The Invention of Murder (50 page)

The bombshell, however, was the evidence of the housemaid Clara Brown. At the inquest she had merely said that Mrs Staunton had lived perfectly contentedly with her husband. Now she turned on her employers. ‘I noticed,’ she said, ‘that Mr. Louis Staunton and Alice Rhodes were too affectionate to one another – I am not quite sure that Alice Rhodes always slept in her own bed – I found her night dress in a chest of drawers … in Mr. Louis’ room.’ She went on to tell the enthralled court how Miss Rhodes and Louis Staunton had moved to Little Grays together, while Mrs Staunton remained with Patrick and Elizabeth Staunton, a mile or so away. After her husband left, Patrick Staunton had kept Mrs Staunton confined, even locking away her hat and jacket to prevent her leaving the house (respectable women did not go outdoors in indoor dress). Just before Christmas 1876, Mrs Staunton was confined to her room, and Patrick was heard to threaten her: ‘You must not come down-stairs you damned cat, or I will break your back,’ while Elizabeth, less harshly but no less unkindly, told her, ‘We don’t want you down here.’ Clara also reported that Patrick hit his sister-in-law when she failed to obey him. Her room, she said, contained nothing but a bed, a chair-bedstead (a rough bedside table) and two boxes. She added, ‘There was no basin or jug or mode of cleaning herself – I was there when the policeman afterwards examined that room – other things had been put into it after she was taken away.’

Other witnesses reinforced the maid’s testimony. The driver of the fly that had brought Mrs Butterfield to Little Grays said that Louis Staunton had shouted at his mother-in-law, ‘You shall not see her if you live for a thousand years, you old bitch,’ before threatening her with a knife. The police had found a draft letter, in Louis’ handwriting, but apparently for his wife to copy, that read: ‘Mrs. Butterfield, – I really am astonished at your audacity and impertinence after your shameful and unnatural behaviour … I would cast myself into a lion’s den to be devoured at once rather than come within arm’s length of you, having come to the fullest determination to have nothing to do with you or your family. I have been again to my solicitor to-day, and we have given instructions for you to be taken into custody at once should you continue to molest me.’ Mr Butterfield had received a letter from Louis, threatening to report him to his bishop, and warning that Mrs Butterfield would be given in charge if she ever approached him again.

For the defence, Clarke produced evidence to show that the corpse’s emaciation and dirt could have been produced by tubercular meningitis, diabetes or Addison’s disease. He dismissed Clara Brown’s evidence, reminding the jury that she had sworn the exact opposite at the inquest. He did a good job, but he was unfortunate in that Mr Justice Hawkins, trying his first big case, was not much impressed with the idea of medical experts: ‘Why make these examinations in pursuit of something you have no reason to believe existed?’ was his dismissive view. (This was the same Hawkins whose dog was to contribute to his memoirs.) Instead he focused his summing-up on Mrs Staunton’s financial situation, and how the moment her money was paid over to Louis he immediately left to join Miss Rhodes in their ‘illicit’ (Hawkins used the word a lot) relationship. Even the
Sporting Gazette,
which admired Hawkins, thought that the ‘grim persistence with which the judge dwelt upon the prosecution side’, and ‘almost ignored’ the defence, was ‘cruel’. The jury, at any rate, was crushed, and brought in a verdict of ‘guilty of murder, but recommended Elizabeth Ann Staunton and Alice Rhodes to mercy, the latter strongly’.

The
Lancet
immediately organized a petition signed by six hundred doctors. Medical evidence was routinely based on post-mortems performed by general practitioners, men with no medico-legal training. (In 1870 one doctor had testified that he had found nothing at a post-mortem to account for the death of a man, and he rather thought, therefore, that he had died of fright. Although, he added as an afterthought, the man had fallen out a window and ‘that might have been another cause of death’.) The
Lancet
warned that Mrs Staunton’s post-mortem had been ‘inefficient and the practitioners inexperienced and the results obtained most unsatisfactory, owing to the absence of some eminent Pathologist who … would have demonstrated with greater accuracy the presence of disease’. The entire case, it concluded, ‘was bad in fact and therefore … bad in law … [T]hat the deceased died of starvation is not only unproved, but entirely unsupported by the evidence.’

