upon it.
I have a greater responsibility than the jury and I declare to you now, before God, I believe you thoroughly guilty, and I have no more doubt of it than that you are before me at this moment; When I first heard the case I did entertain doubts, and I have lain awake hours thinking over the various points involved, and determined if those doubts were not moved not to try you again. But now I have not the slightest doubt of your guilt, and I believe I can demonstrate to any man that you are guilty.
I think it utterly impossible for a rational person to believe that that man shot himself. You say he had intentions. I have had great experience in criminal trials, extending over thirty-two years, and have tried perhaps more cases than any judge in any country, and I have never known a case clearer than your own; nor have I known a single case in which a man who was really determined to kill himself talked about it to his friends. If a man talks of committing suicide, it is almost a proof that he never intends to take his life. Is there the slightest probability that without any temptation and with his pipe in his mouth—having only half an hour before been playing with his child, and just bought oysters for his wife and given them to the servant to prepare for supper—this unfortunate man should, no pistol having been seen in his possession about that time, go into the drawing-room in your presence, in the presence of your wife and his own, and commit a bungling attempt at suicide like that described by you? No person ever heard of such a thing in the annals of crime.
He might have been embarrassed and addicted to drinking.
Had he not been a drunkard his wife probably would not have been seduced by Jackson, and you would not have debauched her. If drink did not give the temptation to crime by him, it afforded opportunities for crime in others. All the records of Criminal Courts show repeated instances of crime being committed through the agency of drunkenness—the victim being a drunkard, and affording opportunities for crime against himself. I do not think Kinder was drunk on that day, but whether drunk or sober it is inconceivable that he could have intended to take his life in that bungling, stupid, incredible manner. I find you had every temptation, every motive, for destroying him. You were madly in love with this woman, with a passion eating into your vitals, and you would have committed any crime to have her as your own. Half mad I believe you to be, for you never could have talked as you did, unless there was a partial disturbance of your mind—wild, eccentric, strange, to an utterly unprecedented degree, your mind was overshadowed by the influence this unhappy woman had acquired over you.
I hear you say that at the time of writing the impassioned sentences to her, burning with love, you had no other intent than to satisfy the cravings of her romantic feelings. Why, you admit you wrote them as a deep and abandoned hypocrite. I do not believe it. I believe that, maddened by the passion of your attachment to her, you did this terrible deed, and your statements previous were to be accounted for by the idea that in saying his death was likely to occur, when it eventually took place you as his friend would not be looked on with suspicion. I do not make any excuses for Jackson; his conduct was extremely bad. But I feel some sympathy for him, believing that he spoke the truth. I think he deserves punishment, but the law was never meant for a case like his, but for persons who wrote threatening to accuse persons of crimes they never committed, I am satisfied that he believed what he said you did to him in uttering dark, mysterious, dangerous hints, and used expressions justifying him in the belief that you intended to commit the murder; and, therefore, I think the man should be pardoned. He has had sufficient punishment for writing that imprudent letter. But he did not demand money by threatening to accuse you of crime without having grounds for believing you committed it.
You allude to what you call a prejudice against you, yet you must see that it arises in an abhorrence of your proved crimes, and which is the most universal feeling of the country, and this verdict will, I believe, be received with perfect approval.
Nothing can pain a Judge so much as the assumption that a verdict is unjust. I believe you to be guilty, and I shall feel deeper pain than I express if I thought there were anything wrong in the verdict, because I am satisfied you will suffer death. I am sure you deserve the verdict and I am certain in my mind that it is true.
And when you talk about idle words and complain of being spoken of as a fiend, surely when one reads your journal, hears what is said by your sister, by Mrs. Robertson, by Burne, by Bell-house, and knows why you invited this man to your house, all their testimony uniting and tending the same way, you cannot but be regarded as a fiend. You are not a human being in feeling.
I can speak of you with compassion, because I do not think that you are fully possessed of the mind that God has been pleased to give to almost all of us. On that account alone I feel some sympathy. It is distressing and sad that any father of a family, a man that might be useful in his generation, should die on the scaffold for a crime that makes human nature shudder.
The sentence is that you be taken hence to the place whence you came, and thence, on a day to be named by the Governor in Council, to the place of execution, and at that place to be hanged till your body be dead. If you are to find mercy, as I hope you will, seek it elsewhere, but from no human tribunal.
But His Honour’s certainty of the prisoner’s guilt, and his desire to save time, led him into an impropriety. To avoid calling again every witness who had spoken at the first trial, the Chief Justice, during the course of the second trial, read to the jury from his own notes certain items of evidence. This had been done, in fact, at the instance of the prisoner himself, who, weary with repetitions, had pleaded that His Honour should take every means to bring his ordeal soon to an end. But the Supreme Court, to which appeal was immediately made, found this a point of great significance, and the four judges’ opinions were equally divided as to whether or no there had been a mistrial. It was argued for four days; the result of a similar inquiry in England, which might afford a precedent, was ascertained by letter and telegram; and as a result the Court ordered that the verdict should be vacated the record; the prisoner meanwhile being held in custody to await his third trial at the next sittings of the Supreme Court in its criminal jurisdiction, to be held in the following May.
The Legislative Assembly of New South Wales then took up the affair. The behaviour and competence of the Chief Justice, with one of the other judges of the Supreme Court, offered matter for questions. The Government was implored, on the one hand to appeal to the Privy Council, and, alternatively, begged not to bring the judicature of the colony into disrepute by so doing. A magnificent public quarrel was blowing up, when Bertrand himself, to use one of his own phrases, cut the knot. The doctors at long last gave him a certificate of madness, and he was removed from Darlinghurst to the prison for criminal lunatics at Parramatta.
X
From the point of view of a reader of detection stories, this is an unsatisfactory crime. The murderer was insane, and the purist in these matters prefers a murderer who is compos mentis; the chain of logical deduction should not, he thinks, clank to a madman’s fandango. It is a crime which defies all the canons. Premeditated, it yet was committed before a cloud of witness; even, one of these had been brought to the spot marked with a cross deliberately, and against her will, by the chief performer. Its object was to obtain sole possession of a woman who had already yielded to the criminal, and was, in the words of his associate, “as good as a wife to him”. It was discovered, not through any process of suspicion and inquiry, but owing to the indiscretion of the man who had actually bluffed a coroner’s jury into a verdict of suicide, but who, even to save his neck, could not hold his tongue. The police had only to listen, to search, and, when they had found Bertrand’s letters and diary, to present their case.
That Bertrand did kill Henry Kinder is indisputable. The amateur of crime, disgusted with the whole flamboyantly silly proceeding, finds a stimulus to curiosity at one point only. By what means was Henry Kinder killed? The coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of death by shooting. The post-mortem finding, death from haemorrhage and shock, was nothing more than a variation upon the jury’s theme. Nor is it easy to pick out the
