16
‘It Was Not My Place’
Whatever the source of her outward strength, Hannah Dobbs would surely also have been helped by the dizzying pace of the proceedings. The following day in the New Court of the Old Bailey, the defence was ready to begin cross-examinations. And Mary Bastendorff was the first to be recalled to the witness box. She was first asked once again about the gold watch and chain that Hannah Dobbs had started to affect around the house.
Mrs Bastendorff recalled that just before Dobbs left her service, she found two pledge tickets in Dobbs’ box; these were for a pawnshop run by a Mr Thompson. And while Dobbs worked at 4, Euston Square, how much latitude did the servant have in terms of taking time off? She was, said Mrs Bastendorff, ‘in the habit of frequently going out. Sometimes she went out on Sunday – whenever she chose to ask, she went out’. And if the lodgers needed anything in these absences, a ‘little girl’ would step help. This ‘girl’ was a ‘nurse’ or nanny but she was not there in October 1877 – or indeed, at any point when Matilda Hacker was in the house. And Mrs Bastendorff added that she could not recall Hannah Dobbs ‘going out at all’ during the time ‘that Miss Hacker was lodging’.
The defence counsel was interested in this. Could Mrs Bastendorff be quite sure on this point? It seemed not; she could not ‘swear to it’. What were the more precise terms of Hannah Dobbs’ duties when it came to the lodgers? ‘She provided for all the requirements of the lodgers before she went out,’ said Mrs Bastendorff. Occasionally, she herself would send Dobbs on errands. But yes, she conceded that lodgers might occasionally come into her own room if there were any requests.
Mr Mead continued, could Mrs Bastendorff swear that Matilda Hacker never spent an afternoon with the landlady? ‘I do not recollect it,’ said Mrs Bastendorff. ‘It is very improbable that she did.’ However, she conceded, ‘on one occasion, she might have taken my children into the square’.
Could Mrs Bastendorff also be quite certain about the stained carpet in Matilda Hacker’s room? ‘The stain was not on the carpet when Miss Hacker came,’ she said, adding that she only saw it ‘after she left’. She did not, she told the court, go into the room when Matilda Hacker was staying there.
And yet, the defence asked, ‘managing this lodging house, will you swear that you never went into their rooms?’ Mrs Bastendorff became quite vehement, telling him: ‘No. I never went into Miss Hacker’s room. I was too much engaged with other things. It was not my place to look after lodgers.’
This received a startlingly aggressive response from Mr Mead: ‘I should rather think that it was your place to look after the comfort of your lodgers.’ The cross-examination went on.
Did Mrs Bastendorff see Matilda Hacker’s luggage being taken away in a cab? No, she did not. Was it normal for Hannah Dobbs to look after the children? She ‘was in the habit of taking (the) children’. And so could it have been the case that Hannah Dobbs had the children on that fateful Sunday when ‘Miss Hacker went away?’ Mrs Bastendorff ‘could not say that she did not do this’.
So what were Matilda Hacker’s daily habits? As a rule, said Mrs Bastendorff, she ‘dressed in the morning and went out’. Mr Mead returned to the children; and Mary Bastendorff was forced to concede that it was a possibility that on that Sunday, Hannah Dobbs had taken them up to Hampstead.
And so when precisely did Hannah Dobbs relay the news that ‘Miss Uish’ had gone? It was on the Monday, at around lunchtime. But how could Mrs Bastendorff not have noticed the inevitable disturbance – the noise of belongings being taken downstairs, the footsteps above moving back and forth, checking that all had been packed, the summoning of the cab outside – that comes with departure? ‘Anyone,’ she said, ‘could come downstairs and leave without (her) hearing.’
Indeed, when pushed on this, she added that she ‘should not have seen the cab unless she had watched for it’.
From the business point of view, was it not the case that her lodgers would have to give her notice of at least a few days if they were planning to leave? No, said Mrs Bastendorff. It was ‘not at all usual for the lodgers to give notice’. The judge leaned in, interested, and asked: ‘Not usual?’
‘Not in furnished apartments,’ said Mary Bastendorff. ‘At least,’ she added, she ‘did not make it a rule.’ The judge asked if all her tenants had departed similarly. Mrs Bastendorff ‘could not remember whether the next lodger who came gave notice or not’. But on that occasion, she had seen the lady – Miss Willoughby – depart.
