Courts and Criminals Part 6

"Don't know him myself, but I tell you what, his help says he's the best employer they ever had-and they stay there forever!"

The boss drove on to the house, which he observed was situated at about an equal distance from three different railway stations and surrounded by a piazza with pillars. He walked around it, examining the vines until his eye caught a torn creeper and a white scratch on the paint. It had been an outside job after all, and two weeks had already been lost. Deduction was responsible for a mistake which would not have occurred had a little knowledge been acquired first. That is the lesson of this story.

The denouement, which has no lesson at all, is interesting. The superintendent saw no prospect of getting back the necklace, but before so informing the client, decided to cogitate on the matter for a day or two. During that time he met by accident a friend who made a hobby of studying yeggmen and criminals and occasionally doing a bit of the amateur tramp act himself.

"By the way," said the friend, "do you ever hear of any 'touches' up the river or along the Sound?"

"Sometimes," answered the boss, p.r.i.c.king up his ears. "Why do you ask?"

"Why, the other night," replied the friend, "I happened to be meeting my wife up at the Grand Central about six o'clock and I saw two yeggs that I knew taking a train out. I thought it was sort of funny. Pittsburgh Ike and Denver Red."

"When was it?"

"Two weeks ago," said the friend.

"Thanks," returned the boss. "You must excuse me now; I've got an important engagement."

Three hours later Pittsburgh Ike and Denver Red were in a cell at headquarters. At six o'clock that evening the necklace had been returned. This was a coincidence that might not occur in a hundred years, but had the deductive detective determined the question he would still be pondering on the comparative probability of whether the cook, the ch.o.r.e man, or the hired girl was the guilty party.

A clean bit of detection on the part of an agency, and quite in the day's work, was the comparatively recent capture of a thief who secured three hundred and sixty thousand dollars worth of securities from a famous banking inst.i.tution in New York City by means of a very simple device. A firm of stock brokers had borrowed from this bank about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a day or two and put up the securities as collateral. In the ordinary course of business, when the borrower has no further use for the money, he sends up a certified check for the amount of the loan with interest, and the bank turns over the securities to the messenger. In this particular case a messenger arrived with a certified check, shoved it into the cage, and took away what was pushed out to him in return-three hundred and sixty thousand dollars in bonds. The certification turned out to be a forgery and the securities vanished. I do not know whether the police were consulted or not. Sometimes in such cases the banks prefer to resort to more private methods and, perhaps, save the necessity of making a public admission of their stupidity. When my friend, the superintendent, was called in, the officers of the bank were making the wildest sort of guesses as to the ident.i.ty of the master mind and hand which had deceived the cas.h.i.+er. He must, they felt sure, have made the forgery with a camel's hair brush of unrivalled fineness.

"A great artist!" said the president.

"The most skilful forger in the world!" opined another.

"We must run down all the celebrated criminals!" announced a third.

"Great artist-nothing!" remarked the boss, rubbing his thumb over the certification which blurred at the touch. "He's no painter! Why, that's a rubber stamp!"

What a shock for those dignified gentlemen! To think that their cas.h.i.+er had been deceived by a mere, plebeian, common or garden thing of rubber!

"Good-day, gents!" said the boss, putting the check in his wallet. "I've got to get busy with the rubber stamp makers!"

He returned to his office and detailed a dozen men to work on the East Side and a dozen on the West Side, with orders to search out every man in New York who manufactured rubber stamps. Before the end of the afternoon the maker was found on the Bowery, near Houston Street. This was his story: A couple of weeks before, a young man had come in and ordered a certification stamp, drawing at the time a rough design of what he wanted. The stamp, when first manufactured, had not been satisfactory to him; and on his second visit, the customer had left a piece of a check, carefully torn out in circular form, which showed the certification which he desired copied. This fragment the maker had retained, as well as a slip of paper, upon which the customer had written the address of the place to which he wished the stamp sent-The Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation! The face of the fragment showed a part of the maker's signature. The superintendent ran his eye over a list of brokers and picked out the name of the firm most like the hieroglyphics on the check. Then he telephoned over and asked to be permitted to see their pay roll. Carefully comparing the signature appearing thereon with the Y.M.C.A. slip, he picked his man in less than ten minutes.

