The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (45 page)

His accusers, however, noticing with satisfaction that he had not made any allusion at all to the rumours that had, at one time, been current in Artigues, with regard to the bewitchment of Martin Guerre and his wife, commented upon this point to the judges, who at once examined him on it, but his replies to all the questions put to him were perfectly satisfactory, and tallied in every detail with a statement in writing, relative to the same subject, made by Bertrande Guerre.

A hundred and fifty witnesses were now called to say whether they identified the accused as Martin Guerre or Arnold Tilh. About sixty of them could not decide one way or the other. Forty drew attention to certain marks on the accused, namely, a scar on the forehead, a misshapen nail on the forefinger of his right hand, several warts on various of the other fingers of the same hand, and a conspicuous mole over one eye, declaring that Martin Guerre, whom they remembered as a youth, had all these marks, and therefore they were convinced that the man they now saw before them in the person of the accused actually was Martin Guerre; whilst, on the other hand, fifty witnesses pronounced the accused to be Arnold Tilh of Sagias, whom they had known as a boy, and who, they thought, might quite possibly have possessed marks on his person similar to those said to have been seen on the person of Martin Guerre.

As a further test, Sanxi, the acknowledged son of Martin Guerre, was brought into Court. The majority of those present decided that he bore no resemblance whatsoever to the accused; but, on the other hand, they observed that Martin Guerre’s four sisters, who had preceded Sanxi in the witness box, bore a very close resemblance to the accused.

Thus the pros and cons in the case seemed to be about equal, and considerable excitement ensued, when the judges, after conferring together for some time, returned to pronounce their verdict. It was to the effect that the accused, being found guilty of all the charges against him, was sentenced to be executed and quartered.

He made an appeal to a higher tribunal, and another trial was consequently arranged before the High Court of Justice, at Toulouse. In due course it took place.

One of the first witnesses called was Bertrande Guerre. Her past life, the fact that for eight years she had remained wholly loyal to her absent husband, resolutely refusing to divorce him or to marry again, had created a very strong impression in her favour, and this impression was enhanced by her extreme beauty, simple air and very modest bearing. It seemed impossible that she could descend to falsehood, or that she would have lived with a man, unless she had been thoroughly convinced he was her lawful husband. Yet, on being confronted by the accused and asked by him in his usual calm, steady voice to tell the Court whether he was or was not the real Martin Guerre, she dropped her eyes, looked confused and declined to give any definite reply. Fortunately for the accused, the judges were of the opinion that this hesitation on Bertrande’s part was due to intimidation on the part of Peter Guerre and his sons-in-law. She was afraid to speak the truth because of them.

Thirty of the people who had figured as witnesses in the previous trial were re-examined, and, as before, they could not agree. While some of them declared the accused was Martin Guerre, others were equally positive he was Tilh. Those who remembered both Martin Guerre and Arnold Tilh as youths agreed that the likeness between Martin Guerre and Arnold Tilh had been remarkable, but that there were certain differences. Arnold Tilh, for instance, was more robust looking and upright than Martin Guerre. I have already referred to certain marks the boy Martin Guerre was declared to have possessed; some of the witnesses who had already affirmed that Arnold Tilh had several, if not all, of those marks, now differed as to the position of some of them, some declaring, for instance, that the scar had been over the right eye, and some over the left. Indeed, no two witnesses agreed
in
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. And with regard to other testimony it was just as conflicting. An innkeeper of Rieux in the witness box swore that the accused had once told him in confidence that he was, in reality, Arnold Tilh; and two other witnesses said that, on a certain occasion, seeing the accused out of doors, in company with some of Martin Guerre’s relatives, they were about to greet him as their old friend Arnold Tilh, when he signalled to them to be silent, and shortly afterwards one of them received a present from him with a message to the effect that silence was golden.
¹⁹
Also, an uncle of Arnold Tilh, on seeing the accused in Court in chains, at once identified him as his nephew, and burst into tears, which involuntary demonstration on the part of a witness made a great impression on the judges, who regarded it as very telling evidence for the prosecution.

