He told the jury that it was not necessary for them to consider a motive if the evidence seemed to them to be conclusive of guilt.
On June 26 at five eighteen the jury retired. They were placed in a room directly over that occupied by the doctor and his guard through the tedious hours of waiting. It was a high paneled room with windows flung open to the warm, balmy air.
“I never heard such a riot,” the guards told Dr. Wilkins, as those open windows gave forth the sounds from the room. The jury was shouting, jumping about and, it seemed, flinging its members onto the floor, against walls and generally engaging in rather unusual activities.
“Do they always act that way?” Dr. Wilkins asked.
The guard laughed.
“I bet there is a couple of black eyes already,” he said.
The Smuggled Rope
The conduct in the jury room was, it appears, to say the least, a bit unseemly. Immediately upon filing into the court room, a very small, determined and apparently provoked little man asked the judge if he might report an incident in the jury room.
The judge silenced him. “I am not interested in anything which went on in that room,” he remarked. “You bring your verdict to me; not your complaints.”
The verdict was “Guilty,” but with a strong recommendation to mercy because of the age of the convicted man.
The judge turned to them, far more in sorrow than in anger.
“It pains me that I cannot comply with your request for mercy,” he said, “but first degree murder carries with it an automatic penalty of death. The only clemency in this case can be obtained from the Governor.”
Dr. Wilkins was stunned and sat down heavily after hearing the verdict. But he stood straight later as he answered the necessary questions, then, with an unfaltering step, left the court room.
“My faith in his innocence is unshaken,” his lawyer said in a statement. “The jury was browbeaten. I intend to call singly on every man there and find out just what undue pressure was brought to bear.”
But this act was unnecessary. Dr. Wilkins took matters into his own hands. First he made a statement.
“I am absolutely innocent of this crime,” he wrote. “There was never anything but love in our house. I would not harm a hair of my wife’s head. The jury could not have understood the law when they rendered the verdict with recommendation to mercy. I am stunned.”
But for a man in his desperate situation, the guards remarked, he was in an unusually happy frame of mind. He sat in his cell awaiting sentence, reading and writing. Guards were doubled; every possible article which might do him harm, belt buckle, even lead pencils were taken from him; yet so cheerful was he that this seemed absurd.
The guards passing his cell every ten minutes did not, however, glance over his shoulder one evening as he sat writing three notes in plain view.
“I am going to be my own executioner,” he confided in a letter to his attorney.
“By so doing it will save myself from being taken across the State, and I want to save the judge from looking me in the eye and saying that I had a fair trial.”
He wrote a letter to the sheriff inclosing fifty dollars and asking that he be cremated.
Then he wrote a third letter giving instructions for his cats and dog.
At twenty minutes to eight the guard, as was his wont, passed the doorway. The doctor looked up and said something pleasant about the cooling shower which they had just enjoyed.
The cell door was open and the bathroom to which the prisoner might proceed without interference lay a few feet from the cell.
With catlike steps the doctor hastened within and closed the door. Ten minutes later the guard rushed in. There was the old man, hanging by a rope tossed over the waterpipe, his feet but an inch or so off the floor, his neck broken, his body cooling. He was quite beyond help.
For so old a man Dr. Wilkins had worked expertly and without bungling. Some one had smuggled him a rope, which he had tied together at each end, flung over the pipe, slipped into a noose which, by standing on the waste can, he had fitted about his neck. He must have jumped off the can with much force, for although the drop was hardly two feet his neck had been broken instantly.
Fifteen minutes later he was officially pronounced dead.
“I rather anticipated this,” his lawyer said in a statement; “the doctor, in all events, had not long to live; and with death so near at hand in any case he did not wish to die under a cloud.”
Who smuggled the rope inside the jail to Dr. Wilkins?
That was the question which was agitated for some time in the daily press, but the culprit was never found.
“This is the jail,” one of the papers wrote, “in which four years earlier Erich Meunter committed suicide in a similar fashion.
“What is there about this jail which facilitates these suicides? Are there no men to watch the prisoners and what sort of men are they? It is time a searching investigation is made!”
The rope would have made a bulky parcel. Who smuggled it in? And who was failing to watch while he also tore a sheet into ropes and tied them end to end.
A writer of that day commented thus on the guilty man: “Dr. Wilkins, when in command of himself, was a cool and audacious criminal. There were times, however, when he lost his head, such as when he shaved and disguised himself and disappeared. He quickly repaired that error in returning to give himself up, it is true, and by remaining on the whole bold and cool.
“It was an error, nevertheless, and it was that error alone which made it impossible for the jury, no matter how much dust was thrown into its eyes, to acquit him.”
What’s the Law Among Friends?
by Louis Weadock
FROM OUT OF THE YEARS CAME ADMIRAL FARRAGUT’S FAMOUS WORDS, JUST AS HE HAD HEARD HIS FATHER QUOTE THEM: “DAMN THE TORPEDOES! GO AHEAD!”
I
Just as the courthouse clock in the cow town of Merida City finished tolling the hour of midnight, John Barrett, the new prosecuting attorney of Merida County, turned from his office window out of which he had been gazing silently for several minutes.
“I’ve made up my mind, judge,” he said to the lean and spectacled little old man who was the only other occupant of the room. “Give me a warrant for Bill.”
Little old Judge Oglesby peered over his steel-rimmed glasses at the worried but determined face of the young prosecutor. What he saw was a good face; it was not a handsome one, rather it was ruggedly homely; yet the rough-hewn features, lighted by honest, friendly eyes, were now so careworn that the judge, himself evidently no weakling, hesitated a moment before adding to his youthful friend’s perplexities.
After a pause he remonstrated: “Why begin your term by, being a persecutor instead of a prosecutor? What’s the use of my giving you a murder warrant for Bill Wacker because that worthless sheep man Pedro Alvarado, flown with insolence and moonshine, as the poet says, went on a rampage in Bill’s hotel and managed to get himself manslaughtered—”
“It wasn’t manslaughter, judge,” the troubled John Barrett objected patiently, “it was cold-blooded and deliberate murder. And just because Bill’s a political power in this county — of course, I’ll have to admit he was a cold-blooded and deliberate contributor to my campaign fund — is no reason he’s above the law. I’ll thank you for the warrant.”