The latter was carefully trailed to his home, and thence to the Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation, after which he called on his fiancee at her father's house. He spent the night at his own boarding place. Next morning (Sunday) he was arrested on his way to church, and all the securities (except some that he later returned) were discovered in his room. More quick work! The amateur's method had been very simple. He knew that the loan had been made and the bonds sent to the bank. So he forged a check, certified it himself, and collected the securities. Of course, he was a bungler and took a hundred rash chances.

A good example of the value of the acc.u.mulated information-doc.u.mentary, pictorial, and otherwise-in the possession of an agency was the capture of Charles Wells, more generally known as Charles Fisher, alias Henry Conrad, an old-time forger, who suddenly resumed his activities after being released from a six-year term in England. A New York City bank had paid on a bogus two hundred and fifty dollar check and had reported its loss to the agency in question. The superintendent examined the check (although Fisher had been in confinement for six years on the other side) spotted it as his work. The next step was to find the forger. Of course, no man who does the actual "scratching" attempts to "lay down" the paper. That task is up to the "presenter." The cas.h.i.+er of the bank identified in the agency's gallery the picture of the man who had brought in the two hundred and fifty dollar check, and he in turn proved to be another ex-convict well known in the business, whose whereabouts in New York were not difficult to ascertain. He was "located" and "trailed" and all his a.s.sociates noted and followed. In due course he "connected up" (as they say) with Fisher. Now, it is one thing to follow a man who has no idea that he is being followed and another to trail a man who is as suspicious and elusive as a fox. A professional criminal's daily business is to observe whether or not he is being followed, and he rarely if ever, makes a direct move. If he wants a drink at the saloon across the street, he will, by preference, go out the back door, walk around the block and dodge in the side entrance under the tail of an ice wagon. In this case the detectives followed the presenter for days before they reached Fisher, and when they did they had still to locate his "plant."

The arrest in this case ill.u.s.trates forcibly the chief characteristic of successful criminals-egotism. The essential quality of daring required in their pursuits gives them an extraordinary degree of self-confidence, boldness, and vanity. And to vanity most of them can trace their fall. It seems incredible that Fisher should have returned to the United States after his discharge from prison and immediately resumed his operations without carefully concealing his impedimenta. Yet when he was run down in a twenty-six family apartment house, the detectives found in his valise several thousand blank and model checks, hundreds of letters and private papers, a work on "Modern Bank Methods," and his "ticket of leave" from England! This man was a successful forger and because he was successful, his pride in himself was so great that he attributed his conviction in England to accident and really felt that he was immune on his release.

The arrest of such a man often presents great legal difficulties which the detectives overcome by various practical methods. Of course, no officer without a search warrant has a right to enter a house or an apartment. A man's house is his castle. Mayor Gaynor, when a judge, in a famous opinion (more familiarly known in the lower world even than the Decalogue) laid down the law unequivocally and emphatically in this regard. Thus, in the Fisher case, the defendant having been arrested on the street, the detectives desired to search the apartment of the family with which he lived. They did this by first inducing the tenant to open the door and, after satisfying themselves that they were in the right place, ordering the occupants to get in line and "march" from one room to another while they rummaged for evidence. "Of course, we had no right to do it, but they didn't know we hadn't!" said the boss.

But frequently the defendant knows his rights just as well as the police. On one occasion the same detective who arrested Fisher wanted to take another man out of an apartment where he had been run to earth. His mother (aged eighty-two years) put the chain on the door and politely declined to open it. All the evidence against the forger was inside the apartment and he was actively engaged in burning it up in the kitchen stove. In half an hour to arrest him would have been useless! The detectives stormed and threatened, but the old crone merely grinned at them. She hated a "bull" as much as did her son. Fearing to take the law into their own hands, they summoned a detective sergeant from head-quarters, but, although he sympathized with them, he had read Mayor Gaynor's decision and declined to take any chances. They then "appealed" to the cop on the beat, who proved more reasonable, but although he used all his force, he was unable to break down the door which had in the meantime been reinforced from the inside. After about an hour, the old lady unchained the door and invited the detectives to come in. The crook was sitting by the window smoking a cigar and reading St. Nicholas, while all evidence of his crime had vanished in smoke.