Something by this stage had started to visibly irk the judge, Justice Hawkins. Perhaps he thought Mary Bastendorff was being wilfully evasive, or hostile – perhaps he simply thought that she was a neglectful landlady – but his own questions stepped up. He wanted to hear more from her about the nature of the coal cellar. ‘The cellar would hold a large quantity of coals,’ she said. ‘They had had four tons in it.’ And ‘it was a light cellar’ (meaning that with the door open, it got the light).
And what of the day that Matilda Hacker arrived and moved into number 4, Euston Square? Mary Bastendorff was once more blank. She ‘did not see her arrive, but understood that she brought luggage’. No, she did not ‘hear the luggage being taken upstairs’. Someone might more fairly have pointed out that as the mother of four young children, she might have been elsewhere attending to other matters as the old lady was let into the house by Hannah Dobbs. But Justice Hawkins now volubly lost his temper, as though he felt that Mary Bastendorff was being deliberately obstructive.
He turned to the jury. And he asked them: ‘Is there any other question I can try to get answered? I never saw such a witness. We cannot get answers to questions which ought to be answered.’1
Mrs Bastendorff was asked then whether she noticed the comings and goings of the tenants in the unfurnished rooms, for which they supplied all their own needs. And yes, this was the distinction that she had wanted to make: she remembered the departure of Mr Riggenbach, for instance, ‘as he had his own furniture’.
This had clearly been an ordeal for Mrs Bastendorff; but perhaps where the judge thought he saw sullen silence, there could have been a range of other emotions, one of which might have been an inward terror. Each of these encounters was scraping layers of respectability and security off the life of her home and family. She might also have known that there was worse to come.
Now Severin Bastendorff was re-called, and he swore his oaths. Without any kind of preamble, Mr Mead – who had now clearly been briefed very much more comprehensively by his client – began his questioning aggressively.
The inquest had heard about Hannah Dobbs’ relationship with Peter Bastendorff. Mr Mead was now about to allege that there was quite another relationship going on at the same time.
Was it the case, Mead asked Severin Bastendorff, that he had been ‘keeping company’ with Hannah Dobbs?
The denial was instant and hot. Bastendorff declared that all the time Hannah Dobbs was in the family’s service, he ‘was never out with her’.
Was Mr Bastendorff perhaps familiar, Mr Mead now asked, with the Princes Hotel in Argyle Street?
Bastendorff replied that he ‘knew Argyle Street, not the Prince’s Hotel’.
Was he ever there with Hannah Dobbs?
No, he said. He ‘was never in Argyle Street with her’.
Now Mr Mead mentioned an inn in the Surrey town of Redhill, some 30 miles south of London. Had he ever been there with Hannah Dobbs? Or after she left his service, did he perhaps go and see her at her lodgings just off the Edgware Road? Again, the denial was most insistent. He ‘did not go to Redhill to see her, nor to her lodgings in the Edgware Road’.
But, it was put to him, she had also been observed in the vicinity of Euston Square after she had left service there. Yes, Bastendorff said, he had on occasion seen her outside his house but he ‘never walked one inch with her’.
Mr Mead suggested that there was a local publican who thought otherwise. Bastendorff ‘knew a publican named Johnson and his brother’, but he ‘did not tell the latter’ that he ‘had been out’ with Hannah Dobbs.
The defence counsel would not leave the subject. Was Severin Bastendorff ‘not attached’ to Hannah Dobbs? ‘No,’ said Bastendorff simply. ‘I liked her very well because my brother was keeping company with her.’
Wasn’t younger brother Peter uneasy about Severin’s affection for Hannah?
‘My brother never complained that I was too fond of her,’ said Bastendorff. ‘If he says so, it is untrue.’
All of this must have been profoundly shifting the views of the jury. At the start, and through newspaper speculation, Hannah Dobbs had been presented as a defiant, shameless young woman; her sexual relationship with Peter Bastendorff shockingly free and casual. But into this portrait of modern amorality was thrown a further element of seaminess; sexual betrayal.
Mr Mead wanted to know still yet more. Did Severin Bastendorff ever give Hannah Dobbs any presents? His answer had an unintentional element of Pooterish humour about it. ‘Never of more value than two shillings and sixpence,’ he said. ‘That was the value of a cabinet I gave her.’
And, continued Mr Mead silkily, did Hannah Dobbs ever lend Severin any money? ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Three pounds in the year 1877.’
That was a startlingly large sum – almost a quarter of her annual salary. And now Mr Mead was ploughing into murkier territory; what else, Mead asked, did Hannah Dobbs give him? Bastendorff told him that she lent him ‘her watch for half a day’. She also ‘gave him a pencil case’.
