Hours before the trial got underway extra officers had to be rushed to Old Bailey to hold back the large crowd seeking entry to the small courtroom.
Once again history repeated itself in a situation too unbelievable to be dreamed up by any fiction writer. The only evidence against Field was his voluntary confession and Field again promptly repudiated the confession he had given to Cornish.
The only part of his confession that had been true, he told the jury, had been his desire to die and his lack of nerve. “So I thought I would stick myself in the position where somebody else would do it.”
The position he stuck himself into, he maintained, was his false confession to the murder of Mrs. Sutton.
He said he had met Mrs. Sutton several days before the murder and she had allowed him to sleep in a small rear room. He had been in his room on the night of the murder and heard her quarreling with a man. Their voices suddenly stopped, there was an abrupt silence for some ten to fifteen minutes and then he heard the man leave.
When he failed to hear Mrs. Sutton moving about, he went to her bedroom, knocked on the door, but received no reply. He then opened the door and found her dead on the bed, covered with the pillows. That was all he knew about the crime. He had not seen the killer and doubted that the other was aware he was in the house.
The courtroom spectators looked at Cornish of the Yard wondering how he would counteract Field’s new story. Although no mention of the Upchurch trial had been allowed, the facts were familiar to everybody there.
Cornish leaned over and whispered to the prosecutor who then announced to the court that the Crown had a witness in rebuttal.
The Scotland Yard man had not been caught this time. Immediately after Field’s arrest he had interviewed the woman at whose home the suspect had been picked up. Field had come to her only several hours after Mrs. Sutton had been murdered. He seemed excited and told her, “I have done something. I will try and tell you what it is, but if I can’t you will see it in the newspapers.” He said nothing beyond that.
The woman repeated Field’s words on the witness stand. The prosecutor hammered home that four-word sentence, “I have done something,” and suggested that since he admitted being in Mrs. Sutton’s home it could only mean that he had done in Mrs. Sutton, murdered her.
Field had talked just four words too many after his second murder. There were no missing keys or purse to befog the issue this time and he was found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to be hanged.
In an appeal for a new trial before the Lord Chief Justice of England, his attorney admitted that Field’s story was fantastic but raised the possibility that both confessions had been due to mental disturbance. The court turned down the suggestion and denied the appeal.
On June 30, 1936, Field was hanged at Wandworth Prison. Although, officially, he was executed for the murder of Mrs. Sutton, as far as Cornish of the Yard was concerned, Field went to the gallows for the murder of Nora Upchurch. Cornish never would have connected Field with the strangling of Mrs. Sutton had not the details of his first lost case been etched so deeply in his mind.
The Baby Sitter
by Jonathan Craig
When the Boardmans came home, their children were fine. But the baby sitter who’d watched them had been killed.
The policewoman had finished her search of the girl’s body, and now the assistant M.E. had begun his preliminary examination and the techs and photographers were busy with their powders and chemicals and cameras. The girl lay sprawled on the living room floor, midway between the sectional sofa and the plate-glass coffee table. She had been very young, though well-developed, with long, tapering legs and unusually small feet in velvet ballet slippers. Her facial features were small and even, and her short, black hair glistened like washed coal. She’d probably been extremely pretty, but after a girl has been strangled to death it’s difficult to be sure.
“About how old is she, Doctor?” I asked.
The assistant M.E. pushed the girl’s skirt back down to her knees and shifted his position to peer again at the dark marks on her neck. “Fifteen,” he said over his shoulder. “Certainly no more than that.”
“She looks at least seventeen or eighteen.”
“They’ll fool you. This girl’s taller than most fifteen-year-olds, and much more filled-out. But that’s all she is, Steve. Fifteen.”
“Any doubt about the cause of death?”
“Very little. I wouldn’t swear to anything, until after the autopsy, but there’s every indication she died of manual strangulation. Note the gouged places left by someone’s fingernails. I’d say somebody — almost certainly a man — simply got her throat in his hands and held it there till she was dead. There isn’t another mark on her body.”
“Any flesh under her nails?”
“I can’t be sure. It doesn’t look that way, but we won’t know definitely until we put the scrapings under a microscope.”
“How about assault?”
“There again, I can’t be positive until I get her to Bellevue. Offhand, I’d say no.”
I nodded. “There’s no sign of a struggle, and none of her clothing was torn or deranged. I guess we can forget about that part of it, unless you or the techs come up with something else.” I got out my notebook and pencil. “How close can you come to the time of death, Doctor?”
He straightened, pursed his lips thoughtfully, and glanced at his wrist watch. “It’s a couple of minutes past midnight,” he said. “Taking one factor with another, Steve, my best guess is that she was killed about ten-thirty. I can’t narrow it down to the minute, of course, but I’d say that if you worked on the assumption that she was killed no earlier than ten, and no later than eleven, you’d be within very safe limits.”
I wrote it down in my notebook. “Anything else you can tell me?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, I’m afraid not. