He was hanged.

CHAPTER XXXV.

THE ST. NEOTS CASE.

This is the last trial for murder that I presided over.  The object is not to show the horrible details of the deed, but my mode of dealing with the facts, for it is in the elimination of the false from the true that the work of a Judge must consist, otherwise his office is a useless form.  I shall give this case, therefore, more in detail than I otherwise should.

The case was that of Horsford, in the year 1898, at Huntingdon Assizes.  I say now, long after the event, the murderer was not improperly described by the Daily News as the greatest monster of our criminal annals, and yet even in that case some kind-hearted people said I had gone quite to the limits of a Judge’s rights in summing up the case.  Let me say a word about circumstantial evidence.  Some writers have spoken of it as a kind of “dangerous innovation in our criminal procedure.”  It is actually almost the only evidence that is obtainable in all great crimes, and it is the best and most reliable.

You may draw wrong impressions from it, I grant, but so you may from the evidence of witnesses where it is doubtful; but you cannot fail to draw the right ones where the facts are not doubtful.  If it is capable of a wrong inference, a Judge should be absolutely positive in his direction to the jury not to draw it.

I have witnessed many great trials for murder, but do not remember one where there was an eye-witness to the deed.  How is it possible, then, to bring home the charge to the culprit unless you rely on circumstantial evidence?  Circumstantial evidence is the evidence of circumstances—­facts that speak for themselves and that cannot be contradicted.  Circumstances have no motive to deceive, while human testimony is too often the product of every kind of motive.

The history of this case is extremely simple.  The accused, Walter Horsford, aged thirty-six, was a farmer of Spaldwick.  The person murdered, Annie Holmes, was a widow whose age was thirty-eight years.  She had resided for several months at St. Neots, where she died on the night of January 7.  She had been married, and lost her husband thirteen years ago.  On his death he left two children, Annie and Percy.  The latter was sixteen years of age and the girl fourteen.  The prisoner was a cousin of the deceased woman.  While she lived at Stonely the man had been in the habit of visiting her, and had become an intimate member of the family.

In the month of October the prisoner was married to a young woman named Bessie ——.  The widow with her two children, and a third, which it would be idle affectation to suggest was the offspring of her late husband, went to reside at St. Neots in a cottage rented at about L8 a year.  The prisoner wrote to Annie Holmes on at least two occasions.

Towards the close of the year Annie Holmes suspected herself to be pregnant.  She was anxious not to bring another child into the world, and had some communication with the prisoner on the subject.