The Anatomy of Murder, page 29
Here is another instance of the witness’s honesty under cross-examination, even when speaking the truth might harm her own case:
Were you fond of your husband?—I did not love him; no.
If he had wanted his rights as a husband would you have been ready to grant them to him in March 1935?—No.
If counsel had hoped to elicit some damaging admission upon the significance of which he could afterwards enlarge, he had it here handed to him on a plate, so openly that perhaps the gift embarrassed rather than helped him.
Mr. O’Connor’s examination concluded with the usual meaningless question which defending counsel always put to their clients, as if the assumption was that anyone would rather confess to murder than commit perjury, and which the newspapers the next morning always call ‘dramatic’:
Did you yourself murder your husband?—Oh, no.
Did you take any part whatsoever in planning it?—No.
Did you know anything about it until Stoner spoke to you in your bed?—No. I would have prevented it had I known a half or a quarter of a minute before—naturally!
In this, as in the rest of her evidence, Mrs. Rattenbury no doubt spoke the truth. In fact the only statements of hers which seem open to any doubt are those in which she denied any memory at all of everything that happened after she was sick on the whisky she had drunk soon after finding her husband wounded; and one would not be sceptical here were the maxim not so well known that ignorance is the best defence. Even so, Mrs. Rattenbury almost carries conviction:
I can remember a few things, like an awful nightmare. I remember rubbing his hands because they were cold, and I wanted to get his teeth in for him to tell me what had happened. And little John standing in the doorway with his little face—I remember that. I remember getting into the car, but I don’t know what car.
Finally, the judge himself put a few questions to Mrs. Rattenbury on this point, making clear to the jury her contention that she remembered perfectly what Stoner had said to her in bed, even down to the detail of hiding the mallet; it was only later that her memory failed.
“But you remember every word by Stoner just before?” persisted the judge.
“Yes, naturally,” Mrs. Rattenbury replied. “I hadn’t had that dreadful shock then. I was quite happy. Life was different.”
Mr. Casswell was in a difficult position when he rose to open the case for Stoner, and he made no secret of his difficulties to the jury. He began with a reference to the case of Thompson and Bywaters, and warned the jury not to look on that case as a precedent for this one, for in that there was indisputable evidence that both the accused were present when the fatal blow was struck.
Mr. Casswell pointed out that the case for the Crown was one of conspiracy: two people were in the dock, and the prosecution averred that each was equally guilty with the other. Yet:
Can you imagine any crime which bears less evidence of having been the result of two people working it out beforehand? It was the result of a sudden impulse—the mad act of one only.
This is the position [pointed out counsel, as well he might]. The Crown accusing two people, and each one trying to take the blame on him—or herself: and one of them a cocaine addict whose statements cannot be relied upon. You can imagine that the defence of Stoner has been a very anxious task. You can imagine that few stones have been left unturned to find out what is the truth. Because if this had not been a joint trial—if I could have been in the happy position of representing Stoner and Stoner alone, I could have said boldly that the prosecution have not proved their case: the evidence against this boy is practically nothing. But how can I do that when there is someone else in the dock?
That counsel for Stoner intended to be very careful for that other person in the dock he showed at once. Referring further to the Thompson-Bywaters case, he said:
Many doubts have been expressed as to whether one of those persons was rightly convicted. That is the sort of thing you will be particularly careful to see does not happen here. There must be no mistake.
This was tantamount to an admission from Stoner’s counsel that Mrs. Rattenbury was innocent. The admission that Stoner alone was responsible was a necessary corollary. Having committed himself so far on his journey between Scylla and Charybdis, Mr. Casswell then indicated what, in these peculiar and perhaps unique circumstances, his defence was to be. Suggesting that a possible verdict in the case of Stoner was ‘guilty, but insane’, counsel offered them what amounted to his own way out of the difficulty: that the confusion in Stoner’s mind was such, and the toxic effect of the cocaine was such, that he was not capable of forming the necessary intent to make the crime of murder. In other words, he gave them the alternative of manslaughter.
