Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders (17 page)

That decision was the last autonomous one for Chantrelle. Henceforth he was at the mercy of others’ interpretation of events. He had not long to wait. Suspicion gathered quickly. The post-mortem examination took place on Thursday, 3 January. The broken pipe was discovered the next day, Chantrelle on that date still maintaining to Mrs Dyer and his brother-in-law John James Dyer that Lizzie had been killed by gas. He suggested that the pipe might have been broken by the children hanging their clothes on the shutter, an absurd theory. He was by now disturbed by the police activity. Mary Byrne described him coming into the kitchen on the Thursday evening with a bottle, a tumbler and the watercrock. `He began to speak about the officers, and he wondered very much what they were wandering about the place for. “I wish they would give me peace”, he said, “and leave me alone…. Do they want to make out that I poisoned my wife?”’ He had reached that moment which comes to murderers when they realise that they are no longer free agents: consequences, long ignored, will have their inexorable way. The paradox is revealed. The murderer kills to realise his power; up to the moment of action his power, being only potential, is enormous. He kills, and feels himself at one with the Gods. But the Gods are jealous and animated by irony. From that moment, his freedom is curtailed. Power, actualised and no longer potential, drains away. Subsequent actions, even successive murders, are forced on him: `to be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus’.

The post-mortem examination by Professor MacLagan and Dr Littlejohn had failed to establish the cause of death, but had confirmed MacLagan’s opinion that it had not resulted from coal-gas poisoning. (A subsequent chemical analysis was also to yield no positive evidence.) However the analysis of the stains on the nightdress and bedclothes revealed the presence of opium. Though they could not show how it had been administered, the Procurator-Fiscal judged that the circumstances of the death, the results of this analysis, and the history of the marriage combined to justify Chantrelle’s apprehension. He was therefore arrested on the afternoon of Saturday 5 January, immediately after Lizzie’s funeral, during which he had displayed an emotion which impressed those present. He was taken to the Calton Jail, examined in the City Chambers on the Tuesday and Wednesday of the next week, and lay there awaiting the preparation of the indictment against him.

That took some time and it was not till Monday 8 April that Chantrelle was served with it. It substantially bore that on 1 or 2 January he had murdered his wife in his dwelling house by administering opium to her in orange and lemonade; and it further bore that he had previously evinced malice and ill-will towards her, and by his maltreatment and threats had previously put her in fear of losing her life. Appended to this document was a list of 115 witnesses and an inventory of 198 productions, many of which were to be irrelevant.

Two points may be made about the indictment. First, it was clear that the Crown had been unable to decide how the opium had been administered, for it was absurd to suggest that he had doctored both orange and lemonade. (How you stuff opium into an orange sitting on someone’s bedside table is a bit baffling too.) What they were doing was leaving an escape route. This fuzziness was to be a handicap for the Defence, who never seemed quite certain exactly what they were arguing against. In fact, Mr Traynor chose to dispute the cause of death, the coal-gas therefore acting as a screen in a way ironically opposite to that intended by Chantrelle. So much time was to be spent in disputing the cause of death that the Crown’s failure effectively to establish the means of administration was never satisfactorily challenged.

The second part of the indictment was fuzzy also, for the full text referred to accusations of adultery and incest made by Chantrelle against his wife. These could only confuse the argument, for though it might be an essential part of the Crown’s case to show that relations between the two had never been good, to introduce these matters was to risk irrelevance and prejudice, since it was never proposed that jealousy had been a motive for the murder. The Defence therefore objected to their inclusion. Yet the removal of those words did not remove the fuzziness. It was the Crown’s case that the motive for the murder lay in Chantrelle’s financial position and in the insurance policy: but a good deal of the evidence led was rather calculated to show what an unsatisfactory husband he had been. In other words it was designed to blacken his character, or perhaps, more fairly, to reveal the black side of his character, so that the jury might believe him capable of a murder which the Crown otherwise doubted its ability to prove he had actually committed. It was if the whole tenor of the Crown’s case was calculated to distract attention from the act of murder, and direct it towards the character of the accused. And nobody pointed out that all this evidence might have provided Lizzie with a motive for murder rather than Chantrelle; for surely the abused wife has more reason to kill, than the husband who abuses her.

