The Jury (18 page)

HAVING been duly sworn in, they filed into the jury-box—Charles Weeden Underhay, Clare Cranshaw, Reginald Forth, George Oliver Brackett, Arthur Cheed, Cyril Enderby Gaskin, Blanche Izeley, Roger Coates, Sidney Harrington Nywood, Lionel Bonaker, Lucy Prynne, and James Bayfield. The most timid among them, Lucy Prynne, sat with averted head for some moments, as though in prayer; but the others could not resist glancing towards the dock. Natural curiosity: they wanted to know what a murderer looked like. And though they themselves were assembled to decide precisely this question, whether the man accused was a murderer or not, there couldn't be much doubt about it—could there?— since he had been already branded as such by a Coroner's court.…

AN USHER OF THE COURT: If any one can inform my Lords the King's Justices, the King's Serjeant, or the King's Attorney-General, ere this inquest be taken between our Sovereign Lord the King and the prisoner at the bar, of any treasons, murders, felonies, or misdemeanours, done or committed by the prisoner at the bar, let him come forth, and he shall be heard; for the prisoner now stands at the bar on his deliverance. And all persons who are bound by recognizance to prosecute or give evidence against the prisoner at the bar, let them come forth, prosecute, and give evidence, or they shall forfeit their recognizances. God save the King.

DEPUTY-CLERK OF THE COURT: Roderick William Strood, you are charged on indictment for that you on the 30th day of October in this present year feloniously and wilfully and of your own malice aforethought did kill and murder your wife Daphne Strood. How say you: are you guilty or not guilty?

PRISONER: Not guilty.

DEPUTY-CLERK OF THE COURT: Members of the jury, the prisoner at the bar, Roderick William Strood, is charged in this indictment with the wilful murder of his wife Daphne Strood on the 30th day of October in this present year. Upon this indictment he has been arraigned, and upon arraignment he has pleaded not guilty. Your duty therefore is to inquire whether he be guilty or not guilty, and to hearken to the evidence.

SIR JOHN BUCKHORN, KC, HIS MAJESTY'S ATTORNEY-GENERAL: May it please your lordship. Members of the jury, the charge against the prisoner, as you have heard, is the gravest of all charges, that of murder. I must now open to you a case which, though its technical features may present some little difficulty, is in its essential character a perfectly straightforward case. It is my duty to put you in possession, link by link, of a chain of evidence which I cannot but believe will prove too strong to be broken. Let me say at once, and I say it without affectation or pretence, that the duty is a peculiarly painful one. All such cases are painful, in the nature of things; but this one, I say, is peculiarly painful, in that the crime in question is imputed, not to some unhappy wretch of criminal habits and low intelligence, but to a man gently nurtured, an educated man, a man of whom, something less than a year ago, it might have been said, would have been said, that he had an unblemished character. He is a professional man, an architect; the material circumstances of his life were easy and comfortable; and you might have supposed that here, if anywhere, was a man who had every reason to be contented with his lot. Yet it is the contention of the Crown that this man, on the 30th of October, at his house in Merrion Square, murdered his wife by poison.

The facts, briefly, are these. At about five o'clock on the evening of that day, the deceased woman, Mrs Strood, feeling a little feverish and having for some days suffered from sleeplessness, went to bed. The prisoner had not then returned from his office. He did, however, return, reaching home, as you will hear from Mrs Tucker the cook, at about twenty-five minutes past six. Naturally, he was admitted to his wife's bedroom and had an interview with her. The conversation, in spite of Mrs Strood's low state of health, seems to have
occupied something in the neighbourhood of three-quarters of an hour, for it was between seven-twenty and seven-thirty that the prisoner finally emerged from that bedroom. Now Mrs Tucker, at the prisoner's request, had prepared a cup of hot malted milk for her mistress. On her way through the hall with this beverage she was met by the prisoner, who had just come downstairs, and he, the prisoner, gave her further instructions. As you will hear from the lips of Mrs Tucker herself …
[summary of Mrs Tucker's evidence omitted].
Next morning Mrs Strood was discovered to have died in the night. But, members of the jury, there was something else that happened that night. Or, if you like to put it so, there was something else that didn't happen. A few minutes after Mrs Tucker had taken the cup of milk to her mistress, the prisoner left the house. He did not return that night. He did not return next morning. He sent no message. So far as we can ascertain, he manifested no sort of interest in the state of health of his wife, whom, you must remember, he had left ailing and in bed. The next day passes, and there is still no sign of the prisoner, no message, nothing. He is not at his office. His professional partner, as that gentleman himself will tell you, telephoned to the house in Merrion Square to inquire after him. In the evening of that day, the day after the night in which Mrs Strood died, in the evening of that day, before the second news-bulletin was read, an SOS was transmitted from Broadcasting House asking Roderick Strood to return at once to his house, where, as the message put it, 'his wife Daphne Strood lies dangerously ill'.

