Authors: Ruth Rendell
You have told the court you placed ten grains in the sugar basin in the sugar that only your wife took?—Yes, but mixed in a pound of sugar.
Never mind the sugar. You placed twice the lethal dose of this toxic substance in a foodstuff that only your wife used?
Here Roper showed his first sign of indignation. He said: That is not the way I would put it.
You are saying then that you are a more accurate authority on the subject of toxic substances than Dr Pond?—No, but—
I think the point has been made. When you returned to Devon Villa at about five-thirty on July 27th, why did you not use your own front-door key?—I had not got it on me. It was in the house.
With the sovereign case perhaps?—I do not know where it was.
When she had let you in Miss Fisher went into the dining room?—I do not know where she went.
She went into the dining room and you went into the kitchen to find the bread knife?—I did not. I looked for my sovereign case in the hat-stand drawer. I could not find it so I went upstairs.
I put it to you that when you went into your bedroom you found your wife alone and asleep in bed.—She was not asleep.
I put it to you that she was asleep, as she often was at this time of day, as a result of the somniferous effects of hyoscin?—She was not asleep and she was not in bed.
Did you not find her a ready victim, deeply asleep, in a drugged sleep, alone and in bed?—No.
She was so deeply asleep that she did not stir or cry out when you cut her throat from ear to ear?—I did not.
Although you covered your body with the counterpane you could not keep the blood from your right hand and your coat sleeve?—The blood came from the graze on my hand.
Over and over Mr Tate-Memling took Roper through those fifteen minutes which passed while he was in the house but Roper did not weaken or alter his replies. Mr de Filippis blew his nose and drank some water. He had used up five of the clean handkerchiefs and only one remained. The final drama came when Counsel for the Prosecution asked the accused a question that was inevitably charged with emotion. A gasp went up from the public gallery, not at the question but at Roper’s reply.
Did you love your wife?—No, I no longer loved her.
Closing Speech for the Defence
Gentlemen of the jury, I thank you for the unbroken attention you have given to this case. I should just like to remind you that you must return your verdict—the responsibility of which is yours—not on the speeches of Counsel or the summing up of the learned judge, but on the evidence and the evidence alone.
The Crown has not yet set aside that presumption of innocence which is the groundwork of our criminal law. I had hoped that my friend at the close of the case for the Crown would have said he would carry the case no further, resting as it did solely on suspicion. But I do not know that I regret it, now that you have heard the defence. It is my submission that it will compel you to return a verdict of Not Guilty.
Is it possible that a man would carry out such a murder in broad daylight in a house also occupied by two other women and a child? Is it possible that he would have himself admitted to the house, though in possession of a key of his own? And having blood upon him, make no attempt to conceal it by washing his hand or his coat sleeve but merely cover his bloodstained hand with a handkerchief?
Is it possible that, having planned a murder, he would leave the obtaining of a weapon to the merest chance, so that securing it depended upon the unlikely absence from her usual place of duty of his domestic servant?
I have listened carefully to some sort of suggestion of motive. There are two kinds of murders: those which are motiveless and those which have a motive. A motiveless murder is that done by a practically insane person. I ask you, gentlemen of the jury, where is the motive for this murder?
Does a man murder his wife merely because he has ceased to love her? If that were the case, so sorry have certain aspects of our society become and so negligent of the old-fashioned virtues many of its members, that wife murder would become a commonplace. No, such a man settles down to a life of duty and obligation or else has recourse to the law which, in this case particularly, would have swiftly granted him his freedom. If, indeed, his misery grows insupportable, inflamed perhaps by jealousy and passion, there have been instances in which he makes a spontaneous attack of violence upon his wife and thereby brings about her death. He does not plan it, down to the deliberate mislaying of keys and sovereign cases, to the prearranged drugging of his victim and the assuring that all witnesses to his crime be occupied in other parts of the house.