One more anecdote, at the expense of the deductive detective. A watchman was murdered, the safe of a brewery blown open and the contents stolen. Local detectives worked on the case and satisfied themselves that the night engineer at the brewery had committed the crime. He was a quiet and, apparently, a G.o.d-fearing man, but circ.u.mstances were conclusive against him. In fact, he had been traced within ten minutes of the murder on the way to the scene of the homicide. But some little link was lacking and the brewery officials called in the agency. The first thing the superintendent did was to look over the engineer. At first sight he recognized him as a famous crook who had served five years for a homicidal a.s.sault! One would think that that would have settled the matter. But it didn't! The detective said nothing to his a.s.sociates or employers, but called on the engineer that evening and had a quiet talk with him in which he satisfied himself that the man was entirely innocent. The man had served his time, turned over a new leaf, and was leading an honest, decent life. Two months later the superintendent caused the arrest of four yeggmen, all of whom were convicted and are now serving fifteen years each for the crime.

Thus, the reader will observe that there are just a few more real detectives still left in the business-if you can find them. Incidentally, they, one and all, take off their hats to Scotland Yard. They will tell you that the Englishman may be slow (fancy an American inspector of police wearing gray suede gloves and brewing himself a dish of tea in his office at four o'clock), but that once he goes after a crook he is bound to get him-it is merely a question of time. I may add that in the opinion of the heads of the big agencies the percentage of ability in the New York Detective Bureau is high-one of them going so far as to claim that fifty per cent of the men have real detective ability-that is to say "brains." That is rather a higher average than one finds among clergymen and lawyers, yet it may be so.

CHAPTER VII. Women in the Courts

AS WITNESSES Women appear in the criminal courts constantly as witnesses, although less frequently as complainants and defendants. As complainants are always witnesses, and as defendants may, and in point of fact generally do become so, whatever generalizations are possible regarding women in courts of law can most easily be drawn from their characteristics as givers of testimony. Roughly speaking, women exhibit about the same idiosyncrasies and limitations in the witness-chair as the opposite s.e.x, and at first thought one would be apt to say that it would be fruitless and absurd to attempt to predicate any general principles in regard to their testimony, but a careful study of female witnesses as a whole will result in the inevitable conclusion that their evidence has virtues and limitations peculiar to itself.

The ancient theory that woman was man's inferior showed itself in the tendency to reject, or at least to regard with suspicion, her evidence in legal matters.

"The following law," says W. M. Best, "is attributed to Moses by Josephus: 'Let the testimony of women not be received on account of the levity and audacity of their s.e.x'; a law which looks apocryphal, but which, even if genuine, could not have been of universal application.... The law of ancient Rome, though admitting their testimony in general, refused it in certain cases. The civil canon laws of mediaeval Europe seem to have carried the exclusion much further. Mascardus says: 'Feminis plerumque omnino non creditur, et id dumtaxat, quod sunt feminae qua ut plurimum solent esse fraudulentre fallaces, et dolosae' [Generally speaking, no credence at all is given to women, and for this reason, because they are women, who are usually deceitful, untruthful, and treacherous in the very highest degree.] And Lancelottus, in his 'Inst.i.tutiones Juris Canonici,' lays it down in the most distinct terms, that women cannot in general be witnesses, citing the language of Virgil: 'Varium et mutabile semper femina'....

"Bruneau, although a contemporary of Madame de Sevigne, did not scruple to write, in 1686, that the deposition of three women was only equal to that of two men. At Berne, so late as 1821, in the Canton of Vaud, so late as 1824, the testimony of two women was required to counterbalance that of one man.... A virgin was ent.i.tled to greater credit than a widow.... In the 'Canonical Inst.i.tutions of Devotus,' published at Paris in 1852, it is distinctly stated that, except in a few peculiar instances, women are not competent witnesses in criminal cases. In Scotland also, until the beginning of the eighteenth century, s.e.x was a cause of exclusion from the witness-box in the great majority of instances."

c.o.c.kburn in his Memoirs tells of an incident during the trial of Glengarry, in Scotland, for murder in a duel, which is, perhaps, explicable by this extraordinary att.i.tude: A lady of great beauty was called as a witness and came into court heavily veiled. Before administering the oath, Lord Eskgrove, the judge (to whom this function belongs in Scotland), gave her this exposition of her duty:

"Young woman, you will now consider yourself as in the presence of Almighty G.o.d and of this High Court. Lift up your veil, throw off all your modesty, and look me in the face."

