Review: She Stands Accused
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X3500800325 |
| Published date | 01 July 1935 |
| Date | 01 July 1935 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
REVIEWS
of the trial. No judge ever summed-up in a manner so closely resembling
the closing speech of counsel for the Crown. We are doubtful also of the
procedure which follows the confession in court of one of the witnesses.
The
prisoner could only be released if
the
jury
found a verdict of " not
guilty",
or the Director of Public Prosecutions decided to drop the case
against him.
The
chief feature of this story is the conspicuous absence of
any effective detective work.
The
vicar and the heroine do their best,
but
they follow an entirely intuitional process and do not really deserve to arrive
at the truth. However, the story is amusing and vivacious.
SHE
STANDS
ACCUSED. By
VICTOR
MACCLURE.
(Harrap &Co.)
Price 7s. 6d. net.
A
STUDY
of the cases herein related, were they truly representative, might
seem to justify the hardest things ever said about Women, e.g. " All malice
is
but
little to the malice of a
Woman"!
To
such depths of depravity have
some of them sunk that to compare
them
with tigresses is
unfair-to
the
tigress!
In
some instances the motives for
murder
were obvious
enough:
a
quarrel, greed, jealousy, illicit love, and the like. But what can we think
of Helene Jegado who poisoned five people out of spite and twenty-three
others with almost nothing to gain thereby?
Or
of one who poisoned about
seventeen children, many of them her own by a succession of ill-fated
husbands, with no more to gain than had
the
aforesaid Helene?
The
search for such motives, along with the accounts of some of the trials,
affords the main interest of this book.
As the author says,
"there
is no romance in
crime:
romance is
...
life idealized; crime is never anything
but
asordid business."
And sordid indeed is the procession of criminals brought before us,
from the murderers of Sir Thomas Overbury among the Court circle of
James
1-(
of sinister repute
)-to
the miserable laundress who killed three
people with her own hands to secure property worth perhaps about £100.
Incidentally, however, other points of interest emerge: the hiring of
false witnesses, prone to play their hirers false on
trial;
the blindness of
bystanders to crimes perpetrated
under
their very noses; the slackness
of watchmen and custodians in old
days;
and the extraordinary lack of
communication between authorities charged with the maintenance of law
and order.
The
cases selected are taken from the seventeenth, eighteenth,
and first nine months of the nineteenth centuries; before much was known
of the chemistry of drugs, of arsenic in
particular-ignorance
most
fortunate for some of the "
accused".
The
Overbury case has never been quite cleared up. Owing to this
ignorance of tests and the suppression by L.C.J. Coke of material evidence,
the exact causation of Overbury's death is uncertain, and his secret about
Lady Essex is also a matter for speculation. And
why-it
may still be
asked-were
the prime movers in the plot only imprisoned for a few years
after some of their miserable underlings had been hanged? All this is
discussed at some length by the author.
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