The
Examiner
did not agree with the
Lancet’s
insistence on the primacy of medical evidence. The Stauntons had imprisoned and ill-treated their victim, and no amount of tubercular meningitis would change that, in the newspaper’s view. But after a pause, non-medical views swung against the convictions, led by a campaign in the
Telegraph
spearheaded by the novelist Charles Reade. Reade’s first letter to the newspaper, two weeks after the convictions, was headlined ‘Hang in Haste, Repent at Leisure’. Hawkins had said in his summing-up that whoever had had ‘the charge’ of Mrs Staunton and had failed to protect her was guilty of murder. But, Reade pointed out, only Patrick had ‘the charge’ of her. Elizabeth Staunton was brutalized by her husband, and anyway legally a wife who had abetted her husband in a criminal act could be sentenced only to two years’ imprisonment. Miss Rhodes did not have Mrs Staunton in her ‘charge’ – she lived separately. Louis had paid his brother £1 a week to care for his wife, which wasn’t much, but was enough for food: if Patrick had failed to look after her, that was not Louis’ legal responsibility.

The other newspapers agreed, as did their readers – virtually all the papers daily carried letters protesting against the verdict. Perhaps the
Maidstone and Kentish Journal
best summarized the feelings of middle-class readers: the original charges had been brought to ‘show disapproval’ of the Stauntons; a conviction was the last thing that had been expected, and the jury had been led into giving the wrong verdict for the type of people in the dock. Hawkins, seemingly surprised by the outcry, ‘upon consideration’ thought that perhaps the capital penalty was too strong. The Home Secretary, under the weight of media and professional opposition, gently caved in. Miss Rhodes was pardoned and immediately released, and Elizabeth, Patrick and Louis Staunton had their sentences commuted to penal servitude for life. But as
Reynolds’s
pointed out, if they were guilty, they should by law be executed; if they were innocent, they should by law be released. They could not be a little bit guilty. ‘The fact is, the Home Secretary has done his best to get Hawkins out of the mess his reckless and intemperate charge had plunged him into.’ Most, however, were satisfied that the result reflected the gravity of the crime while taking into account the medical uncertainty. Harriet Staunton had been brutalized, and permitted to die, even if she had not been murdered; the consensus was that her tormentors should suffer too.

Patrick Staunton died in prison three years later. Elizabeth served six years and was quietly released in 1883. Louis served the longest, spending twenty years in Dartmoor. When he was released, still only forty-six years old, he married Miss Rhodes and they had another two children. He received financial help from Edward Clarke – who offered him the choice of receiving £2 a week for two years, or a lump sum of £100 to set himself up in business, ‘about the same as the amount of the fees I had received in the case, which had brought me great rewards’, said the barrister – and he returned to his previous occupation of auctioneer, living to the venerable age of eighty-three.

Medico-legal advances, in this case, were on balance accepted. But there was something about the story that pulled people back to older attitudes towards crime. Broadsides, which had been in decline from mid-century, made a comeback to sing the doom of poor Mrs Staunton. ‘No one to love her, no one to care,/For the poor starving wife in secret despair’, chorused one, a distinct improvement on another, which bumpily proclaimed: ‘Poor Harriet Strnnton [sic] tho’ born well to do,/Has died in such misery it hardly seems true/It is said she’s been starved and cruelly used,/Worse than a dog has she been abused.’ This was published before the inquest was over, and ended with ‘a warningtobad husbands wesay [sic]/Not to treat wives in an unmanly way’. The household at Little Grays was broken up and the goods sold by auction, with hundreds of eager souvenir-hunters buying the 6
d.
catalogue, and ‘thousands’ attending the sale itself, as thousands had done half a century before at Probert’s cottage.

But there was novelty too. After the verdict, but before the commutations, the deputy governor at Maidstone prison, where the four were held, had the prisoners photographed ‘In accordance with the regulations’. The Prevention of Crimes Act 1871 had formalized the photographing of criminals; in the first year 30,463 photographs were taken – so many that by 1876 only ‘habitual’ criminals and paroled prisoners were routinely photographed. Owing to their notoriety, the Stauntons were an exception. While photography in prison was relatively new, the images were immediately used in an old-fashioned way – the Staunton brothers asked for copies to give to family members as souvenirs, just as Courvoisier and others had signed bits of paper from their condemned cells.

