the desire to go on." At length the faltering assassin arrived at
the house, and in his painful anxiety of mind shot a servant instead of
the intended victims.(8)


     (8) Case of Porcher and Hardouin cited in Despine. "Psychologie
Naturelle."


In a town in Austria there dwelt a happy and contented married couple,
poor and hard-working. A charming young lady, a rich relation and an
orphan, comes to live with them. She brings to their modest home wealth
and comfort. But as time goes on, it is likely that the young lady will
fall in love and marry. What then? Her hosts will have to return
to their original poverty. The idea of how to secure to himself the
advantages of his young kinswoman's fortune takes possession of the
husband's mind. He revolves all manner of means, and gradually murder
presents itself as the only way. The horrid suggestion fixes itself
in his mind, and at last he communicates it to his wife. At first she
resists, then yields to the temptation. The plan is ingenious. The wife
is to disappear to America and be given out as dead. The husband will
then marry his attractive kinswoman, persuade her to make a will in his
favour, poison her and, the fortune secured, rejoin his wife. As if
to help this cruel plan, the young lady has developed a sentimental
affection for her relative. The wife goes to America, the husband
marries the young lady. He commences to poison her, but, in the presence
of her youth, beauty and affection for him, relents, hesitates to commit
a possibly unnecessary crime. He decides to forget and ignore utterly
his wife who is waiting patiently in America. A year passes. The
expectant wife gets no sign of her husband's existence. She comes back
to Europe, visits under a false name the town in which her faithless
husband and his bride are living, discovers the truth and divulges the
intended crime to the authorities. A sentence of penal servitude for
life rewards this perfidious criminal.(9)


     (9) Case of the Scheffer couple at Linz, cited by Sighele.


Derues said to a man who was looking at a picture in the Palais de
Justice: "Why study copies of Nature when you can look at such a
remarkable original as I?" A judge once told the present writer that he
did not go often to the theatre because none of the dramas which he saw
on the stage, seemed to him equal in intensity to those of real life
which came before him in the course of his duties. The saying that truth
is stranger than fiction applies more forcibly to crime than to
anything else. But the ordinary man and woman prefer to take their crime
romanticised, as it is administered to them in novel or play. The true
stories told in this book represent the raw material from which works
of art have been and may be yet created. The murder of Mr. Arden of
Faversham inspired an Elizabethan tragedy attributed by some critics
to Shakespeare. The Peltzer trial helped to inspire Paul Bourget's
remarkable novel, "Andre Cornelis." To Italian crime we owe Shelley's
"Cenci" and Browning's "The Ring and the Book." Mrs. Manning was the
original of the maid Hortense in "Bleak House." Jonathan Wild, Eugene
Aram, Deacon Brodie, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright have all been made
the heroes of books or plays of varying merit. But it is not only in its
stories that crime has served to inspire romance. In the investigation
of crime, especially on the broader lines of Continental procedure, we
can track to the source the springs of conduct and character, and come
near to solving as far as is humanly possible the mystery of human
motive. There is always and must be in every crime a terra incognita
which, unless we could enter into the very soul of a man, we cannot hope
to reach. Thus far may we go, no farther. It is rarely indeed that a man
lays bare his whole soul, and even when he does we can never be quite
sure that he is telling us all the truth, that he is not keeping back
some vital secret. It is no doubt better so, and that it should be left
to the writer of imagination to picture for us a man's inmost soul. The
study of crime will help him to that end. It will help us also in the
ethical appreciation of good and evil in individual conduct, about which
our notions have been somewhat obscured by too narrow a definition
of what constitutes crime. These themes, touched on but lightly and
imperfectly in these pages, are rich in human interest.

And so it is hardly a matter for surprise that the poet and the
philosopher sat up late one night talking about murders.




The Life of Charles Peace


"Charles Peace, or the Adventures of a Notorious Burglar," a large
volume published at the time of his death, gives a full and accurate
account of the career of Peace side by side with a story of the Family
Herald type, of which he is made the hero. "The Life and Trial of
Charles Peace" (Sheffield, 1879), "The Romantic Career of a Great
Criminal" (by N. Kynaston Gaskell, London 1906), and "The Master
Criminal," published recently in London give useful information. I have
also consulted some of the newspapers of the time. There is a delightful
sketch of Peace in Mr. Charles Whibley's "Book of Scoundrels."

I

HIS EARLY YEARS

Charles Peace told a clergyman who had an interview with him in prison
shortly before his execution that he hoped that, after he was gone, he
would be entirely forgotten by everybody and his name never mentioned
again.

Posterity, in calling over its muster-roll of famous men, has refused
to fulfil this pious hope, and Charley Peace stands out as the one
great personality among English criminals of the nineteenth century. In
Charley Peace alone is revived that good-humoured popularity which
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fell to the lot of Claude
Duval, Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard. But Peace has one grievance
against posterity; he has endured one humiliation which these heroes
have been spared. His name has been omitted from the pages of the
"Dictionary of National Biography." From Duval, in the seventeenth,
down to the Mannings, Palmer, Arthur Orton, Morgan and Kelly, the
bushrangers, in the nineteenth century, many a criminal, far less
notable or individual than Charley Peace, finds his or her place in that
great record of the past achievements of our countrymen. Room has
been denied to perhaps the greatest and most naturally gifted criminal
England has produced, one whose character is all the more remarkable for
its modesty, its entire freedom from that vanity and vaingloriousness
so common among his class.

The only possible reason that can be suggested for so singular an
omission is the fact that in the strict order of alphabetical succession
the biography of Charles Peace would have followed immediately on that
of George Peabody. It may have been thought that the contrast was too
glaring, that even the exigencies of national biography had no right
to make the philanthropist Peabody rub shoulders with man's constant
enemy, Peace. To the memory of Peace these few pages can make but
poor amends for the supreme injustice, but, by giving a particular and
authentic account of his career, they may serve as material for
the correction of this grave omission should remorse overtake those
responsible for so undeserved a slur on one of the most unruly of
England's famous sons.

From the literary point of view Peace was unfortunate even in the hour
of his notoriety. In the very year of his trial and execution, the
Annual Register, seized with a fit of respectability from which it
has never recovered, announced that "the appetite for the strange and
marvellous" having considerably abated since the year 1757 when the
Register was first published, its "Chronicle," hitherto a rich mine of
extraordinary and sensational occurrences, would become henceforth a
mere diary of important events. Simultaneously with the curtailment
of its "Chronicle," it ceased to give those excellent summaries of
celebrated trials which for many years had been a feature of its
volumes. The question whether "the appetite for the strange and
marvellous" has abated in an appreciable degree with the passing of time
and is not perhaps keener than it ever was, is a debatable one. But
it is undeniable that the present volumes of the Annual Register have
fallen away dismally from the variety and human interest of their
predecessors. Of the trial and execution of Peace the volume for 1879
gives but the barest record.

Charles Peace was not born of criminal parents. His father, John
Peace, began work as a collier at Burton-on-Trent. Losing his leg in an
accident, he joined Wombwell's wild beast show and soon acquired some
reputation for his remarkable powers as a tamer of wild animals. About
this time Peace married at Rotherham the daughter of a surgeon in
the Navy. On the death of a favourite son to whom he had imparted
successfully the secrets of his wonderful control over wild beasts of
every kind, Mr. Peace gave up lion-taming and settled in Sheffield as a
shoemaker.

It was at Sheffield, in the county of Yorkshire, already famous in the
annals of crime as the county of John Nevison and Eugene Aram, that
Peace first saw the light. On May 14, 1832, there was born to John Peace
in Sheffield a son, Charles, the youngest of his family of four. When he
grew to boyhood Charles was sent to two schools near Sheffield, where
he soon made himself remarkable, not as a scholar, but for his singular
aptitude in a variety of other employments such as making paper models,
taming cats, constructing a peep-show, and throwing up a heavy ball of
shot which he would catch in a leather socket fixed on to his forehead.

The course of many famous men's lives has been changed by what appeared
at the time to be an unhappy accident. Who knows what may have been the
effect on Charles Peace's subsequent career of an accident he met with
in 1846 at some rolling mills, in which he was employed? A piece of red
hot steel entered his leg just below the knee, and after eighteen months
spent in the Sheffield Infirmary he left it a cripple for life. About
this time Peace's father died. Peace and his family were fond of
commemorating events of this kind in suitable verse; the death of John
Peace was celebrated in the following lines:

     "In peace he lived;
         In peace he died;
     Life was our desire,
         But God denied."


Of the circumstances that first led Peace to the commission of crime we
know nothing. How far enforced idleness, bad companionship, according to
some accounts the influence of a criminally disposed mother, how far
his own daring and adventurous temper provoked him to robbery, cannot
be determined accurately. His first exploit was the stealing of an old
gentleman's gold watch, but he soon passed to greater things. On October
26, 1851, the house of a lady living in Sheffield was broken into and a
quantity of her property stolen. Some of it was found in the possession
of Peace, and he was arrested. Owing no doubt to a good character for
honesty given him by his late employer Peace was let off lightly with a
month's imprisonment.

After his release Peace would seem to have devoted himself for a time to
music, for which he had always a genuine passion. He taught himself to
play tunes on a violin with one string, and at entertainments which he
attended was described as "the modern Paganini." In later life when he
had attained to wealth and prosperity the violin and the harmonium were
a constant source of solace during long winter evenings in Greenwich and
Peckham. But playing a one-stringed violin at fairs and public-houses
could not be more than a relaxation to a man of Peace's active temper,
who had once tasted what many of those who have practised it, describe
as the fascination of that particular form of nocturnal adventure known
by the unsympathetic name of burglary. Among the exponents of the art
Peace was at this time known as a "portico-thief," that is to say one
who contrived to get himself on to the portico of a house and from that
point of vantage make his entrance into the premises. During the
year 1854 the houses of a number of well-to-do residents in and about
Sheffield were entered after this fashion, and much valuable property
stolen. Peace was arrested, and with him a girl with whom he was keeping
company, and his sister, Mary Ann, at that time Mrs. Neil. On October
20, 1854, Peace was sentenced at Doncaster Sessions to four years' penal
servitude, and the ladies who had been found in possession of the
stolen property to six months apiece. Mrs. Neil did not long survive her
misfortune. She would seem to have been married to a brutal and drunken
husband, whom Peace thrashed on more than one occasion for ill-treating
his sister. After one of these punishments Neil set a bulldog on to
Peace; but Peace caught the dog by the lower jaw and punched it into a
state of coma. The death in 1859 of the unhappy Mrs. Neil was lamented
in appropriate verse, probably the work of her brother:

     "I was so long with pain opprest
         That wore my strength away;
     It made me long for endless rest
         Which never can decay."


On coming out of prison in 1858, Peace resumed his fiddling, but it was
now no more than a musical accompaniment to burglary. This had become
the serious business of Peace's life, to be pursued, should necessity
arise, even to the peril of men's lives. His operations extended beyond
the bounds of his native town. The house of a lady living in Manchester
was broken into on the night of August 11, 1859, and a substantial booty
carried away. This was found the following day concealed in a hole in
a field. The police left it undisturbed and awaited the return of
the robber. When Peace and another man arrived to carry it away, the
officers sprang out on them. Peace, after nearly killing the officer
who was trying to arrest him, would have made his escape, had not other
policemen come to the rescue. For this crime Peace was sentenced to six
years' penal servitude, in spite of a loyal act of perjury on the part
of his aged mother, who came all the way from Sheffield to swear that he
had been with her there on the night of the crime.

He was released from prison again in 1864, and returned to Sheffield.
Things did not prosper with him there, and he went back to Manchester.
In 1866 he was caught in the act of burglary at a house in Lower
Broughton. He admitted that at the time he was fuddled with whisky;
otherwise his capture would have been more difficult and dangerous.
Usually a temperate man, Peace realised on this occasion the value
of sobriety even in burglary, and never after allowed intemperance to
interfere with his success. A sentence of eight years' penal servitude
at Manchester Assizes on December 3, 1866, emphasised this wholesome
lesson.

Whilst serving this sentence Peace emulated Jack Sheppard in a daring
attempt to escape from Wakefield prison. Being engaged on some repairs,
he smuggled a small ladder into his cell. With the help of a saw made
out of some tin, he cut a hole through the ceiling of the cell, and was
about to get out on to the roof when a warder came in. As the latter
attempted to seize the ladder Peace knocked him down, ran along the
wall of the prison, fell off on the inside owing to the looseness of the
bricks, slipped into the governor's house where he changed his clothes,
and there, for an hour and a half, waited for an opportunity to escape.
This was denied him, and he was recaptured in the governor's bedroom.
The prisons at Millbank, Chatham and Gibraltar were all visited by Peace
before his final release in 1872. At Chatham he is said to have taken
part in a mutiny and been flogged for his pains.

On his liberation from prison Peace rejoined his family in Sheffield.
He was now a husband and father. In 1859 he had taken to wife a widow
of the name of Hannah Ward. Mrs. Ward was already the mother of a
son, Willie. Shortly after her marriage with Peace she gave birth to a
daughter, and during his fourth term of imprisonment presented him with
a son. Peace never saw this child, who died before his release. But,
true to the family custom, on his return from prison the untimely death
of little "John Charles" was commemorated by the printing of a funeral
card in his honour, bearing the following sanguine verses:

     "Farewell, my dear son, by us all beloved,
     Thou art gone to dwell in the mansions above.
     In the bosom of Jesus Who sits on the throne
     Thou art anxiously waiting to welcome us home."


Whether from a desire not to disappoint little John Charles, for some
reason or other the next two or three years of Peace's career would seem
to have been spent in an endeavour to earn an honest living by picture
framing, a trade in which Peace, with that skill he displayed in
whatever he turned his hand to, was remarkably proficient. In Sheffield
his children attended the Sunday School. Though he never went to church
himself, he was an avowed believer in both God and the devil. As he
said, however, that he feared neither, no great reliance could be placed
on the restraining force of such a belief to a man of Peace's daring
spirit. There was only too good reason to fear that little John Charles'
period of waiting would be a prolonged one.

In 1875 Peace moved from Sheffield itself to the suburb of Darnall. Here
Peace made the acquaintance--a fatal acquaintance, as it turned out--of
a Mr. and Mrs. Dyson. Dyson was a civil engineer. He had spent some
years in America, where, in 1866, he married.

Toward the end of 1873 or the beginning of 1874, he came to England with
his wife, and obtained a post on the North Eastern Railway. He was a
tall man, over six feet in height, extremely thin, and gentlemanly in
his bearing. His engagement with the North Eastern Railway terminated
abruptly owing to Dyson's failing to appear at a station to which he had
been sent on duty.

It was believed at the time by those associated with Dyson that this
unlooked-for dereliction of duty had its cause in domestic trouble.
Since the year 1875, the year in which Peace came to Darnall, the
domestic peace of Mr. Dyson had been rudely disturbed by this same ugly
little picture-framer who lived a few doors away from the Dysons'
house. Peace had got to know the Dysons, first as a tradesman, then as
a friend. To what degree of intimacy he attained with Mrs. Dyson it is
difficult to determine. In that lies the mystery of the case Mrs. Dyson
is described as an attractive woman, "buxom and blooming"; she was
dark-haired, and about twenty-five years of age. In an interview with
the Vicar of Darnall a few days before his execution, Peace asserted
positively that Mrs. Dyson had been his mistress. Mrs. Dyson as
strenuously denied the fact. There was no question that on one occasion
Peace and Mrs. Dyson had been photographed together, that he had given
her a ring, and that he had been in the habit of going to music halls
and public-houses with Mrs. Dyson, who was a woman of intemperate
habits.

Peace had introduced Mrs. Dyson to his wife and daughter, and on one
occasion was said to have taken her to his mother's house, much to the
old lady's indignation. If there were not many instances of ugly men who
have been notably successful with women, one might doubt the likelihood
of Mrs. Dyson falling a victim to the charms of Charles Peace. But
Peace, for all his ugliness, could be wonderfully ingratiating when he
chose. According to Mrs. Dyson, Peace was a demon, "beyond the power of
even a Shakespeare to paint," who persecuted her with his attentions,
and, when he found them rejected, devoted all his malignant energies
to making the lives of her husband and herself unbearable. According to
Peace's story he was a slighted lover who had been treated by Mrs. Dyson
with contumely and ingratitude.

