Dodgy Evidence Part Two: Eyewitness Accounts

 

One of these men is Adolf Beck. The other is not. Perhaps to you that is obvious, but in 1895 not everyone could tell the difference.

Ottilie Meissonier, a language teacher, was walking down Victoria Street in London on her way to a flower show. A man approached her, tipped his hat, and asked, "Are you Lady Everton?" Ms Meissonier replied that she was not, but a conversation ensued between the two nonetheless. The man, who introduced himself as Lord Willoughby, told Ms Meissonier that he had a Lincolnshire estate which was so large that its upkeep required the employ of six gardeners. Bonding over their shared love of horticulture, Ms Meissonier invited her new acquaintance, the dashing and well-mannered Lord Willoughby, to tea the next day. He duly arrived the following afternoon and ended up inviting Ms Meissonier to the French Riviera, going so far as to offer to pay for new clothes for the trip. Giving her a cheque for £40, Willoughby then looked through her jewellery, saying that he would buy her new jewellery as well, but needed to take the wristwatch and rings in order to match the sizes. Willoughby then departed and, shortly afterwards, Ms Meissonier realised that another piece was missing and began to worry. When she took the cheque to the bank she found that it was, of course, entirely worthless.

Three weeks later, on 16th December 1895, Ms Meissonier was once again making her way along Victoria Street when she recognised the fraudster exiting a house. When she accosted the man, he dismissed her and tried to walk away, but Meissonier followed him. Eventually a policeman became involved, with the man claiming that she was a troublesome prostitute who was following him for unknown reasons, and Meissonier trying to tell the story of the fraud of which she had been victim. The man was arrested.

The subsequent investigation revealed that scores of women had been the victims of similar frauds, all carried out by a grey-haired moustachioed man calling himself Lord Willoughby. The arrested man duly took part in a line up parade, one in which he was the only grey-haired man with a moustache, and was thus identified by a number of women as being the so-called Lord Willoughby.

In the 1870s, a man named John Smith had been arrested for conducting frauds under the name of Lord Willoughby; the police determined that this was the very same man. A police officer from that time testified at the Old Bailey that 'there is no doubt whatever - I know quite well what is at stake on my answer and I say without doubt he is the man'.

The man, meanwhile, protested strongly that he was innocent and could bring witnesses from South America to prove that he had not even been in England in the 1870s. Despite this, the man was found guilty in March 1896, and sentenced to seven years penal servitude. 

Luckily for this man, who incidentally was actually a Norwegian man named Adolf Beck, a Daily Mail journalist called George Robert Sims knew him. He wrote an article arguing that this was in fact a case of mistaken identity, and gradually the swell of public opinion began to turn in Beck's favour. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle weighed in with his doubts. In 1898, a Home Office official noticed that John Smith had been Jewish and was therefore circumcised, while Adolf Beck was not. When asked for his opinion on this, Judge Forrest Fulton accepted that Beck may in fact be Beck rather than Smith, but that it did not matter, for he had nonetheless most likely committed the fraud. Beck remained in prison until he was paroled in 1901.

George Robert Sims

On 15th April 1904, Adolf Beck was leaving his flat when a woman ran up to him and accused him of having stolen her jewellery. In a blind panic (which I'm sure we can all imagine was reasonable) Beck ran but was quickly caught, arrested, and put on trial. Again. This time another five women identified him as the culprit and the jury found him guilty. Again. 

This time, the judge in the case had some doubts. Something about it seemed off and so he delayed sentencing. And then, luckily for Beck, another man was arrested, this time on Tottenham Court Road, for defrauding actresses out of their jewellery. This man, it would soon be confirmed, was the real John Smith. This John Smith was a Viennese medical man, previously personal physician to the King of Hawaii and a grower of coffee in the United States. He was sentenced to five years imprisonment in September 1904.

Adolf Beck was, of course, granted a pardon, and was also awarded a settlement of £5000. His case was a direct factor in the setting up of the Court of Appeal in 1907 and an Inquiry castigated some of those who had been involved in his conviction. It didn't do poor Adolf Beck much good and he died of pleurisy and bronchitis at the end of 1909.

