Women as witnesses

EDMUND PEARSON

When we think of the woman testifying in court, we usually recall the comic picture of the lady on the witness stand, ogling the jury and trying to overcome their sobriety by a liberal display of sheer hose. She is the least perplexing of the women witnesses: others cause much more trouble.

The most preposterous witness who ever came into Court, in our time, was the "Pig Woman" in the Hall-Mills trial. She had a dubious past, and was living, under an alias, with a reputation not too good. But as a picturesque female ragamuffin, living near the scene of the notorious murder of the Rev. Dr. Hall and Mrs. Mills, she was a god-send to reporters. She cruised about at night, on a mule, armed with a shot-gun, and full of wrath toward fancied thieves and full of curiosity about illicit lovers in the underbrush. Such a woman, the reporters felt, must have seen or heard something.

At first, the Pig Woman (Jane Gibson was her alias) was cagey. Hers was the rustic pose of mysterious pretense: "I ain't tellin' all I know."

Her vague stories before the Grand Jury convinced nobody, and the Jurors refused to indict the clergyman's wife, or anyone else. But each time she told her story it became more marvellous, and more and more it proved that she had tele-photo eyes for recognizing people in the darkness. Those who seek, in every conspicuous trial, a vehicle for the expression of their sense of social injustice, began to hail the Pig Woman as a sturdy Daughter of the Soil, bearing witness against wickedness in high places.

Four years later, when the circulationbooster of a tabloid engineered an indictment and a trial, the Pig Woman burgeoned into glory. Anything would go now, and publicity, as she had learned in her circus days, could sometimes be changed into cash. So she was brought into Court, on her "death-bed" (actually, she lived for years afterwards) and since she was in a "dying condition" she could not, of course, be harshly questioned by the opposing side. She could shake her skinny hand, and croak out her accusations of murder against Mrs. Hall and her brothers. Situations like this, far more than "framing" by the police, have brought about the unjust convictions of history.

The jury, however, were neither tabloid reporters, nor socially conscious intellectuals from the city. They were twelve sensible men from the Pig Woman's own neighborhood. After the trial was over, one of them spoke briefly about the State's leading witness: "Not one of us was in any doubt about Jane Gibson. She was an unmitigated liar."

Juries, I think, accept women witnesses on equal terms with men. On some points—the speed of a motor-car, for instance,—the male juror may prefer a man's opinion. But for matters of observation about ordinary things, the jury will estimate the individual, with no regard to sex. Among witnesses who for hire give false or misleading testimony (that is, the actual paid perjurers) the majority will probably be found among men; so, also, I think it is chiefly men who get themselves on the witness stand in a notorious trial, and tell a string of lies for no earthly reason except that they enjoy twenty minutes in the spot-light. The Hauptmann trial had several examples of this breed.

The great female mischief-makers among false witnesses are those who are not only convinced that their story is true, but that they have it on some kind of superhuman authority: a dream, or a revelation, or because "it came over her like a flash".

The noose is practically around your neck if one of these seeresses gets after you. Some years ago, one of them, led on by dreams and "visions", nearly chased two poor old bedraggled harlots up the steps of the gallows, for committing a murder which, as a matter of fact, took place a thousand miles away, while they were shut up in jail.

If a case has been long before the public, and has been fully described in the newspapers, a woman almost invariably appears at the last moment, with a crucial bit of evidence. It is peculiar to observe how neatly it fits into some empty gap in the testimony, and equally peculiar that she didn't remember it before.

Thus, in the first Molineux trial, the State convinced the jury that Molineux himself mailed the package of poisoned bromoseltzer to Mr. Cornish at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club. But at the second trial, a lady made her first appearance, and swore that she remembered that exact afternoon, in the post-office, four years before, and that she saw a man mailing this exact package, with the address which had been notorious for years, and that this man was not Molineux. This proved highly convenient for the prisoner, and helped acquit him.

On the other hand, many a convict has justly gone to his punishment because of the testimony quietly given by some woman, whose clear-thinking brain was as apparent as her disinterestedness. A murder case comes to an end, with a verdict of "guilty"; and one of those wiseacres, who know more than the jury, begins to storm: "Why should he be convicted? There's no evidence against him at all!"

Some one replies: "Don't you think it's rather odd he should have been seen, two days after the murder, wearing a jewelled stick-pin, which, it is admitted, belonged to the murdered girl?"

"But he denied that he wore any such pin, and a witness backed him up."

Yes, he denied it, and his witness—a pal, as shifty-eyed as himself—denied it, too. And who affirmed it? A decent middle-aged woman, who didn't know him at all, but testified against him with obvious reluctance. And the jury were not such fools as to be unable to see that she was one of that fast disappearing number of citizens to whom the words "the sanctity of an oath" are not entirely a joke.

This chance to observe witnesses face to face, and compare their credibility is one of the; reasons we have trials—despite the number o;f people who can form such amazing snap-judgments a hundred miles away.

Miss Alice Russell went before the Grand Jury in Massachusetts in 1892 and gave the testimony which caused her best friend, Lizzie Borden, to be indicted and tried for murder. It was that she had seen Miss Borden burn a dress, which possibly contained blood stains. Later, at the trial, Miss Russell testified for the State, and the two friends never met again. Miss Russell admitted that she acted, on both occasions, against her will, and in fear of the law. She died many years later, believing, so it is said, in her friend's guilt.

Everyone remembers Evelyn Nesbitt, looking sixteen, and as virginal as Lucrece, testifying in favor of Harry Thaw, her husband, and telling a sensational story, much of which she afterwards repudiated.

All the learned chemists of Yale University once wrought in vain against a woman on the witness stand. The question was whether the Rev. Mr. Hayden of Connecticut had or had not murdered a girl. The testimony of Professor Dana, and his colleagues, by some extremely minute reasoning, about grains of arsenic, tended to show that he might have done so. But Mrs. Hayden, a handsome and, what was more, a noblelooking woman, swore that her husband was chopping wood, back of the house, during most of the time of the murder. The jurors, or enough of them, preferred to believe her. Apparently they argued that no man could be a very bad sort, when he had such a fine woman to speak up for him. And the professors, they intimated, could take their arsenical octahedra right back to Yale and much good might they do them.

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A few years ago, a plain-clothes policeman in New York, a member of the "vice-squad", decided, together with his pal, to make a couple of hundred dollars. This was the way of it. They picked on a Russian woman who lived with her mother in a groundfloor apartment, and who gave dancing lessons in the front room. The cops sent their stool-pigeon ahead, with instructions to pretend to ask for dancing lessons, then suddenly stage a scene which should give a different and quite improper aspect to his visit.

The stool-pigeon followed out these conventional orders; the two policemen broke in and arrested the Russian woman for "vagrancy", i.e., prostitution. At this point, she should, of course, have given the policemen $200 and all would have ended happily. She failed to do this, so she was taken to Jefferson Market Court.

The case was too raw; the woman was discharged—financially ruined— and the policeman was disappointed. He had made the blunder of signing a sworn statement to the effect that the scene at the apartment was a genuine one, when he knew it was faked. His stool-pigeon squealed, and when Judge Samuel Seabury began to investigate these things, the copper found himself on trial for perjury. His Russian victim was the chief witness against him.

She testified for two days, and at the end, although she had neither youth nor beauty with which to cajole their favor, the jury took less than five minutes in arriving at a verdict which not only indicated their belief in her truthfulness, but sent the enterprising policeman to Sing Sing for seven years.