And did he ever give her a gold watch? He said no.
Did he not give her the gold watch and chain, persisted the defence counsel, ‘and tell her to say that her uncle had given them to her, and that because you did not wish your wife to know the circumstance?’
‘No,’ said Bastendorff, ‘I did not.’
‘Nor the gold eyeglass?’
‘No.’
The sequence of questions had the appearance of trying to move the shadow of guilt away from Hannah Dobbs and on to Severin Bastendorff.
When, Mr Mead wanted to know, did Bastendorff first see Matilda Hacker’s basket trunk? ‘Last autumn,’ he said (which would have been the autumn of 1878). ‘It was then in the scullery. It might have been in the house a long time,’ and, he said, he would not have seen it.
And what of the cash-box? Bastendorff said he ‘used it for Christmas 1877’. It was Hannah Dobbs who had given him the box. Why, asked Mead. Bastendorff had ‘asked her for it,’ he said. ‘It was standing on the dresser.’ And Dobbs gave it to him.
Mead abruptly turned to rumours concerning the moral nature of 4, Euston Square. Was he right to state that on the sabbath, there was frequently drinking and gambling taking place there? ‘On Sunday, card-playing sometimes went on,’ in his house, Bastendorff said, ‘and drinking.’ But then he had got into a routine of going away for the weekend, and so such activities stopped. Indeed, he told the court, he absented himself precisely because he wanted to ‘turn-up’ the card-playing, meaning give it up. He ‘did not like it on Sundays’.
This had the effect once more of shifting impressions; not merely an apparently respectable man using his house for gambling, but also a man for whom the card-playing was becoming a problem. Mead had astutely established the unusual fact of the servant lending money to her employer; and he had also fixed in those minds the image of the cashbox, also being handed by the servant to the employer. And the thread of this narrative was becoming more and more pronounced; if perhaps the old lady had been murdered opportunistically for money, might there not have been a likelier suspect?
And these weekend sojourns in the country, continued Mr Mead. Did Mrs Bastendorff ever join him in these jaunts? ‘On one occasion,’ he said. And yet could he not recall having said at the police court that Hannah Dobbs had joined him on a Sunday, bringing one or two of the children? He said he had not ‘had time to think over the matter’.
There were yet more curious mysteries to be considered. Why, asked Mr Mead, had pages been torn from the general rent book of 4, Euston Square? Bastendorff declared that he could not say. Then there were the guns in the house: the lodger Mr Findlay apparently had a revolver – but he was not the only one, was he, said Mr Mead. Bastendorff replied that in 1876, he had had a revolver ‘which he sold in that year’. He conceded though that he ‘borrowed a revolver from his brother’.
The prosecution returned to the subject of Hannah Dobbs; he was interested in the amount of latitude that she had within the house. Mr Bastendorff testified that she was ‘in the habit of going out’; and that if the lodgers ever required anything while she was out, sometimes the childrens’ young nursemaid would help. Though Bastendorff also recalled one occasion when Hannah went out and a lodger started ringing for her attention. The lodger was ignored by everyone else and indeed carried on ringing for hours until the maid returned.
This gift of a cabinet to the maid; the prosecution was interested in hearing more about it. Bastendorff told him that it was a ‘Japanese cabinet’; he had ‘allowed her to choose’. And for what reason had Hannah Dobbs lent her employer the sum of £3? ‘It was to pay the carriage of a cask of claret,’ said Bastendorff. He had the wine imported specially from France; the reason for the loan was that he ‘happened to be very busy at the time’ (thus not being able to get to the bank) and he ‘paid the money back the same week’.2 But where had Hannah Dobbs obtained the money from?
He was also asked about the layout of 4, Euston Square in terms of sleeping arrangements; this presumably was to help narrow down the hours in which Matilda Hacker was fatally attacked. Bastendorff told the court that ‘the children slept on the floor above that which Miss Hacker had her room’. He added that they ‘were usually put to bed at 7 o’clock’.
This seemed to suggest that the murder had certainly taken place earlier; surely the young children would have been awoken by any disturbance from downstairs? Equally though, it might have pointed in the other direction: the tired little children soundly asleep, and the house otherwise empty save for Matilda Hacker and whomever her assailant might have been.
Bastendorff was now relieved from the stand. He would have known that the suggestion of a sexual relationship with the woman accused of murder would be featuring in all of the newspapers the next day; that it would be there in the eyes of all his neighbours in Euston Square. It cannot be known how much, after the hearing, he protested innocence to Mary.