The trial opened on the morning of Tuesday 7 May. It was raining, but that did not deter a huge crowd from gathering in Parliament Square, some of them hoping for admission, others content merely to boo and hiss the prisoner. So great was the throng that the Police had to exercise force to clear the approaches for those who had the right to enter. It was no wonder. As W.N. Roughead put it, `in the Edinburgh of the late Seventies the Chantrelle case created a painful sensation … the aspidistras shuddered in their chaste receptacles.’ `It was’, in The Scotsman’s words, `the only such crime committed in the city by a man of education in the last fifty years.’ Chantrelle had been in many a correct drawingroom; men of substance and standing had known him as a fellow Mason.

In the dock he looked languid and weary. He had spent four months in prison, and was still wearing mourning. Such proprieties had to be observed, just as Lizzie had been buried in her wedding gown. His voice was calm and self-possessed as he made his plea of `not guilty’.

The trial was to last for four days, of which three were taken up by the evidence and the fourth by the speeches of the Counsel, the judge’s charge to the jury, and the verdict and sentence. Inevitably the Crown with its huge list of witnesses took up most of the time. In contrast the Defence only called eight witnesses, one of them being the Crown witness Professor Maclagan, recalled for further questioning; the Defence had to rely therefore on counterpunching. A good deal of the Crown case was occupied with the Chantrelle marriage. The theory of suicide was quickly dismissed. Lizzie, it was said had never indicated any desire to kill herself (Chantrelle’s assertion that she had, made in his Declaration, was never referred to; probably wisely.) Moreover her card to Anna Baird had promised a letter in a day or two; that did not sound like suicide. Finally her devotion to the children made the whole idea absurd. The question of the cause of death resolved itself into the choice of coal-gas or narcotic poisoning. Much of the evidence was therefore highly technical, and it may reasonably be questioned whether the members of the jury were able to follow such detailed and frequently contradictory exposition; or to retain it, if they did. Even reading the evidence is hard going. Probably they relied on the Judge eventually elucidating it for them, and telling them what they should believe; he rather shirked doing this; correctly enough. The nub of the Crown case here was that though the postmortem examinations showed no opium in the body, the stains on the nightdress and sheets showed opium clearly. In other words, though they could not prove that opium had stayed in the body, they could show that some of it had come out; and, of course, Lizzie was dead, which was, to say the least, evidence of something.

Chantrelle’s part in her death was still difficult to prove. He had of course considerable knoledge of the uses and effects of poisons. He had opium in his possession - a drachm (60 grams) of solid extract of opium which he had bought on 25 November 1877. This was, the Lord Advocate said in his summing-up of the crown case, `about twenty or thirty doses, each sufficient, if administered, to prove fatal to human life. He (the Lord Advoate) did not know whether it was suggested that the prisoner was in the habit of dispensing that drug. There had certainly been no explanation as to what came of that opium. It was not found anywhere in his house. The extract he bought in 1872 was got in the press; but the extract bought in November was not there, and what came of it he did not know. But what, after all, was the evidence that he dispensed? Did doctors use that amount of opium in such a time?…’ That certainly sounded a formidable argument, and it may be imagined that jury-heads wagged in assent. Opium bought; opium not to be found; opium therefore in Lizzie. All the same the Defence had an answer, for it turned out there was another bottle in the press, labelled no 24 in the Crown’s list of articles, and this was a fluid extract of opium. So Mr Traynor was able to say that, `it was just as obvious as that two and two make four, if a man would open his eyes and look at the fact, that that was what came of that drachm of opium. It had been reduced to a fluid, and that was where it had gone to…’ Only, there remained the question of quantity, and this was never resolved. So, after much argument, no one was really any the wiser.