Whether to put a stop to his wife's intimacy with Peace, or to protect
himself against the latter's wanton persecution, sometime about the end
of June, 1876, Dyson threw over into the garden of Peace's house a card,
on which was written: "Charles Peace is requested not to interfere with
my family." On July 1 Peace met Mr. Dyson in the street, and tried to
trip him up. The same night he came up to Mrs. Dyson, who was talking
with some friends, and threatened in coarse and violent language to
blow out her brains and those of her husband. In consequence of
these incidents Mr. Dyson took out a summons against Peace, for whose
apprehension a warrant was issued. To avoid the consequences of this
last step Peace left Darnall for Hull, where he opened an eating-shop,
presided over by Mrs. Peace.

But he himself was not idle. From Hull he went to Manchester on
business, and in Manchester he committed his first murder. Entering the
grounds of a gentleman's home at Whalley Range, about midnight on
August 1, he was seen by two policemen. One of them, Constable Cock,
intercepted him as he was trying to escape.

Peace took out his revolver and warned Cock to stand back. The policeman
came on. Peace fired, but deliberately wide of him. Cock, undismayed,
drew out his truncheon, and made for the burglar. Peace, desperate,
determined not to be caught, fired again, this time fatally. Cock's
comrade heard the shots, but before he could reach the side of the dying
man, Peace had made off. He returned to Hull, and there learned shortly
after, to his intense relief, that two brothers, John and William
Habron, living near the scene of the murder, had been arrested and
charged with the killing of Constable Cock.

If the Dysons thought that they had seen the last of Peace, they were
soon to be convinced to the contrary. Peace had not forgotten his
friends at Darnall. By some means or other he was kept informed of all
their doings, and on one occasion was seen by Mrs. Dyson lurking near
her home. To get away from him the Dysons determined to leave Darnall.
They took a house at Banner Cross, another suburb of Sheffield, and
on October 29 moved into their new home. One of the first persons Mrs.
Dyson saw on arriving at Banner Cross was Peace himself. "You see,"
he said, "I am here to annoy you, and I'll annoy you wherever you go."
Later, Peace and a friend passed Mr. Dyson in the street. Peace took out
his revolver. "If he offers to come near me," said he, "I will make him
stand back." But Mr. Dyson took no notice of Peace and passed on. He had
another month to live.

Whatever the other motives of Peace may have been--unreasoning passion,
spite, jealousy, or revenge it must not be forgotten that Dyson, by
procuring a warrant against Peace, had driven him from his home in
Sheffield. This Peace resented bitterly. According to the statements of
many witnesses, he was at this time in a state of constant irritation
and excitement on the Dyson's account. He struck his daughter because
she alluded in a way he did not like to his relations with Mrs. Dyson.
Peace always believed in corporal chastisement as a means of keeping
order at home. Pleasant and entertaining as he could be, he was feared.
It was very dangerous to incur his resentment. "Be sure," said his wife,
"you do nothing to offend our Charley, or you will suffer for it." Dyson
beyond a doubt had offended "our Charley." But for the moment Peace was
interested more immediately in the fate of John and William Habron,
who were about to stand their trial for the murder of Constable Cock at
Whalley Range.

The trial commenced at the Manchester Assizes before Mr. Justice (now
Lord) Lindley on Monday, November 27. John Habron was acquitted.

The case against William Habron depended to a great extent on the fact
that he, as well as his brother, had been heard to threaten to "do for"
the murdered man, to shoot the "little bobby." Cock was a zealous young
officer of twenty-three years of age, rather too eager perhaps in
the discharge of his duty. In July of 1876 he had taken out summonses
against John and William Habron, young fellows who had been several
years in the employment of a nurseryman in Whalley Range, for being
drunk and disorderly. On July 27 William was fined five shillings,
and on August 1, the day of Cock's murder, John had been fined half
a sovereign. Between these two dates the Habrons had been heard to
threaten to "do for" Cock if he were not more careful. Other facts
relied upon by the prosecution were that William Habron had inquired
from a gunsmith the price of some cartridges a day or two before the
murder; that two cartridge percussion caps had been found in the pocket
of a waistcoat given to William Habron by his employer, who swore that
they could not have been there while it was in his possession; that the
other constable on duty with Cock stated that a man he had seen lurking
near the house about twelve o'clock on the night of the murder appeared
to be William Habron's age, height and complexion, and resembled him in
general appearance; and that the boot on Habron's left foot, which was
"wet and sludgy" at the time of his arrest, corresponded in certain
respects with the footprints of the murderer. The prisoner did not
help himself by an ineffective attempt to prove an alibi. The Judge was
clearly not impressed by the strength of the case for the prosecution.
He pointed out to the jury that neither the evidence of identification
nor that of the footprint went very far. As to the latter, what evidence
was there to show that it had been made on the night of the murder? If
it had been made the day before, then the defence had proved that it
could not have been Habron's. He called their attention to the facts
that Habron bore a good character, that, when arrested on the night of
the murder, he was in bed, and that no firearms had been traced to him.
In spite, however, of the summing-up the jury convicted William Habron,
but recommended him to mercy. The Judge without comment sentenced him to
death. The Manchester Guardian expressed its entire concurrence with the
verdict of the jury. "Few persons," it wrote, "will be found to dispute
the justice of the conclusions reached." However, a few days later
it opened its columns to a number of letters protesting against the
unsatisfactory nature of the conviction. On December 6 a meeting of
some forty gentlemen was held, at which it was resolved to petition Mr.
Cross, the Home Secretary, to reconsider the sentence. Two days before
the day of execution Habron was granted a respite, and later his
sentence commuted to one of penal servitude for life. And so a tragic
and irrevocable miscarriage of justice was happily averted.

Peace liked attending trials. The fact that in Habron's case he was the
real murderer would seem to have made him the more eager not to miss so
unique an experience. Accordingly he went from Hull to Manchester,
and was present in court during the two days that the trial lasted. No
sooner had he heard the innocent man condemned to death than he left
Manchester for Sheffield--now for all he knew a double murderer.

It is a question whether, on the night of November 28, Peace met Mrs.
Dyson at an inn in one of the suburbs of Sheffield. In any case, the
next morning, Wednesday, the 29th, to his mother's surprise Peace walked
into her house. He said that he had come to Sheffield for the fair.
The afternoon of that day Peace spent in a public-house at Ecclesall,
entertaining the customers by playing tunes on a poker suspended from
a piece of strong string, from which he made music by beating it with
a short stick. The musician was rewarded by drinks. It took very little
drink to excite Peace. There was dancing, the fun grew fast and furious,
as the strange musician beat out tune after tune on his fantastic
instrument.

At six o'clock the same evening a thin, grey-haired,
insignificant-looking man in an evident state of unusual excitement
called to see the Rev. Mr. Newman, Vicar of Ecclesall, near Banner
Cross. Some five weeks before, this insignificant-looking man had
visited Mr. Newman, and made certain statements in regard to the
character of a Mr. and Mrs. Dyson who had come to live in the parish.
The vicar had asked for proof of these statements. These proofs his
visitor now produced. They consisted of a number of calling cards and
photographs, some of them alleged to be in the handwriting of Mrs.
Dyson, and showing her intimacy with Peace. The man made what purported
to be a confession to Mr. Newman. Dyson, he said, had become jealous of
him, whereupon Peace had suggested to Mrs. Dyson that they should give
her husband something to be jealous about. Out of this proposal their
intimacy had sprung. Peace spoke of Mrs. Dyson in terms of forgiveness,
but his wrath against Dyson was extreme. He complained bitterly that
by taking proceedings against him, Dyson had driven him to break up his
home and become a fugitive in the land. He should follow the Dysons, he
said, wherever they might go; he believed that they were at that moment
intending to take further proceedings against him. As he left, Peace
said that he should not go and see the Dysons that night, but would call
on a friend of his, Gregory, who lived next door to them in Banner Cross
Terrace. It was now about a quarter to seven.

Peace went to Gregory's house, but his friend was not at home. The lure
of the Dysons was irresistible. A little after eight o'clock Peace was
watching the house from a passageway that led up to the backs of the
houses on the terrace. He saw Mrs. Dyson come out of the back door,
and go to an outhouse some few yards distant. He waited. As soon as
she opened the door to come out, Mrs. Dyson found herself confronted
by Peace, holding his revolver in his hand. "Speak," he said, "or I'll
fire." Mrs. Dyson in terror went back. In the meantime Dyson, hearing
the disturbance, came quickly into the yard. Peace made for the passage.
Dyson followed him. Peace fired once, the shot striking the lintel
of the passage doorway. Dyson undaunted, still pursued. Then Peace,
according to his custom, fired a second time, and Dyson fell, shot
through the temple. Mrs. Dyson, who had come into the yard again on
hearing the first shot, rushed to her husband's side, calling out:
"Murder! You villain! You have shot my husband." Two hours later Dyson
was dead.

After firing the second shot Peace had hurried down; the passage into
the roadway. He stood there hesitating a moment, until the cries of Mrs.
Dyson warned him of his danger. He crossed the road, climbed a wall,
and made his way back to Sheffield. There he saw his mother and brother,
told them that he had shot Mr. Dyson, and bade them a hasty good-bye.
He then walked to Attercliffe Railway Station, and took a ticket for
Beverley. Something suspicious in the manner of the booking-clerk made
him change his place of destination. Instead of going to Beverley that
night he got out of the train at Normanton and went on to York. He spent
the remainder of the night in the station yard. He took the first train
in the morning for Beverley, and from there travelled via Collingham
to Hull. He went straight to the eating-house kept by his wife, and
demanded some dinner. He had hardly commenced to eat it when he heard
two detectives come into the front shop and ask his wife if a man called
Charles Peace was lodging with her. Mrs. Peace said that that was
her husband's name, but that she had not seen him for two months. The
detectives proposed to search the house. Some customers in the shop told
them that if they had any business with Mrs. Peace, they ought to go
round to the side door. The polite susceptibility of these customers
gave Peace time to slip up to a back room, get out on to an adjoining
roof, and hide behind a chimney stack, where he remained until the
detectives had finished an exhaustive search. So importunate were the
officers in Hull that once again during the day Peace had to repeat this
experience. For some three weeks, however, he contrived to remain in
Hull. He shaved the grey beard he was wearing at the time of Dyson's
murder, dyed his hair, put on a pair of spectacles, and for the first
time made use of his singular power of contorting his features in such
a way as to change altogether the character of his face. But the hue and
cry after him was unremitting. There was a price of L100 on his head,
and the following description of him was circulated by the police:


"Charles Peace wanted for murder on the night of the 29th inst. He is
thin and slightly built, from fifty-five to sixty years of age. Five
feet four inches or five feet high; grey (nearly white) hair, beard and
whiskers. He lacks use of three fingers of left hand, walks with his
legs rather wide apart, speaks somewhat peculiarly as though his
tongue were too large for his mouth, and is a great boaster. He is
a picture-frame maker. He occasionally cleans and repairs clocks and
watches and sometimes deals in oleographs, engravings and pictures. He
has been in penal servitude for burglary in Manchester. He has lived in
Manchester, Salford, and Liverpool and Hull."


This description was altered later and Peace's age given as forty-six.
As a matter of fact he was only forty-four at this time, but he looked
very much older. Peace had lost one of his fingers. He said that it had
been shot off by a man with whom he had quarrelled, but it was believed
to be more likely that he had himself shot it off accidentally in
handling one of his revolvers. It was to conceal this obvious means of
identification that Peace made himself the false arm which he was in the
habit of wearing. This was of gutta percha, with a hole down the middle
of it into which he passed his arm; at the end was a steel plate to
which was fixed a hook; by means of this hook Peace could wield a fork
and do other dexterous feats.

Marked man as he was, Peace felt it dangerous to stay longer in Hull
than he could help. During the closing days of the year 1876 and the
beginning of 1877, Peace was perpetually on the move. He left Hull for
Doncaster, and from there travelled to London. On arriving at King's
Cross he took the underground railway to Paddington, and from there a
train to Bristol. At the beginning of January he left Bristol for Bath,
and from Bath, in the company of a sergeant of police, travelled by
way of Didcot to Oxford. The officer had in his custody a young woman
charged with stealing L40. Peace and the sergeant discussed the case
during the journey. "He seemed a smart chap," said Peace in relating
the circumstances, "but not smart enough to know me." From Oxford he
went to Birmingham, where he stayed four or five days, then a week in
Derby, and on January 9th he arrived in Nottingham.

Here Peace found a convenient lodging at the house of one, Mrs. Adamson,
a lady who received stolen goods and on occasion indicated or organised
suitable opportunities for acquiring them.

She lived in a low part of the town known as the Marsh. It was at
her house that Peace met the woman who was to become his mistress and
subsequently betray his identity to the police. Her maiden name was
Susan Gray.

She was at this time about thirty-five years of age, described as
"taking" in appearance, of a fair complexion, and rather well educated.
She had led a somewhat chequered married life with a gentleman named
Bailey, from whom she continued in receipt of a weekly allowance until
she passed under the protection of Peace. Her first meeting with her
future lover took place on the occasion of Peace inviting Mrs. Adamson
to dispose of a box of cigars for him, which that good woman did at a
charge of something like thirty per cent. At first Peace gave himself
out to Mrs. Bailey as a hawker, but before long he openly acknowledged
his real character as an accomplished burglar. With characteristic
insistence Peace declared his passion for Mrs. Bailey by threatening
to shoot her if she did not become his. Anxious friends sent for her to
soothe the distracted man. Peace had been drowning care with the help
of Irish whiskey. He asked "his pet" if she were not glad to see him, to
which the lady replied with possible sarcasm: "Oh, particularly, very,
I like you so much." Next day Peace apologised for his rude behaviour
of the previous evening, and so melted the heart of Mrs. Bailey that she
consented to become his mistress, and from that moment discarding the
name of Bailey is known to history as Mrs. Thompson.

Life in Nottingham was varied pleasantly by burglaries carried out with
the help of information supplied by Mrs. Adamson. In the June of 1877
Peace was nearly detected in stealing, at the request of that worthy,
some blankets, but by flourishing his revolver he contrived to get
away, and, soon after, returned for a season to Hull. Here this hunted
murderer, with L100 reward on his head, took rooms for Mrs. Thompson and
himself at the house of a sergeant of police. One day Mrs. Peace, who
was still keeping her shop in Hull, received a pencilled note saying, "I
am waiting to see you just up Anlaby Road." She and her stepson, Willie
Ward, went to the appointed spot, and there to their astonishment stood
her husband, a distinguished figure in black coat and trousers, top
hat, velvet waistcoat, with stick, kid gloves, and a pretty little fox
terrier by his side. Peace told them of his whereabouts in the town, but
did not disclose to them the fact that his mistress was there also. To
the police sergeant with whom he lodged, Peace described himself as
an agent. But a number of sensational and successful burglaries at
the houses of Town Councillors and other well-to-do citizens of Hull
revealed the presence in their midst of no ordinary robber. Peace had
some narrow escapes, but with the help of his revolver, and on one
occasion the pusillanimity of a policeman, he succeeded in getting away
in safety. The bills offering a reward for his capture were still to
be seen in the shop windows of Hull, so after a brief but brilliant
adventure Peace and Mrs. Thompson returned to Nottingham.

Here, as the result of further successful exploits, Peace found a reward
of L50 offered for his capture. On one occasion the detectives came
into the room where Peace and his mistress were in bed. After politely
expressing his surprise at seeing "Mrs. Bailey" in such a situation,
one of the officers asked Peace his name. He gave it as John Ward, and
described himself as a hawker of spectacles. He refused to get up and
dress in the presence of the detectives who were obliging enough to go
downstairs and wait his convenience. Peace seized the opportunity to
slip out of the house and get away to another part of the town. From
there he sent a note to Mrs. Thompson insisting on her joining him.
He soon after left Nottingham, paid another brief visit to Hull, but
finding that his wife's shop was still frequented by the police, whom he
designated freely as "a lot of fools," determined to quit the North for
good and begin life afresh in the ampler and safer field of London.


