The Ability to Kill (5 page)

I had been told that it was a pleasure to do a story for
Life
, and so it proved. It was assumed that you knew what you were doing and you were left to do it. If you asked for help you received it, promptly. One day I called for the police record of an obscure Minneapolis gangster, as well as for the details of the private financial arrangements existing between the defendant and his lawyer. Both sets of facts were delivered without fuss the same afternoon.

My only regret was that
Life
had decided to publish the piece before the trial ended. This meant that I had to be circumspect. Although I was allowed (as I certainly would not have been allowed in England) to use information not brought out in evidence at the trial, I could not say all the things I would have liked to say. It was not so much that the case was
sub judice
—the risk of being held in contempt of court was apparently slight—as the fear of attracting massive libel suits if the defendants were acquitted and advised that they had been given grounds. Obviously,
Life
was going to see that there were no such grounds. The number of ‘if-we-are-to-believe’s,’ ‘it-seems-that’s,’ and ‘according to’s,’ that I was obliged to use, gave the piece, I thought, a shifty air. It is possible, now, to be more explicit.

The A6 murder trial interested me for a special reason.

Some years ago, I became involved, as a witness, in a case concerning the ‘taking and driving away’ of a car. The car was mine. A question arose as to my identification of the driver. The circumstances were these:

I was living in London at the time. One Saturday, two youths in their late ’teens knocked at the door and asked if I wanted my car washed. They regularly washed cars for several of my neighbours, they said. Their charges were reasonable. I told them that they could start the following week.

The following week they reported for work. I showed them the garage at the back of the house, and gave them the ignition key so that they could move the car out into the mews and use the hose on it.

An hour or so later, I went out to see how they were getting on. I found the car gone.

I did not call the police then. The young men had left their cleaning materials there. I did not know how long the car had been gone. They might just, at that moment, have driven out on to the road in order to turn the car before putting it back into the garage—an unnecessary manœuvre, but, providing they didn’t do any damage, one that I didn’t object to.

I walked to the main road. There was no car. I waited at the mews entrance for the best part of an hour before they returned. The car appeared to be undamaged. I was both
relieved and annoyed. The driver said that he had gone to a shop to buy some polish. He could not produce the polish. When I asked if he had a driving licence, both of them scrambled out of the car and ran away. I still did not know how long they had had the car out, or where they had been. If the car had been involved in an accident, the insurance company would want to know who had been driving and if he had had my permission. I decided in the end that it would be sensible to telephone the police and tell them of the incident.

A detective-sergeant came and took particulars. I gave a fairly precise description of the driver and an indistinct one of his companion. Some weeks later, I was asked to attend an identity parade at the local police station. I had seen the pair on three separate occasions and in broad daylight, but my only clear memory was of the one who had spoken to me, and also driven the car. I had told the police this. The parade was held at night, under electric lights in a police garage.

As everyone who has ever been asked to make this kind of identification will know, it is an uncomfortable experience. Along with the wish to be helpful goes the determination not to make a mistake because of that wish. As you sit alone in the waiting room while the final preparations are made, you try to cast your mind back and clarify the relevant images in your mind’s eye. After a few minutes of this, you become convinced that you are really so unobservant that any identification you make is bound to be incompetent. You consider advising the police to call the whole thing off.

A uniformed inspector was in charge of the parade, which seemed to be conducted according to a strict set of rules. There was a line of about twenty hatless young men standing on the far side of the garage and well away from the door by which I was brought in. At the door, the inspector asked me to go across the garage to the line, walk along it, and see if I
recognised ‘any of the persons standing there.’ He was no more specific than that. He suggested also that I looked at every man in the line, and that I did not hurry. Then, he and the one or two other uniformed men who were there moved well away and stood where I would not be able to see them while the parade was on.

I walked over to the line and immediately recognised the driver standing somewhere near the centre. Nevertheless, I did as I had been asked, and walked slowly along the line from left to right. When I came to the driver, I took a long look at him to make quite sure. He stared through me as if he had never seen me before. I went on along the line. If the companion was there I did not recognise him. I walked back and stopped again in front of the driver.

I said: ‘I recognise this young man.’

The inspector came forward and asked me: ‘Where have you seen him before?’

‘Driving my car.’

‘Are you quite sure that this is the person?’

‘Quite sure.’

Then the driver spoke: ‘Mr Ambler has made a mistake.’ It was said firmly and without indignation.

I recognised the voice, too. Of course, I did not know his name then. For convenience here, I will call him Frank.
^*

I repeated the identification. Frank insisted again that I was mistaken.

A week or so later, I attended another parade to see if I could identify Frank’s companion. I failed to do so. On that occasion, I asked the police where they found the men to make up these parades. They told me that for a parade in that age group they were usually helped by volunteers from a local Territorial drill hall.

Meanwhile, Frank had been charged and the case was to be heard at the magistrate’s court. Frank proved elusive, however. Twice the hearing was postponed because he had sent word that he was ill. About five weeks elapsed before I was called to give evidence. Then, to the magistrate’s evident annoyance, Frank elected to be tried before a jury in a higher court. He was remanded on bail of fifty pounds. The money was put up by his father. They had the same lean, aquiline features; but there the resemblance ended. Frank was taller and had a flamboyant, challenging air. The father was wistful and gentle-looking, a craftsman of some kind who had worked hard and steadily all his life. On one occasion he nodded to me glumly when we encountered one another outside a courtroom.

After the first identification parade, I had suggested to the police that, as no harm had been done, and as the offence was pretty trivial anyway, Frank should simply be given a warning and told to behave himself in the future. The inspector’s response had been cool and brief. At the jury trial, five months later, I learned why.