The Crown was however on surer ground elsewhere: There was Chantrelle’s attempt to create a false impression of the cause of death; there was the breaking of the gas pipe; there were his foolish protestations of ignorance as to the pipe’s existence; there was the fact that Mary Byrne had noticed no smell of gas when she first entered the room; there was the fact, the sort of fact which is always significant, that Chantrelle had been the last person to see Lizzie on the night before she died, and that he had, by his own account, given her lemonade and a piece of orange. And then, in a grand finale, the Lord Advocate rehearsed yet again the miserable circumstances of the Chantrelle marriage, the story of Chantrelle’s violence and of his frequent threats to poison Lizzie in a way that could not be detected; and he asserted incontestably `that the prisoner was interested to the extent of one thousand pounds sterling in the woman’s death being accidental, that, and Chantrelle’s indigence, were facts that could not be argued away. They would help the jury to believe that, because Chantrelle was a bad husband, it followed that he was a murderer also.

It was a strong case for the Defence to answer. Their own evidence had been so thin that Chantrelle had given vent to a cry of despair from the dock: `is that all the evidence for the Defence?’ Still it was not impregnable, and Mr Traynor knew it. He began by reflecting, as one reasonable man to twelve others, on what had been said about the Chantrelles’ daily life.

`They heard that Chantrelle did not often take his meals with his family, that he did not sleep in the same room as Madame, that he did not rise early, that he had a cup of tea taken to him in his bed. Now the jury knew, he durst say that these were but the ordinary habits of a Frenchman’s life…’

This was good man-of-the-world stuff, flattering to the jury. Mr Traynor proceeded to dismiss the threats and the violence in the same sort of tone. Chantrelle might be a bad husband; there were many worse ones, `who kicked and abused their wives as Chantrelle never did, who would yet shrink from the attempt to take away their lives.’ Even infidelity and the frequenting of brothels were not, in Mr Traynor’s tolerant view, evidence of intent to murder one’s wife. He went so far as to suggest that anyone who believed otherwise was, not fit for anything else than a residence in Morningside.’ (He meant, one assumes, the lunatic asylum rather than the genteel suburb, though possibly that might be the conviction of the suburb too.) He pointed out, moreover, that relations between Chantrelle and Lizzie had improved in the eighteen months before her death. `It was suggested by the Lord Advocate that he commenced to treat her better (after 1876) so that he might poison her in 1878.’ That Mr Traynor considered `a most extravagant suggestion.’ This was the voice of reason; but reason had more difficulty when it came to considered the financial aspects.

True, he was able to show, or at least suggest, that Chantrelle’s need for money had not been urgent when he had actually taken out the insurance policy. He was able to exercise effective sarcasm as to his presumed intention with regard to the other policy holders - did he mean to murder them all? But none of this was ultimately convincing, for he could not hide the fact that Chantrelle’s financial position had become desperate since: there were the letters from the Union Bank, pressing for payment, the last one (dated 27 December) threatening that, unless payment of the balance of his bill, was made by the end of the month, they would, `institute proceedings against you for recovery of the Debt’; there was the evidence offered by John James Dyer that Lizzie, `said her husband was in pecuniary difficulties, that he owed over £.200, and that he had nothing to pay it with’.

Finally, though Mr Traynor made a determined attempt to confuse the cause of death, and to suggest that Lizzie had indeed died of coal-gas poisoning, that still left unanswered the question: `Who broke the pipe?’ No one could imagine that this had been done by anybody other than Chantrelle. The whole irony of the case rested there. If coal-gas had been accepted as the cause of death - which was what Mr Traynor was still striving to suggest - then there would have been absolutely no difficulty in proving Chantrelle guilty. At best, one feels, Mr Traynor must have been hoping for a verdict of Not Proven; and he might get that if he had sufficiently obfuscated the intelligence of the jurymen.

The Lord Justice-Clerk, in his charge to the jury, dwelt first on the nature of circumstantial evidence, on which the case wholly depended. He said, `circumstantial evidence, when it is complete, is as satisfactory as any evidence can be. A combination of circumstances, all pointing, and pointing clearly to one cause, will produce conviction on the minds of men as readily as direct evidence…’ He took the jury through the evidence scrupulously, with fair balance. Nevertheless his gist was clear enough: the case turned on the casue of death: if the jury felt opium poisoning had been established, then they had no option but to convict Chantrelle, for, that granted, all the circumstances pointed to his guilt. (But, of course, if the doctors and the Crown had gone for gas, and they might well have, the same would have applied.) Only if the Crown had failed to make out that case could he escape.