II

PEACE IN LONDON


Peace's career in London extended over nearly two years, but they were
years of copious achievement. In that comparatively short space of time,
by the exercise of that art, to his natural gifts for which he had now
added the wholesome tonic of experience, Peace passed from a poor and
obscure lodging in a slum in Lambeth to the state and opulence of a
comfortable suburban residence in Peckham. These were the halcyon days
of Peace's enterprise in life. From No. 25 Stangate Street, Lambeth, the
dealer in musical instruments, as Peace now described himself, sallied
forth night after night, and in Camberwell and other parts of South
London reaped the reward of skill and vigilance in entering other
people's houses and carrying off their property. Though in the beginning
there appeared to be but few musical instruments in Stangate Street to
justify his reputed business, "Mr. Thompson," as he now called himself,
explained that he was not wholly dependent on his business, as Mrs.
Thompson "had money."

So successful did the business prove that at the Christmas of 1877 Peace
invited his daughter and her betrothed to come from Hull and spend
the festive season with him. This, in spite of the presence of Mrs.
Thompson, they consented to do. Peace, in a top hat and grey ulster,
showed them the sights of London, always inquiring politely of a
policeman if he found himself in any difficulty. At the end of the visit
Peace gave his consent to his daughter's marriage with Mr. Bolsover,
and before parting gave the young couple some excellent advice. For more
reasons than one Peace was anxious to unite under the same roof Mrs.
Peace and Mrs. Thompson. Things still prospering, Peace found himself
able to remove from Lambeth to Crane Court, Greenwich, and before long
to take a couple of adjoining houses in Billingsgate Street in the
same district. These he furnished in style. In one he lived with Mrs.
Thompson, while Mrs. Peace and her son, Willie, were persuaded after
some difficulty to leave Hull and come to London to dwell in the other.

But Greenwich was not to the taste of Mrs. Thompson. To gratify her
wish, Peace, some time in May, 1877, removed the whole party to a house,
No. 5, East Terrace, Evelina Road, Peckham. He paid thirty pounds a year
for it, and obtained permission to build a stable for his pony and trap.
When asked for his references, Peace replied by inviting the agent to
dine with him at his house in Greenwich, a proceeding that seems to have
removed all doubt from the agent's mind as to the desirability of the
tenant.

This now famous house in Peckham was of the ordinary type of suburban
villa, with basement, ground floor, and one above; there were steps up
to the front door, and a bow window to the front sitting-room. A garden
at the back of the house ran down to the Chatham and Dover railway line.
It was by an entrance at the back that Peace drove his horse and trap
into the stable which he had erected in the garden. Though all living
in the same house, Mrs. Peace, who passed as Mrs. Ward, and her son,
Willie, inhabited the basement, while Peace and Mrs. Thompson occupied
the best rooms on the ground floor. The house was fitted with Venetian
blinds. In the drawing-room stood a good walnut suite of furniture; a
Turkey carpet, gilded mirrors, a piano, an inlaid Spanish guitar, and,
by the side of an elegant table, the beaded slippers of the good
master of the house completed the elegance of the apartment. Everything
confirmed Mr. Thompson's description of himself as a gentleman of
independent means with a taste for scientific inventions. In association
with a person of the name of Brion, Peace did, as a fact, patent an
invention for raising sunken vessels, and it is said that in pursuing
their project, the two men had obtained an interview with Mr. Plimsoll
at the House of Commons. In any case, the Patent Gazette records the
following grant:


"2635 Henry Fersey Brion, 22 Philip Road, Peckham Rye, London, S.E., and
John Thompson, 5 East Terrace, Evelina Road, Peckham Rye, London, S.E.,
for an invention for raising sunken vessels by the displacement of water
within the vessels by air and gases."


At the time of his final capture Peace was engaged on other inventions,
among them a smoke helmet for firemen, an improved brush for washing
railway carriages, and a form of hydraulic tank. To the anxious
policeman who, seeing a light in Mr. Thompson's house in the small hours
of the morning, rang the bell to warn the old gentleman of the possible
presence of burglars, this business of scientific inventions was
sufficient explanation.

Socially Mr. Thompson became quite a figure in the neighbourhood. He
attended regularly the Sunday evening services at the parish church, and
it must have been a matter of anxious concern to dear Mr. Thompson that
during his stay in Peckham the vicarage was broken into by a burglar and
an unsuccessful attempt made to steal the communion plate which was kept
there.

Mr. Thompson was generous in giving and punctual in paying. He had his
eccentricities. His love of birds and animals was remarkable. Cats,
dogs, rabbits, guinea-pigs, canaries, parrots and cockatoos all found
hospitality under his roof. It was certainly eccentricity in Mr.
Thompson that he should wear different coloured wigs; and that his dark
complexion should suggest the use of walnut juice. His love of music was
evinced by the number of violins, banjoes, guitars, and other musical
instruments that adorned his drawing-room. Tea and music formed the
staple of the evening entertainments which Mr. and Mrs. Thompson would
give occasionally to friendly neighbours. Not that the pleasures of
conversation were neglected wholly in favour of art. The host was
a voluble and animated talker, his face and body illustrating
by appropriate twists and turns the force of his comments. The
Russo-Turkish war, then raging, was a favourite theme of Mr. Thompson's.
He asked, as we are still asking, what Christianity and civilisation
mean by countenancing the horrors of war. He considered the British
Government in the highest degree guilty in supporting the cruel Turks, a
people whose sobriety seemed to him to be their only virtue, against
the Christian Russians. He was confident that our Ministers would be
punished for opposing the only Power which had shown any sympathy with
suffering races. About ten o'clock Mr. Thompson, whose health, he said,
could not stand late hours, would bid his guests good night, and by
half-past ten the front door of No. 5, East Terrace, Evelina Road, would
be locked and bolted, and the house plunged in darkness.

Not that it must be supposed that family life at No. 5, East Terrace,
was without its jars. These were due chiefly to the drunken habits of
Mrs. Thompson. Peace was willing to overlook his mistress' failing
as long as it was confined to the house. But Mrs. Thompson had an
unfortunate habit of slipping out in an intoxicated condition, and
chattering with the neighbours. As she was the repository of many a
dangerous secret the inconvenience of her habit was serious. Peace was
not the man to hesitate in the face of danger. On these occasions
Mrs. Thompson was followed by Peace or his wife, brought back home and
soundly beaten. To Hannah Peace there must have been some satisfaction
in spying on her successful rival, for, in her own words, Peace never
refused his mistress anything; he did not care what she cost him in
dress; "she could swim in gold if she liked." Mrs. Thompson herself
admitted that with the exception of such punishment as she brought on
herself by her inebriety, Peace was always fond of her, and treated her
with great kindness. It was she to whom he would show with pride the
proceeds of his nightly labours, to whom he would look for a smile when
he returned home from his expeditions, haggard and exhausted

Through all dangers and difficulties the master was busy in the practice
of his art. Night after night, with few intervals of repose, he would
sally forth on a plundering adventure. If the job was a distant one, he
would take his pony and trap. Peace was devoted to his pony, Tommy,
and great was his grief when at the end of six months' devotion to duty
Tommy died after a few days' sickness, during which his master attended
him with unremitting care. Tommy had been bought in Greenwich for
fourteen guineas, part of a sum of two hundred and fifty pounds which
Peace netted from a rich haul of silver and bank-notes taken from a
house in Denmark Hill. Besides the pony and trap, Peace would take with
him on these expeditions a violin case containing his tools; at other
times they would be stuffed into odd pockets made for the purpose in
his trousers. These tools consisted of ten in all--a skeleton key, two
pick-locks, a centre-bit, gimlet, gouge, chisel, vice jemmy and knife; a
portable ladder, a revolver and life preserver completed his equipment.

The range of Peace's activities extended as far as Southampton,
Portsmouth and Southsea; but the bulk of his work was done in
Blackheath, Streatham, Denmark Hill, and other suburbs of South London.
Many dramatic stories are told of his exploits, but they rest for the
most part on slender foundation. On one occasion, in getting on to a
portico, he fell, and was impaled on some railings, fortunately in no
vital part. His career as a burglar in London lasted from the beginning
of the year 1877 until October, 1878. During that time this wanted man,
under the very noses of the police, exercised with complete success his
art as a burglar, working alone, depending wholly on his own mental and
physical gifts, disposing in absolute secrecy of the proceeds of his
work, and living openly the life of a respectable and industrious old
gentleman.

All the while the police were busily seeking Charles Peace, the murderer
of Mr. Dyson. Once or twice they came near to capturing him. On one
occasion a detective who had known Peace in Yorkshire met him in
Farringdon Road, and pursued him up the steps of Holborn Viaduct, but
just as the officer, at the top of the steps, reached out and was on the
point of grabbing his man, Peace with lightning agility slipped through
his fingers and disappeared. The police never had a shadow of suspicion
that Mr. Thompson of Peckham was Charles Peace of Sheffield. They knew
the former only as a polite and chatty old gentleman of a scientific
turn of mind, who drove his own pony and trap, and had a fondness for
music and keeping pet animals.

Peace made the mistake of outstaying his welcome in the neighbourhood
of South-East London. Perhaps he hardly realised the extent to which
his fame was spreading. During the last three months of Peace's career,
Blackheath was agog at the number of successful burglaries committed
in the very midst of its peaceful residents. The vigilance of the local
police was aroused, the officers on night duty were only too anxious to
effect the capture of the mysterious criminal.

About two o'clock in the morning of October 10, 1878, a police
constable, Robinson by name, saw a light appear suddenly in a window at
the back of a house in St. John's Park, Blackheath, the residence of a
Mr. Burness. Had the looked-for opportunity arrived? Was the mysterious
visitor, the disturber of the peace of Blackheath, at his burglarious
employment? Without delay Robinson summoned to his aid two of his
colleagues. One of them went round to the front of the house and rang
the bell, the other waited in the road outside, while Robinson stayed in
the garden at the back. No sooner had the bell rung than Robinson saw a
man come from the dining-room window which opened on to the garden, and
make quickly down the path. Robinson followed him. The man turned; "Keep
back!" he said, "or by God I'll shoot you!" Robinson came on. The man
fired three shots from a revolver, all of which passed close to the
officer's head. Robinson made another rush for him, the man fired
another shot. It missed its mark. The constable closed with his would-be
assassin, and struck him in the face. "I'll settle you this time," cried
the man, and fired a fifth shot, which went through Robinson's arm just
above the elbow. But, in spite of his wound, the valiant officer held
his prisoner, succeeded in flinging him to the ground, and catching hold
of the revolver that hung round the burglar's wrist, hit him on the head
with it. Immediately after the other two constables came to the help of
their colleague, and the struggling desperado was secured.

Little did the police as they searched their battered and moaning
prisoner realise the importance of their capture. When next morning
Peace appeared before the magistrate at Greenwich Police Court he was
not described by name--he had refused to give any--but as a half-caste
about sixty years of age, of repellant aspect. He was remanded for a
week. The first clue to the identity of their prisoner was afforded
by a letter which Peace, unable apparently to endure the loneliness and
suspense of prison any longer, wrote to his co-inventor Mr. Brion. It is
dated November 2, and is signed "John Ward." Peace was disturbed at the
absence of all news from his family. Immediately after his arrest, the
home in Peckham had been broken up. Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Peace, taking
with them some large boxes, had gone first to the house of a sister of
Mrs. Thompson's in Nottingham, and a day or two later Mrs. Peace had
left Nottingham for Sheffield. There she went to a house in Hazel Road,
occupied by her son-in-law Bolsover, a working collier.(10)


     (10) Later, Mrs. Peace was arrested and charged with being in possession
of stolen property. She was taken to London and tried at the Old Bailey
before Mr. Commissioner Kerr, but acquitted on the ground of her having
acted under the compulsion of her husband.


It was no doubt to get news of his family that Peace wrote to Brion. But
the letters are sufficiently ingenious. Peace represents himself as a
truly penitent sinner who has got himself into a most unfortunate and
unexpected "mess" by giving way to drink. The spelling of the letters is
exaggeratedly illiterate. He asks Mr. Brion to take pity on him and not
despise him as "his own famery has don," to write him a letter to "hease
his trobel hart," if possible to come and see him. Mr. Brion complied
with the request of the mysterious "John Ward," and on arriving at
Newgate where Peace was awaiting trial, found himself in the presence of
his friend and colleague, Mr. Thompson.

In the meantime the police were getting hot on the scent of the identity
of "John Ward" with the great criminal who in spite of all their efforts
had eluded them for two years. The honour and profit of putting the
police on the right scent were claimed by Mrs. Thompson. To her Peace
had contrived to get a letter conveyed about the same time that he wrote
to Mr. Brion. It is addressed to his "dearly beloved wife." He asks
pardon for the "drunken madness" that has involved him in his present
trouble, and gives her the names of certain witnesses whom he would wish
to be called to prove his independent means and his dealings in musical
instruments. It is, he writes, his first offence, and as he has "never
been in prison before," begs her not to feel it a disgrace to come and
see him there. But Peace was leaning on a broken reed. Loyalty does not
appear to have been Susan Thompson's strong point. In her own words she
"was not of the sentimental sort." The "traitress Sue," as she is called
by chroniclers of the time, had fallen a victim to the wiles of the
police. Since, after Peace's arrest, she had been in possession of a
certain amount of stolen property, it was easier no doubt to persuade
her to be frank.

In any case, we find that on February 5, 1879, the day after Peace had
been sentenced to death for the murder of Dyson, Mrs. Thompson appealed
to the Treasury for the reward of L100 offered for Peace's conviction.
She based her application on information which she said she had supplied
to the police officers in charge of the case on November 5 in the
previous year, the very day on which Peace had first written to her from
Newgate. In reply to her letter the Treasury referred "Mrs. S. Bailey,
alias Thompson," to the Home Office, but whether she received from that
office the price of blood history does not relate.

The police scouted the idea that any revelation of hers had assisted
them to identify "John Ward" with Charles Peace. They said that it
was information given them in Peckham, no doubt by Mr. Brion, who, on
learning the deplorable character of his coadjutor, had placed himself
unreservedly in their hands, which first set them on the track. From
Peckham they went to Nottingham, where they no doubt came across Sue
Thompson, and thence to Sheffield, where on November 6 they visited
the house in Hazel Road, occupied by Mrs. Peace and her daughter, Mrs.
Bolsover. There they found two of the boxes which Mrs. Peace had brought
with her from Peckham. Besides stolen property, these boxes contained
evidence of the identity of Ward with Peace. A constable who had known
Peace well in Sheffield was sent to Newgate, and taken into the yard
where the prisoners awaiting trial were exercising. As they passed
round, the constable pointed to the fifth man: "That's Peace," he said,
"I'd know him anywhere." The man left the ranks and, coming up to the
constable, asked earnestly, "What do you want me for?" but the Governor
ordered him to go on with his walk.

It was as John Ward, alias Charles Peace, that Peace, on November 19,
1878, was put on his trial for burglary and the attempted murder of
Police Constable Robinson, at the Old Bailey before Mr. Justice Hawkins.
His age was given in the calendar as sixty, though Peace was actually
forty-six. The evidence against the prisoner was clear enough. All Mr.
Montagu Williams could urge in his defence was that Peace had never
intended to kill the officer, merely to frighten him. The jury found
Peace guilty of attempted murder. Asked if he had anything to say why
judgment should not be passed upon him, he addressed the Judge. He
protested that he had not been fairly dealt with, that he never intended
to kill the prosecutor, that the pistol was one that went off very
easily, and that the last shot had been fired by accident. "I really did
not know," he said, "that the pistol was loaded, and I hope, my lord,
that you will have mercy on me. I feel that I have disgraced myself, I
am not fit either to live or die. I am not prepared to meet my God, but
still I feel that my career has been made to appear much worse than it
really is. Oh, my lord, do have mercy on me; do give me one chance of
repenting and of preparing to meet my God. Do, my lord, have mercy on
me; and I assure you that you shall never repent it. As you hope for
mercy yourself at the hands of the great God, do have mercy on me, and
give me a chance of redeeming my character and preparing myself to meet
my God. I pray, and beseech you to have mercy upon me."

