Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol: A Mystery (26 page)

I did not see him face to face again, but I learnt from our conversations that, beneath his cap, he wore his elaborate ladies’ make-up every day. ‘The cap is like the veil of a sari,’ he explained. ‘Whenever we are outside our cells our faces are hidden, so I can paint mine as I please. I do it from memory because I have no looking glass.’ The make-up sticks he used had been supplied to him by Warder Braddle – as a thank-you present for services rendered. They were sticks of theatrical greasepaint bought by Braddle, specially, from Herr Ludwig Leichner’s shop in Covent Garden. Luck kept them secreted between the plank that was the base of his bed and the metal frame of his bedstead. The other warders knew of his painted face, of course, and mocked it, but so long as Luck did not attempt to flaunt his femininity outside his cell, they let him be. They called him the Indian princess.

The presence of the painted Private Luck in the cell adjacent to my own brought me moments of distraction and hours of anxiety. I feared what he might say, however unfounded, and to whom he might say it and when. I had nothing left in the world but one thing. Through my own folly and indulgence I had lost my name, my position, my happiness, my freedom, my wealth. I was a prisoner and a pauper. But I still had my children left. I was a good father to my children. I love them dearly and was dearly loved by them. I knew that one further whiff of scandal – let alone a direct charge of unnatural vice – and I should never be permitted to see either of my boys again.

In February 1897 my wife’s solicitor came to see me in Reading Gaol. He brought with him legal papers that I had no option but to sign. In return for the promise of a modest allowance after my release, I agreed to the handing over of the custody of my children to my wife and a male member of her family. The documents I signed contained a clause to the effect that the promised allowance would be cut off completely should I, after my release, make any attempt to visit my children without their guardians’ permission or should I live in any way ‘notoriously’. That the law could decide that I was one unfit to be with my own children was something quite horrible to me. The disgrace of prison was nothing compared with it. I envied the men who trod the prison yard with me. I was sure that their children waited for them beyond the prison walls. I knew that Private Luck had it within his power to keep my children from me for ever.

In the end, I believe, I bore up against everything by learning to accept everything. I lived in the shadow of Luck’s threats: I had no choice. My ear ached: I endured the discomfort. The Home Secretary ignored my petitions: it was his prerogative to do so.

And with acceptance came reward. Towards the end of February I made a wonderful new friend in Reading Gaol. His name was Warder Martin and the kindnesses he showed to me, and to other poor, sad creatures in the prison, mark him out as one of the unsung saints of this world. He was young and rough, ill favoured and ill spoken, but he had a heart of gold. Warder Stokes was friendly enough (and his crooked teeth and freckled face were endearing), but he was always careful to keep a proper distance from the prisoners in his charge and he never broke the rules. Warder Martin was less handsome, but, bless him, he broke the rules on my behalf almost every day. When I was hungry he brought me ginger biscuits. When I was poorly he brought me boiling beef-tea – hiding the bottle in which he was carrying it to my cell inside his jacket and scalding his chest in the process. Best of all, whenever he was able, he brought me a copy of the
Daily Chronicle
.

As we all know, the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing, and journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. In centuries before ours the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the keyhole. As a consequence, the newspapers today chronicle with degrading avidity the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate, give us accurate and prosaic details of the doings of people of absolutely no interest whatever. I despise journalists: they always apologise to one in private for what they have written against one in public. And I am not much more enamoured of leader writers. (After all, what is behind the leading article but prejudice, stupidity, cant and twaddle?) Nevertheless, after twenty months without seeing a newspaper of any kind, whenever Warder Martin brought it to me, I
devoured
the
Daily Chronicle
.

I was relieved to find that Victoria was still Queen and not surprised to discover that Lord Salisbury was still Prime Minister. I was interested to read that there was a new Archbishop of Canterbury (a churchman who gloried in the name of Temple) and happy to learn that my friend Arthur Conan Doyle had published a new novel – featuring, not Sherlock Holmes, but the Prince Regent and Beau Brummell. I also consumed (with a glee bordering on the shaming) accounts of death and divorce and disaster. In London, the dear Duchess of Bolton had succumbed to a fever; in Paris, Marcel Proust was rumoured to have taken part in a duel; in the United States of America, a meteorite had fallen on West Virginia. And at Reading Assizes, I read, one Sebastian Atitis-Snake, 39, was on trial for his life, charged with the murder of a long-serving and much-respected prison warder at Reading Gaol, ‘where the accused had been serving as a prisoner alongside the disgraced poet and playwright Oscar Wilde’.

According to the newspaper, between his arrest at Reading Gaol and his trial at Reading Assizes, Atitis-Snake had been held at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in Crowthorne, Berkshire, where his ‘condition was closely observed over a period of many weeks’ in order to assess both his ‘fitness for trial’ and ‘the state of his mind’.