Yet, as against all this and more testimony of a condemning nature, certain witnesses, including the brothers of Martin Guerre, were emphatic in their belief that the accused was the person he purported to be, urging in support of their contention the character of Arnold Tilh. Was it possible, they argued, that such an incorrigibly lazy, mendacious and disreputable individual as Arnold Tilh admittedly had been could have lived for three years in perfect harmony with a woman of such an upright and estimable a character as Bertrande? This was a poser. The judges were perplexed; they did not know what to decide, and it is highly probable they would have given a verdict in favour of the accused, had not the prosecution, at this psychological moment, created a big sensation in Court by producing a new witness in the person of the man with the wooden leg, already referred to, who styled himself the real Martin Guerre.

The accused, on being confronted with this new witness, did not appear in any way startled or disconcerted. On the contrary, he maintained the same calm demeanour which had characterized him throughout. He declared the man with the wooden leg was simply an impostor, bribed to appear against him by Peter Guerre, and that it was all part of a conspiracy to deprive him of his lawful wife and the property he lawfully inherited.

In giving his testimony, the man with the wooden leg, while vehemently denying that he had been bribed, and protesting he was the real Martin Guerre, appeared very flustered, and his evidence struck many of those present as forced and unconvincing.

The next step, however, on the part of the prosecution, and one which had probably been well rehearsed beforehand, was to confront the man with the wooden leg with the Guerres. This proved fatal to the accused. Directly the eldest of Martin Guerre’s sisters saw the new witness, she threw herself into his arms, calling him her dear lost brother. Her three sisters followed suit. Then, amid the most tense silence, Bertrande was called. The moment she entered the Court and saw the man with the wooden leg, she became greatly agitated, and bursting into tears fell on her knees before him, crying out that he was her real husband and imploring his forgiveness.

That, in the opinion of the judges, settled the matter. They at once pronounced the accused to be guilty of all the charges brought against him, and sentenced him to be executed. Four days later, that is to say on 16 September 1560, the sentence was carried into effect.

The condemned man, bareheaded, clad only in his shirt, holding in one hand a burning taper, and with a rope round his neck, was, first of all, made to kneel before the door of the Church of Rieux and ask pardon of God, the King, the local authorities, the presumed real Martin Guerre, in other words the man with the wooden leg, and Bertrande. Then, with a cruelty characteristic of those times, he was taken to a scaffold, which had been erected just outside Martin Guerre’s house, and in the presence of Bertrande and all the Guerre family, he was slowly strangled, his body being subsequently burned.

If Bertrande did feel any pity for him, she certainly did not manifest any, but seems to have remained perfectly indifferent to his sufferings. That he was an impostor should not, perhaps, be doubted, since it is said that he made a full and spontaneous confession of his guilt without any coercion whatever.

But, at the same time, it seems to me quite conceivable that this unfortunate man really may have been Martin Guerre, and that he made a false confession with regard to his identity, anticipating torture if he did not.

The question as to whether the man with the wooden leg was the real Martin Guerre may, I think, safely be answered in the negative. It must be remembered that the soldier from Rochefort had publicly declared, most probably at the instigation of Peter Guerre, that the real Martin Guerre, having lost a leg in the wars, was wearing a wooden one. What an inducement then for an adventurer, chancing to have lost a leg, to pretend to be Martin Guerre, the owner of no inconsiderable property and a pretty wife! Learning, too, of Peter Guerre’s fanatical hatred of the man who had for three years passed as Martin Guerre and was now accused of being Arnold Tilh, he would, of course, bank considerably on Peter Guerre’s support, reckoning that with such an influential ally the risk of exposure would not be very great.

Or, again, and what, I think, is more likely, Peter Guerre may have engineered the whole thing and have bribed the man with the wooden leg to play the rôle of Martin Guerre.

As I have already stated, the man with the wooden leg appeared very confused in Court; his replies to questions put to him were evasive and shifty, and he gave not a few of those present in Court the impression that he was not genuine and merely acting a part he found extremely difficult to maintain. Were he the real Martin Guerre, many argued, he would surely have made known his presence in Rieux or Artigues before his appearance at the trial, and the fact of his not having done so suggested he was purposely kept out of the way, lest he should be asked too many questions.