Frank had a record for taking other people’s cars which went back some years. He had been caught and convicted a number of times. He had been placed on probation again and again. In fact, when he had taken my car he had still been on probation for an earlier offence. But the magistrate who had tried the previous case had also suspended Frank’s licence and disqualified him from driving. By taking my car while that disqualification was in force, he had made himself liable to a prison sentence. It would be a very light sentence, of course; but the police hoped that it would at last bring him to his senses.

At the trial Frank’s counsel cross-examined me at length about the first identity parade, and asked me if I recalled Frank’s claim that I had been mistaken. I did, of course.
Frank’s defence was a flat denial of the charge. They had the wrong man. The jury found him guilty and the judge sentenced him to seven days’ imprisonment.

That evening the London newspapers carried reports of the trial with headlines describing it as a case of mistaken identity. One of them had a sub-heading—‘Friend’s Confession.’ Both reports were accompanied by pictures, taken outside the court, of Frank and another young man, apparently of similar height, build and general appearance. The latter was the friend who had now confessed. Frank’s counsel was to lodge an appeal.

The police, when I asked them about the reports, were reticent, relaxed and sympathetic. I had identified Frank, had I not? I had never been in any doubt, had I? Well then, all I had to do was to say so. The appeal would be in the Lord Chief Justice’s court. They would let me know when. They were sorry that they had had to put me to such a lot of trouble—first, all those wasted days at the magistrate’s court, then the hanging about at Quarter Sessions, and now this. No wonder people were reluctant to come forward and be witnesses.

I looked at the newspaper pictures again. It was easy enough to recognise Frank, of course. And why not? I had had all too many opportunities of seeing him since the identity parade. His was a now familiar face. Yet, the friend undoubtedly resembled him. There was the same long, narrow head, the same beaky nose, the same receding forehead. The personalities expressed by the two smiles were undoubtedly different; but, again, why not? The important question was this: if I had seen the friend in the first identity parade instead of Frank, or as well as Frank, what would I have done—might I have identified the friend as the person who had taken my car?

I did not
think
so, but, looking at the pictures, I was by no means certain. The fact that I had had three encounters with ‘X’ before the identity parade could mean little. I had been
interested in having my car washed regularly without the trouble of taking it to a garage, but not all that interested in the faces of those who would do the work. I had remembered ‘X’ chiefly because he had been the spokesman, and because his keen-eyed ‘fast-sell’ tactics had amused me.

The feeling that one may have been responsible for a wrongful conviction is very unpleasant indeed. If Frank should chance to read this, he may take comfort from the fact that I did not enjoy much peace of mind during the weeks preceding the appeal hearing. As it turned out, I had made no mistake. Photographs, especially those reproduced in newspapers, can be very misleading. Instructed by the court to look at Frank and his friend side by side, I saw at once that the resemblance was superficial. The bone structures of the heads were similar; but height, build, complexion, colouring and posture were all quite different. As far as I was aware, I had never set eyes on the friend before.

Frank looked straight at me, keen-eyed to the last. I almost expected him to say, ‘Well, you can’t blame a chap for trying.’ He seemed neither surprised nor put out when I confirmed the identification. He had been remanded in custody for a week, so his sentence had already been served. What he had hoped to avoid, understandably, had been the inconvenience of a prison record. It soon emerged that the friend, who had so obligingly ‘confessed,’ had never before been in any trouble with the police, and so would only have been placed on probation if he had been convicted. It had been an ingenious little conspiracy. The court had harsh words for the pair of them.

What I took away was the memory of my uncertainty when I had learned that the identification had been challenged. I thought of all the murder cases I knew of in which far less positive identifications had been used to build up cases for the prosecution—men glimpsed at night and from a distance, in
artificial light and by persons with poor eyesight. And I remembered the relief I had experienced in court when I had seen Frank’s friend and realised that I would not have to change my evidence and admit that I had been mistaken.

I went home and re-read Mr Sydney Silverman’s account of the case of Walter Graham Rowland. It seemed a salutary thing to do.

Rowland was convicted at Manchester Assizes in 1946 of the murder of a prostitute named Olive Balchin. Her body had been found on a bombed site; death had been caused by hammer blows about the head. The hammer, a new one, had been near the corpse. Rowland had been seen by several witnesses in the dead woman’s company shortly before the murder. He had had a criminal record. Above all, he had been positively identified by a shopkeeper as the man who had bought the hammer.

Rowland protested that it was a case of mistaken identity. The jury found him guilty. Asked if he had anything to say as to why the sentence of death should not be passed on him, he replied:

‘Yes, I have, my Lord. I have never been a religious man, but as I have sat in this court during these last few hours the teachings of my boyhood have come back to me, and I say in all sincerity, and before you and this court, that when I stand in the Court of Courts before the Judge of Judges I shall be acquitted of this crime. Somewhere there is a person who knows that I stand here today an innocent man. The killing of this woman was a terrible crime, but there is a worse crime being committed now, my Lord, because somebody with the knowledge of this crime is seeing me sentenced today for a crime I did not commit. I have a firm belief that one day it will be proved in God’s own time that I am totally innocent of this charge, and the day will come when this case will be quoted in
the courts of this country to show what can happen to a man in a case of mistaken identity. I am going to face what lies before me with the fortitude and calm that only a clear conscience can give. That is all I have to say, my Lord.’

He was condemned to hang.

Four weeks later, a man named David John Ware, then in prison for theft, made a written confession that he had murdered Olive Balchin. He repeated the confession twice. The Court of Criminal Appeal refused to hear this evidence on the grounds that to do so would in effect be trying Ware without a jury. The Home Secretary ordered an inquiry into the confessions. Ware later withdrew them. Rowland was then hanged. He protested his innocence to the last.