Atitis-Snake admitted that he had been responsible for the death of the warder at Reading Gaol, but pleaded ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’. He told the court that as a young man he had developed a fascination with the life and achievements of the Emperor Napoleon of France and that, at certain periods of his life, he had become convinced that he was the reincarnation of the late Emperor. At Reading Gaol, however, associating with criminals for the first time in his life, his fixation with Bonaparte had mutated into a belief that he was not, in fact, the Napoleon of France, but the so-called ‘Napoleon of crime’, Professor Moriarty, the character created by Arthur Conan Doyle as the nemesis of his most celebrated creation, Sherlock Holmes. Atitis-Snake maintained that he had flung the unfortunate prison warder from the gantry outside his cell in a ‘moment of madness’ in which he believed himself to be Moriarty locked in a life-or-death struggle with Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls at Meiringen in Switzerland. Atitis-Snake bore no malice towards the warder. He claimed that he barely knew the man. He had merely been enacting the scene depicted by Dr Conan Doyle in his story, ‘The Final Problem’, which Atitis-Snake had first read in the
Strand Magazine
on its publication in December 1893.

Only four witnesses were called to give evidence at the trial. Two were medical men of some standing who had examined the accused during his sojourn at the Broadmoor asylum and had detected ‘no signs whatsoever’ of ‘any recognised mental illness or condition’. Dr O. C. Maurice, the surgeon at Reading Gaol, who had examined the victim’s body immediately after his fall and signed the death certificate, confirmed that it was the impact of the fall that was the cause of death. Colonel Henry Isaacson, the governor of Reading Gaol at the time of the incident, reported that there had been no witnesses to the attack and that Warder Braddle was an officer of good character and long service. There was no reason to suppose that the warder’s fall had been anything other than a tragic accident until the accused had come forward to admit that he had been the warder’s assassin.

The death of Warder Braddle at Reading Gaol had occurred on Wednesday, 19 February 1896. Sebastian Atitis-Snake had owned up to the killing on Tuesday, 7 July, more than four months later. The judge, Mr Justice Crawford, 71, asked Colonel Isaacson if he had any idea why the accused had waited so long to make his confession. Colonel Isaacson said that he had asked the accused that very question and received no very satisfactory answer. Colonel Isaacson noted, however, that Atitis-Snake had applied for his interview with the governor just an hour after the execution had taken place at Reading Gaol of another murderer, one Charles Wooldridge, a private soldier who had been sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. ‘In my experience,’ said Colonel Isaacson, ‘an execution concentrates the mind of each and every individual in a prison on the day that it takes place. Trooper Wooldridge, consumed with guilt at the murder that he had committed, had given himself up to the police voluntarily and confessed his crime. It is possible that Wooldridge’s execution prompted Atitis-Snake to do the same.’

‘When you interviewed the accused on 7 July,’ asked the judge, ‘did he tell you that he believed that he had killed Warder Braddle in “a moment of madness”?’

‘I think the phrase that he used was “a fit of madness”. As I recall, he said that Warder Braddle had come to his cell in the normal way, as any warder might going about his duties, and that he had seized him on the spur of the moment and “in a fit of madness” had manhandled him out of the cell and onto the gantry, where he had pushed him over the gantry balustrade. He said little more than that.’

‘Did he say what prompted this “fit of madness”?’

‘No.’

‘Did he mention this story of the Reichenbach Falls and the struggle between Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty?’

‘No.’

‘Did Atitis-Snake then, or at any time when he was a prisoner in your charge at Reading Gaol, give the impression that he was a man prone to suffering from delusions or from any other form of mental instability or insanity?’

‘None whatsoever.’

‘Was he prone to violence?’

‘Inside the prison?’

‘Yes – inside the prison.’

‘Most prisoners are liable to display occasional bursts of anger or frustration. Atitis-Snake was no exception, but he was not notably violent and, so far as I can recollect, had not infringed any of the prison regulations to the extent that would have warranted punishment.’

The trial of Sebastian Atitis-Snake for the murder of Warder Braddle lasted two days. During it no mention was made of the accused’s earlier conviction for the attempted murder of his wife. At the end of it, the jury took no more than a matter of minutes to find the prisoner guilty.

According to the
Daily Chronicle
, ‘gasps were heard throughout the courtroom’ when the judge, in passing sentence, revealed that Atitis-Snake had appeared before him on a previous occasion on a charge of attempted murder and that this earlier conviction was, in fact, the reason that he had been a prisoner at Reading Gaol. Mr Justice Crawford, placing the traditional black cap upon his head, said: ‘A crime such as murder is denounced both by God and man. Prisoner at the bar, you have been convicted of a brutal murder carried out in cold blood. It has been established beyond doubt that you are a ruthless killer in full possession of his wits. Your fanciful story of being possessed by the spirit of the fictional character of Professor Moriarity was all too cunningly thought through. You are entirely sane and wholly responsible for your own actions. It is my responsibility to ensure that you commit no further acts of murder, and I do so now. The court doth order you, Sebastian Atitis-Snake, to be taken from hence to the place from whence you came, and thence to the place of execution, and that you then be hanged by the neck until you are dead, and that your body be afterward buried within the precincts of the prison in which you shall be confined after your conviction. And may the Lord in His infinite mercy have compassion on your immortal soul.’

As the sentence was passed, Sebastian Atitis-Snake inclined his head towards the judge in courteous acknowledgement. In the words of the reporter from the
Daily Chronicle
: ‘The guilty man appeared to smile at the prospect of the gallows.’

21
The condemned man