His friends were next to be called as witnesses, to prove that on the day of the murder, he had indeed been out in the country. Taking the stand was John Richards of Brook Street, Erith, to tell how Bastendorff had been visiting at the weekend for the last two years, and how he would accompany him ‘on Saturday and Sunday morning shooting small birds’. Mr Richards remembered the ‘one occasion’ when Mary Bastendorff came down for the weekend to join them. And he also testified that on that crucial October weekend, Bastendorff was there as usual, leaving late on the Sunday evening; Mr Richards remembered that particularly as ‘he had to go after him with a string of birds’ that Bastendorff had presumably forgotten.
Mr Whiffling, Severin’s friend from nearby Gower Street, gave corroborating evidence, adding in his recollection of Bastendorff being fined by the officious Erith policeman.
Then came the turn of Mary Bastendorff’s mother, ‘Mrs Pearce, Charrington Street’. She was there to testify about the gold watch; how Hannah Dobbs had handed her the watch to get it cleaned in October 1877. It was the watch that had been produced in court; the property of Matilda Hacker. The reason Dobbs had sent it her way was that Mrs Pearce had a lodger in Charrington Street called David Rhodes who knew a specialist in jewellery cleaning. He in turn passed the watch to Mr Julius Jeuchner, ‘watchmaker, Soho’; and the watch was duly returned to Hannah Dobbs.
But Mrs Pearce recalled rebuking Hannah Dobbs, telling her that ‘it was very out of place to wear jewellery in the presence of lodgers’. She remembered also that Dobbs appeared to have acquired an eyeglass.
One of Severin Bastendorff’s employees in the furniture workshop at the back of the house was called. William Hanwell, who had been working for Bastendorff since the start of the decade, remembered Hannah Dobbs leaving Euston Square to take a trip to Bideford; and he also recalled how she took little Peter, one of the Bastendorff children. He had repaired a gold chain for her (a chain that was identified in the court as also belonging to Matilda Hacker) and had also noticed the watch. Hannah Dobbs had told him these items had been left to her by her uncle. There were other pieces of jewellery in her possession too, including ‘one or two rings’ which again she said had been a bequest.
And now the pawnbroker was summoned. ‘Mr William Partington, assistant to Mr Thompson, Drummond Street, Euston Square, identified one of the watches produced as having been pledged in the name of Rosina Bastendorff,’ ran the court report. Mr Partington told the court that ‘it was never redeemed’ so in the spring of 1879, the watch was put up for sale. ‘But not being sold, it was taken back into stock’ and held until being given up to the police. Added to this, the gold chain and another watch were brought into the shop, and again pledged under the name ‘Rosina Bastendorff’ of ‘4, Euston Square’.3 For these items, Hannah Dobbs received £2 and 10 shillings.
Next to testify was a St Pancras laundress: Hannah Earls of 68 Stonehurst Street. She regularly cleaned the clothes, linen and bed-linen of all the lodgers in 4, Euston Square. She recalled that in the autumn of 1877, she noticed that Hannah Dobbs had started wearing a gold chain. She told the maid that ‘it did not look very well of a servant wearing this chain in her work and that she might lose it’.
To this, Hannah Dobbs had apparently made no reply, but then told the laundress about her late uncle’s bequest. She then gave Mrs Earls ‘eight to ten handkerchiefs to wash’. But they ‘were not dirty’. There was a handkerchief belonging to Matilda Hacker produced in court; and the laundress confirmed that it corresponded to the ‘character’ of the other items.
Rather more haunting evidence was given by another former servant to the Bastendorffs, Louisa Barker, who worked there for a couple of months, following Hannah Dobbs. During that time, she said, she was ‘in and out of the cellar’. There was, she said, ‘straw, rubbish and coal … and in one of the corners, there was a larger heap of something’.
It was clear she did not care for the cellar (although it might now be wondered how much of this was hindsight). She said that whenever she had to go in there for coal, she always fetched the lumps that were ‘nearest the door’. She also recalled seeing ‘two or three white towels in the cellar’ and that ‘they were rotten’. But no, she told the court: she had ‘no idea there was a body in the cellar’.4
The court reports did not relate whether the next witness – Peter Bastendorff – had composed himself into a more sombre attitude than his previous public appearance.