As we know, she was not dangerously ill. She was beyond danger: she was dead. Now it must be supposed that several million people listened to that SOS in which the name of Roderick Strood was conspicuous. Among those millions there was a man standing in the bar of an hotel at Southampton, a man who, as we believe, had in his possession a passport made out in the name of Williams, and who had booked a passage to the United States of America on a liner that was due to sail from that port, and did in fact sail at eleven fifty-five that same night. But though the name on the passport was given as Roderick Williams, there is good reason to believe that the man who carried it was Roderick William
Strood, the prisoner at the bar. Let me say here, in plain terms, that every point in the case I am putting before you will be spoken to in that witness-box by witnesses that the Crown will call. It would be most improper were I to ask you to accept as proven fact the story that I am putting before you in this opening address. I do not, the Crown does not, ask you to accept the story as proven: I merely put it before you as the story which, in due and proper form, and with the aid of witnesses, I propose to prove. So far as this point about the passport is concerned, I say frankly we cannot prove absolutely that the prisoner carried this false passport on his person on the evening of October the 31st. But we
can
prove that he was passing as Williams, that he was entered as Williams on the passenger-list; and we can prove that the false passport—which you will have an opportunity of examining for yourselves—was found in his house, among his personal possessions, after his arrest. In point of fact it was found in a collar-box. You may think that an extraordinary place for a passport to be found in. I confess it seems to me a very extraordinary place. These facts will suggest to you—I think it is not going too far to say that they will irresistibly suggest to you—a guilty conscience and a secret flight.

Let me, then, resume the story. The prisoner is standing in the bar of a Southampton hotel when a loudspeaker, the property of the hotel, announces in his hearing that Roderick Strood's wife is lying dangerously ill. Any husband who had his wife's welfare at heart, I will go further and say any man who had his friend's welfare at heart, would on hearing such news hurry to the bedside of the sick person. Roderick Strood, however, did nothing of the kind. That he had intended to sail for America that night is sufficiently proved by a conjunction of circumstances, his presence in Southampton, his passport, his booked passage, his own words to which a police witness will testify; and the evidence will show that that intention, that resolution, was in no degree shaken by the news that his wife, the woman whom it was his duty to love and protect, was lying dangerously ill. But on his way to carry out that intention he encountered a check. What happened, as you will hear, was this. The prisoner emerged from the hotel accompanied by a woman, and preceded by a hotel
porter carrying luggage. The luggage and the woman were handed into a waiting taxi; the prisoner directed the driver to drive to the docks, adding the word
Mercatoria,
the name of the liner, in order to make his destination quite clear. He was then accosted by a police officer in mufti, who asked him if he were not Mr Roderick Strood. He replied: “My name is Williams.” The officer then informed him that he had serious news, whereupon the prisoner said: “Is it about my wife?” Told that his wife was dead, he exclaimed: “My God! I killed her!” There followed some conversation between the prisoner and his woman companion …
[further summary of police evidence omitted].
You see how all these incidents that I am putting to you are consistent with the contention of the Crown, and I believe that after hearing all the evidence you will decide that they are not consistent with the theory that the prisoner is an innocent man.

