MR. GREATOREX: So this is Elizabeth Cree. She stands here, according to the account you have just had the pleasure of hearing, as a much wronged and much maligned woman. She is an exemplary wife who has been charged with the foul crime of murder on the evidence of circumstance and gossip alone. You have been told that her unfortunate husband, John Cree, destroyed himself by eating arsenic powder. And why did he willingly embrace such a painful and protracted death? It seems that he was a Romanist who, according to his wife, was so afflicted by morbid piety that he believed he was condemned by God and watched by demons. Self-murder was his deliverance, although it might strike you as a trifle odd that he should thereby deliver himself to those same demons for eternity.
But let us leave religious speculation on one side for a moment, and contemplate the facts of the matter. Elizabeth Cree visited a druggist’s shop in Great Titchfield Street a few days before the death of her husband. “For the rats,” she said—although the maid of the house, Aveline Mortimer, has testified that the newly-built residence in New Cross harbored no vermin of any kind. Then her husband is found dead of arsenic poisoning. The coroner has already testified that the victim must have imbibed quantities of that substance for at least a week before his untimely and unfortunate demise. You may find this unusual in the suicide of a desperate man. And then we have the evidence of a fatal dose, on the evening of October the 26th last year, when the maid has testified that she heard John Cree exclaiming to his wife, “You devil! You are the one!” Only a short while later, as he lay upon the Turkey carpet in his bedroom, Mrs. Cree ran into the street shouting “John has destroyed himself” and other such words. It may seem odd to you that she already knew that this was the intention and the act of her husband—more peculiar still that she realized he was dying of arsenic poisoning without having examined him—but, in any case, it was not until some minutes later that she was able to rouse Doctor Moore. It was he who pronounced John Cree dead, at which point Mrs. Cree fainted into the arms of her maid.
Let us consider Mr. Cree now. His wife has informed you that he was a morbid papist, but no other witness has given evidence to that effect. We are, in other words, supposed to rely upon the sole testimony of Mrs. Cree in order to account for her husband’s self-murder. The maid, who lived in the same house for some years, has denied each one of Mrs. Cree’s allegations. On the contrary, she tells us, Mr. Cree was a kind and liberal employer who gave no sign of any religious obsession at all. Once a week he attended the Catholic church of St. Mary of Sorrows in New Cross with his wife, but this was at Mrs. Cree’s urging; she had a great desire, according to the maid, to appear respectable. And since Mr. Cree’s temperament and state of mind are so important in this case—indeed it is the sole point of the prisoner’s defense—it will be appropriate to consider his life and character in a little more detail. His father was a hosier in Lancaster, but he came to London in the early 1860s to seek his fortune as a literary man. He wished to be a playwright, it seems, and so naturally he was inclined towards the world of the theater. He found employment as a reporter on the Era, a journal devoted to the stage, and it was in this capacity he met and eventually married the woman who stands in the dock before you. Some time after this marriage John Cree’s father died of a gastric fever, and his only son came into a large fortune. This is the fortune, of course, which his wife has now inherited. He gave up his post on the Era and from that time forward devoted his life to literary pursuits of a more serious nature. He frequented the Reading Room of the British Museum, as you have heard, and continued writing his drama. He is also, from the notes found in his possession, supposed to have been compiling a record of the London poor. Is this the kind of man who would succumb to religious delusions, as his wife has stated? Or perhaps John Cree was some evil domestic tyrant, some Bluebeard, who promised a life of unendurable misery? But this is not the case. By all accounts he was a quiet and courteous man who had no reason to kill himself, and against whom his wife could have no possible complaint. He was not, to use a modern analogy, some kind of Limehouse Golem.