Peace's assumption of pitiable senility, sustained throughout the trial,
though it imposed on Sir Henry Hawkins, failed to melt his heart. He
told Peace that he did not believe his statement that he had fired the
pistol merely to frighten the constable; had not Robinson guarded
his head with his arm he would have been wounded fatally, and Peace
condemned to death. He did not consider it necessary, he said, to make
an inquiry into Peace's antecedents; he was a desperate burglar, and
there was an end of the matter. Notwithstanding his age, Mr. Justice
Hawkins felt it his duty to sentence him to penal servitude for life.
The severity of the sentence was undoubtedly a painful surprise
to Peace; to a man of sixty years of age it would be no doubt less
terrible, but to a man of forty-six it was crushing.

Not that Peace was fated to serve any great part of his sentence.

With as little delay as possible he was to be called on to answer to
the murder of Arthur Dyson. The buxom widow of the murdered man had been
found in America, whither she had returned after her husband's death.
She was quite ready to come to England to give evidence against
her husband's murderer. On January 17, 1879, Peace was taken from
Pentonville prison, where he was serving his sentence, and conveyed by
an early morning train to Sheffield. There at the Town Hall he appeared
before the stipendiary magistrate, and was charged with the murder of
Arthur Dyson. When he saw Mrs. Dyson enter the witness box and tell her
story of the crime, he must have realised that his case was desperate.
Her cross-examination was adjourned to the next hearing, and Peace was
taken back to London. On the 22nd, the day of the second hearing in
Sheffield, an enormous crowd had assembled outside the Town Hall. Inside
the court an anxious and expectant audiience{sic}, among them Mrs.
Dyson, in the words of a contemporary reporter, "stylish and cheerful,"
awaited the appearance of the protagonist. Great was the disappointment
and eager the excitement when the stipendiary came into the court about
a quarter past ten and stated that Peace had attempted to escape that
morning on the journey from London to Sheffield, and that in consequence
of his injuries the case would be adjourned for eight days.

What had happened was this. Peace had left King's Cross by the 5.15
train that morning, due to arrive at Sheffield at 8.45. From the very
commencement of the journey he had been wilful and troublesome. He kept
making excuses for leaving the carriage whenever the train stopped.
To obviate this nuisance the two warders, in whose charge he was, had
provided themselves with little bags which Peace could use when he
wished and then throw out of the window. Just after the train passed
Worksop, Peace asked for one of the bags. When the window was lowered
to allow the bag to be thrown away, Peace with lightning agility took a
flying leap through it. One of the warders caught him by the left foot.
Peace, hanging from the carriage, grasped the footboard with his hands
and kept kicking the warder as hard as he could with his right foot.
The other warder, unable to get to the window to help his colleague, was
making vain efforts to stop the train by pulling the communication cord.
For two miles the train ran on, Peace struggling desperately to escape.
At last he succeeded in kicking off his left shoe, and dropped on to the
line. The train ran on another mile until, with the assistance of some
gentlemen in other carriages, the warders were able to get it pulled up.
They immediately hurried back along the line, and there, near a place
called Kineton Park, they found their prisoner lying in the footway,
apparently unconscious and bleeding from a severe wound in the scalp. A
slow train from Sheffield stopped to pick up the injured man. As he was
lifted into the guard's van, he asked them to cover him up as he was
cold. On arriving at Sheffield, Peace was taken to the Police Station
and there made as comfortable as possible in one of the cells. Even then
he had energy enough to be troublesome over taking the brandy ordered
for him by the surgeon, until one of the officers told "Charley" they
would have none of his hanky-panky, and he had got to take it. "All
right," said Peace, "give me a minute," after which he swallowed
contentedly a couple of gills of the genial spirit.

Peace's daring feat was not, according to his own account, a mere
attempt to escape from the clutches of the law; it was noble and Roman
in its purpose. This is what he told his stepson, Willie Ward: "I saw
from the way I was guarded all the way down from London and all the way
back, when I came for my first trial, that I could not get away from the
warders, and I knew I could not jump from an express train without being
killed. I took a look at Darnall as I went down and as I went back, and
after I was put in my cell, I thought it all over. I felt that I could
not get away, and then I made up my mind to kill myself. I got two bits
of paper and pricked on them the words, 'Bury me at Darnall. God bless
you all!' With a bit of black dirt that I found on the floor of my cell
I wrote the same words on another piece of paper, and then I hid them in
my clothes. My hope was that, when I jumped from the train I should be
cut to pieces under the wheels. Then I should have been taken to the
Duke of York (a public-house at Darnall) and there would have been an
inquest over me. As soon as the inquest was over you would have claimed
my body, found the pieces of paper, and then you would have buried me at
Darnall."

This statement of Peace is no doubt in the main correct. But it is
difficult to believe that there was not present to his mind the sporting
chance that he might not be killed in leaping from the train, in which
event he would no doubt have done his best to get away, trusting to his
considerable powers of ingenious disguise to elude pursuit. But such a
chance was remote. Peace had faced boldly the possibility of a dreadful
death.

With that strain of domestic sentiment, which would appear to have been
a marked characteristic of his family, Peace was the more ready to
cheat the gallows in the hope of being by that means buried decently at
Darnall. It was at Darnall that he had spent some months of comparative
calm in his tempestuous career, and it was at Darnall that he had first
met Mrs. Dyson. Another and more practical motive that may have urged
Peace to attempt to injure seriously, if not kill himself, was the
hope of thereby delaying his trial. If the magisterial investigation
in Sheffield were completed before the end of January, Peace could be
committed for trial to the ensuing Leeds Assizes which commenced in the
first week in February. If he were injured too seriously, this would not
be possible. Here again he was doomed to disappointment.

Peace recovered so well from the results of his adventure on the railway
that the doctor pronounced him fit to appear for his second examination
before the magistrate on January 30. To avoid excitement, both on
the part of the prisoner and the public, the court sat in one of the
corridors of the Town Hall. The scene is described as dismal, dark and
cheerless. The proceedings took place by candlelight, and Peace, who was
seated in an armchair, complained frequently of the cold. At other times
he moaned and groaned and protested against the injustice with which
he was being treated. But the absence of any audience rather dashed the
effect of his laments.

The most interesting part of the proceedings was the cross-examination
of Mrs. Dyson by Mr. Clegg, the prisoner's solicitor.

Its purpose was to show that Mrs. Dyson had been on more intimate terms
with Peace than she was ready to admit, and that Dyson had been shot
by Peace in the course of a struggle, in which the former had been the
aggressor.

In the first part of his task Mr. Clegg met with some success. Mrs.
Dyson, whose memory was certainly eccentric--she could not, she said,
remember the year in which she had been married--was obliged to admit
that she had been in the habit of going to Peace's house, that she had
been alone with him to public-houses and places of entertainment, and
that she and Peace had been photographed together during the summer fair
at Sheffield. She could not "to her knowledge" recollect having told the
landlord of a public-house to charge her drink to Peace.

A great deal of Mrs. Dyson's cross-examination turned on a bundle of
letters that had been found near the scene of Dyson's murder on the
morning following the crime. These letters consisted for the most part
of notes, written in pencil on scraps of paper, purporting to have been
sent from Mrs. Dyson to Peace. In many of them she asks for money to get
drink, others refer to opportunities for their meetings in the absence
of Dyson; there are kind messages to members of Peace's family, his wife
and daughter, and urgent directions to Peace to hold his tongue and not
give ground for suspicion as to their relations. This bundle of letters
contained also the card which Dyson had thrown into Peace's garden
requesting him not to interfere with his family. According to the theory
of the defence, these letters had been written by Mrs. Dyson to Peace,
and went to prove the intimacy of their relations. At the inquest after
her husband's murder, Mrs. Dyson had been questioned by the coroner
about these letters. She denied that she had ever written to Peace; in
fact, she said, she "never did write." It was stated that Dyson himself
had seen the letters, and declared them to be forgeries written by Peace
or members of his family for the purpose of annoyance. Nevertheless,
before the Sheffield magistrate Mr. Clegg thought it his duty to
cross-examine Mrs. Dyson closely as to their authorship. He asked her
to write out a passage from one of them: "You can give me something as a
keepsake if you like, but I don't like to be covetous, and to take them
from your wife and daughter. Love to all!" Mrs. Dyson refused to admit
any likeness between what she had written and the handwriting of the
letter in question. Another passage ran: "Will see you as soon as I
possibly can. I think it would be easier after you move; he won't watch
so. The r--g fits the little finger. Many thanks and love to--Jennie
(Peace's daughter Jane). I will tell you what I thought of when I see
you about arranging matters. Excuse this scribbling." In answer to Mr.
Clegg, Mrs. Dyson admitted that Peace had given her a ring, which she
had worn for a short time on her little finger.

Another letter ran: "If you have a note for me, send now whilst he is
out; but you must not venture, for he is watching, and you cannot be too
careful. Hope your foot is better. I went to Sheffield yesterday, but
I could not see you anywhere. Were you out? Love to Jane." Mrs. Dyson
denied that she had known of an accident which Peace had had to his foot
at this time. In spite of the ruling of the magistrate that Mr.
Clegg had put forward quite enough, if true, to damage Mrs. Dyson's
credibility, he continued to press her as to her authorship of these
notes and letters, but Mrs. Dyson was firm in her repudiation of
them. She was equally firm in denying that anything in the nature of a
struggle had taken place between Peace and her husband previous to his
murder.

At the conclusion of Mrs. Dyson's evidence the prisoner was committed to
take his trial at the Leeds Assizes, which commenced the week following.
Peace, who had groaned and moaned and constantly interrupted the
proceedings, protested his innocence, and complained that his witnesses
had not been called. The apprehension with which this daring malefactor
was regarded by the authorities is shown by this clandestine hearing
of his case in a cold corridor of the Town Hall, and the rapidity with
which his trial followed on his committal. There is an appearance almost
of precipitation in the haste with which Peace was bustled to his doom.
After his committal he was taken to Wakefield Prison, and a few days
later to Armley Jail, there to await his trial.

This began on February 4, and lasted one day. Mr. Justice Lopes, who had
tried vainly to persuade the Manchester Grand Jury to throw out the
bill in the case of the brothers Habron, was the presiding judge. Mr.
Campbell Foster, Q.C., led for the prosecution. Peace was defended by
Mr. Frank Lockwood, then rising into that popular success at the bar
which some fifteen years later made him Solicitor-General, and but for
his premature death would have raised him to even higher honours in his
profession.

In addressing the jury, both Mr. Campbell Foster and Mr. Lockwood took
occasion to protest against the recklessness with which the press of
the day, both high and low, had circulated stories and rumours about
the interesting convict. As early as November in 1878 one leading London
daily newspaper had said that "it was now established beyond doubt that
the burglar captured by Police Constable Robinson was one and the same
as the Banner Cross murderer." Since then, as the public excitement grew
and the facts of Peace's extraordinary career came to light, the press
had responded loyally to the demands of the greedy lovers of sensation,
and piled fiction on fact with generous profusion. "Never," said Mr.
Lockwood, "in the whole course of his experience--and he defied any
of his learned friends to quote an experience--had there been such an
attempt made on the part of those who should be most careful of all
others to preserve the liberties of their fellowmen and to preserve the
dignity of the tribunals of justice to determine the guilt of a man."
Peace exclaimed "Hear, hear!" as Mr. Lockwood went on to say that "for
the sake of snatching paltry pence from the public, these persons had
wickedly sought to prejudice the prisoner's life." Allowing for Mr.
Lockwood's zeal as an advocate, there can be no question that, had
Peace chosen or been in a position to take proceedings, more than one
newspaper had at this time laid itself open to prosecution for contempt
of Court. The Times was not far wrong in saying that, since Muller
murdered Mr. Briggs on the North London Railway and the poisonings of
William Palmer, no criminal case had created such excitement as that of
Charles Peace. The fact that property seemed to be no more sacred to him
than life aggravated in a singular degree the resentment of a commercial
people.

The first witness called by the prosecution was Mrs. Dyson. She
described how on the night of November 29, 1876, she had come out of
the outhouse in the yard at the back of her house, and found herself
confronted by Peace holding a revolver; how he said: "Speak, or I'll
fire!" and the sequence of events already related up to the moment when
Dyson fell, shot in the temple.

Mr. Lockwood commenced his cross-examination of Mrs. Dyson by
endeavouring to get from her an admission; the most important to the
defence, that Dyson had caught hold of Peace after the first shot had
been fired, and that in the struggle which ensued, the revolver had gone
off by accident. But he was not very successful. He put it to Mrs. Dyson
that before the magistrate at Sheffield she had said: "I can't say
my husband did not get hold of the prisoner." "Put in the little
word 'try,' please," answered Mrs. Dyson. In spite of Mr. Lockwood's
questions, she maintained that, though her husband may have attempted to
get hold of Peace, he did not succeed in doing so. As she was the only
witness to the shooting there was no one to contradict her statement.

Mr. Lockwood fared better when he came to deal with the relations of
Mrs. Dyson with Peace previous to the crime. Mrs. Dyson admitted that
in the spring of 1876 her husband had objected to her friendship with
Peace, and that nevertheless, in the following summer, she and Peace
had been photographed together at the Sheffield fair. She made a vain
attempt to escape from such an admission by trying to shift the occasion
of the summer fair to the previous year, 1875, but Mr. Lockwood put
it to her that she had not come to Darnall, where she first met Peace,
until the end of that year. Finally he drove her to say that she could
not remember when she came to Darnall, whether in 1873, 1874, 1875, or
1876. She admitted that she had accepted a ring from Peace, but could
not remember whether she had shown it to her husband. She had been
perhaps twice with Peace to the Marquis of Waterford public-house, and
once to the Star Music Hall. She could not swear one way or the other
whether she had charged to Peace's account drink consumed by her at an
inn in Darnall called the Half-way House. Confronted with a little girl
and a man, whom Mr. Lockwood suggested she had employed to carry notes
to Peace, Mrs. Dyson said that these were merely receipts for pictures
which he had framed for her. On the day before her husband's murder,
Mrs. Dyson was at the Stag Hotel at Sharrow with a little boy belonging
to a neighbour. A man followed her in and sat beside her, and afterwards
followed her out. In answer to Mr. Lockwood, Mrs. Dyson would "almost
swear" the man was not Peace; he had spoken to her, but she could not
remember whether she had spoken to him or not. She denied that this man
had said to her that he would come and see her the next night. As
the result of a parting shot Mr. Lockwood obtained from Mrs. Dyson a
reluctant admission that she had been "slightly inebriated" at the
Half-way House in Darnall, but had not to her knowledge been turned
out of the house on that account. "You may not have known you were
inebriated?" suggested Mr. Lockwood. "I always know what I am doing,"
was Mrs. Dyson's reply, to which an unfriendly critic might have replied
that she did not apparently know with anything like certainty what she
had been doing during the last three or four years. In commenting on
the trial the following day, the Times stigmatised as "feeble" the
prevarications by which Mrs. Dyson tried to explain away her intimacy
with Peace. In this part of his cross-examination Mr. Lockwood had made
it appear at least highly probable that there had been a much closer
relationship between Mrs. Dyson and Peace than the former was willing to
acknowledge.

The evidence of Mrs. Dyson was followed by that of five persons who had
either seen Peace in the neighbourhood of Banner Cross Terrace on the
night of the murder, or heard the screams and shots that accompanied it.
A woman, Mrs. Gregory, whose house was between that of the Dysons and
the passage in which Dyson was shot, said that she had heard the noise
of the clogs Mrs. Dyson was wearing as she went across the yard. A
minute later she heard a scream. She opened her back door and saw Dyson
standing by his own. She told him to go to his wife. She then went back
into her house, and almost directly after heard two shots, followed by
another scream, but no sound as of any scuffling.

Another witness was a labourer named Brassington. He was a stranger to
Peace, but stated that about eight o'clock on the night of the murder
a man came up to him outside the Banner Cross Hotel, a few yards from
Dyson's house. He was standing under a gas lamp, and it was a bright
moonlight night. The man asked him if he knew of any strange people who
had come to live in the neighbourhood. Brassington answered that he
did not. The man then produced a bundle of letters which he asked
Brassington to read. But Brassington declined, as reading was not one of
his accomplishments. The man then said that "he would make it a warm 'un
for those strange folks before morning--he would shoot both of them,"
and went off in the direction of Dyson's house. Brassington swore
positively that Peace was the stranger who had accosted him that night,
and Mr. Lockwood failed to shake him in his evidence. Nor could Mr.
Lockwood persuade the surgeon who was called to Dyson at the time of his
death to admit that the marks on the nose and chin of the dead man
could have been caused by a blow; they were merely abrasions of the skin
caused by the wounded man falling to the ground.