The case does not rest there, however. Some of you, many of you, perhaps indeed all of you, must have noticed a very extraordinary omission in the story I have so far unfolded. For I have said nothing yet about the cause of death. I am coming to that now, and it will take us back to the morning of October the 31st, when, as you will remember, the unfortunate Mrs Strood was found dead in her bed. Now Mrs Strood was a young and beautiful woman. And, what is more to the point, she was, as her physician will tell us, a healthy woman. He will tell you, further, how he was called to that scene of death, and how, being at a loss to account for the sudden catastrophe, and having moreover certain suspicions forced upon him, he considered it his duty to communicate with the coroner. The coroner ordered a postmortem, which was carried out in the afternoon of the same day. I will not at this stage ask you to burden your memories with any technical details. All that side of the case will have to be gone into with the utmost care and in very considerable detail, and you, realizing, as I am sure you all do, the extreme gravity of the issue (and indeed no issue could be graver), will follow the medical evidence with close and unremitting attention. You will hear that death was caused by chloral poisoning, and you will hear …
[summary of medical evidence omitted].
The contention of the Crown is that the fatal dose was
administered, feloniously and wilfully and with malice aforethought, by Strood, the prisoner at the bar. But when I say fatal dose I must qualify the phrase with an explanation. It may be that the amount of chloral actually handled and administered by the prisoner, if it shall be shown to your satisfaction that he did handle and administer it, it may be that that amount would not in itself have been sufficient to cause death. But if it was administered by Strood in the full knowledge that other chloral, or some similar drug, had been or was about to be taken by the deceased lady, that will overwhelmingly suggest to you a murderous hope or expectation, and in the event of death ensuing—and we know that in this case death did ensue—that will be murder in fact. As to whether or not the prisoner knew that a draught had been given by the doctor, the evidence will leave you in no doubt.

Now a question will arise in your minds, I have no doubt it has already arisen in your minds, and the question is this: Supposing, for the sake of argument, that the prisoner is guilty of this crime, what can have been his motive for it? As to that, you will not be left long in doubt, and indeed you will have already formed a suspicion from what I have told you. If you ask me what can account for this apparent change in a man's character, what can turn a man of respectable life and human instincts into a cruel and calculating murderer, I answer that there is one thing and perhaps one thing only—the force, the overpowering force, of a guilty sexual passion. It is true that the prisoner benefits financially, to the extent of some twelve hundred pounds, by the death of his wife. But because I wish to be perfectly candid with you, because I wish to put before you no argument in which I do not sincerely believe, I will say at once that it is no part of my case to suggest that this murder, if murder it be, was committed for the sake of that twelve hundred pounds. No, the true motive is glaringly obvious. You will hear in evidence that over that happy and prosperous home there had fallen the shadow of a husband's infidelity; that the prisoner for a period of months had been cherishing and indulging a passion for another woman, the very woman in whose company he was seen at Southampton; that he spent the night of October the 30th, when his wife lay dying, in the intimate company of this
woman—alone with her, at her flat—and, finally, that this woman was to have been his fellow-passenger—I say his fellow-passenger and for the moment I leave it at that—on the liner that was to carry him to America. The Crown, as my lord would tell you, is under no obligation to prove motive in a case of this kind; but, if you want motive, here is motive enough and more than enough.

Members of the jury, I have given you a very brief outline of the case into which you have to inquire; and now, with the assistance of my learned friends, I shall proceed to call the evidence upon which it rests. You, I know, will bring to the consideration of that evidence the close and careful attention that the gravity of the occasion requires. If, at the conclusion of this hearing, you are able to believe, consistently with the evidence, that the prisoner is innocent of the charge on which he stands indicted, you will not hesitate to say so; if, moreover, your fair and unprejudiced consideration of the evidence leaves you with a reasonable doubt of his guilt, then the prisoner will be entitled to the benefit of that doubt. But if you think the Crown's case has been fairly made out and fairly proved, if you come to the conclusion that the prisoner did indeed, as the Crown contends, commit a cunning and cowardly murder, it will be your solemn duty and obligation to return a verdict of Guilty. I have said that my task is a painful one, but I am very keenly sensible that your task, as members of the jury, is equally painful, equally arduous. You have to rid your minds of all prejudice, whether for or against the prisoner. You have to steel your hearts and do strict justice, according to the evidence, on the issue that is yours to determine. Your duty, when the time comes, will be to give a true and honest verdict, a verdict with the consequences of which you have no legitimate concern. I am confident that you will not flinch from that duty.