I ask you [pleaded Mr. Casswell], when you have heard the evidence, that in view of the facts of this case and incidents of the crime, it is impossible to say anybody did it in his normal mind.
(Even at the risk of breaking the narrative one must pause here to wonder whether advocates really do use in their speeches such peculiar grammar, or whether this is always a fault in the reporting.)
This was about the best defence Stoner could make. It eliminated Mrs. Rattenbury from the crime and so might prevent a repetition of the Thompson-Bywaters blunder; and this altruism might not be without its own reward in the favourable impression it would make on the jury. Moreover, the elimination of Mrs. Rattenbury would have another good result for Stoner in removing the conspiracy to murder, which intensifies the degree of this crime so definitely. By saying, “Yes, he did it, the poor lad, maddened by jealousy and dulled by drugs, in a single mad moment,” counsel was making the murder of Mr. Rattenbury a much more excusable act than the prosecution’s version of an abandoned woman who would stick at nothing to obtain her sexual gratification, plotting with her brutal young lover to batter in a helpless old man’s head. And in any case, to attempt to make Stoner out completely innocent would, in the face of Miss Riggs’s evidence alone, have been hopeless.
The trial was adjourned in the middle of counsel’s address, and on the next day, the fourth, Mr. Casswell proceeded to develop his plea by citing the recent successful appeal which he himself had made to the House of Lords in a case of murder, when the Lord Chancellor laid it down that when dealing with a murder case the Crown must prove: (a) death as the result of a voluntary act of the accused, and (b) malice on the part of the accused. In commenting on and explaining this dictum, Mr. Casswell stated the law on this point so clearly and interestingly as to deserve quotation in full:
If the defence either from evidence given by the prosecution or from evidence called for the defence shows an explanation which, if true, would amount to a good defence, the onus of proof is still upon the prosecution to show that the defence is not true. But there is one exception, and it was clearly pointed out in the recent decision in the House of Lords. If the accused’s defence is, “I did the act, but I had not sufficient intent, owing to a disease of the mind, or to drunkenness, or to the taking of drugs, which rendered me in such a state that I was incapable of forming that design,” it is for the accused to prove that.
This, then, was the defence made on behalf of Stoner, and to maintain it counsel had to prove that Stoner was a drug-addict; a contention with which he had not had very much success so far.
Mr. Casswell went on:
You have heard the evidence of Mrs. Rattenbury, and on Stoner’s behalf I accept and endorse the whole of her explanation of the matters which led up to the day of March 24th, and what happened on that day. It necessarily follows that she, in my submission, did not commit this act, and had nothing to do with it. The prisoner Stoner does not deny—in fact, admits—that it was his hand that struck the blow.
This was very fair. Indeed, the judge seemed to think that it was too fair, and that counsel had gone beyond propriety in making this admission. The newspapers naturally seized upon it, and quite properly. We, the public, who were trying this man and woman, of course were anxious to know where the truth lay, so that we might be satisfied that the condemnation or leniency as it might be of our representatives, the jury, had been properly applied; and our only way of learning such things is through the newspapers. To castigate these, as the learned judge did the next day, for giving prominence to such a crux in the case, on the grounds that they “seem to regard this sort of terrible tragedy as a godsend to them”, was not only giving one half of the picture and that the smaller, but is an indication of a rather unfortunate attitude of mind not uncommon among our higher judiciary officials, that what goes on in their courts concerns only those people actually taking part in the proceedings and not at all the public in whose name all trials are held, who appoint the officials to conduct them, and who in the persons of their representatives, the jury, decide the issue.
Mr. Casswell then concluded his very able speech by repeating the alternatives which he had suggested to the jury of ‘guilty, but insane’ or manslaughter, with the reasons why they might arrive at either.
The Stoner parents were Mr. Casswell’s first witnesses. Mr. Stoner testified to his son’s weak physical condition, fainting fits, and general backwardness as a child, and Mrs. Stoner said that when he visited her early in the afternoon of March 24th, Stoner appeared quite normal. (Mr. Casswell later contrasted this normality with the scene Stoner made over the visit to Bridport.)