The fact that Bertrande and Martin Guerre’s sisters proclaimed the man with the wooden leg to be the genuine Martin Guerre the moment they set eyes on him proved nothing, since they had all been just as ready with their recognition in the case of “Arnold Tilh”, so that, if they had been so easily deceived on one occasion, why should they not be on another?

But apart from the fact that their identification was thus proved to be futile, it is more probable than not that, in the case of the man with the wooden leg, they had all acted under the coercion of the vindictive Peter Guerre.

However, if neither the man with the wooden leg nor the man who had been executed was the real Martin Guerre, what had become of him? He was last seen, it will be remembered, that summer morning, some seven or eight years after his marriage, walking along the road leading from his home, through lonely lanes and fields, in the direction of his father’s house. He was well known to have had several inveterate enemies, youths who bitterly resented his prosperity and coveted both his wife and fortune. What more likely, then, than that these envious youths had banded together and murdered him, burying his body in one of the many unfrequented spots all around Artigues?

I can find no definite statement that this explanation of his disappearance was seriously considered at the time, but so obvious is it that there was both motive and opportunity for murder, that were it not for Bertrande’s having been so sure, to begin with, and apparently up to the commencement of his trial, that the man who claimed to be her husband, and with whom she subsequently lived for three years, was her husband, I should say that, without doubt, Martin Guerre was murdered. It is the inconsequent and unsatisfactory behaviour of Bertrande herself that, in my opinion, makes any certain solution to the mystery of her husband’s disappearance impossible.

(Annie Hearn, 1930)

Daniel Farson

Everything about Annie Hearn suggested a long, grey spinsterhood. Plain, slightly dowdy and prematurely middle-aged, she had spent much of her life nursing various ailing relatives in the north of England. In 1919, she claimed to have married a Dr Leonard Hearn in London, but this appears to be unsubstantiated. So is her claim to have been widowed within a week of the wedding. In the early twenties, Mrs Hearn moved south to Cornwall, nursing an elderly aunt and a sister, both of whom died under her care. A local farmer and his wife were in the habit of taking Annie Hearn with them on various outings. For one of these trips, she prepared tinned salmon sandwiches, dressed with her own homemade salad cream. Two weeks later, the farmer’s wife was dead from arsenical poisoning. Annie Hearn disappeared, apparently into thin air. When she was found, she was arrested and tried for murder, but the jury acquitted her and Mrs Hearn walked free. The mystery of what really happened to the poisoned neighbour was never solved. The case caught the attention of the writer and broadcaster Daniel Farson (1927–97). Farson was a rumbustious alcoholic who moved to the West Country in the 1960s from London, where he was a familiar figure in louche Soho circles. He wrote a book on Jack the Ripper, claiming the killer was M.J. Druitt, a barrister who, on 8 September 1888, played cricket for Blackheath less than six hours after Annie Chapman was hacked to death in Spitalfields.

It became one of the most mysterious cases of murder this century, but it had a jaunty beginning. On the afternoon of Saturday 18 October 1930, three people set out by motor car from the small Cornish village of Lewannick, near Launceston, for a trip to the nearby seaside resort of Bude. William Thomas, a farmer, and his wife Alice were taking their neighbour Annie Hearn on an outing. Annie had been on her own since the death of her elder sister Minnie in July and the Thomases had decided that a trip might cheer her up.

Annie Hearn was something of a mystery in the neighbourhood. She lived at Trenhorne House, just outside Lewannick, a hundred yards or so up the road from the Thomases at Trenhorne Farm. She was a “foreigner” from the north of England who had come to Cornwall in 1921. She was apparently a widow, probably in her mid forties, though no one was certain of her age—not even Annie herself. She had known bad luck: her husband had left her only a week after their marriage; her aunt had died at Trenhorne House after a long illness, and then tragedy had struck again with the painful death of her sister Minnie. It was only natural that William and Alice should feel sorry for the lonely woman who lived nearby. Alice made her junkets and clotted cream, which her husband took to Trenhorne House. He had shown sufficient trust in her to lend her thirty-eight pounds two years earlier when she was short of money.