If technology was selling, so too was quackery. Dr Monck, ‘the celebrated medium’ (celebrated among the legal confraternity too, as he had recently served a sentence for fraud), announced that ‘a distressed spirit came to our
séance,
and, giving astounding proofs of her identity as Harriet Staunton, solemnly declared that if the condemned prisoners are hung they will be wrongly executed,
for they were not her intentional murderers, but her death was occasioned by disease alone’.
Monck followed this, somewhat oddly, with the promise that ‘even though the spirits know the truth, he will never tell’, because ‘the spirits are not detectives, not sleuth-hounds baying on the track of human blood’.

Given the lurid details, it is astonishing that only one fictionalized version of the story appeared:
Harriet Staunton, or, Married and Starved for Money,
a penny-dreadful in sixty parts, was advertised in 1878, entitled a ‘romance’. (I have been unable to find a surviving copy.) Apart from this, only small traces of the story were used, two of them linked to Sherlock Holmes. In 1899 William Gillette produced his lasting contribution to theatre,
Sherlock Holmes,
which he wrote and also starred in, first in the USA, and then at the Duke of York’s in London.
*
The first act opens in a mysterious, slightly decaying house, where the Larrabee siblings are discussing Alice, and her stubborn refusal to hand over some documents.

Conan Doyle was named with Gillette as joint author, but it is thought that the work is almost entirely Gillette’s. The next reference, however, is Doyle’s own. In his short story ‘The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax’, Lady Frances is duped by a conman, who takes her to a south London suburb where he refuses her worried family access, while he and his wife nurse a dying servant, whose death an unsuspecting local doctor willingly certifies. (In the nick of time Holmes stops the funeral and has the coffin opened; Lady Frances is found inside together with the dead servant.)

It was, appropriately enough, an actor who ushered in twentieth-century technology with his murder. In 1897 William Terriss was performing in another Gillette vehicle,
Secret Service,
at the Adelphi Theatre. Terriss had the kind of biography that movie stars would later fabricate. Born in 1847 to a barrister father, he joined the merchant navy, jumped ship, worked as a tea-planter in Assam, and a sheep farmer in the Falklands; on his return journey on board a whaler, the crew mutinied and elected the twenty-four-year-old Terriss captain, or at least so he said. By the 1880s he specialized in playing gallant British tars in popular West End melodrama, interspersed with a number of soldiers, also gallant, for variety. He excelled in parts where he could dive about the stage athletically, often performing daring rescues, and his debonair charm won him the nickname Breezy Bill. Terriss had played Shakespearean parts as support lead to Henry Irving (and had once played the murderer Houseman to Irving’s Eugene Aram), but he had little interest in serious drama: in 1895 Shaw wrote
The Devil’s Disciple
for him and his co-star Jessie Millward, but Terriss fell asleep during the reading.

On the night of 16 December 1897, Terriss and a friend had just reached the actor’s private entrance to the Adelphi when he was approached by a man in evening dress and an Inverness cape. The stranger appeared to thump him twice on the back in a friendly way. Terriss turned, and was struck once more. He called out, ‘My God, I am stabbed,’ and his friend grabbed at the man with the knife, calling to a policeman who happened to be passing. Terriss was carried into the theatre, and laid on the floor by the door. A doctor was summoned, but in a matter of minutes Terriss was dead. The policeman escorted the murderer the few dozen yards to Bow Street police station. ‘What could have induced you to do such a cruel deed as this?’ he later reported asking. ‘Mr. Terriss would not employ me, and I was determined to be revenged,’ was the murderer’s response. At the station he added, ‘That’s what I stabbed him with,’ and handed over a knife.

Richard Archer, who called himself Richard Prince, was a failed actor from Dundee. Ten years previously he had been an extra in
Harbour Lights,
with Terriss starring. He then got odd jobs in small provincial theatres, although he was usually sacked fairly quickly; he was incompetent, and most people who came into contact with him thought he was insane. His sister, from the guarded references to her in the press, was probably a prostitute in London (although she may simply have been living with a man: the tone would be the same). For a time Mrs Archer, as she was known, was supported by an actor at the Adelphi, and he helped Prince find work. But the siblings were soon estranged – Prince claimed to have met his sister in the street a few hours before the murder and begged for help, to which he said she replied, ‘I would rather see you dead in the gutter.’ This was probably true, for when the police notified her of the murder, she responded by telegram: ‘Mrs. Archer declines to have anything to do with him.’ Prince in turn believed she was ‘in league with Terriss in blackmailing me’. What he thought Terriss was blackmailing him with or for could never be clarified, and he added that Terriss had arranged for him to be poisoned ‘at Chester, Greenwich and Plymouth’.