Evidence was then given as to threats uttered by Peace against the
Dysons in the July of 1876, and as to his arrest at Blackheath in the
October of 1878. The revolver taken from Peace that night was produced,
and it was shown that the rifling of the bullet extracted from Dyson's
head was the same as that of the bullet fired from the revolver carried
by Peace at the time of his capture.

Mr. Campbell Foster wanted to put in as evidence the card that Dyson
had flung into Peace's garden at Darnall requesting him not to interfere
with his family. This card had been found among the bundle of letters
dropped by Peace near the scene of the murder. Mr. Lockwood objected to
the admission of the card unless all the letters were admitted at the
same time. The Judge ruled that both the card and the letters were
inadmissible, as irrelevant to the issue; Mr. Lockwood had, he said,
very properly cross-examined Mrs. Dyson on these letters to test her
credibility, but he was bound by her answers and could not contradict
her by introducing them as evidence in the case.

Mr. Lockwood in his address to the jury did his best to persuade them
that the death of Dyson was the accidental result of a struggle between
Peace and himself. He suggested that Mrs. Dyson had left her house that
night for the purpose of meeting Peace, and that Dyson, who was jealous
of his wife's intimacy with him, had gone out to find her; that Dyson,
seeing Peace, had caught hold of him; and that the revolver had gone
off accidentally as Dyson tried to wrest it from his adversary.
He repudiated the suggestion of Mr. Foster that the persons he had
confronted with Mrs. Dyson in the course of his cross-examination had
been hired for a paltry sum to come into court and lie.

Twice, both at the beginning and the end of his speech, Mr. Lockwood
urged as a reason for the jury being tender in taking Peace's life that
he was in such a state of wickedness as to be quite unprepared to meet
death. Both times that his counsel put forward this curious plea, Peace
raised his eyes to heaven and exclaimed "I am not fit to die."

Mr. Justice Lopes in summing up described as an "absolute surmise" the
theory of the accidental discharge of the pistol. He asked the jury to
take Peace's revolver in their hands and try the trigger, so as to see
for themselves whether it was likely to go off accidentally or not. He
pointed out that the pistol produced might not have been the pistol used
at Banner Cross; at the same time the bullet fired in November, 1876,
bore marks such as would have been produced had it been fired from the
pistol taken from Peace at Blackheath in October, 1878. He said that Mr.
Lockwood had been perfectly justified in his attempt to discredit the
evidence of Mrs. Dyson, but the case did not rest on her evidence alone.
In her evidence as to the threats uttered by Peace in July, 1876, Mrs.
Dyson was corroborated by three other witnesses. In the Judge's opinion
it was clearly proved that no struggle or scuffle had taken place
before the murder. If the defence, he concluded, rested on no solid
foundation, then the jury must do their duty to the community at large
and by the oath they had sworn.

It was a quarter past seven when the jury retired. Ten minutes later
they came back into court with a verdict of guilty. Asked if he had
anything to say, Peace in a faint voice replied, "It is no use my
saying anything." The Judge, declining very properly to aggravate the
prisoner's feelings by "a recapitulation of any portion of the details
of what I fear, I can only call your criminal career," passed on him
sentence of death. Peace accepted his fate with composure.

Before we proceed to describe the last days of Peace on earth, let us
finish with the two women who had succeeded Mrs. Peace in his ardent
affections.

A few days after Peace's execution Mrs. Dyson left England for America,
but before going she left behind her a narrative intended to contradict
the imputations which she felt had been made against her moral
character. An Irishwoman by birth, she said that she had gone to America
when she was fifteen years old.

There she met and married Dyson, a civil engineer on the Atlantic and
Great Western Railway. Theirs was a rough and arduous life. But Mrs.
Dyson was thoroughly happy in driving her husband about in a buggy among
bears and creeks. She did not know fear and loved danger: "My husband
loved me and I loved him, and in his company and in driving him about in
this wild kind of fashion I derived much pleasure." However, Mr. Dyson's
health broke down, and he was obliged to return to England. It was at
Darnall that the fatal acquaintance with Peace began. Living next
door but one to the Dysons, Peace took the opportunity of introducing
himself, and Mr. Dyson "being a gentleman," took polite notice of his
advances. He became a constant visitor at the house. But after a time
Peace began to show that he was not the gentleman Mr. Dyson was. He
disgusted the latter by offering to show him improper pictures and "the
sights of the town" of Sheffield.

The Dysons tried to shake off the unwelcome acquaintance, but that was
easier said than done. By this time Peace had set his heart on making
Mrs. Dyson leave her husband. He kept trying to persuade her to go to
Manchester with him, where he would take a cigar or picture shop, to
which Mrs. Dyson, in fine clothes and jewelry, should lend the charm of
her comely presence. He offered her a sealskin jacket, yards of silk,
a gold watch. She should, he said, live in Manchester like a lady, to
which Mrs. Dyson replied coldly that she had always lived like one and
should continue to do so quite independently of him. But Peace would
listen to no refusal, however decided its tone. Dyson threw over
the card into Peace's garden. This only served to aggravate his
determination to possess himself of the wife. He would listen at
keyholes, leer in at the window, and follow Mrs. Dyson wherever she
went. When she was photographed at the fair, she found that Peace had
stood behind her chair and by that means got himself included in the
picture. At times he had threatened her with a revolver. On one occasion
when he was more insulting than usual, Mrs. Dyson forgot her fear of him
and gave him a thrashing. Peace threatened "to make her so that neither
man nor woman should look at her, and then he would have her all to
himself." It was with some purpose of this kind, Mrs. Dyson suggested,
that Peace stole a photograph of herself out of a locket, intending to
make some improper use of it. At last, in desperation, the Dysons moved
to Banner Cross. From the day of their arrival there until the murder,
Mrs. Dyson never saw Peace. She denied altogether having been in his
company the night before the murder. The letters were "bare forgeries,"
written by Peace or members of his family to get her into their power.

Against the advice of all her friends Mrs. Dyson had come back from
America to give evidence against Peace. To the detective who saw her at
Cleveland she said, "I will go back if I have to walk on my head all the
way"; and though she little knew what she would have to go through in
giving her evidence, she would do it again under the circumstances. "My
opinion is," she said, "that Peace is a perfect demon--not a man. I am
told that since he has been sentenced to death he has become a changed
character. That I don't believe. The place to which the wicked go is not
bad enough for him. I think its occupants, bad as they might be, are too
good to be where he is. No matter where he goes, I am satisfied that
there will be hell. Not even a Shakespeare could adequately paint such a
man as he has been. My lifelong regret will be that I ever knew him."

With these few earnest words Mrs. Dyson quitted the shores of England,
hardly clearing up the mystery of her actual relations with Peace.

A woman with whom Mrs. Dyson very much resented finding herself
classed--inebriety would appear to have been their only common
weakness--was Mrs. Thompson, the "traitress Sue." In spite of the fact
that on February 5 Mrs. Thompson had applied to the Treasury for L100,
blood money due her for assisting the police in the identification of
Peace, she was at the same time carrying on a friendly correspondence
with her lover and making attempts to see him. Peace had written to her
before his trial hoping she would not forsake him; "you have been my
bosom friend, and you have ofttimes said you loved me, that you would
die for me." He asked her to sell some goods which he had left with
her in order to raise money for his defence. The traitress replied on
January 27 that she had already sold everything and shared the proceeds
with Mrs. Peace. "You are doing me great injustice," she wrote, "by
saying that I have been out to 'work' with you. Do not die with such a
base falsehood on your conscience, for you know I am young and have my
living and character to redeem. I pity you and myself to think we should
have met." After his condemnation Mrs. Thompson made repeated efforts
to see Peace, coming to Leeds for the purpose. Peace wrote a letter on
February 9 to his "poor Sue," asking her to come to the prison. But,
partly at the wish of Peace's relatives and for reasons of their own, a
permission given Mrs. Thompson by the authorities to visit the convict
was suddenly withdrawn, and she never saw him again.



III

HIS TRIAL AND EXECUTION


In the lives of those famous men who have perished on the scaffold
their behaviour during the interval between their condemnation and their
execution has always been the subject of curiosity and interest.

It may be said at once that nothing could have been more deeply
religious, more sincerely repentant, more Christian to all appearances
than Peace's conduct and demeanour in the last weeks of his life. He
threw himself into the work of atonement with the same uncompromising
zeal and energy that he had displayed as a burglar. By his death a truly
welcome and effective recruit was lost to the ranks of the contrite
and converted sinners. However powerless as a controlling force--and he
admitted it--his belief in God and the devil may have been in the past,
that belief was assured and confident, and in the presence of death
proclaimed itself with vigour, not in words merely, but in deeds.

In obedience to the wishes of his family, Peace had refrained from
seeing Sue Thompson. This was at some sacrifice, for he wished very much
to see her and to the last, though he knew that she had betrayed him,
sent her affectionate and forgiving messages. These were transmitted
to Sue by Mr. Brion. This disingenuous gentleman was a fellow-applicant
with Sue to the Treasury for pecuniary recognition of his efforts in
bringing about the identification of Peace, and furnishing the police
with information as to the convict's disposal of his stolen property. In
his zeal he had even gone so far as to play the role of an accomplice of
Peace, and by this means discovered a place in Petticoat Lane where the
burglar got rid of some of his booty.

After Peace's condemnation Mr. Brion visited him in Armley Jail. His
purpose in doing so was to wring from his co-inventor an admission that
the inventions which they had patented together were his work alone.
Peace denied this, but offered to sell his share for L50. Brion refused
the offer, and persisted in his assertion that Peace had got his name
attached to the patents by undue influence, whatever that might mean.
Peace, after wrestling with the spirit, gave way. "Very well, my
friend," he said, "let it be as you say. I have not cheated you, Heaven
knows. But I also know that this infamy of mine has been the cause of
bringing harm to you, which is the last thing I should have wished to
have caused to my friend." A deed of gift was drawn up, making over to
Brion Peace's share in their inventions; this Peace handed to Brion
as the price of the latter's precious forgiveness and a token of the
sincerity of his colleague's repentance. Thus, as has often happened
in this sad world, was disreputable genius exploited once again by
smug mediocrity. Mr. Brion, having got all he wanted, left the prison,
assuring the Governor that Peace's repentance was "all bunkum," and
advising, with commendable anxiety for the public good, that the warders
in the condemned cell should be doubled.

Peace had one act of atonement to discharge more urgent than displaying
Christian forbearance towards ignoble associates. That was the righting
of William Habron, who was now serving the third year of his life
sentence for the murder of Constable Cock at Whalley Range. Peace
sent for the Governor of the jail a few days before his execution and
obtained from him the materials necessary for drawing up a plan. Peace
was quite an adept at making plans; he had already made an excellent one
of the scene of Dyson's murder. He now drew a plan of the place where
Cock had been shot, gave a detailed account of how he came by his death,
and made a full confession of his own guilt.

In the confession he described how, some days before the burglary, he
had, according to his custom, "spotted" the house at Whalley Range. In
order to do this he always dressed himself respectably, because he had
found that the police never suspected anyone who wore good clothes. On
the night of the crime he passed two policemen on the road to the house.
He had gone into the grounds and was about to begin operations when he
heard a rustle behind him and saw a policeman, whom he recognised as one
of those he had met in the road, enter the garden. With his well-known
agility Peace climbed on to the wall, and dropped on to the other side,
only to find himself almost in the arms of the second policeman. Peace
warned the officer to stand back and fired his revolver wide of him.
But, as Peace said, "these Manchester policemen are a very obstinate
lot." The constable took out his truncheon. Peace fired again and killed
him.

Soon after the murderer saw in the newspapers that two men had been
arrested for the crime. "This greatly interested me," said Peace. "I
always had a liking to be present at trials, as the public no doubt know
by this time." So he went to Manchester Assizes and saw William Habron
sentenced to death. "People will say," he said, "that I was a hardened
wretch for allowing an innocent man to suffer for the crime of which
I was guilty but what man would have given himself up under such
circumstances, knowing as I did that I should certainly be hanged?"
Peace's view of the question was a purely practical one: "Now that I
am going to forfeit my own life and feel that I have nothing to gain
by further secrecy, I think it is right in the sight of God and man to
clear this innocent young man." It would have been more right in the
sight of God and man to have done it before, but then Peace admitted
that during all his career he had allowed neither God nor man to
influence his actions.

How many men in the situation of Peace at the time, with the certainty
of death before him if he confessed, would have sacrificed themselves to
save an innocent man? Cold-blooded heroism of this kind is rare in the
annals of crime. Nor did Peace claim to have anything of the hero about
him.

     "Lion-hearted I've lived,
     And when my time comes
     Lion-hearted I'll die."

Though fond of repeating this piece of doggerel, Peace would have
been the last man to have attributed to himself all those qualities
associated symbolically with the lion.

A few days before his execution Peace was visited in his prison by Mr.
Littlewood, the Vicar of Darnall. Mr. Littlewood had known Peace a few
years before, when he had been chaplain at Wakefield Prison. "Well, my
old friend Peace," he said as he entered the cell, "how are you to-day?"
"'I am very poorly, sir," replied the convict, "but I am exceedingly
pleased to see you." Mr. Littlewood assured Peace that there was at any
rate one person in the world who had deep sympathy with him, and that
was himself. Peace burst into tears. He expressed a wish to unburden
himself to the vicar, but before doing so, asked for his assurance that
he believed in the truth and sincerity of what he was about to say to
him. He said that he preferred to be hanged to lingering out his life
in penal servitude, that he was grieved and repentant for his past
life. "If I could undo, or make amends for anything I have done, I would
suffer my body as I now stand to be cut in pieces inch by inch. I feel,
sir, that I am too bad to live or die, and having this feeling I cannot
think that either you or anyone else would believe me, and that is the
reason why I ask you so much to try to be assured that you do not think
I am telling lies. I call my God to witness that all I am saying and
wish to say shall be the truth--the whole truth--nothing but the truth."
Mr. Littlewood said that, after carefully watching Peace and having
regard to his experience of some of the most hardened of criminals
during his service in Wakefield Prison, he felt convinced that Peace
was in earnest and as sincere as any man could be; he spoke rationally,
coherently, and without excitement.

Peace was determined to test the extent of the reverend gentleman's
faith in his asseverations. "Now, sir," he said, "I understand that you
still have the impression that I stole the clock from your day-schools."
Mr. Littlewood admitted that such was his impression. "I thought so,"
replied Peace, "and this has caused me much grief and pain, for I can
assure you I have so much respect for you personally that I would rather
have given you a clock and much more besides than have taken it. At the
time your clock was stolen I had reason for suspecting that it was taken
by some colliers whom I knew." There was a pause. Mr. Littlewood thought
that Peace was going to give him the name of the colliers. But that was
not Peace's way. He said sharply: "Do you now believe that I have spoken
the truth in denying that I took your clock, and will you leave me
to-day fully believing that I am innocent of doing that?" Mr. Littlewood
looked at him closely and appeared to be deliberating on his reply.
Peace watched him intently. At last Mr. Littlewood said, "Peace, I am
convinced that you did not take the clock. I cannot believe that you
dare deny it now in your position, if you really did." Once more Peace
burst into tears, and was unable for some time to speak.

Having recovered his self-possession, Peace turned to the serious
business of confession. He dealt first with the murder of Dyson.

He maintained that his relations with Mrs. Dyson had been of an intimate
character. He wanted to see her on the night of the crime in order
to get her to induce her husband to withdraw the warrant which he had
procured against him; he was tired, he said, of being hunted about
from place to place. He intercepted Mrs. Dyson as she crossed the
yard. Instead of listening to him quietly Mrs. Dyson became violent and
threatening in her language. Peace took out his revolver, and, holding
it close to her head, warned her that he was not to be trifled with. She
refused to be warned. Dyson, hearing the loud voices, came out of his
house. Peace tried to get away down the passage into Banner Cross Road,
but Dyson followed and caught hold of him. In the struggle Peace fired
one barrel of his revolver wide. Dyson seized the hand in which Peace
was holding the weapon. "Then I knew," said Peace, "I had not a moment
to spare. I made a desperate effort, wrenched the arm from him and fired
again. All that was in my head at the time was to get away. I never did
intend, either there or anywhere else, to take a man's life; but I was
determined that I should not be caught at that time, as the result,
knowing what I had done before, would have been worse even than had I
stayed under the warrant." If he had intended to murder Dyson, Peace
pointed out that he would have set about it in quite a different and
more secret way; it was as unintentional a thing as ever was done; Mrs.
Dyson had committed the grossest perjury in saying that no struggle had
taken place between her husband and himself.