In the autumn of 1877, he told the court, he ‘lived in the Hampstead-Rd’ (which ran a little north of Euston Square) and ‘worked for a cabinet maker’. He was, he said, ‘in the habit of visiting his brother’ at 4, Euston Square; and he saw Hannah Dobbs there. ‘For some time,’ he said, he ‘kept company with her.’ Did he recall Dobbs taking time off to go to Bideford with one of Mary and Severin’s children? He did. Did he recall the lodger Matilda Hacker or ‘Miss Uish’? He did not.
But now once again the electric crackle of scandal was in the air. Was it the case that Peter complained to his older brother about Severin’s relationship with Hannah Dobbs? He did not, he said, ‘complain of his brother’s too great familiarity … but he heard something in a public house and spoke to her (Hannah) about it several times’.
So Peter did have suspicions concerning his then lady-friend? The young man now contradicted himself. He said that he ‘thought himself that there was something between (Hannah) and his brother and he complained of it to both’.
At this pregnant moment, he was allowed to step down.
The court now addressed the question of Hannah Dobbs’ late uncle, from whom she claimed to have inherited her jewellery. Called to testify was ‘Mr James Hamelin, of Newton Tracey, near Bideford’; he declared that he was the uncle of the prisoner. But, he pointed out, there was another uncle, called Clarke, who had died almost two years beforehand in 1877. He too ‘lived at Newton Tracey’, he said. ‘It was after harvest time when he died. He left a widow and five children.’ What Hamelin did not say was whether he had left much money or indeed a bequest for his niece.
There was a break as Justice Hawkins adjourned for lunch. Hannah Dobbs was removed to her cell; then she was brought back up as the court rose for the afternoon session. There seemed little prospect of fresh clarity: new witnesses were set to make the mystery even murkier.
Dr Pepper, one of the experts who had initially examined the remains of Matilda Hacker, was recalled for more questioning. This time the defence counsel Mr Mead asked him if he could really be quite certain as to the cause of death; given the old lady’s age, might there not have been the possibility of natural causes? Dr Pepper stated that if ‘a person had a large varicose vein which burst suddenly, death might ensue’. He ‘had known of such cases. The bursting would produce a great flow of blood and would account, had it occurred with the deceased, for the blood upon the carpet’.
Such cases are indeed very rare; had the vein burst in this fashion, the bleeding might have been akin to a pierced artery. But, it would have produced much more blood than the carpet stain suggested.
The prosecutor might well have been justified in demanding that Dr Pepper furnish the court with more exact details. But the Attorney General objected: and on closer questioning, Dr Pepper reluctantly conceded that actually ‘there was nothing to show that the deceased suffered from varicose veins’. So did he perhaps have any other possible theories that might have involved violence? Dr Pepper, now clearly irked, was reluctant to be pulled down this path. He suggested that ‘pressure applied to the throat might rupture a small vein, though it would not effect a great flow of blood.’ And, he added, ‘the stain on the carpet was probably caused by about four ounces of blood’.
The jury and the judge were now left with the confusing sense that neither natural causes nor murderous assault could explain the matter. If there was no sign of a blow to the head, then what caused the bleeding? Similarly, if Matilda Hacker had been strangled, then why was there blood? But even more pressingly, if she had died of natural causes, then quite why had her body been dragged all the way down four flights of stairs and hidden at the back of the coal cellar? The more witnesses were called, the cloudier the case became.
This confusion – plus the seeds of more danger for Severin Bastendorff – were carried by the next witness Robert Barnley, ‘warder at Westminster prison’, who had accompanied Hannah Dobbs in a cab on her way to the hearing at Bow Street. In the course of that journey, he said, Dobbs ‘had told him there had been a lodger called Findlay living in the house and that he was in the habit of carrying a seven-chambered revolver. She believed,’ Barnley continued, ‘it was he who had committed the murder and stated that (Findlay) wanted to commit a secret to her keeping, and offered her £50 to go to America with him.’
Dobbs, according to Barnley, also had an explanation for the goods belonging to Matilda Hacker that she had pawned: it was ‘to clear off what she called Mr Bastendorff’s bastard debt’. There was another prison warder present in that cab; Francis Hawkins confirmed that this is what Hannah Dobbs had said.
It is easy to imagine the frustration of Inspector Hagen throughout all this; to see his case being torn this way and that in cross-currents of hearsay and scandalous speculation. Now he had the chance to stand up before a court to press his case.
After swearing the oath, Inspector Hagen took the court through the sequence of his movements. ‘On May 12th, 1879, I went to see the prisoner, against whom there was then no suspicion,’ he said. This was just after news of the discovery of the corpse had been featured prominently in newspapers all over the country; though there was no indication of whether the prisoner Hannah Dobbs had any access to newspapers. ‘I went in company with Inspector Gatlin,’ Inspector Hagen told the court. ‘I made a memorandum of what she said.’
