The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (74 page)
Read The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes Online
Authors: Roger Wilkes
Wild’s final speech does not lend itself to condensation. It began with an appeal to the jurors’ sympathy: “Shall it go forth to the world that this poor country girl”—she had been married thirteen years and borne eight children
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—“who has staggered from her illness in order to face the ordeal of cross-examination is the wife of a murderer?” It underlined the main points of the defence, admitting that if they did not believe Mrs Gardiner and thought her husband was guilty that she must then be an accomplice in the murder of his paramour. It conceded that Gurrin’s evidence was good enough for a civil action, but was not to be acted on in a criminal case. And ended up in an impassioned plea to say that the case was not proven and that the accused was, in England, therefore entitled to be acquitted.
Dickens replied that this was not a case where the jury should be misled by sympathy for the accused’s relatives. Murder had been done and, although he had refrained from taking technical objections, everything pointed at the accused as the guilty man. Why should they, as the defence suggested, look for an unknown man—for neither Davis nor Goodchild were guilty—when they had the letter, the footmarks, the signal, the knife, the association, the shoes, and the bottle all pointing to Gardiner. People did not swear a man’s life away recklessly and there was no reason whatever for thinking that Skinner, a man of twenty-seven, or Rouse, or Stammers, would swear to seeing what they had not seen.
Mr Justice Lawrance pointed out the difference between direct and circumstantial evidence and went on to analyse certain aspects of the evidence. The most improbable part of Skinner’s story was the language attributed to the dead girl but, after considering the literary compositions found in her possession, the improbability immediately disappeared. As far as the Sibton investigation went, it did not matter what Guy thought of the facts: what did matter was what the jury thought. It had been suggested that Rouse was an evil-liver, but had this been the case, would he have been allowed to remain in a position of trust in his church? Judging the similarity of handwriting was a matter for the jury, but experts were useful in pointing out similarities and Gurrin was the best in his class. Someone made an appointment with the girl, someone kept it and the girl had died. Very strong suspicion must be cast on the writer of such a letter. The defence had not contradicted the fact that, from in front of Gardiner’s doorstep Rose’s window was clearly visible, and where was Gardiner seen at the time that the signal was to be given? Stammers had seen a fire early that morning. Morriss had seen footprints and, had the police not wasted time speculating on suicide, somebody else might have remembered these prints. The evidence about the condition of the knife was not important taken by itself, but it was certainly significant in the light of the other evidence. The label on the bottle was significant. The absence of bloodstains on Gardiner was a point in his favour, but there was no suggestion that the blood had been stepped in: the evidence about his possessing only two shirts was perplexing. The murderer might not have been the father of the girl’s unborn child, but he probably had good reason to suppose that he would be given the credit for her condition. If they had a reasonable doubt, the accused was entitled to the benefit of it but such doubt must be fair and reasonable and not trivial “such as the speculative ingenuity of counsel might suggest”. The only certainty they could have would be what they had seen with their own eyes but they had to act on the sort of evidence that they would act on in their ordinary lives. It depended so much on what people meant by a moral certainty. If the facts led them to the conclusion that the accused, although no human eye saw him, was the man who did the murder they would be justified in giving effect to such opinion. Otherwise, Gardiner was entitled to their verdict.
The jury retired at five o’clock and were out for nearly two and a quarter hours before returning to announce that, like their predecessor, they were unable to agree. The judge had correctly assumed that standards of what was a moral certainty varied, and it was later understood that once again it had been eleven votes to one, though on this occasion eleven were for acquittal. Although double disagreements are not unknown, it is as far as I know unique for there to be one in a murder case. The practice is to put the accused on trial a third time and offer no evidence, thus giving him the advantage of a full acquittal: there is much to be said for this course as it is hard to say that a case has been proved beyond reasonable doubt when two juries have already disagreed.
On this occasion the procedure was varied. Five days after the second disagreement, the Attorney-General lodged a
nolle prosequi
, thereby intimating that it was not intended to proceed with a third trial. Gardiner was accordingly released from Ipswich Gaol and, after removing his distinctive beard, departed for London and was not thereafter heard of again with any certainty. Legend in Peasenhall has it that he once visited Yoxford, his wife’s village, and his children are said to have visited Peasenhall itself. He is variously supposed to have found employment in London as a wheelwright and to have taken over a tobacconist’s. If he was innocent, then his tribulations were those of Job, but I fear that my sympathies are with the majority of the first jury.
The reader need not agree. He may even find solace in the accident theory. According to this school of thought, Rose slipped on the stairs as she came to the door to let in her lover. She fell on the little bottle which was in her hand, thereby cutting her throat in two places and wounding herself in the chest: the lamp dropped from her hand and broke on the floor, setting fire to the paraffin. The lover entered and fled in horror, presumably leaving behind his old copy of the
East Anglian Daily Times
.
There is also the detective story solution. I have always assumed that it was in reference to the Peasenhall case that ex-Detective Sergeant Leeson wrote:
A sequel . . . may be found in the evidence given at a murder trial some years ago. The victim had been done to death in her own house by someone who had visited her, and the evidence on which the prosecution relied to prove the case consisted of footprints which they endeavoured to prove were made by the accused man. There was no doubt that the boots produced belonged to the prisoner, and fitted the prints, but he was acquitted for want of substantiating evidence.
It is true that the footprints were made by someone passing to and from the prisoner’s home, but to my mind the evidence, had it been weaved differently, would have proved the prisoner’s wife to have been the guilty person.
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It is true that it was theoretically possible for Georgina Gardiner to have carried out the murder, but her demeanour in the witness-box hardly fits her for the role of Lady Macbeth. She may have had the will to destroy the viper that threatened to destroy her home, but she would hardly have borrowed her husband’s knife for the purpose: nor, in the broadest sense of the word, was the murder of Rose Harsent a ladylike operation.
