Murden

“ Could they conceive that an accessory to murder was worthy of credit?—and yet the law made him an admissible witness. The man who was the chief evidence in a trial for the crime of murder,—who had told that he sat on a chair within a yard of the murdered and murderer, and raised not an arm, nor uttered a cry to save the unhappy victim calling for help and struggling with the assassin in the last agonies of life;—which was the most guilty,—the cool, cold-blooded spectator of the foul murder—or the actor, whose physical exertions would, in such an awful moment, impart phrenzy to his mind? ”

“ One to commit such a murder must have been without heart, without soul, a fiend incarnate, the very vilest of degraded and depraved humanity, or he must have been a maniac. The circumstances, execution and all the surroundings cover it with mystery profound. Explanations and evidence as to both perpetrator and motive are shrouded in a mystery that is almost inexplicable. That such a crime could have been committed during the busy hours of the day, right in the heart of a populous city, is passing comprehension. As we ponder, we exclaim in our perplexity, why was the deed done? ”

“ I wish you could have heard him say, ‘She’s dead, boys, she’s dead; and by God! they killed her.’ The sound of its agony would have found the heart that was intended to do more than keep you alive with its beating. Do you know what murder is? Do you know the difference between the gross, stupid, brutal murder that in satisfying its coarse lust for blood runs its thick neck into the halter, and the finer, daintier, infinitely more cruel murder that kills with torturing cruelty, and thus outwits the gallows? The blood-murderer is a poor fool, dwarfed in mind and crippled in soul. ”

“ We are next treated to an artistic study of murder in low life, the murderer being in hot pursuit of a young female in a nightgown, whose hair sets out straight as porcupine's quills from her head, and within an inch of the itching fingers of her pursuer, while behind him are laid out in an ascending scale the dead bodies of an old man, an old woman, and a child, the same being the victims he has just finished off. ”

“ Foreman. We sometimes forget the past. Over those bodies we stand, and we say to ourselves, is it possible that this crime cannot be discovered. You are standing, as has been suggested, in the presence of death itself. It is only what comes hereafter, but it is the double death that comes before. There is a place—it is the chamber of death—where all these personal animosities, passions and prejudices have no room, where all matters of sentiment are one side, where nothing but the truth, the naked truth, finds room and lodgment. In that spirit I adjure you to enter upon the trial of this case. ”

“ We have not been permitted to lift the veil, and show you the perpetrators of this horrible murder—a murder most atrocious in its inception, brutal and cowardly in its execution a crime which in many respects stands without a parallel. But the blood of a pure and honourable man, shed in the streets of your city, calls aloud to Heaven for vengeance, and I trust the cry will be heard and answered ”

“ I myself would not willingly try that visit over again, not that I dread anything of harm from such an act, but because I have been there once before and have had enough. But if I never see that strange visitor again, I will see the murderer. Of that I am convinced. I have firm reliance in law when it is honestly employed to detect crime or protect the wronged. I have faith in that subtle sympathy, which connects us with the dead. ”

“ A murderer’s hand has been lifted against me while I slept—I have seen blood shed before my eyes, and could not stay the unrighteous hand of the murderer—I have had none to love me but one—no mother ever smiled upon me—no recollection of a father’s caress warms my heart. ”

“ Did you ever hear of a murderer getting a witness to his work who could see it or hear it? Murder is the work of stealth and craft in which there are not only no witnesses, but the traces are attempted to be obliterated. What is called sometimes circumstantial evidence is nothing in the world but that presumption of circumstances, it may be one or fifty. There isn’t any chain about it: the word “chain” is a misnomer as applied to it; it is the presentation of circumstances from which one is irresistibly driven to the conclusion that crime has been committed. ”

“ All people who have read anything, have read of the irresistible fascination that the scene of the murder has for the murderer, of the way in which the victim "haunts" the slayer, and of how the truth that "murder will out" is really based on the fact that the murderer is his own most dangerous accuser by reason of his life of terror, remorse, and terrible hallucination.
My case is in no wise parallel.
I am absolutely without fear, regret, remorse, repentance, dread or terror in the matter of my killing Sergeant Burker. ”