And now he proceeded to take the court through that first interview in the prison cell: questions about Hannah Dobbs’ memories of lodgers, about any recollections she might have had of an elderly lady. Hannah Dobbs did remember what she termed a ‘shabbily’ dressed and rather mean old lady. She did not see her depart the house, she told the inspector, because ‘I had to go out sometimes with the children. I went once with them to Hampstead Heath, and I rather think it was then that the old lady went away.’
In that cell, Inspector Hagen had asked Hannah Dobbs about the old lady’s habits; what she ate and drank; and how her rents were collected. Then Hagen asked Hannah if she ever went to the coal cellar. She answered him: ‘Every day.’ Had she noticed anything ‘wrong’ about the cellar? ‘No.’ The inspector had then asked her: ‘There has been a dead body found there; do you know anything about it? Hannah had replied: ‘A body? A body in the coal cellar!’ She said she knew nothing about it.’
Intriguingly, Inspector Hagen now told the court that after a few more questions about the lodger, Hannah said that ‘the lady’s name was Hacker – Miss Hacker’.
This was the first time that Inspector Hagen had heard the name. He told the court: ‘I asked her if (the name) was not Uish. She said, “no, it was Hacker”. She told me the lady had come up to collect her rents.’ [This, it may be presumed, was a reference to Matilda Hacker’s rental incomes.] I asked, “had she plenty of money?” She said she did not know; she had a gold watch and chain and that she only wore it on Sunday.
‘She said, “I am sure now I was with the children at Hampstead when she went away and when I returned I was told she had gone and left a shilling for me.” I asked her, “who told you that?” and she said, “Mrs Bastendorff”. She said, “after she had gone, I found a dream book in her drawer, and I gave it to Mrs Bastendorff. She used to be always reading this dream book.”’
The defence counsel Mr Mead asked Hagen how he had drawn the conclusions that he had. ‘It was in great part through the prisoner that I was enabled to trace the case to Miss Hacker.’5
The Attorney General informed Mr Justice Hawkins that concluded the case for the prosecution. And it was at this point that Mr Mead, with some force and flair, submitted that there was no case to go to the jury.
‘There was no evidence,’ Mead added, ‘that the deceased person, whoever she was, had been murdered, except for the mere fact of a rope having been found around her neck, and which might have been put there after her death. Besides, all the other appearances of the body were inconsistent with the theory of strangulation.’ He returned to the possibility of a burst varicose vein, ‘from which complaint Miss Hacker, whose body it was supposed to be, was suffering. There was,’ Mead added, ‘no evidence of any murder having been committed’ and therefore he wished it to be submitted that ‘the prisoner had nothing to answer.’
It was an intriguing gambit; but the judge was not convinced. He said he ‘could not withdraw the case from the jury’.
Mr Mead now turned, in his legal passion, to the jury. He told them that he thought they would ‘hesitate some time’ before they came to their conclusion, ‘especially when the life of a fellow creature [is] in danger, that a murder had been committed’. The defence counsel mused a little on the rope found around the neck of the remains. This was the only evidence of ‘a violent death’. He averred that some may think the cord ‘might have been drawn with considerable force’ but after such a long time, ‘there would have been considerable decomposition’. He did not elaborate on quite what he meant by that; was this the opinion of any of the doctors called as witnesses? Mead told the jury that there were ‘two theories that might be put forward as the cause of death – that it was by strangulation or hanging’. He suggested that a ‘portion of the evidence’ about the ‘position of the rope’ was that it was consistent with a person being ‘suspended’ rather than strangled. Mead did not go so far as to use the word ‘suicide’ at this point; he simply left the suggestion in the air. Whatever happened, he said, there was no evidence of strangulation.
But now Mead pressed home what he saw as a more persuasive theory: that it might have been ‘that someone had discovered that Miss Hacker had died. There was, perhaps, nobody in the house at the time’. He added that ‘an avaricious person would at once conclude that the best thing to do would be to hide the body and take possession of any property she left after her. That,’ he said, was ‘a more likely theory than that a murder was committed by strangulation.’