(Jessie Costello, 1933)
Sydney Horler
To everyone’s surprise, Jessie Costello was cleared of murdering her fireman husband by dosing him with a poisonous compound used to burnish her kitchen boiler. The American Edmund Pearson, who was at the trial in 1933, put the comely Mrs Costello’s acquittal down to twelve male jurors “as helpless as twelve rabbits under the influence of those glittering ophidian eyes”. This account is by a British author, Sydney Horler (1888–1954), a former
Daily Mail
reporter who wrote dozens of thrillers in the 1920s and 1930s in the style of Edgar Wallace. Never one to mince his words, Horler described Mrs Costello’s acquittal and subsequent Broadway career, as “the most astonishing crime-farce within living memory”.
In these days of highly-publicized crime, murderers often get newspaper space which might well be devoted to more worthy individuals. At least, that is the plaint of the moralists, the high thinkers and the what-nots generally. Well, they have this consolation: if things are bad enough in this country, they are very much worse in America. Every now and then in that continent of fierce turbulence of one kind and another, there springs up a crime possessing so many bizarre features that something like 120 million people are held enthralled, fascinated, or repelled according to the nature of their mentality.
Having delivered ourselves of this brief homily, let us now examine in some detail the truly astonishing case of Jessie Costello. This woman may be said to have run the whole gamut of human emotions, not through her own merits but through the stark fact that she was accused of murdering her husband by means of cyanide of potassium poisoning. During her trial she became the most important figure in all the Americas: immediately after the trial she was besieged by film and music-hall agents with dazzling offers—and, final and most bewildering phase of all, two months after her acquittal from an ordeal which a spirited writer in the
New Yorker
called “as luscious a trial as any in the gaudy annals of American jurisprudence,” she stood beside Mrs Aimée Semple Macpherson, the hot-gospeller revivalist, and sang “The Old Rugged Cross”, maybe with fervour, but certainly with an eye to the main chance.
If ever a woman can be said to have determined to capitalize the notoriety due to having stood in the dock on a charge of murder, it was Mrs Jessie Costello. She had believed—and hoped—that she would find her inevitable way to the Bright Lights of Broadway as a result of having been placed in the pen; but when the wheel of Fate turned about and landed her instead by the side of that other truly remarkable character, Aimée Semple Macpherson, she felt not only bewildered but reproachful. As the writer in the
New Yorker
so ably put it, “as she faced 8,000 devout people in Boston’s Arena, even the ecstatic amens and hallelujahs that greeted her throaty blues-singer’s voice did not completely banish her resentment. Her trial had brought her to God instead of to Broadway, and if she was a bit rebellious who can blame her?”
All things considered, I am of the opinion that the Costello trial—practically unknown in this country, let it be added—and what followed it constitutes the most amazing piece of criminal jurisprudence within the last fifty years. If any should doubt this assertion, and it is very possible, all I ask is for that sceptic to read on.
The remarkable Jessie was a Maid of Salem. Before her great advancement she strutted on the meagre stage of Peabody, Massachusetts. Peabody is a small, drab, entirely undistinguished factory town of 20,000 inhabitants, distant some thirty miles from Boston. Born in 1902, Jessie had always disliked school, and at the age of fourteen had refused ever to return. She is said to have resembled her father, a breezy, blunt, go-to-hell type of a fellow, with a temper to match his ham-like hands. From an early age—but here I must borrow again the inimitable prose of the
New Yorker
writer:
Jessie was destined for higher things. The success she achieved at the Salem Court-house was perhaps no surprise to those connoisseurs of seductiveness who, lolling against corner lamp-posts, had watched Mrs Costello’s provocative and rather hefty sensuosity wriggle off into the distance. Frequently, in the past, they had given her dark, intense figure, whose ample torso bent a little forward from burgeoning hips, that accolade of approval expressed by the phrase “get a load of that!” In their way, they were pioneers. Perhaps, too, those of Mrs Costello’s neighbours who had engaged with her in certain fierce debates were not surprised by the fire and dash she later revealed. She had a certain masculinity of expression, rich, varied and yet precise, which she occasionally employed in the heat of combat.
From the above, a very good impression will be gathered of the type of woman this was.
She could not settle down to any ordinary employment; perhaps the visions of her future greatness prevented it. In any case, she tripped, in a single year, from a bakery shoppe, to the operation of an adding machine, and from this on to a Peabody Corset Emporium, where she was the chief sales-girl. (With her impressive bust she made a good model, no doubt.)
Well, there Jessie was—an opulent-breasted, big-hipped wench, full of zing, craving for life, never able to stay put for very long in one place, attracting the attention of all the males in the neighbourhood, seeing all the movies, attending all the dances, reading all the highly-spiced sex magazines in which American journalism abounds. It was, we are told, “a rich, full life”—and it was to be infinitely richer and infinitely fuller.
When she was seventeen—that was in November 1919—Jessie, looking at least ten years older in spite of the short skirts which were the fashion in those times, attracted the attention, whilst standing on a street corner selling poppies for the disabled veterans of the world war, of a tall, bleak-faced young fireman of Celtic cast, who was walking swiftly by. In the ordinary way, William J. Costello, himself a veteran of the war, and now an employee in the Fire Department of the Peabody Corporation, did not pay any attention to females; he was not that type. Sex meant nothing in his austere life. But this girl was different: when Jessie, reaching out, nabbed him by the arm, passers-by smiled; it was such a characteristic gesture of this go-getting wench. To those who were not beset with arid puritanism, the picture might have been a pleasant one—these onlookers could not have seen the shadow of death hovering in the distance.