“ Murderers! The angry hum of a bullet past his ear roused a fury in his soul that was elemental, primal, and he cursed now under his breath. Murderers... six feet of earth... in cold blood... or if they winged him, the car, amuck, slanting from the road to up-end itself, would do their bloody work for them... Bookie Skarvan... some day, if he lived through this... Bookie Skarvan... it was strange that all their shots had missed... even if the back of his car was a protection... ”

“ No one touched the grey-headed murderer, who knelt down—not to pray, but to look into his son's eyes—and to examine his lips—and to feel his left breast—and to search out all the symptoms of a fainting-fit, or to assure himself—and many a corpse had the plunderer handled on the field after hush of the noise of battle—that this was death. ”

“ Death brooded palpably over the brown and grey Court, and held the tense faces of all in his thrall, and weighted every syllable of the speeches. Never was the irrelevancy of murder as a political weapon made more clear, and the fearful appropriateness of capital punishment seemed clear too, mystery requited with mystery. ”

“ My father and the rest of the family being obliged to attend as witnesses, I accompanied them to the court. During the whole of this wretched mockery of justice I suffered living torture. It was to he decided, whether the result of my curiosity and lawless devices would cause the death of two of my fellow-beings: one a smiling babe, full of innocence and joy; the other far more dreadfully murdered, with every aggravation of infamy that could make the murder memorable in horror. ”

“ There had been some sort of bond between them till the vision of death rose before each shrinking soul. Shoulder to shoulder in crime, they fell apart as their doom approached, and rushing, shrieking, each man for himself, they one and all sought to escape by doors, windows, or any outlet which promised release from this fatal spot. ”

“ So far as the circumstances are known to us, a murder, if it had occurred, would have been an impromptu murder, committed in a more or less public place. But the first indication of a murder of that kind is usually—the discovery of the body. ”

“ The hunted fugitive who struck through our hearts to slay him, should stand beside his stately bier to see how powerless are bullets and blades to take the real life of any noble man!
LETTER III. THE MURDERER. Washington, April 27th.
Justice is satisfied, though blinder vengeance may not be. While the illustrious murdered is on the way to the shrine, the stark corpse of his murderer lies in the shambles. The one died quietly, like his life; the other died fighting, like his crime. ”

“ Murder! and such a murder in such a place!—not twenty rods from the busiest haunts of men, on a peaceful street—sudden, sure, unprovoked! People looked behind them as they walked, hearing the assassin’s step in every rustle of the breeze. Murder!—the far-away, frightful idea had suddenly assumed a real shape—it seemed to have stalked through the town, entering each dwelling, standing by every hearth-stone.
While the inquest was proceeding, Mr. Argyll and myself were thinking more of Eleanor than of her murdered lover. ”

“ Murderers there have been in every country under heaven, from the time of Cain to the present—murderers from hate, from revenge, from jealousy, from fear, from the instigation of any and every evil passion of our nature ”

“ How many murders are there that the world has never heard of, and never will? How many a murdered man, for instance, lies among the gum-trees of Victoria, or in the old abandoned mining-shafts on the diggings, who is missed by nobody, perhaps, but a pining wife at home, or helpless children, or an old mother? ”

“ But the murderer who outwits the law in his killing, who murders the innocent and unsuspecting and confiding, who makes friendship the cup from which the poison is drunk, who employs the most damnable lies and treachery, who calmly watches the increasing agonies of his victim as the poison slowly does its work,—what punishment do you think can reach such a murderer as that? ”

“ What guidance the jury got from the explanation of what constitutes murder is not quite clear to the lay mind, however satisfactory it may have appeared to the judge.
"Gentlemen," he stated, with admirable lucidity, "murder is where a man is murderously killed. The killer in such a case is a murderer. Now, murder by poison is just as much murder as murder with a gun, pistol, or knife. It is the simple act of murdering that constitutes murder in the eye of the law. Don't let the idea of murder and manslaughter confound you. Murder is one thing; manslaughter is quite another. ”