Counsel then got down to the real job, and called his two experts who were to prove that Stoner was a drug-addict.
The first was Dr. L. A. Weatherley, a mental expert and the president of the Society of Mental and Nervous Diseases. He had visited Stoner in Dorchester Prison, and though not prepared to say that Stoner was mentally deficient he was convinced that Stoner was a cocaine-addict. His conclusion was based on Stoner’s description of the cocaine-addict’s hallucination of touch, as being like a rash moving about under his skin. Dr. Weatherley, having made up his mind on the main point, naturally found that everything else fitted in, particularly the violent jealousy. Even the fact that Stoner possessed a small dagger was regarded by Dr. Weatherley as a symptom of addiction to cocaine, who also unspiked the gun disabled by Dr. Grierson by stating that after the exaltation of cocaine passed off it was followed by a feeling of great mental irritability.
All the incidents on Stoner’s part after 4.30 on March 24th were put down by Dr. Weatherley to cocaine, particularly the threats and violence over the Bridport visit and the accusation of ‘relationship’ (counsel’s excellent word) by Mrs. Rattenbury with her husband when the bedroom door was closed in the afternoon, which the witness considered “entirely an hallucination of hearing arising out of cocainism”.
The judge, who appears to have become a little restive under this sweeping positivism, then asked the witness whether all these incidents might also be consistent “with his not having taken a dose of cocaine, but being very angry and jealous with his mistress”, to which Dr. Weatherley, sticking manfully by his artillery, replied, “I doubt it.”
Mr. Casswell, indeed, must have deplored this continued scepticism on the part of the judge, for after further references to cocaine-induced jealousy we have the latter asking again: “Do you know after sixty-two years as a medical man that some people get very jealous without cocaine or drink having anything to do with it?” This time the witness had to cede a little ground and admit that he had heard of such disappointing cases.
As may be expected, Mr. Croom-Johnson got very little change out of this veteran in cross-examination, Dr. Weatherley definitely refusing to agree that cocaine-addicts get irritable and upset when deprived of the drug; morphia-addicts, heroin-addicts, any other addicts you like, yes, but cocaine-addicts, just as it happens, no.
Dr. Gillespie followed Dr. Weatherley into the witness-box.
Dr. Gillespie, the physician for psychological medicine at Guy’s Hospital, explained the usual symptoms of the cocaine-addict, laying stress on the ‘morbid jealousy’, under the domination of which a person is extremely likely to misinterpret all the goings-on around him.
Here the judge interposed, “Is that not true of all jealousy?”
Dr. Gillespie, who does not seem to have displayed the true British doggedness of Dr. Weatherley, hedged a little. “Yes, my lord, but I should have thought it more likely to happen in a diseased jealousy.”
“Have you ever read the play of Othello?” asked the judge.
Dr. Gillespie hedged again. He had read it—but a long time ago.
This exchange seems to have thrown counsel as well as witness a little off his balance, for a few moments later Mr. Casswell asked what must be one of the most difficult questions ever put to a witness:
Is a person at the moment of committing that act of violence likely to think much beforehand of the consequences?
Nevertheless, Dr. Gillespie was equal to this, and replied, in effect, that he did not believe that such a person would think much beforehand while in the act of committing violence; wherein the doctor was undoubtedly right.
A little later, when the possible regeneration of cocaine-addicts was under discussion, the judge took the business in hand again and, thrusting a pin through all the verbiage, pricked Mr. Casswell’s pretty balloon with this unkind but pertinent question to the witness:
Do you know in your experience any such case as this—a cocaine-addict suddenly cut off from any supply, given no drugs of any sort or kind to take the place of cocaine, and from the day that the supply is cut off, for a period of two months, being a person who could probably be described as rational, sleeping well, taking his food well, and being perfectly healthy?