Whatever difference does exist in character between the testimony of men and women has its root in the generally recognized diversity in the mental processes of the two s.e.xes. Men, it is commonly declared, rely upon their powers of reason; women upon their intuition. Not that the former is frequently any more accurate than the latter. But our courts of law (at least those in English-speaking countries) are devised and organized, perhaps unfortunately, on the principle that testimony not apparently deduced by the syllogistic method from the observation of relevant fact is valueless, and hence woman at the very outset is placed at a disadvantage and her usefulness as a probative force sadly crippled.

The good old lady who takes the witness-chair and swears that she knows the prisoner took her purse has perhaps quite as good a basis for her opinion and her testimony (even though she cannot give a single reason for her belief and becomes hopelessly confused on cross-examination) as the man who reaches the same conclusion ostensibly by virtue of having seen the defendant near by, observed his hand reaching for the purse, and then perceived him take to his heels. She has never been taught to reason and has really never found it necessary, having wandered through life by inference or, more frankly, by guesswork, until she is no longer able to point out the simplest stages of her most ordinary mental processes.

As the reader is already aware, the value of all honestly given testimony depends first upon the witness's original capacity to observe the facts; second upon his ability to remember what he has seen and not to confuse knowledge with imagination, belief or custom, and lastly, upon his power to express what he has, in fact, seen and remembers.

Women do not differ from men in their original capacity to observe, which is a quality developed by the training and environment of the individual. It is in the second cla.s.s of the witness's limitations that women as a whole are more likely to trip than men, for they are p.r.o.ne to swear to circ.u.mstances as facts, of their own knowledge, simply because they confuse what they have really observed with what they believe did occur or should have occurred, or with what they are convinced did happen simply because it was accustomed to happen in the past.

Perhaps the best ill.u.s.tration of the female habit of swearing that facts occurred because they usually occurred, was exhibited in the Twitch.e.l.l murder trial in Philadelphia, cited in Wellman's "Art of Cross-Examination." The defendant had killed his wife with a blackjack, and having dragged her body into the back yard, carefully unbolted the gate leading to the adjacent alley and, retiring to the house, went to bed. His purpose was to create the impression that she had been murdered by some one from outside the premises. To carry out the suggestion, he bent a poker and left it lying near the body smeared with blood. In the morning the servant girl found her mistress and ran shrieking into the street.

At the trial she swore positively that she was first obliged to unbolt the door in order to get out. Nothing could shake her testimony, and she thus unconsciously negatived the entire value of the defendant's adroit precautions. He was justly convicted, although upon absolutely erroneous testimony.

The old English lawyers occasionally rejected the evidence of women on the ground that they are "frail." But the exclusion of women as witnesses in the old days was not for psychological reasons, nor did it originate from a critical study of the probative value of their testimony.

Though the conclusions to which women frequently jump may usually be shown by careful interrogation to be founded upon observation of actual fact, their habit of stating inferences often leads them to claim knowledge of the impossible-"wiser in [their] own conceit than seven men that can render a reason."

In a very recent case where a clever thief had been convicted of looting various apartments in New York City of over eighty thousand dollars' worth of jewelry, the female owners were summoned to identify their property. The writer believes that in every instance these ladies were absolutely ingenuous and intended to tell the absolute truth. Each and every one positively identified various of the loose stones found in the possession of the prisoner as her own. This was the case even when the diamonds, emeralds and pearls had no distinguis.h.i.+ng marks at all. It was a human impossibility actually to identify any such objects, and yet these eminently respectable and intelligent gentlewomen swore positively that they could recognize their jewels. They drew the inference merely that as the prisoner had stolen similar jewels from them these must be the actual ones which they had lost, an inference very likely correct, but valueless in a tribunal of justice.

Where their inferences are questioned, women, as a rule, are much more ready to "swear their testimony through" than men. They are so accustomed to act upon inference that, finding themselves unable to substantiate their a.s.sertion by any sufficient reason, they become irritated, "show fight," and seek refuge in prevarication. Had they not, during their entire lives, been accustomed to mental short-cuts, they would be spared the humiliation of seeing their evidence "stricken from the record."

One of the ladies referred to testified as follows:

"Can you identify that diamond?"

"I am quite sure that it is mine:"

"How do you know?"

"It looks exactly like it."

"But may it not be a similar one and not your own?"