Where is the evidence of a condition of mind that would account for the perpetration of this crime? Has the Prosecution called witnesses to testify that they overheard Roper make threats against the deceased? Have you heard evidence of quarrels between the accused and the deceased? Had there been a single act of violence perpetrated against the deceased by the accused prior to the act which brought about her death? No to all these. No, no and no again. We have solely Alfred Roper’s own statement which you as humane men, men experienced in life, may see as tragic, may even find yourselves moved near to tears by it. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I no longer loved her.’ That has been his sole comment, gentlemen, on the years of suffering and upon his own state of mind: “I no longer loved her.’
Whether he, as a man who was not a medical man, should have taken it upon himself to treat his wife for what he diagnosed as an illness, is not for you or me to judge. But there is one thing we can say, one thing that all who heard his simple testimony might say. It was a better thing that he did, a kinder, more generous, more forbearing thing, than the action of a man who on less evidence than he had, would have dragged his wife into the divorce court or separated himself and his children from her.
I must strongly impress upon you, members of the jury, that you are trying the accused for murder, not for making unsound judgements or usurping the function of medical doctors. Remember that. Though there may be evidence of folly here and of imprudence, there is none of murder, and upon what the Crown has put forward I defy you to hang this man.
I must remind you that the precise time of the death of Mrs Roper is not known and now never will be known. It may have taken place on the evening of July 27th but on the other hand it may have taken place on the following day. There is no evidence, medical or circumstantial, to point either way. As far as I can see the only thing the Prosecution have against my client is his having a bandage upon his hand when he arrived for the second time at Liverpool Street Station. Not blood, gentlemen of the jury, mark that. Not blood. The man Mr Grantham took to Liverpool Street may have had blood upon his hand but you must remember that Mr Grantham could not identify his fare. Though he could say his fare had blood upon one of his hands, he did not know which one, he could not identify that fare. He could not pick him out in this court.
Mr Wood, the porter at Liverpool Street, saw a bandage upon Roper’s right hand. He saw no blood. You have no more reason to believe the man Mr Grantham saw with blood on his hand was Roper than that it was any other man he may have transported to Liverpool Street on that evening.
Apart from this, all that the Prosecution has against the accused is that he was a husband and is now a widower. He was a husband whose wife was murdered—
ergo
, says the Prosecution, he must be guilty of that murder. Never mind those other men, very possibly those many other men, who had passed through this unfortunate woman’s life over the years both before and, alas, after her marriage to the accused. They have not been considered. They have not been found. At the very least, they have not been looked for.
If you are satisfied beyond all reasonable doubt that the man standing there, on the evening of July 27th, murdered Elizabeth Roper, although it breaks your hearts to do so, find him guilty and send him to the scaffold. But if, under the guidance of a greater Power than any earthly power, making up your minds for yourselves on the evidence, if you feel you cannot honestly and conscientiously say you are satisfied that the Prosecution has proved this man guilty, then I tell you it will be your duty as well as your pleasure to say, as you are bound to say, that Alfred Roper is not guilty of the murder of his wife.
Closing Speech for the Crown
I ask you, gentlemen of the jury, not to attach any importance to an apparent absence of motive. Evidence of motive is of great assistance to a jury in coming to a decision, but it is never absolutely necessary. There are some cynical men who would tell you that any married man has a motive for murdering his wife, though I would not be among them. I would, however, tell you that of all those persons surrounding Elizabeth Roper, no one had a stronger motive for wishing to disembarrass himself of her society than her husband.
Whatever she may truly have been, to him she appeared—and I am obliged to use strong language—a libidinous, licentious and immoral woman, a woman of voracious sexual appetites. Can we suppose that he thought it feasible to drug her for the rest of her natural life? Without doing so, could he contemplate living with her?
