“I THOUGHT THAT it went very well,” Eldridge Appleton said. “Considering—”
“Considering what?” Marshall Hinckley responded. “Considering the Spiritualists did everything but summon the ghosts from their graves to whisper sweet nothings into the ears of the jurors?”
“No,” Appleton said. “Considering the strength of the Defense’s cross-examination, and how well you and your men answered the questions.”
“There were snickers,” Hinckley said. “Those damned Spiritualists were laughing at us.”
“But they shall not have the last laugh,” Appleton said.
Inspector Bolles looked at Marshall Hinckley, who would not be satisfied until Edward Moody was in prison.
“The Spiritualists have hired a great deal of counsel,” Bolles said. “But the people will decide in your favor.”
Bolles was making an attempt at conciliation. After only one day, it had become evident that more than a trial was taking place in that courtroom.
“It’s preposterous,” Hinckley said. “This gaggle of witch doctors surrounding him.”
“I thought your men made him appear very foolish,” Appleton said. “Ten dollars per sitting, because ‘the spirits do not like the throng, and want to exclude the vulgar multitude with high prices.’ It makes him out to be the money-grubbing predator that he is. I think the jury will see that.”
“Unless,” Hinckley emphasized, “those damned Spiritualists paint a picture that even one member of the jury wants to see. There is no shortage of Spiritualists in that courtroom, and even in the jury box there may be a hankering for ‘beautiful communion.’”
Eldridge Appleton had done his duty that day, calling witnesses to the stand and beginning the prosecution’s side of the story. There had been Hinckley’s three decoys—all three of them members of the Institute—who had gone separately to visit Moody, and requested pictures with departed relatives. The negatives, upon development, had indeed revealed spectral figures behind the sitters; but the figures, according to all three of the witnesses, “bore not a ghost of a resemblance to the deceased.” Appleton encouraged Hinckley’s men to share the details of how Moody had attempted to coerce them into seeing something that wasn’t there. “He was trying to produce a train of thought,” one witness said, “that would eventually lead me to confound the picture’s shadowy background with the features of my dear departed mother.” Another witness insisted that the likeness of his own face on the negative was “a passable one,” but that the spirit of his dead father-in-law was “a most dismal failure.”
By the time Inspector Bolles took the stand later in the day to describe Moody’s “escape” from Boston, the courtroom had been treated to numerous accounts of how Edward Moody had seduced many of his visitors into seeing things that were not there. It seemed a wonderful and sensible coup for the prosecution—but that was what had Marshall Hinckley so enraged. Moody’s case, and the fate of photography in general, was about so much more than seeing and believing.
“The pictures are obvious frauds,” Appleton said. “And we will prove that beyond doubt—the jury will see it.”
“Yes,” Hinckley replied, “that’s all well and good, but if Moody, or anyone else for that matter, can take a picture of a lady with her hand in a gentlemen’s hair—a hand that one can just as easily adjust to surround the same gentleman’s waist—then how can we ever trust the accuracy of a photograph again?”
“We can’t,” Bolles said.
“Precisely,” Hinckley said. “But we must. We must be able to trust the science of photography. This is what is at stake here, Bolles—and I’ve been trying to tell you this all along. Before this spiritual nonsense began, it was nature—and nature only—that could be ‘took’ by the photographer’s camera. But now, where are people to turn, when I can give you Lincoln hectoring a gang of negroes in a cotton field, or the parson in the arms of a whore? Gentlemen, we have treasured photographs in believing that, like figures, they cannot lie. But they are now being made to lie with a most deceiving exactness, and that is what our efforts must make clear—and punish!”
Did the photograph tell a lie? That was the ultimate question for Montgomery Bolles. After the arrest, Bolles had taken the negative from Edward Moody’s coat pocket himself. He had set the case down on the table between them, and there it sat during their interview, unopened.
“You know what is in that case,” Moody had said.
And the inspector had returned a grave nod.
“And you know what it means, and who it was for … and what it could possibly do.”
“We have apprehended you,” Bolles replied, “at a great cost to the people of Boston. You and this negative have come back to us at a great cost. Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“I have done many things,” Moody had replied, “but none of that matters to me any longer. I know what you are going to do with me—”
And he paused, grimacing.
“But what will you do with—that?”