The identity parade in Beck's case was notably badly done but such a dodgy line up was not unique. These days, there are rules around how they are to be carried out in order to be admissible in court - the other individuals in the parade must be of similar enough appearance to the suspect, and the witnesses must be informed that the suspect may not even be in the line up and that they are not obliged to pick anybody at all. Photographic line ups have been shown to be less useful than parades conducted in person, but simultaneous line ups, whereby witnesses are shown a group all at the same time, generally lead to witnesses choosing the individual who looks the most like the person who committed the crime. Alternatively, sequential line ups, in which witnesses look at each individual one after another, has been shown to lead to up to 21% fewer mistaken identifications. 

Another case in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took an interest, and which also involved an identity parade, was that of Oscar Slater, a German Jewish man who was convicted of murder in 1909 and sentenced to death. It is arguably one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history.

Oscar Slater

Marion Gilchrist's maid, Helen Lambie, had only gone out for a few minutes. Eighty-three-year-old Miss Gilchrist was beaten to death and robbed by an unknown assailant in those few minutes, an assailant who was believed to have known his victim as there were no signs of forced entry, suggesting that the octogenarian had let her attacker into the house. The only thing of Miss Gilchrist's belongings that was missing was a diamond brooch, likely because the thief was disturbed by a neighbour. This neighbour, a Mr Adams, heard noises from the flat above and had gone to see what was the matter; he then passed a man who came rushing down the staircase. The same man hurried past the maidservant, Helen Lambie, as she returned home. Outside, the man was spotted again by a fourteen-year-old girl. None of the three witnesses gave matching descriptions of the man, but it didn't matter too much, as the police had already landed on a suspect.

Oscar Slater had a bad reputation for being a. involved in gambling, b. associated with disreputable people, and c. foreign. Within days of the murder, Slater left Glasgow for New York aboard a steamer ship and, unfortunately for him, the police were waiting for him at the other end; his sudden flight (which was later shown not to have been sudden) made them deeply suspicious. Added to that, a pawn ticket for a brooch was found in his possession. He was extradited back to Scotland, tried, and found guilty. The public outcry was great; many believed that he had been convicted almost entirely on the basis of his previous bad character, especially as the pawn ticket proved to be irrelevant to the case, relating to a piece of jewellery that had been pawned weeks before the murder. Imprisoned in 1909, Slater would not be released until 1928, when, having served almost twenty years in prison, his conviction was quashed. He was awarded the equivalent of about £330,000 in today's money, married a German woman, and settled quietly in Scotland. Never returning to Germany, he was briefly interred during the war as an alien, and lost most of his family in the Holocaust. You can see some of the documents relating to his trial, including letters written by Slater from prison, here, at the National Records of Scotland website. 

Along with confessions, the public tend to view eyewitness accounts as rock solid evidence, but they are certainly not. According to the Innocence Project, 69% of DNA exonerations involve eyewitness misidentification. They discuss such cases further, including what causes them and how they can be avoided, on their website. 

This unshakeable faith in eyewitness testimony has a long history. In 1835, William Bonil was sixty-eight-years-old and rented a room in a house in Southwark, London. In the August of that year, two men arrived at Bonil's room - thirty-year-old James Pratt, a groom, and forty-year-old John Smith, a labourer. Bonil's landlord had long been suspicious abut his male visitors and on this occasion, to satisfy his curiosity/ suspicion, he first climbed up to peer through Bonil's window and then afterwards through the keyhole. His wife would testify that she too had looked through the keyhole. As a result of what the two apparently saw, police were summoned, and William Bonil, James Pratt, and John Smith were all arrested, with Pratt and Smith charged with buggery, and Bonil charged as an accessory.

The prosecution rested on the testimony of the landlord and his wife, and their evidence was near-identical. The sexual acts which the couple claimed to have witnessed are likely to have been impossible to see through a keyhole, but nevertheless all three men were found guilty. Bonil was transported to Australia where he died in 1841. James Pratt and John Smith were sentenced to death and hanged at Newgate Prison on 27th November 1835.

Pratt and Smith were the last men executed for buggery in this country but the legal system maintained its stranglehold over the lives of gay men in other ways. Sexual acts between men remained on the statute book and prosecutions continued throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Partial decriminalisation in the 1960s did not put an end to these convictions and indeed the scope of the law's interference in gay lives went beyond what they did in the bedroom and sought to control what they wore and what they read. Moral campaigners, reluctantly accepting that gay men would have to be allowed to exist, did their utmost to use the British legal system to ensure that they did that existing as quietly and as shamefully as possible. 

Next week, a (very) naughty poem about Jesus, a sex-ed-teacher-turned-moral-campaigner, and a blasphemous libel.