Starting from this, Bill argued — in line with the fervent discussion he had had with Ellery the night before — it was child’s play to reconstruct the devilish frame-up: the murderess stole Lucy’s car; she stopped for gas for no other reason than to fix the car and the veiled driver firmly in the station owner’s mind. “This is proved,” he cried, “by the fact that she did not really need gas, that she could have gone on for sixty, eighty miles on the gas already in her car’s tank!” She went to the shack, he continued, saw the paper-cutter with its gift card, killed Gimball with the knife, and finally drove back to Philadelphia and wrecked the car in a place where it would be — as it was — easily found by the police.
“If this defendant, my sister,” he roared, “were the criminal, why did she wear a veil? She would know that the shack was isolated, that there was little chance of her being seen except by the victim, who would be dead. But the real criminal had every reason to use a veil if she were framing Lucy! Should her own face be seen, the frame-up was defeated. For that matter, if Lucy were this woman, why did she leave the veil to be found in the car? But the criminal had every reason to do so if she were framing the crime around Lucy.
“Furthermore, if Lucy were the criminal everything she did was almost unbelievably stupid. Would she leave an open trail to her own car, would she leave impressions of her tires in the mud, would she permit her car to be found, would she leave the veil, would she make no attempt to fix an alibi for herself, would she wield that knife without the precaution of wearing gloves? Stupid, stupid! So stupid that its very stupidity cries out,” shouted Bill, “her innocence. But a woman framing Lucy would have every reason to leave such a plain trail!”
It was an impassioned summation, and it left a visible impression on the jury. Bill concluded more quietly on the note of reasonable doubt. If there was a single member of the jury, he said, who could honestly and conscientiously declare now that there was no reasonable doubt of the defendant’s guilt... He flung up his hands and sat down.
But Pollinger had the last word. He derided the ‘obvious’ defense theory of a frame-up, “the whimper,” he said, “of every weak defense.” As for the defendant’s stupidity, Pollinger remarked with a significant and open glance at Ellery, any practical criminologist knew that all criminals were stupid; it was only in books that criminals were masterminds. This defendant, he said, was not a habitual criminal; her motives had, as usual in the case of the vengeful woman, betrayed her into blind actions; she had left a trail without realizing that she had done so.
The State had amply proved, he said vigorously, her movements on the day of the crime up to its actual commission. She had been seen on the road leading to the shack only a few minutes before the murder. She had been seen driving her car toward that shack. Her car had then left its clear tire prints in the mud before the shack, under such circumstances that it was possible to prove, as the State had proved, that the car had visited that shack during the general period of the murder. This had placed the defendant, he went on, at the scene of the crime circumstantially. And, he pointed out, if there was any doubt concerning her identity as the driver of the Ford, it was completely and irrefutably dispelled by her fingerprints on the knife which killed her husband.
“Fingerprints,” he said ironically, “aren’t framed — except, perhaps, in those books I mentioned.” The jury grinned. “This defendant had her hands on that knife in that shack. The State, then, has led her to the corpse.” That was sufficient connection, he went on, in a circumstantial case, to remove all doubt. What was the answer of the defense to this all-important question of fingerprints on the knife? That her prints had got on the knife the night before in her own home! But where was the proof of this transparent story? There was not a single witness to support her explanation. There was not a single proof that the victim even spent that Friday night in his Philadelphia home... And when was this explanation given? After it was brought out that the fingerprints were on the knife! Didn’t that show all the evidences of a hastily trumped-up story to explain away a damaging fact?
“I give you my word,” said the prosecutor earnestly, “that my heartfelt sympathy goes out to this poor young man who has so ably defended his sister in this trial. He has toiled long and tirelessly to make the best of a bad, bad case. We are all deeply sorry for him. But that should not sway you, ladies and gentlemen, in your judgment of this case. A jury determines facts and ignores its sympathies. You must not permit yourselves to be influenced in your verdict by emotions which would defeat the ends of justice.” Moreover, he added dryly, the defendant had been wholly unable to prove an alibi for the night of the crime.
When Pollinger was through outlining the motives he went briefly into the question of deliberation. “The motive here,” he said, “was twofold, as I have shown: revenge on the man who had lied to her for ten years, and the natural desire to benefit, while punishing him for that awful living lie, from his death. To have known that he was Joseph Kent Gimball, to have known that he carried a million-dollar policy and had recently changed his beneficiary from Mrs. Gimball to herself, Mrs. Wilson must have had knowledge well in advance of June first. In fact, there is nothing to show that she did not compel Gimball to assign his insurance to her in ‘payment’ for the wrong he had done her; indeed, psychologically everything points to it. In the light of this, how can anyone doubt that this was a murder planned in advance?
“And if there is any doubt in your minds, consider that this defendant came disguised — clumsily, it is true, but there was an effort at concealment — to the shack in which she murdered her husband. The defense has tried to argue that the use of the newly-purchased paper-cutter as the killing weapon indicates in itself a spontaneous crime, a crime on the spur of the moment; and that, therefore, even if Lucy Wilson had killed her husband it could not be construed as anything but an unpremeditated murder. But how false that is when examined in the naked light! For if I adopt the defense’s own theory — that Lucy Wilson was framed for this crime — you will see at once that the use of the knife was merely a convenient alternative for this defendant. If someone framed Lucy Wilson it could only have been with intent and plan far in advance of the actual commission. This flimsy ‘someone’ could not have known that Joseph Wilson would buy a desk-set the day before his death; therefore the so-called ‘framer’ must have planned to kill Wilson by some other means — a revolver, strangling, even a knife. But not this knife. Nevertheless, this knife was used. Wouldn’t that seem to show that there was no framer? The argument is fallacious all along the line. It shows no such thing. Lucy Wilson came prepared to kill Joseph Kent Gimball with a gun, perhaps, or another knife. In the heat of the encounter she used a knife already on the scene. The point is meaningless.”
His peroration was a masterpiece of shrewd persuasion. Then he sat down, quietly rubbing his neck with a handkerchief.
Judge Menander’s charge to the jury was surprisingly short. It outlined the possible verdicts and explained the law of circumstantial evidence. It was observed with astonishment by trained spectators that the famous jurist refrained from injecting into his short charge — it took only twenty-five minutes — the slightest hint of his own convictions in the matter, an unusual phenomenon in a State which permitted its presiding justices in capital cases the widest latitude for the expression of their own views.