jury on
her behalf. The look, the tone, the action—these no reporter could convey.
For the time he fairly carried everything before him—as, with quivering
voice, he painted the anguish and despair of the unhappy girl in her
attempt to recover those fearful letters containing such damning evidence
of her shame—as he indignantly denounced the man who refused to listen to
those passionate appeals, and who determined to keep the letters as an
engine of terror and oppression. After reading to the jury the letter
posted by the panel on the morning of the 22nd March, he asked:
"When was it that she waited and
longed? It was upon Thursday evening—that was the tryst. The letter
(of L’Angelier) to Miss Perry proves conclusively that it was on the
Thursday she waited, expecting him to come in answer to her previous
invitation. When, then, do you think that she should write her next
summons? I should think that, in all human probability it was on the
following evening—that is, on Friday.
"She almost always wrote her letters
in the evening, and I think I am not going too far when I say, that when
she did not write them in the evening, she almost always put the hour to
them at which they were written; and when she wrote her letters in the
evening they were invariably posted next morning, and not that evening,
for very obvious reasons. Now then, is it not clear to you that this all
important letter, written upon the Friday evening, was posted on the
Saturday morning, while she believed that he was in Glasgow with Mrs.
Jenkins, making the appointment for Saturday evening, and not for the
Sunday."
The Dean of Faculty next lucidly
pointed out that inference was made by the Crown Advocate to take
the place of proven fact, with reference to the motive and object of
L’Angelier’s Sunday journey from Bridge of Allan to Glasgow, and more
particularly as to what was assumed to have taken place from the eventful
time that the clue failed, at half-past nine, on Sunday evening,
till about two o’clock next morning, which effort to set up inference
as a basis of conviction he exposed and denounced as "an entire and
startling novelty."
Towards the close of his eloquent
address and appeal to the jury, the learned counsel for the panel said:—
"I do venture to submit to you that
if the case for the Crown is a failure—as it unquestionably is—upon the
first and the second charges, it is a far more signal and
radical failure as regards the third. The one fact which is
absolutely indispensable to bring guilt home to the prisoner remains not
only not proved—I mean the act of administration—but the whole evidence
connected with the proceedings of that day seems to go to negative such an
assumption.
"No man probably will, or ever can,
tell how L’Angelier met with his death. But whether he met his death by
suicide, or whether he met his death by accident, or in what way soever he
met his death, the question for you is—Is this murder proved? You are not
in the least degree bound to account for his death. The question you have
got to try is—Whether the poison was administered by the hands of the
prisoner? I pray you to remember that you are asked to affirm on your
oaths as a fact that the arsenic which was found in that man’s stomach was
presented to him by the hands of the prisoner."
Finally, as the learned counsel
painted, with the hand of a master, the horror and remorse which must
forever haunt the jury if they were to convict her, and her perfect
innocence should be afterwards established - more than one of the jury, as
well as many of the audience, were dissolved in tears.