Was it? One or two of the jury might have asked themselves if it was actually more likely that an avaricious person happening across a dead body might first swiftly appropriate and hide any valuables, rather than hiding the corpse itself: and then with the valuables safely stashed, then alert the household to the death. It would be some time – in a household of strangers – before anyone would establish beyond doubt that valuables were missing. Surely all that would be rather less effort than finding the body, fetching a cord to wind around its neck, dragging the corpse down the stairs and stuffing it into an alcove that was used daily, and where it was certain to be discovered in time.
Mead also addressed the blood stain on the carpet, and the difficulty of getting this part of the evidence to fit with strangulation. In all, he said, in a case like this, where there was ‘mystery’, he was satisfied that the jury would not overlook these alternative theories as to the cause of death. ‘Before long,’ he said, they would give their verdict, which would ‘affect the life of a fellow being’; and so he redoubled his plea for them to consider all possibilities.
The defence counsel summed up with bravura the genuinely puzzling elements of this story: he told the jury that in order to find Hannah Dobbs guilty, it would have to be proven that Hannah Dobbs was alone in 4, Euston Square with the old lady on 14 October 1877.
‘Mr and Mrs Bastendorff were away,’ he said, and yet ‘it was shown’ that Mrs Bastendorff was not away. (Mead did not say who had ‘shown’ this – the vital fact appeared not to have been mentioned in court.) Mead added that indeed, Hannah Dobbs had the Bastendorff children with her in the house that day; were the jury really to believe that ‘such a murder could be committed without making a noise and that the children would not have heard that noise?’
He was quite right to focus on the curious timings of the prosecution case: at what point of the day was this murder committed, given that ‘Mr Bastendorff and some of the lodgers’ had latchkeys and when Hannah Dobbs knew ‘that at any time any of these persons might return and come in?’ And had Hannah Dobbs herself not gone out that day? And ‘supposing’ she had been ‘alone in the house’; ‘was it to be believed that without concert or assistance she would have committed the deed? What weapon had she? And how was the body to be carried downstairs into the cellar?’ More, ‘was it conceivable’ that ‘the girl had the nerve’ to ‘go through all that proceeding unaided?’ There was also the matter of ‘washing up the blood and various other things’ that she would have had to do. Where was the time?
Mead conceded that the gold watch subsequently seen in the possession of Hannah Dobbs was Matilda Hacker’s; but he said that he was less certain about the chain which might simply have ‘resembled’ one of hers. The handkerchief: no proof that it was the property of Matilda Hacker. The Book of Dreams: it ‘might be conceded that that had belonged to the deceased lady’. But not, he said, the eyeglass. So all in all, the only item that could really be traced to Hannah Dobbs was the gold watch.
At this, Mr Mead once more deftly swerved the focus of the case away from Hannah Dobbs and more firmly on to the master of the house, Severin Bastendorff. Hannah Dobbs, he said, had declared that ‘Mr Severin Bastendorff had given the watch to her and,’ added Mead, ‘looking at the relations which had existed between the two, was there anything unreasonable in that account of it?’ In other words, he was saying that there was no doubt whatsoever that there had been a sexual relationship between Bastendorff and his maid. ‘Mr Severin Bastendorff’s brother,’ continued Mead, ‘had shown that intimate relations existed between the master and his servant.
‘As to Mr S. Bastendorff’s account of the matter,’ Mead added, ‘he had denied what his brother had sworn, that there were those relations; and if he could deny the one thing, might he not also deny the other?’
Mead was relentless in his theme. ‘There was the cabinet,’ he said, which Hannah Dobbs’ master had admitted ‘he had given her as a present. Was there anything unreasonable in supposing that other things had been given as presents in a similar way?’
Mead also tackled the issue of class rather neatly, suggesting that part of the reason that there seemed to be such suspicion attached to Hannah Dobbs sporting fine watches was the idea of her ‘being possessed of property unsuited to her condition’. In conclusion, he told the jury that even if the possessions told against her, the jury would have to suppose that Hannah Dobbs ‘acted like a mad woman’ if they thought her guilty. Given that anyone might have come calling for Matilda Hacker after her death, was it likely or rational that Hannah Dobbs would have been answering the door flaunting the jewellery of a dead woman?
He also pleaded with the jury to consider whether – if she had committed murder – she would have ‘stopped in the same house … displaying no fear of being found out, and not exciting the suspicion of those about her’.
Now, in his efforts to turn the charge away from his client, Mr Mead once more fixed his attentions upon the house’s other occupants. How was it, he asked, that nobody in the house, after all those months, ever noticed the body of the dead woman? Hannah Dobbs, he said, had behaved with the utmost candour ever since Inspector Hagen went to see her at the House of Correction. And nothing happened to arouse any suspicions when Dobbs was taken to the mortuary to see the remains. Now, it was the case that she had told her wardens of the lodger Findlay, and his revolver; but Mr Mead wanted the jury to be sure that that was just ‘gossip’.