It is to be remembered that Peace and Mrs. Dyson were the sole
witnesses of what took place that night between the two men. In point
of credibility there may be little to choose between them, but Peace can
claim for his account that it was the statement of a dying, and, to all
appearances, sincerely repentant sinner.

Peace then repeated to Mr. Littlewood his confession of the killing of
Constable Cock, and his desire that Habron should be set free.(11) As to
this part of his career Peace indulged in some general reflections.
"My great mistake, sir," he said, "and I can see it now as my end
approaches, has been this--in all my career I have used ball cartridge.
I can see now that in using ball cartridge I did wrong I ought to have
used blank cartridge; then I would not have taken life." Peace said that
he hoped he would meet his death like a hero. "I do not say this in
any kind of bravado. I do not mean such a hero as some persons will
understand when they read this. I mean such a hero as my God might wish
me to be. I am deeply grieved for all I have done, and would atone
for it to the utmost of my power." To Mr. Littlewood the moment seemed
convenient to suggest that as a practical means of atonement Peace
should reveal to him the names of the persons with whom he had disposed
of the greater part of his stolen property. But in spite of much
attempted persuasion by the reverend gentleman Peace explained that he
was a man and meant to be a man to the end.


     (11) William Habron was subsequently given a free pardon and L800 by way
of compensation.


Earlier in their interview Peace had expressed to Mr. Littlewood a hope
that after his execution his name would never be mentioned again, but
before they parted he asked Mr. Littlewood, as a favour, to preach a
sermon on him after his death to the good people of Darnall. He wished
his career held up to them as a beacon, in order that all who saw might
avoid his example, and so his death be of some service to society.

Before Mr. Littlewood left, Peace asked him to hear him pray. Having
requested the warders to kneel down, Peace began a prayer that lasted
twenty minutes. He prayed for himself, his family, his victims, Mr.
Littlewood, society generally, and all classes of the community. Mr.
Littlewood described the prayer as earnest, fervent and fluent. At the
end Peace asked Mr. Littlewood if he ought to see Mrs. Dyson and beg
her forgiveness for having killed her husband. Mr. Littlewood, believing
erroneously that Mrs. Dyson had already left the country, told Peace
that he should direct all his attention to asking forgiveness of his
Maker. At the close of their interview Peace was lifted into bed and,
turning his face to the wall, wept.

Tuesday, February 25, was the day fixed for the execution of Peace.
As the time drew near, the convict's confidence in ultimate salvation
increased. A Dr. Potter of Sheffield had declared in a sermon that "all
hope of Peace's salvation was gone for ever." Peace replied curtly,
"Well, Dr. Potter may think so, but I don't." Though his health had
improved, Peace was still very feeble in body. But his soul was hopeful
and undismayed. On the Saturday before his death his brother and
sister-in-law, a nephew and niece visited him for the last time. He
spoke with some emotion of his approaching end. He said he should die
about eight o'clock, and that at four o'clock an inquest would be held
on his body; he would then be thrown into his grave without service
or sermon of any kind. He asked his relatives to plant a flower on a
certain grave in a cemetery in Sheffield on the day of his execution. He
was very weak, he said, but hoped he should have strength enough to
walk to the scaffold. He sent messages to friends and warnings to avoid
gambling and drinking. He begged his brother to change his manner of
life and "become religious." His good counsel was not apparently
very well received. Peace's visitors took a depressing view of their
relative's condition. They found him "a poor, wretched, haggard man,"
and, meeting Mrs. Thompson who was waiting outside the gaol for news of
"dear Jack," wondered how she could have taken up with such a man.

When, the day before his execution, Peace was visited for the last time
by his wife, his stepson, his daughter, Mrs. Bolsover, and her husband,
he was in much better spirits. He asked his visitors to restrain
themselves from displays of emotion, as he felt very happy and did
not wish to be disturbed. He advised them to sell or exhibit for money
certain works of art of his own devising. Among them was a design
in paper for a monument to be placed over his grave. The design is
elaborate but well and ingeniously executed; in the opinion of Frith,
the painter, it showed "the true feeling of an artist." It is somewhat
in the style of the Albert Memorial, and figures of angels are prominent
in the scheme. The whole conception is typical of the artist's sanguine
and confident assurance of his ultimate destiny. A model boat and a
fiddle made out of a hollow bamboo cane he wished also to be made the
means of raising money. He was describing with some detail the ceremony
of his approaching death and burial when he was interrupted by a sound
of hammering. Peace listened for a moment and then said, "That's a noise
that would make some men fall on the floor. They are working at my own
scaffold." A warder said that he was mistaken. "No, I am not," answered
Peace, "I have not worked so long with wood without knowing the sound of
deals; and they don't have deals inside a prison for anything else than
scaffolds." But the noise, he said, did not disturb him in the least, as
he was quite prepared to meet his fate. He would like to have seen his
grave and coffin; he knew that his body would be treated with scant
ceremony after his death. But what of that? By that time his soul would
be in Heaven. He was pleased that one sinner who had seen him on his way
from Pentonville to Sheffield, had written to tell him that the sight of
the convict had brought home to him the sins of his own past life, and
by this means he had found salvation.

The time had come to say good-bye for the last time. Peace asked his
weeping relatives whether they had anything more that they wished to ask
him. Mrs. Peace reminded him that he had promised to pray with them
at the last. Peace, ever ready, knelt with them and prayed for half an
hour. He then shook hands with them, prayed for and blessed each one
singly, and himself gave way to tears as they left his presence. To his
wife as she departed Peace gave a funeral card of his own designing. It
ran:

     In
     Memory
     of
     Charles Peace
     Who was executed in
     Armley Prison
     Tuesday February 25th,
     1879 Aged 47

     For that I don but never
     Intended.


The same day there arrived in the prison one who in his own trade had
something of the personality and assurance of the culprit he was to
execute. William Marwood--unlike his celebrated victim, he has his place
in the Dictionary of National Biography--is perhaps the most remarkable
of these persons who have held at different times the office of public
executioner. As the inventor of the "long drop," he has done a lasting
service to humanity by enabling the death-sentence passed by the judge
to be carried out with the minimum of possible suffering. Marwood took a
lofty view of the office he held, and refused his assent to the somewhat
hypocritical loathing, with which those who sanction and profit by his
exertions are pleased to regard this servant of the law. "I am doing
God's work," said Marwood, "according to the divine command and the
law of the British Crown. I do it simply as a matter of duty and as
a Christian. I sleep as soundly as a child and am never disturbed by
phantoms. Where there is guilt there is bad sleeping, but I am conscious
that I try to live a blameless life. Detesting idleness, I pass
my vacant time in business (he was a shoemaker at Horncastle, in
Lincolnshire) and work in my shoeshop near the church day after day
until such time as I am required elsewhere. It would have been better
for those I executed if they had preferred industry to idleness."

Marwood had not the almost patriarchal air of benevolent respectability
which his predecessor Calcraft had acquired during a short experience
as a family butler; but as an executioner that kindly old gentleman
had been a sad bungler in his time compared with the scientific and
expeditious Marwood. The Horncastle shoemaker was saving, businesslike,
pious and thoughtful. Like Peace, he had interests outside his ordinary
profession. He had at one time propounded a scheme for the abolition of
the National Debt, a man clearly determined to benefit his fellowmen in
some way or other. A predilection for gin would seem to have been his
only concession to the ordinary weakness of humanity. And now he had
arrived in Armley Jail to exercise his happy dispatch on the greatest
of the many criminals who passed through his hands, one who, in his own
words, "met death with greater firmness" than any man on whom he had
officiated during seven years of Crown employment.

The day of February the 25th broke bitterly cold. Like Charles I.
before him, Peace feared lest the extreme cold should make him appear
to tremble on the scaffold. He had slept calmly till six o'clock in the
morning. A great part of the two hours before the coming of the hangman
Peace spent in letter-writing. He wrote two letters to his wife, in one
of which he copied out some verses he had written in Woking Prison
on the death of their little boy John. In the second he expressed his
satisfaction that he was to die now and not linger twenty years in
prison. To his daughter, step-son and son-in-law he wrote letters of
fervent, religious exhortation and sent them tracts and pictures
which he had secured from well-intentioned persons anxious about
his salvation. To an old friend, George Goodlad, a pianist, who
had apparently lived up to his name, he wrote: "You chose an honest
industrious way through life, but I chose the one of dishonesty,
villainy and sin"; let his fate, he said, be a warning.

Peace ate a hearty breakfast and awaited the coming of the executioner
with calm. He had been troubled with an inconvenient cough the night
before. "I wonder," he said to one of his warders, "if Marwood could
cure this cough of mine." He had got an idea into his head that Marwood
would "punish" him when he came to deal with him on the scaffold, and
asked to see the hangman a few minutes before the appointed hour. "I
hope you will not punish me. I hope you will do your work quickly," he
said to Marwood. "You shall not suffer pain from my hand," replied that
worthy. "God bless you," exclaimed Peace, "I hope to meet you all in
heaven. I am thankful to say my sins are all forgiven." And so these two
pious men--on the morning of an execution Marwood always knelt down and
asked God's blessing on the work he had to do--shook hands together and
set about their business. Firmly and fearlessly Peace submitted himself
to the necessary preparations. For one moment he faltered as the gallows
came in sight, but recovered himself quickly.

As Marwood was about to cover his face, Peace stopped him with some
irritation of manner and said that he wished to speak to the gentlemen
of the press who had been admitted to the ceremony. No one gainsaid him,
and he thus addressed the reporters: "You gentlemen reporters, I wish
you to notice the few words I am going to say. You know what my life
has been. It has been base; but I wish you to notice, for the sake of
others, how a man can die, as I am about to die, in fear of the Lord.
Gentlemen, my heart says that I feel assured that my sins are forgiven
me, that I am going to the Kingdom of Heaven, or else to the place
prepared for those who rest until the great Judgment day. I do not think
I have any enemies, but if there are any who would be so, I wish them
well. Gentlemen, all and all, I wish them to come to the Kingdom of
Heaven when they die, as I am going to die." He asked a blessing on the
officials of the prison and, in conclusion, sent his last wishes and
respects to his dear children and their mother. "I hope," he said, "no
one will disgrace them by taunting them or jeering them on my account,
but to have mercy upon them. God bless you, my dear children. Good-bye,
and Heaven bless you. Amen: Oh, my Lord God, have mercy upon me!"

After the cap had been placed over his head Peace asked twice very
sharply, as a man who expected to be obeyed, for a drink of water. But
this time his request was not compiled with. He died instantaneously and
was buried in Armley Jail.

Had Peace flourished in 1914 instead of 1874, his end might have been
honourable instead of dishonourable. The war of to-day has no doubt
saved many a man from a criminal career by turning to worthy account
qualities which, dangerous in crime, are useful in war. Absolute
fearlessness, agility, resource, cunning and determination; all these
are admirable qualities in the soldier; and all these Charles Peace
possessed in a signal degree. But fate denied him opportunity, he became
a burglar and died on the scaffold. Years of prison life failed, as they
did in those days, to make any impression for good on one resolute in
whatever way he chose to go. Peace was a born fighter. A detective who
knew him and had on one occasion come near capturing him in London, said
that he was a fair fighter, that he always gave fair warning to those on
whom he fired, and that, being a dead shot, the many wide shots which
he fired are to be reckoned proofs of this. Peace maintained to the last
that he had never intended to kill Dyson. This statement ex-detective
Parrock believed, and that the fatal shot was fired over Peace's
shoulder as he was making off. Though habitually sober, Peace was made
intoxicated now and then by the drink, stood him by those whom he used
to amuse with his musical tricks and antics in public-houses. At such
times he would get fuddled and quarrelsome. He was in such a frame
of mind on the evening of Dyson's murder. His visit to the Vicar of
Ecclesall brought him little comfort or consolation. It was in this
unsatisfactory frame of mind that he went to Dyson's house. This much
the ex-detective would urge in his favour. To his neighbours he was an
awe-inspiring but kind and sympathetic man. "If you want my true opinion
of him," says Detective Parrock, "he was a burglar to the backbone but
not a murderer at heart. He deserved the fate that came to him as little
as any who in modern times have met with a like one." Those who are in
the fighting line are always the most generous about their adversaries.
Parrock as a potential target for Peace's revolver, may have erred on
the side of generosity, but there is some truth in what he says.

As Peace himself admitted, his life had been base. He was well aware
that he had misused such gifts as nature had bestowed on him. One
must go back to mediaeval times to find the counterpart of this daring
ruffian who, believing in personal God and devil, refuses until the end
to allow either to interfere with his business in life. In this respect
Charles Peace reminds us irresistibly of our Angevin kings.

There is only one criminal who vies with Charley Peace in that genial
popular regard which makes Charles "Charley" and John "Jack," and that
is Jack Sheppard. What Jack was to the eighteenth century, that Charley
was to the nineteenth. And each one is in a sense typical of his period.
Lecky has said that the eighteenth century is richer than any other
in the romance of crime. I think it may fairly be said that in the
nineteenth century the romance of crime ceased to be. In the eighteenth
century the scenery and dresses, all the stage setting of crime make for
romance; its literature is quaint and picturesque; there is something
gay and debonair about the whole business.

Sheppard is typical of all this. There is a certain charm about the
rascal; his humour is undeniable; he is a philosopher, taking all that
comes with easy grace, even his betrayal by his brother and others
who should have been loyal to him. Jack Sheppard has the good-humoured
carelessness of that most engaging of all eighteenth century
malefactors, Deacon Brodie. It is quite otherwise with Charley Peace.
There is little enough gay or debonair about him. Compared with
Sheppard, Peace is as drab as the surroundings of mid-Victorian crime
are drab compared with the picturesqueness of eighteenth century
England.

Crime in the nineteenth century becomes more scientific in its methods
and in its detection also. The revolver places a more hasty, less
decorous weapon than the old-fashioned pistol in the hands of the
determined burglar. The literature of crime, such as it is, becomes
vulgar and prosaic. Peace has no charm about him, no gaiety, but he has
the virtues of his defects. He, unlike Sheppard, shuns company; he works
alone, never depending on accomplices; a "tight cock," as Sheppard would
have phrased it, and not relying on a like quality of tightness in
his fellows. Sheppard is a slave to his women, Edgeworth Bess and Mrs.
Maggot; Mrs. Peace and Sue Thompson are the slaves of Peace. Sheppard
loves to stroll openly about the London streets in his fine suit
of black, his ruffled shirt and his silver-hilted sword. Peace lies
concealed at Peckham beneath the homely disguise of old Mr. Thompson.
Sheppard is an imp, Peace a goblin. But both have that gift of
personality which, in their own peculiar line, lifts them out from the
ruck, and makes them Jack and Charley to those who like to know famous
people by cheery nicknames.

And so we must accept Charles Peace as a remarkable character, whose
unquestioned gifts as a man of action were squandered on a criminal
career; neither better nor worse than a great number of other persons,
whose good fortune it has been to develop similar qualities under
happier surroundings. There are many more complete villains than the
ordinary criminal, who contrive to go through life without offending
against the law. Close and scientific investigation has shown that the
average convicted criminal differs intellectually from the normal person
only in a slightly lower level of intelligence, a condition that may
well be explained by the fact that the convicted criminal has been
found out. Crime has been happily defined by a recent and most able
investigator into the character of the criminal(12) as "an unusual act
committed by a perfectly normal person." At the same time, according
to the same authority, there is a type of normal person who tends to
be convicted of crime, and he is differentiated from his fellows by
defective physique and mental capacity and an increased possession of
antisocial qualities.(13)


     (12) "The English Convict," a statistical study, by Charles Goring, M.D.
His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1913.

