Mrs. Wilkins, whose estate bordered on sixty-five thousand dollars, left a will which was not, after all, in her devoted husband’s favor, but divided her effects among several charitable institutions. This had been made in 1903, before she had married Dr. Wilkins, and it was thought at first that she had merely neglected remaking the will to suit her present situation.
And then a diligent search disclosed a second will, made in Dr. Wilkins’s favor and quite recently, too, but unwitnessed and therefore invalid.
“Strange that she did not make this legal,” some one said who understood the love Mrs. Wilkins bore the doctor.
The Piece of Newspaper
“It is strange,” the doctor said, but he would say nothing further, as if unwilling to cast even this small reflection on the deceased.
He seemed willing enough, however, to discuss all details of the tragedy with any one who suggested it. Detectives, spurred on by the disgust of Long Beach in general, repeatedly tried to solve this mystery, in which they made no headway at all, and consulted Dr. Wilkins constantly.
Newspaper men haunted the place, eagerly searching for some valuable clew overlooked by the authorities. And then they began to notice several things. Dr. Wilkins, although he made no show of unwillingness in discussions, frequently, little by little, began to change his tale.
His wife was struck down with a blunt instrument, a lead pipe, a hammer, a bludgeon, a blackjack, according to varying reports. Whatever it had been, it was, at any rate, wrapped in a piece of newspaper which concealed it, a newspaper which was carefully preserved as Exhibit A, gruesomely stained with the dead woman’s blood.
Then an enterprising young reporter discovered another bit of that very newspaper in the pocket of the suit the doctor had worn that fatal night! Detectives and newspaper men had searched the house several times, when, quite unaccountably, a later unexpected search brought to light the very jewelry the doctor reported stolen — the watch in the springs of a couch, the loveknot pin in the lining of an overcoat on a hidden closet shelf, and the wallet, containing money, beneath the mattress in the dog kennel!
The Doctor Disappears
In the attic they found the typewriter on which the second will had been made — and it was proved that Mrs. Wilkins could not operate such a machine.
The town house gave up a piece of lead pipe stuffed with some more of the incriminating paper, and three knives blotched with what proved to be dog’s blood!
Dr. Wilkins had, further, sent a gray suit with green and white penciled stripes to be cleaned of blood spots shortly after the tragedy.
“I didn’t think anything of that.” the tailor affirmed. “Doctors are always more or less spotted with blood. But it was his suit all right.”
And though dozens of people could swear that they had seen him wear it, Dr. Wilkins committed the grave error of insisting that the suit was not his. Circumstantial evidence closed about him.
He engaged a lawyer. And then William J. Burns got into the case.
The first thing Burns did was to fingerprint Wilkins. He was not arrested as a suspect, but this was done, Burns said, as a matter of form. And they found that the finger-prints on the hammer with which Mrs. Wilkins had been killed were those of her own husband.
“I picked up the hammer, yes.” the doctor admitted. “I have told you that.”
“You told us that you handled it lightly,” Burns replied. “These prints are the sort made by grasping very firmly indeed.”
Still there was no arrest, but there were several rather warm talks between the doctor and his attorney, who objected to his client’s affable willingness to converse on his affairs so readily.
“Talk too much and you will hang yourself,” he told the bereaved man exasperatedly, when he believed himself out of earshot of the reporters.
The Burns bill for March was just twelve hundred and fifty-six dollars seventy-four cents, which paid for several things. First he called attention to the fact that the doctor’s hat was spattered with blood underneath its brim; second that though he spoke of being beaten over the head and felled to earth, he bore no signs of such rough handling other than torn clothes; and, lastly, that when he entered the house he carefully, though guessing the presence of robbers, shut the vestibule door and thus shut out any possible help.
“Strange,” said Burns to the district attorney as he pointed these things out. “Damned queer!” was the reply.
Dr. Wilkins, too, began thinking how queer it was. But he had not been arrested. And on March 18 he committed his worst if not initial mistake — he disappeared.
Surrender at Last
That Sunday morning he stood in a telephone booth in the Long Island station and phoned his lawyer, who asked him to call at his house.
“I’ll leave on the eleven thirteen train,” Wilkins promised. But he failed to do so. Instead he went to Baltimore, shaved his beard and registered under another name at a quiet hotel.
He was held as a fugitive from justice pending arrest by the Nassau County authorities.
No one knew where he had gone — every avenue of escape was covered, his bank the railroads and steamship lines. And his daughter by another marriage also was watched.
Still he was not found.
“Has he committed suicide?” people began to inquire.
The district attorney snorted. “Not he,” was his cryptic reply:
And then, just as he had been last heard from in a phone booth, so was he found within one, not a stone’s throw from the first booth from which he had talked to his lawyer before he disappeared.
Arriving in the Pennsylvania Station, he called the authorities, but happened to be arrested as he stepped from a telephone booth, and as detectives met him a look of almost relief spread over his shaven countenance.
“I had just then given myself up,” he said.
Antics in the Jury Room
He did not know, he told them, just why he had run away. He knew that he was suspected, although he had been treated considerately and had not been arrested. But the idea of arrest was odious; it preyed upon his mind. Well, here he was back again. He would soon prove that he was not guilty of this crime.
In his cell, though he had been composed when examined, he paced the floor and sobbed aloud.
It took seven days to get a jury, while the doctor became more and more restless and nervous. On the stand he crossed and recrossed his legs, shuffled about, but stuck in the main to his story.
He loved his wife, he would not harm a hair of her head. And he pointed out, what could her death profit him in the face of the unwitnessed will?
The State, however, worked on the theory that either the doctor was not aware that it would be invalid without witnesses or else that he had forgotten that this detail had not been attended to in full.
Many people testified that his relations with his wife were cordial and loving. His lawyer pointed out the unmistakable fact of other robberies in Long Beach that night and on the nights previous to Mrs. Wilkins’s death. But the defense lost ground as it proceeded. Step by step the built up story was attacked, disproved, and substituted for sounder theories which damned the doctor, who did little to aid himself on the stand.
At sixty-seven he made a pitiable figure fighting in his own defense. He touched the sympathies of his jury to whom the judge said: “Don’t be swayed by sentimentality. A man not too old to commit a crime is not too old to suffer for it.”