But proof of motive is not imperative, most particularly in a crime like this where the circumstances surrounding its commission are so singular. I would ask you, before we begin to look once more at those circumstances, if it is within the bounds of possibility, not to say the bounds of probability, that any other person, whatever his motive might be, would have had the means and the knowledge to commit this crime. Would some casual visitor to the house have known where the bread knife was kept? Would he have known that Mrs Roper frequently fell into a drugged sleep at this hour, that being the time after which she had drunk her afternoon tea, liberally laced with hyoscin? Would he have been able to count on finding her alone and asleep? Would he have been aware that at this precise time the deceased’s mother was in the habit of taking her granddaughter from the room so that the mother could rest undisturbed?
The prisoner, gentlemen of the jury, knew all these things. Knowing too exactly where the bread knife was kept, he calculated that to fetch it would be the work not of a minute or half a minute but a mere fifteen seconds. In order to accomplish that he took care, you will have noted, to send his servant into the dining room where she could not be a witness to his securing the bread knife. With a courtesy that we have no reason to suppose habitual with him, he opened the dining-room door for her to pass into the room.
The Defence has made much play with the word ‘suspicion’. There has been an attempt which I can only call absurd to persuade you, members of the jury, that there is no case to go before you. It was not an attempt which succeeded with the learned judge.
Could any honest man looking at the facts before you dispute the seriousness of the evidence of the blood on the prisoner’s hand and his deliberate sending of Miss Fisher out of the way in his ruthless quest for the knife with which to commit this deed? Could any man of perspicacity view the facts of the prisoner’s long administration of a toxic substance to his wife and place upon it no more sinister interpretation than that of a desire to calm the unfortunate woman’s passions?
Are these suspicions? One of the definitions of the word ‘suspicion’, gentlemen of the jury, is the imagination or conjecture of the existence of something evil or wrong without proof. It does not apply here. This is not suspicion. There is suspicion in this case, suspicion of the prisoner’s contriving of a plot, suspicion of his hoping for his wife’s death from poison, suspicion that he deliberately left his sovereign case behind when he travelled that first time to Liverpool Street Station.
But there is no suspicion that he administered a toxic substance to his wife over many months, that he drugged his wife on the afternoon of July 27th, that he sent Miss Fisher out of his way so that he might secure unobserved the weapon with which to kill his wife. All this is evidence.
I ask you to act not upon suspicion but upon evidence, the evidence which is before you now.
The Charge to the Jury
A change generally came over the demeanour of Mr Justice Edmondson when the time came for him to sum up. His lethargy was shed and those who suspected he had not been attending, or that he was indifferent to the proceedings, understood that their suspicions were unfounded. It was not that he suddenly became alert. It was not that he began to speak in circumlocutory or mellifluous phrases, but rather that he showed a grasp of what had gone before and a mastery of the facts, an absolute ability to distinguish between the subtle hints of the Defence and the Prosecution and the true hard evidence.
He embarked slowly and with gravity upon his Charge to the jury.
I am exceedingly glad that I am at last able to congratulate you, gentlemen of the jury, on the fact that your labours are approaching an end. I cannot say that it will be any reward to you, but it may be some satisfaction to know that you have been engaged in one of the most remarkable trials that are to be found in the annals of the Criminal Courts of England for many years. That the unfortunate woman had been done to death there is no doubt. She was murdered in a most remarkable way. There is no doubt that the murder was committed by someone who knew well how to put a person quickly to death.
I have tried a great many murder cases but I have never before tried one in which a woman was apparently murdered in her sleep by a single blow delivered with great force and apparently without a struggle. This poor woman was murdered in her sleep, without ever waking again in this world, by one blow inflicted with great force and skill, with great coolness and determination.
A great deal has been said about the absence of any clear motive and no motive has been shown by the Prosecution. It is my duty to tell you that in these cases it is not a safe test to ask what was the motive that induced a person to commit such an act as this. We none of us can control, we are not able to control, human thought or feeling or fathom the workings of the human heart. You know from the records in the past that many of the most brutal murders have been committed without any apparent motive which would be appreciated by or have any effect upon the mind of an ordinary individual. Therefore, it must not be assumed that, because no motive has been shown on the part of the accused, he is not guilty.