     (13) Murderers--at least those executed for their crimes--have not for
obvious reasons been made the subject of close scientific observation.
Their mental capacity would in all probability be found to be rather
higher than that of less ambitious criminals.


How does Peace answer to the definition? Though short in stature, his
physical development left little to be desired: he was active, agile,
and enjoyed excellent health at all times. For a man of forty-seven he
had aged remarkably in appearance. That is probably to be accounted for
by mental worry. With two murders on his conscience we know from Sue
Thompson that all she learnt of his secrets was what escaped from him in
his troubled dreams--Peace may well have shown traces of mental
anxiety. But in all other respects Charles Peace would seem to have been
physically fit. In intellectual capacity he was undoubtedly above the
average of the ordinary criminal. The facts of his career, his natural
gifts, speak for themselves. Of anti-social proclivities he no doubt
possessed his share at the beginning, and these were aggravated, as in
most cases they were in his day, by prison life and discipline.

Judged as scientifically as is possible where the human being is
concerned, Peace stands out physically and intellectually well above
the average of his class, perhaps the most naturally gifted of all those
who, without advantages of rank or education, have tried their hands at
crime. Ordinary crime for the most part would appear to be little better
than the last resort of the intellectually defective, and a poor game
at that. The only interesting criminals are those worthy of something
better. Peace was one of these. If his life may be said to point a
moral, it is the very simple one that crime is no career for a man of
brains.




The Career of Robert Butler


There is a report of Butler's trial published in Dunedin. It gives in
full the speeches and the cross-examination of the witnesses, but not
in all cases the evidence-in-chief. By the kindness of a friend in
New Zealand I obtained a copy of the depositions taken before the
magistrate; with this I have been able to supplement the report of the
trial. A collection of newspaper cuttings furnished me with the details
of the rest of Butler's career.

I

THE DUNEDIN MURDERS

On the evening of March 23, 1905, Mr. William Munday, a highly respected
citizen of the town of Tooringa, in Queensland, was walking to the
neighbouring town of Toowong to attend a masonic gathering. It was about
eight o'clock, the moon shining brightly. Nearing Toowong, Mr. Munday
saw a middle-aged man, bearded and wearing a white overcoat, step
out into the moonlight from under the shadow of a tree. As Mr. Munday
advanced, the man in the white coat stood directly in his way. "Out with
all you have, and quick about it," he said. Instead of complying with
this peremptory summons, Mr. Munday attempted to close with him. The man
drew back quickly, whipped out a revolver, fired, and made off as fast
as he could. The bullet, after passing through Mr. Munday's left arm,
had lodged in the stomach. The unfortunate gentleman was taken to a
neighbouring hospital where, within a few hours, he was dead.

In the meantime a vigorous search was made for his assailant. Late the
same night Constable Hennessy, riding a bicycle, saw a man in a white
coat who seemed to answer to the description of the assassin. He
dismounted, walked up to him and asked him for a match. The man put his
hand inside his coat. "What have you got there?" asked the constable.
"I'll--soon show you," replied the man in the white coat, producing
suddenly a large revolver. But Hennessy was too quick for him. Landing
him one under the jaw, he sent him to the ground and, after a sharp
struggle, secured him. Constable Hennessy little knew at the time that
his capture in Queensland of the man in the white coat was almost as
notable in the annals of crime as the affray at Blackheath on an autumn
night in 1878, when Constable Robinson grappled successfully, wounded as
he was, with Charles Peace.

The man taken by Hennessy gave the name of James Wharton, and as
James Wharton he was hanged at Brisbane. But before his death it was
ascertained beyond doubt, though he never admitted it himself, that
Wharton was none other than one Robert Butler, whose career as a
criminal and natural wickedness may well rank him with Charles Peace in
the hierarchy of scoundrels. Like Peace, Butler was, in the jargon of
crime, a "hatter," a "lone hand," a solitary who conceived and
executed his nefarious designs alone; like Peace, he supplemented an
insignificant physique by a liberal employment of the revolver; like
Peace, he was something of a musician, the day before his execution he
played hymns for half an hour on the prison organ; like Peace, he knew
when to whine when it suited his purpose; and like Peace, though not
with the same intensity, he could be an uncomfortably persistent lover,
when the fit was on him. Both men were cynics in their way and viewed
their fellow-men with a measure of contempt. But here parallel ends.
Butler was an intellectual, inferior as a craftsman to Peace, the
essentially practical, unread, naturally gifted artist. Butler was a man
of books. He had been schoolmaster, journalist. He had studied the lives
of great men, and as a criminal, had devoted especial attention to those
of Frederick the Great and Napoleon. Butler's defence in the Dunedin
murder trial was a feat of skill quite beyond the power of Peace. Peace
was a religious man after the fashion of the mediaeval tyrant, Butler
an infidel. Peace, dragged into the light of a court of justice, cut a
sorry figure; here Butler shone. Peace escaped a conviction for murder
by letting another suffer in his place; Butler escaped a similar
experience by the sheer ingenuity of his defence. Peace had the modesty
and reticence of the sincere artist; Butler the loquacious vanity of the
literary or forensic coxcomb. Lastly, and it is the supreme difference,
Butler was a murderer by instinct and conviction, as Lacenaire or
Ruloff; "a man's life," he said, "was of no more importance than a
dog's; nature respects the one no more than the other, a volcanic
eruption kills mice and men with the one hand. The divine command,
'kill, kill and spare not,' was intended not only for Joshua, but for
men of all time; it is the example of our rulers, our Fredericks and
Napoleons."

Butler was of the true Prussian mould. "In crime," he would say, "as
in war, no half measures. Let us follow the example of our rulers whose
orders in war run, 'Kill, burn and sink,' and what you cannot carry
away, destroy.'" Here is the gospel of frightfulness applied almost
prophetically to crime. To Butler murder is a principle of warfare; to
Peace it was never more than a desperate resort or an act the outcome of
ungovernable passion.

Ireland can claim the honour of Butler's birth. It took place at
Kilkenny about 1845. At an early age he left his native land for
Australia, and commenced his professional career by being sentenced
under the name of James Wilson--the same initials as those of James
Wharton of Queensland--to twelve months' imprisonment for vagrancy. Of
the sixteen years he passed in Victoria he spent thirteen in prison,
first for stealing, then in steady progression for highway robbery and
burglary. Side by side with the practical and efficient education in
crime furnished by the Victorian prisons of that day, Butler availed
himself of the opportunity to educate his mind. It was during this
period that he found inspiration and encouragement in the study of the
lives of Frederick and Napoleon, besides acquiring a knowledge of music
and shorthand.

When in 1876 Butler quitted Australia for New Zealand, he was
sufficiently accomplished to obtain employment as a schoolmaster.

At Cromwell, Otago, under the name of "C. J. Donelly, Esq.," Butler
opened a "Commercial and Preparatory Academy," and in a prospectus that
recalls Mr. Squeers' famous advertisement of Dotheboys Hall, announced
that the programme of the Academy would include "reading, taught as
an art and upon the most approved principles of elocution, writing,
arithmetic, euclid, algebra, mensuration, trigonometry, book-keeping,
geography, grammar, spelling and dictation, composition, logic and
debate, French, Latin, shorthand, history, music, and general lectures
on astronomy, natural philosophy, geology, and other subjects." The
simpler principles of these branches of learning were to be "rendered
intelligible, and a firm foundation laid for the acquirement of future
knowledge." Unfortunately a suspicion of theft on Butler's part cut
short the fulfilment of this really splendid programme, and Butler left
Cromwell hurriedly for the ampler field of Dunedin. There, less than a
fortnight after his arrivel{sic}, he was sentenced to four years' hard
labour for several burglaries committed in and about that city.

On the 18th of February, 1880, Butler was released from prison. With
that consummate hypocrisy which was part of the man, he had contrived to
enlist the sympathies of the Governor of the Dunedin Jail, who gave
him, on his departure, a suit of clothes and a small sum of money.
A detective of the name of Bain tried to find him employment. Butler
wished to adopt a literary career. He acted as a reporter on the Dunedin
Evening Star, and gave satisfaction to the editor of that newspaper. An
attempt to do some original work, in the shape of "Prison Sketches,"
for another newspaper, was less successful. Bain had arranged for the
publication of the articles in the Sunday Advertiser, but when the time
came to deliver his manuscript, Butler failed to appear. Bain, whose
duty it was to keep an eye on Butler, found him in the street looking
wild and haggard. He said that he had found the work "too much for his
head," that he had torn up what he had written, that he had nowhere to
go, and had been to the end of the jetty with the intention of drowning
himself. Bain replied somewhat caustically that he thought it a pity he
had not done so, as nothing would have given him greater joy than
going to the end of the jetty and identifying his body. "You speak
very plainly," said Butler. "Yes, and what is more, I mean what I say,"
replied Bain. Butler justified Bain's candour by saying that if he broke
out again, he would be worse than the most savage tiger ever let loose
on the community. As a means of obviating such an outbreak, Butler
suggested that, intellectual employment having failed, some form of
manual labour should be found him. Bain complied with Butler's request,
and got him a job at levelling reclaimed ground in the neighbourhood of
Dunedin. On Wednesday, March 10, Butler started work, but after three
hours of it relinquished the effort. Bain saw Butler again in Dunedin on
the evening of Saturday, March 13, and made an appointment to meet him
at half-past eight that night. Butler did not keep the appointment. Bain
searched the town for him, but he was nowhere to be found.

About the same time Butler had some talk with another member of the
Dunedin police force, Inspector Mallard. They discussed the crimes of
Charles Peace and other notable artists of that kind. Butler remarked to
Mallard how easy it would be to destroy all traces of a murder by fire,
and asked the inspector whether if he woke up one morning to find some
brutal murder had been committed, he would not put it down to him. "No,
Butler," replied the inspector, "the first thing I should do would be to
look for suspicious circumstances, and most undoubtedly, if they pointed
to you, you would be looked after."

In the early morning of this Saturday, March 13, the house of a Mr.
Stamper, a solicitor of Dunedin, had been broken into, and some articles
of value, among them a pair of opera glasses, stolen. The house had been
set on fire, and burned to the ground. On the morning of the following
day, Sunday, the 14th, Dunedin was horrified by the discovery of a far
more terrible crime, tigerish certainly in its apparent ferocity. In a
house in Cumberland Street, a young married couple and their little baby
were cruelly murdered and un{sic}{an??} unsuccessful attempt made to
fire the scene of the crime.

About half-past six on Sunday morning a man of the name of Robb, a
carpenter, on getting out of bed, noticed smoke coming from the house
of a neighbor of his, Mr. J. M. Dewar, who occupied a small one-floored
cottage standing by itself in Cumberland Street, a large and broad
thoroughfare on the outskirts of the town. Dewar was a butcher by trade,
a young man, some eighteen months married, and father of a baby girl.
Robb, on seeing smoke coming from Dewar's house, woke his son, who was
a member of the fire brigade. The latter got up, crossed the street,
and going round to the back door, which he found wide open, entered the
house. As he went along the passage that separated the two front rooms,
a bedroom and sitting-room, he called to the inmates to get up. He
received no answer, but as he neared the bedroom he heard a "gurgling"
sound. Crawling on his hands and knees he reached the bedroom door, and
two feet inside it his right hand touched something. It was the body of
a woman; she was still alive, but in a dying condition. Robb dragged
her across the passage into the sitting-room. He got some water, and
extinguished the fire in the bedroom. On the bed lay the body of Dewar.
To all appearances he had been killed in his sleep. By his side was
the body of the baby, suffocated by the smoke. Near the bed was an
axe belonging to Dewar, stained with blood. It was with this weapon,
apparently, that Mr. and Mrs. Dewar had been attacked. Under the bed was
a candlestick belonging also to the Dewars, which had been used by
the murderer in setting fire to the bed. The front window of the
sitting-room was open, there were marks of boot nails on the sill, and
on the grass in front of the window a knife was found. An attempt
had been made to ransack a chest of drawers in the bedroom, but some
articles of jewellery lying in one of the drawers, and a ring on the
dressing-table had been left untouched. As far as was known, Mr. and
Mrs. Dewar were a perfectly happy and united couple. Dewar had been last
seen alive about ten o'clock on the Saturday night getting off a car
near his home. At eleven a neighbour had noticed a light in the Dewars'
house. About five o'clock on the Sunday morning another neighbour
had been aroused from his sleep by the sound as of something falling
heavily. It was a wild and boisterous night. Thinking the noise might be
the slamming of his stable door, he got up and went out to see that
it was secure. He then noticed that a light was burning in the bedroom
window of the Dewars' cottage.

Nothing more was known of what had occurred that morning until at
half-past six Robb saw the smoke coming from Dewars' house. Mrs. Dewar,
who alone could have told something, never recovered consciousness
and died on the day following the crime. Three considerable wounds
sufficient to cause death had been inflicted on the unfortunate woman's
head, and five of a similar character on that of her husband. At the
head of the bed, which stood in the corner of the room, there was a
large smear of blood on the wall just above the door; there were spots
of blood all over the top of the bed, and some smaller ones that had to
all appearances spurted on to the panel of the door nearest to the bed.

The investigation of this shocking crime was placed in the hands of
Detective Bain, whose duty it had been to keep an eye on Robert Butler,
but he did not at first associate his interesting charge with the
commission of the murder. About half-past six on Sunday evening Bain
happened to go to a place called the Scotia Hotel, where the landlord
informed him that one of his servants, a girl named Sarah Gillespie, was
very anxious to see him. Her story was this: On the morning of Thursday,
March 11, Robert Butler had come to the hotel; he was wearing a dark
lavender check suit and carried a top coat and parcel. Butler had stayed
in the hotel all Thursday and slept there that night. He had not slept
in the hotel on the Friday night, and Sarah Gillespie had not seen him
again until he came into the house about five and twenty minutes to
seven on Sunday morning. The girl noticed that he was pale and excited,
seemed afraid and worried, as if someone were coming after him. After
giving her some money for the landlord, he went upstairs, fetched his
top coat, a muffler, and his parcel. Before leaving he said he would
have a pint of beer, as he had not breakfasted. He then left, presumably
to catch an early train.

Butler was next seen a few minutes later at a shop near the hotel, where
he bought five tins of salmon, and about the same time a milk-boy saw
him standing on the kerb in Cumberland Street in a stooping position,
his head turned in the direction of Dewars' house. A little after ten
the same night Butler entered a hotel at a place called Blueskin, some
twelve miles distant from Dunedin. He was wearing an overcoat and a
light muffler. He sat down at a table in the dining-room and seemed
weary and sleepy. Someone standing at the bar said "What a shocking
murder that was in Cumberland Street!" Butler started up, looked
steadily from one to the other of the two men who happened to be in the
room, then sat down again and, taking up a book, appeared to be reading.
More than once he put down the book and kept shifting uneasily in his
chair. After having some supper he got up, paid his reckoning, and left
the hotel.

At half-past three the following morning, about fifteen miles from
Dunedin, on the road to Waikouaiti, two constables met a man whom they
recognised as Butler from a description that had been circulated by the
police. The constables arrested and searched him. They found on him a
pair of opera glasses, the property of Mr. Stamper, whose house had been
burgled and burned down on the morning of the 13th. Of this crime Butler
acknowledged himself to be the perpetrator. Besides the opera glasses
the constables took from Butler two tins of salmon, a purse containing
four shillings and sixpence, a pocket knife, a box of matches, a piece
of candle, and a revolver and cartridges. The prisoner was carrying a
top coat, and was dressed in a dark coat and grey trousers, underneath
which he was wearing a white shirt, an under flannel and a Rob Roy
Crimean shirt. One of the constables noticed that there were marks of
blood on his shirt. Another singular feature in Butler's attire was the
fact that the outer soles of his boots had been recently removed. When
last seen in Dunedin Butler had been wearing a moustache; he was now
clean shaven.

