WILLIAM HARTLEY’S COURTROOM sketch of Adolf Beck is a record of a controversial miscarriage of justice that was very nearly repeated in relation to the same man.
The story commenced with a man named Weiss who had been convicted, under the false name of John Smith, in 1877 and had been imprisoned for five years for frauds of a very distinctive method that overshadowed other details of the case. The man befriended and entertained women, passed himself off as an aristocrat, invited them to go cruising with him and offered to finance a set of new clothes by giving them a cheque. He would borrow a ring or other item of jewellery from them so that he could obtain a superior version of the right size. The man would then disappear, his cheque would be found to be worthless and the woman’s jewellery would have been pawned or sold. Some of the victims, invariably unmarried women, may well have been too embarrassed by their agreement to the proposition to report the incidents, thus some cases may have gone unrecorded.
In 1895 the frauds started again, with their victims describing exactly the same method, and one of the victims recognised Adolf Beck in the street, found a police officer, and had him arrested. Beck denied any involvement, but he was put on a series of identification parades and picked out by no less than ten women. On the basis that Beck was the same man renewing this distinctive fraud against women, and had been repeatedly identified, Beck was prosecuted and convicted, regardless of his repeated denials.
There was no doubt that the 1895 frauds had been committed by the man who had carried out the 1877 offences, and, indeed, the arresting officer from 1877 gave evidence that Beck was the same man that he had arrested eighteen years earlier. In fact, the trial judge, Sir Forrest Fulton, had been the prosecuting counsel in the 1877 trial. Beck’s evidence that he had been in South America at the time of the 1877 trial was held to be inadmissible. As well as being identified by the ten women (of a total of twenty-two), handwriting evidence was heard. At the time, Thomas H. Gurrin of Holborn Viaduct was commissioned by the Home Office, Admiralty and Scotland Yard to act as an expert witness in handwriting. He had been earning his living in this way for about nine years when he took part in Beck’s trial. Gurrin testified that the handwriting used in the 1877 case was all written by one person, in a Scandinavian style, and that the 1895 case documents were also written by the same person, who had been disguising his handwriting, regardless of the very significant difference in style. So, on the basis of identification and handwriting evidence, Beck was convicted and sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude.
Whilst in prison, Beck maintained his innocence, using various arguments including the fact that the convict ‘Smith’ had been circumcised, whilst he had not. This succeeded in removing the 1877 offences from his criminal record, but Sir Forrest Fulton maintained that Beck had been convicted of the 1895 offences on the trial’s own merits, so Beck remained in prison until 1901.
In 1904, the same frauds recommenced, and one of the victims, accompanied by a police officer, recognised Beck in Tottenham Court Road as Beck went from his lodgings to the City of London. This time all five female victims identified him and he was again taken to the Old Bailey where he was convicted of a set of frauds for a second time, yet again on the basis of identification evidence and that of Thomas Gurrin, who repeated his professional belief that Beck had disguised his handwriting from the style that had been used in 1877.
Fortunately, the 1904 trial judge, Mr Justice Grantham, had a lingering doubt about the case and delayed Beck’s sentencing. On 7 July 1904, a few days into Beck’s remand in prison, another of the frauds took place. Not only could Beck not have committed this offence from his prison cell, but there was also an immediate arrest of ‘William Thomas’ at a pawnbroker’s after two sisters had asked their landlord to follow him from their lodgings, after he had borrowed their rings as part of exactly the same fraud. Detective Inspector John Kane made a thorough investigation into ‘William Thomas’, established his real identity as a German man named William Weiss who had indeed been convicted in 1877, and demonstrated the striking similarity of Weiss’ handwriting to the documents produced in all three trials. The handwriting similarity proved the miscarriage of justice in Beck’s 1895 and 1904 convictions. Beck was Norwegian and was not dissimilar to Weiss in appearance.
Adolf Beck was pardoned and awarded £5,000 in compensation, his case being instrumental in the introduction of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907. A repetition would be avoided by the introduction of fingerprints to prove previous convictions.
Comparison of handwriting is often accompanied by the close examination of questioned documents at a forensic science laboratory, where modern scientific techniques can reveal many details about the paper, inks and other details to detect forgeries and inconsistencies. Thomas Gurrin had become a handwriting expert by developing a long-term interest in the subject and had then started to earn his living from his considerable skill. He gave expert evidence in a number of cases at the Old Bailey from 1888 onwards. In some cases he would use a microscope and different coloured light to reveal traces of writing that had been erased, for instance, but expressing an expert opinion about whether a second set of writing was by the same person disguising his handwriting style was an entirely different proposition.