The principle, though, was this: he ‘had a right to suggest that the murder was committed by some other person’. He ‘did not care whether the jury thought Mr Bastendorff or Mrs Bastendorff were guilty or not guilty’. Their main aim was to rid themselves of any prejudice that might have attached itself to the defendant who ‘had but small opportunity of saying anything for herself to remove that prejudice’. He also asked the jury to consider ‘the lady of the house’, and the oddness of Mrs Bastendorff’s ‘want of knowledge’ concerning the business of the people who lodged under her roof.
Indeed, he said, ‘what evidence there was, was stronger … against the Bastendorffs than it was against Hannah Dobbs’. He concluded with a peroration about the ‘poor defenceless woman’ who instead had been forced to stand trial, and that this ‘poor defenceless woman’ should be given the benefit of any doubt.6
Rising to counter this extraordinary defence, the Attorney General speaking for the prosecution was crisp: he declared that ‘the circumstantial evidence on which that charge was founded pointed conclusively’ to guilt. Even as late as 1879, circumstantial evidence was still regarded as having perfect legitimacy; that such evidence provided a kind of moral signpost in a case.
And so now it was time for Mr Justice Hawkins to sum up; he admitted that the case had a remarkably ‘narrow compass’ despite the ‘considerable time’ that they had spent on it (a two-day trial in 1879 was unusually lengthy). He then went on to talk of Matilda Hacker, and of the landlady who seemed ‘never to have seen her, nor cared to see her’.
He talked of the corpse, and certain striking features, including the curvature of the spine and some condition of the leg. ‘It was not suggested that the body had been mutilated,’ the judge said, ‘… but it was imputed that the death was due to violence, this being shown by the coils of rope tied tightly round the neck and by the dragging of the body into the coal cellar.’
The judge seemed as bewildered as even the defence counsel had sounded. ‘There was … no suggestion she had committed suicide,’ he said. But ‘if the woman had died a natural death, what earthly object was there in hiding the body except, perhaps, for the sake of possessing the few little articles which she had worn?’ The judge also pondered the point that if it was indeed murder, then the jury had to consider if the defendant had committed the crime alone.
Matilda Hacker had been last seen on 10 October; she was supposed to have met her death four days later. It could be shown beyond doubt that Severin Bastendorff was in Erith; Mrs Bastendorff was out most of that afternoon; and no other lodgers were present. It was just her, Hannah Dobbs, and the Bastendorff children. The judge said that it had to be asked why the next day, Hannah Dobbs, when sent to fetch Miss Hacker’s rent, ‘immediately returned’ with a £5 note. If she was innocent, why had she simply not said that Matilda Hacker was not in her room, and had gone?
Hannah later stated that the old lady was intending to go; and then announced that she had gone, although no-one saw her leave. Matilda Hacker’s basket trunk and The Book of Dreams remained. The jury had also to consider that blood stain on the carpet, which had not been there when the old lady took the room.
What the jury had before them was the evidence, and it was on that that they should ‘firmly discharge their duty’.7
It was five minutes to eight on the summer’s evening of 6 July 1879 when the jury retired; they did not take long. Twenty-five minutes later, they returned to the courtroom.
‘The prisoner,’ ran one court report, ‘who was very pale, and in a half-fainting condition, was brought back to the dock.’
The ‘clerk of arraigns’ asked the foreman of the jury whether they had all agreed upon their verdict. He ‘replied in the affirmative’. The clerk then asked if they found Hannah Dobbs ‘guilty or not guilty of the charge of wilful murder’.
The foreman replied: ‘We find her not guilty.’
‘You say she is not guilty,’ said the clerk, ‘and that is the verdict of you all?’
‘It is,’ said the foreman.
With this, according to one report, ‘a sigh of intense relief escaped from the prisoner, who during the whole trial had behaved with the greatest possible decorum and evidently with a full appreciation of the serious position in which she stood. She was then removed from the dock.’8
Hannah Dobbs was not free, not yet; she still had a few weeks of her previous sentence for theft to serve. And despite the verdict, this was only the end of one act of this tragedy.
For both Hannah Dobbs and the Bastendorff family, there were to be ricocheting, shocking consequences extending far beyond the legal system. The darkness that had gathered in and around 4, Euston Square was set to intensify.