The same evening a remarkable interview took place in the lock-up at
Waikouaiti between Butler and Inspector Mallard. Mallard, who had some
reason for suspecting Butler, bearing in mind their recent conversation,
told the prisoner that he would be charged with the murder in Cumberland
Street. For a few seconds, according to Mallard, the prisoner seemed
terribly agitated and appeared to be choking. Recovering himself
somewhat, he said, "If for that, you can get no evidence against me; and
if I am hanged for it, I shall be an innocent man, whatever other crimes
I may have committed." Mallard replied, "There is evidence to convict
you--the fire was put out." Butler than{sic} said that he would ask
Mallard a question, but, after a pause, decided not to do so. Mallard,
after examining Butler's clothes, told him that those were not the
clothes in which he had left the Scotia Hotel. Butler admitted it, and
said he had thrown those away in the North East Valley. Mallard alluded
to the disappearance of the prisoner's moustache. Butler replied that he
had cut it off on the road. Mallard noticed then the backs of Butler's
hands were scratched, as if by contact with bushes. Butler seemed often
on the point of asking questions, but would then stop and say "No, I
won't ask you anything." To the constables who had arrested him Butler
remarked, "You ought to remember me, because I could have shot you if I
had wished." When Mallard later in the evening visited Butler again, the
prisoner who was then lying down said, "I want to speak to you. I want
to ask the press not to publish my career. Give me fair play. I suppose
I shall be convicted and you will see I can die like a man."

A few days after Butler's arrest a ranger on the Town Belt, a hill
overlooking Dunedin, found a coat, a hat and silk striped cravat, and
a few days later a pair of trousers folded up and placed under a bush.
These articles of clothing were identified as those which Butler
had been seen wearing on the Saturday and Sunday morning. They were
examined. There were a number of bloodstains on them, not one of them
larger in size than a pea, some almost invisible. On the front of the
trousers about the level of the groin there were blood spots on both
sides. There was blood on the fold of the left breast of the coat and on
the lining of the cuff of the right arm. The shirt Butler was wearing
at the time of his arrest was examined also. There were small spots of
blood, about fourteen altogether, on the neck and shoulder bands, the
right armpit, the left sleeve, and on both wristbands. Besides the
clothes, a salmon tin was found on the Town Belt, and behind a seat in
the Botanical Gardens, from which a partial view of the Dewars' house
in Cumberland Street could be obtained, two more salmon tins were found,
all three similar to the five purchased by Butler on the Sunday morning,
two of which had been in his possession at the time of his arrest.

Such were the main facts of the case which Butler had to answer when,
a few weeks later, he was put on his trial before the Supreme Court at
Dunedin. The presiding judge was Mr. Justice Williams, afterwards Sir
Joshua Williams and a member of the Privy Council. The Crown Prosecutor,
Mr. Haggitt, conducted the case for the Crown, and Butler defended
himself.


II

THE TRIAL OF BUTLER


To a man of Butler's egregious vanity his trial was a glorious
opportunity for displaying his intellectual gifts, such as they were.
One who had known him in prison about this time describes him as a
strange compound of vanity and envy, blind to his own faults and envious
of the material advantages enjoyed by others. Self-willed and arrogant,
he could bully or whine with equal effect. Despising men, he believed
that if a man did not possess some requisite quality, he had only to ape
it, as few would distinguish between the real and the sham.

But with all these advantages in the struggle for life, it is certain
that Butler's defence would have been far less effective had be{sic}
been denied all professional aid. As a matter of fact, throughout his
trial Butler was being advised by three distinguished members of the New
Zealand bar, now judges of the Supreme Court, who though not appearing
for him in court, gave him the full benefit of their assistance
outside it. At the same time Butler carried off the thing well. Where
imagination was required, Butler broke down; he could not write sketches
of life in prison; that was too much for his pedestrian intellect. But
given the facts of a case, dealing with a transaction of which he alone
knew the real truth, and aided by the advice and guidance of trained
intellects, Butler was unquestionably clever and shrewd enough to make
the best use of such advantages in meeting the case against him.

Thus equipped for the coming struggle, this high-browed ruffian, with
his semi-intellectual cast of countenance, his jerky restless posturing,
his splay-footed waddle, "like a lame Muscovy duck," in the graphic
words of his gaol companion, stood up to plead for his life before the
Supreme Court at Dunedin.

It may be said at the outset that Butler profited greatly by the
scrupulous fairness shown by the Crown Prosecutor. Mr. Haggitt extended
to the prisoner a degree of consideration and forbearance, justified
undoubtedly towards an undefended prisoner. But, as we have seen, Butler
was not in reality undefended. At every moment of the trial he was in
communication with his legal advisers, and being instructed by them how
to meet the evidence given against him. Under these circumstances the
unfailing consideration shown him by the Crown Prosecutor seems almost
excessive. From the first moment of the trial Butler was fully alive
to the necessities of his situation. He refrained from including in his
challenges of the jury the gentleman who was afterwards foreman; he knew
he was all right, he said, because he parted his hair in the middle, a
"softy," in fact. He did not know in all probability that one gentleman
on the jury had a rooted conviction that the murder of the Dewars was
the work of a criminal lunatic. There was certainly nothing in Butler's
demeanour or behaviour to suggest homicidal mania.

The case against Butler rested on purely circumstantial evidence.

No new facts of importance were adduced at the trial. The stealing
of Dewar's wages, which had been paid to him on the Saturday, was the
motive for the murder suggested by the Crown. The chief facts pointing
to Butler's guilt were: his conversation with Mallard and Bain previous
to the crime; his demeanour after it; his departure from Dunedin; the
removal of his moustache and the soles of his boots; his change of
clothes and the bloodstains found upon them, added to which was
his apparent inability to account for his movements on the night in
question.

Such as the evidence was, Butler did little to shake it in
cross-examination. His questions were many of them skilful and pointed,
but on more than one occasion the judge intervened to save him from the
danger common to all amateur cross-examiners, of not knowing when to
stop. He was most successful in dealing with the medical witnesses.
Butler had explained the bloodstains on his clothes as smears that had
come from scratches on his hands, caused by contact with bushes. This
explanation the medical gentlemen with good reason rejected. But they
went further, and said that these stains might well have been caused by
the spurting and spraying of blood on to the murderer as he struck his
victims. Butler was able to show by the position of the bloodstains on
the clothes that such an explanation was open to considerable doubt.

Butler's speech in his defence lasted six hours, and was a creditable
performance. Its arrangement is somewhat confused and repetitious, some
points are over-elaborated, but on the whole he deals very successfully
with most of the evidence given against him and exposes the
unquestionable weakness of the Crown case. At the outset he declared
that he had taken his innocence for his defence. "I was not willing,"
he said, "to leave my life in the hands of a stranger. I was willing to
incur all the disadvantages which the knowledge of the law might bring
upon me. I was willing, also, to enter on this case without
any experience whatever of that peculiarly acquired art of
cross-examination. I fear I have done wrong. If I had had the assistance
of able counsel, much more light would have been thrown on this case
than has been." As we have seen, Butler enjoyed throughout his trial the
informal assistance of three of the most able counsel in New Zealand, so
that this heroic attitude of conscious innocence braving all dangers
loses most of its force. Without such assistance his danger might have
been very real.

A great deal of the evidence as to his conduct and demeanour at the time
of the murder Butler met by acknowledging that it was he who had broken
into Mr. Stamper's house on the Saturday morning, burgled it and set it
on fire. His consciousness of guilt in this respect was, he said, quite
sufficient to account for anything strange or furtive in his manner
at that time. He was already known to the police; meeting Bain on the
Saturday night, he felt more than ever sure that he was susspected{sic}
of the robbery at Mr. Stamper's; he therefore decided to leave Dunedin
as soon as possible. That night, he said, he spent wandering about the
streets half drunk, taking occasional shelter from the pouring rain,
until six o'clock on the Sunday morning, when he went to the Scotia
Hotel. A more detailed account of his movements on the night of the
Dewars' murder he did not, or would not, give.

When he comes to the facts of the murder and his theories as to the
nature and motive of the crime--theories which he developed at rather
unnecessary length for the purpose of his own defence--his speech is
interesting. It will be recollected that on the discovery of the murder,
a knife was found on the grass outside the house. This knife was not
the property of the Dewars. In Butler's speech he emphasised the opinion
that this knife had been brought there by the murderer: "Horrible though
it may be, my conclusion is that he brought it with the intention of
cutting the throats of his victims, and that, finding they lay in rather
an untoward position, he changed his mind, and, having carried out the
object with which he entered the house, left the knife and, going back,
brought the axe with which he effected his purpose. What was the purpose
of the murderer? Was it the robbery of Dewar's paltry wages? Was it
the act of a tiger broken loose on the community? An act of pure wanton
devilry? or was there some more reasonable explanation of this most
atrocious crime?"

Butler rejected altogether the theory of ordinary theft. No thief
of ambitious views, he said, would pitch upon the house of a poor
journeyman butcher. The killing of the family appeared to him to be
the motive: "an enemy hath done this." The murderer seems to have had a
knowledge of the premises; he enters the house and does his work swiftly
and promptly, and is gone. "We cannot know," Butler continues, "all the
passages in the lives of the murdered man or woman. What can we know of
the hundred spites and jealousies or other causes of malice which might
have caused the crime? If you say some obscure quarrel, some spite or
jealousy is not likely to have been the cause of so dreadful a murder,
you cannot revert to the robbery theory without admitting a motive much
weaker in all its utter needlessness and vagueness. The prominent
feature of the murder, indeed the only feature, is its ruthless,
unrelenting, determined vindictiveness. Every blow seemed to say, 'You
shall die you shall not live.'"

Whether Butler were the murderer of the Dewars or not, the theory that
represented them as having been killed for the purpose of robbery
has its weak side all the weaker if Butler, a practical and ambitious
criminal, were the guilty man.

In 1882, two years after Butler's trial, there appeared in a New Zealand
newspaper, Society, published in Christchurch, a series of Prison
"Portraits," written evidently by one who had himself undergone a term
of imprisonment. One of the "Portraits" was devoted to an account of
Butler. The writer had known Butler in prison. According to the story
told him by Butler, the latter had arrived in Dunedin with a quantity of
jewellery he had stolen in Australia. This jewellery he entrusted to a
young woman for safe keeping. After serving his first term of two years'
imprisonment in Dunedin, Butler found on his release that the young
woman had married a man of the name of Dewar. Butler went to Mrs. Dewar
and asked for the return of his jewellery; she refused to give it up. On
the night of the murder he called at the house in Cumberland Street and
made a last appeal to her, but in vain. He determined on revenge. During
his visit to Mrs. Dewar he had had an opportunity of seeing the axe and
observing the best way to break into the house. He watched the husband's
return, and decided to kill him as well as his wife on the chance of
obtaining his week's wages. With the help of the knife which he had
found in the backyard of a hotel he opened the window. The husband he
killed in his sleep, the woman waked with the first blow he struck her.
He found the jewellery in a drawer rolled up in a pair of stockings.
He afterwards hid it in a well-marked spot some half-hour before his
arrest.

A few years after its appearance in Society, this account of Butler was
reproduced in an Auckland newspaper. Bain, the detective, wrote a letter
questioning the truth of the writer's statements. He pointed out
that when Butler first came to Dunedin he had been at liberty only a
fortnight before serving his first term of imprisonment, very little
time in which to make the acquaintance of a woman and dispose of the
stolen jewellery. He asked why, if Butler had hidden the jewellery just
before his arrest, he had not also hidden the opera-glasses which he
had stolen from Mr. Stamper's house. Neither of these comments is very
convincing. A fortnight seems time enough in which a man of Butler's
character might get to know a woman and dispose of some jewellery;
while, if Butler were the murderer of Mr. Dewar as well as the burglar
who had broken into Stamper's house, it was part of his plan to
acknowledge himself guilty of the latter crime and use it to justify his
movements before and after the murder. Bain is more convincing when he
states at the conclusion of his letter that he had known Mrs. Dewar from
childhood as a "thoroughly good and true woman," who, as far as he knew,
had never in her life had any acquaintance with Butler.

At the same time, the account given by Butler's fellow-prisoner, in
which the conduct of the murdered woman is represented as constituting
the provocation for the subsequent crime, explains one peculiar
circumstance in connection with the tragedy, the selection of this
journeyman butcher and his wife as the victims of the murderer. It
explains the theory, urged so persistently by Butler in his speech to
the jury, that the crime was the work of an enemy of the Dewars, the
outcome of some hidden spite, or obscure quarrel; it explains the
apparent ferocity of the murder, and the improbability of a practical
thief selecting such an unprofitable couple as his prey. The rummaged
chest of drawers and the fact that some trifling articles of jewellery
were left untouched on the top of them, are consistent with an eager
search by the murderer for some particular object. Against this theory
of revenge is the fact that Butler was a malignant ruffian and liar in
any case, that, having realised very little in cash by the burglary at
Stamper's house, he would not be particular as to where he might get a
few shillings more, that he had threatened to do a tigerish deed, and
that it is characteristic of his vanity to try to impute to his crime a
higher motive than mere greed or necessity.

Butler showed himself not averse to speaking of the murder in Cumberland
Street to at least one of those, with whom he came in contact in his
later years. After he had left New Zealand and returned to Australia,
he was walking in a street in Melbourne with a friend when they passed
a lady dressed in black, carrying a baby in her arms. The baby looked
at the two men and laughed. Butler frowned and walked rapidly away. His
companion chaffed him, and asked whether it was the widow or the baby
that he was afraid of. Butler was silent, but after a time asked his
companion to come into some gardens and sit down on one of the seats, as
he had something serious to say to him. For a while Butler sat silent.
Then he asked the other if he had ever been in Dunedin. "Yes," was the
reply. "Look here," said Butler, "you are the only man I ever made any
kind of confidant of. You are a good scholar, though I could teach you
a lot." After this gracious compliment he went on: "I was once tried in
Dunedin on the charge of killing a man, woman and child, and although
innocent, the crime was nearly brought home to me. It was my own ability
that pulled me through. Had I employed a professional advocate, I should
not have been here to-day talking to you." After describing the murder,
Butler said: "Trying to fire the house was unnecessary, and killing
the baby was unnecessary and cruel. I respect no man's life, for no man
respects mine. A lot of men I have never injured have tried to put a
rope round my neck more than once. I hate society in general, and one
or two individuals in particular. The man who did that murder in Dunedin
has, if anything, my sympathy, but it seems to me he need not have
killed that child." His companion was about to speak. Butler stopped
him. "Now, don't ever ask me such a silly question as that," he said.
"What?" asked his friend. "You were about to ask me if I did that deed,"
replied Butler, "and you know perfectly well that, guilty or innocent,
that question would only be answered in one way." "I was about to ask
nothing of the kind," said the other, "for you have already told me that
you were innocent." "Good!" said Butler, "then let that be the end of
the subject, and never refer to it again, except, perhaps, in your own
mind, when you can, if you like, remember that I said the killing of the
child was unnecessary and cruel."

Having developed to the jury his theory of why the crime was committed,
Butler told them that, as far as he was concerned, there were four
points against him on which the Crown relied to prove his guilt.
Firstly, there was the fact of his being in the neighbourhood of the
crime on the Sunday morning; that, he said, applied to scores of other
people besides himself. Then there was his alleged disturbed appearance
and guilty demeanour. The evidence of that was, he contended, doubtful
in any case, and referable to another cause; as also his leaving Dunedin
in the way and at the time he did. He scouted the idea that murderers
are compelled by some invisible force to betray their guilt. "The doings
of men," he urged, "and their success are regulated by the amount
of judgment that they possess, and, without impugning or denying the
existence of Providence, I say this is a law that holds good in all
cases, whether for evil or good. Murderers, if they have the sense and
ability and discretion to cover up their crime, will escape, do escape,
and have escaped. Many people, when they have gravely shaken their heads
and said 'Murder will out,' consider they have done a great deal and
gone a long way towards settling the question. Well, this, like many
other stock formulas of Old World wisdom, is not true. How many murders
are there that the world has never heard of, and never will? How many a
murdered man, for instance, lies among the gum-trees of Victoria, or
in the old abandoned mining-shafts on the diggings, who is missed by
nobody, perhaps, but a pining wife at home, or helpless children, or
an old mother? But who were their murderers? Where are they? God knows,
perhaps, but nobody else, and nobody ever will." The fact, he said, that
he was alleged to have walked up Cumberland Street on the Sunday morning
and looked in the direction of the Dewars' house was, unless the causes
of superstition and a vague and incomplete reasoning were to be accepted
as proof, evidence rather of his

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