Dr. Gillespie then had to admit that, on the whole, and perhaps with qualifications, he would be surprised to meet such a case.
That ended the expert evidence for the defence.
Those who expected Stoner to take his turn next in the box were disappointed. Mr. Casswell, rising to make his final address, explained that to put Stoner in the box could not help the jury at all, since he was under the influence of a drug at the time, and what he could say would be of little consequence. Nor had Mr. Casswell much new to say. He summed up the evidence he had called, and asked the jury to say that, from the time he threatened Mrs. Rattenbury at the telephone with a revolver, Stoner’s acts were “not those of a normal boy, but the acts of somebody under the influence of insane hallucination”. As for the contention of the prosecution that the murder had been planned and committed to get Mr. Rattenbury out of the way, “Whose way was he in?” asked Mr. Casswell.
One striking passage in Mr. Casswell’s speech sums up nearly everything that we feel to be strange, and therefore wrong, about this case:
In my submission the only motive that can be assigned was entirely unsufficient for this crime. It was simply the motive to prevent the trip to Bridport.
You get this clumsy crime, committed in this clumsy manner, with no chance of an alibi, no attempt at escape, no chance of the defence of accident, no chance of pleading that it was suicide.
By all these considerations you are driven, and inevitably driven, to the conclusion that this was an act of impulse, the act of somebody who had not planned it beforehand, who acted under an impulse—as I suggest, an uncontrollable impulse.
Much of this is true. The crime was certainly one of the most stupid murders ever committed. Yet it is possible to believe that Mr. Casswell’s ‘inevitable conclusion’ contains only half the truth.
Repeating his offer of guilty but insane or manslaughter, Mr. Casswell sat down.
Mr. Croom-Johnson summed up the case for the prosecution very temperately. He suggested that the key to the solution of the problem was that “Stoner throughout this unhappy story was dominated by Mrs. Rattenbury”, and asked whether it was possible to believe the word of a woman “who, upon her own statement, has for some years been engaged in lying to her husband about money matters”. He cast doubt on Mrs. Rattenbury’s assertion that her mind went blank, and said that it was his duty, on behalf of the prosecution, to suggest to the jury that the statements in which Mrs. Rattenbury had incriminated herself were the truth. Mr. Croom-Johnson also laid stress on the exchange between Mrs. Rattenbury and Stoner as the former was leaving the house under arrest; he described this evidence as “of the greatest significance in the case”, and asked the jury whether it did not indicate to them that the two prisoners had had a common object that night.
Mr. Croom-Johnson was dealing with Mr. Casswell’s suggestion of a verdict of guilty but insane, when the judge intervened to say that he intended to tell the jury not only that such a verdict would not be justified, but that they must put out of their minds Mr. Casswell’s admission that it had been Stoner who struck the blows. “They must decide the case on the evidence and not on any quasi-admission his counsel may make. Stoner has not said so,” remarked the judge.
Mr. Croom-Johnson concluded his speech with a remarkable sentence, in which he deliberately allowed the human being to show through the mask of duty:
But if, and perhaps mercifully in pursuance of your oath, you can still bring yourselves to the view that you are not satisfied that a case has been made out to your satisfaction, then it will be your duty—and, possibly, a pleasure to us all—for you to say, not being satisfied, that your verdict is a verdict for the defence.
This was the clearest possible hint to the jury that the prosecution, though dutifully putting forward such evidence as there was against Mrs. Rattenbury, were not really pressing the case against her—and might even be grateful for an acquittal.
Mr. O’Connor began his address for Mrs. Rattenbury with a tribute to the fairness with which the prosecution had been conducted, as well he might. Counsel did not spare the moral character of his client, but warned the jury that this must not mean “that justice is to be prostituted because you have been misled, because of your hatred of the life she has been leading”; and he pointed out, rightly, that without her own statements there was no evidence against Mrs. Rattenbury at all. “Fragments snatched from the disordered mind of a woman sodden with drink and hysteria,” was Mr. Connor’s unflattering but graphic description of his client’s confession.