“ Knots of men went hurrying by, and he caught snatches of their talk. There had been a murder—a man was murdered in his bed—it was a woman—a man had murdered his wife—there were two murders—three—the tale went every way, but it was always Murder, Murder, Murder. ”

“ In the solitude of that house, with ample fire in the stove, with ample wit of woman nobody has suggested that as to the first crime there was not ample opportunity, ample means and that nothing could be suggested as a reason why all the evidence of that crime could not have been amply and successfully concealed. But as to the second murder the question is one of more difficulty. I cannot answer it. You cannot answer it. You are neither murderers nor women. You have neither the craft of the assassin nor the cunning and deftness of the sex. ”

“ Our murderers will assault you with a smile, rob you with a joke on their tongue's end, and give you back car fare when they hold you up, and if they murder you they will do it easy and lay you out with your hands across on your breast and notify the coroner, but your White Chapel murderer wants to disembowel you and cut you up into chunks, and throw your remains head first into something nasty, and if you have money enough on your person to buy a bottle of gin your murderer is as well satisfied as though he got a roll. ”

“ I have committed no crime — what has been done, that you are going to murder me?" was my reply. My master then asked me why I had followed the young lady and her brother, who went from the house the evening before, and murdered her? Astonished and terrified at the charge of being a murderer, I knew not what to say ”

“ Murderers come into my shop, I won’t say every day, but often. My dear friend, the world is full of them. You will ask, if that is so why are so comparatively few murders committed? For this reason, very few people have the motive for slaying a fellow man or woman. I myself cannot remember a single time in my life when the commission of a murder would have benefited me much, and when that murder could have been committed by me with reasonable chance of not being discovered. ”

“ When a witness, for example, swears, directly and unhesitatingly, that he saw the prisoner inflict a wound, with a deadly weapon, upon another person—that he saw that other person instantly fall, and die shortly after, this is positive evidence of something. Yet the act may be murder, or it may be manslaughter, or it may be justifiable homicide. Murder consists of three parts, the malice prepense, the blow inflicted or means employed, and the death ensuing, within a time prescribed by law. There can be no murder, if either of these parts be absent. ”

“ There is this to be observed in the physiology of every murder,—that before the coroner's inquest the sole object of public curiosity is the murdered man; while immediately after that judicial investigation the tide of feeling turns; the dead man is buried and forgotten, and the suspected murderer becomes the hero of men's morbid imaginations.
John Mellish looked in at the door of the cottage to ask a few questions. ”

“ All other cases are murder. Now you may easily conceive, my dear son, how much pain it gave me to think for one whole week that my son was a murderer. I have this day, however, received from a person calling himself Moraber, whom you must have heard of in our neighborhood, the most strong and solemn assurance that you are innocent of this terrible offense--that you did not fight your cousin, and that he was slain by some other hand. ”

“ The exceptional treatment of hanging and then burning the body of the criminal was owing to the crime being, over and above that of murder, the particularly heinous one, in the eye of the old laws, of petit treason, the murdered person being the master of, and person in authority over, the assassin. ”

“ The ghost of the murdered man still haunts the spot where he was foully deprived of life, crying for vengeance on his assassin. The murderer’s form is seen at the foot of the gibbet where he expiated his crime. The shade of the suicide lingers about the spot where he committed his rash act. ”

“ When murder is for the time licensed and the blood of the defender of his door-stone and his hearth dabbles his gray hair on one or the other of those sacred places, and there is no thought of punishment for the red hand, except as God may silently mete it in the years to come. ”

“ I feel myself to be a guilty wretch, an assassin, and murderer.”
“Mon Dieu, monsieur, you are talking in a wild, incoherent manner. Assassin and murderer—​bah! Be reasonable if you please. Don’t talk in such a false and ridiculous strain. Come, here we are at our domicile. Jump out, and come in—​ha, ha! and make your life happy. I won’t have you accuse yourself thus wrongfully. Murder—​bah! it is ridiculous.” ”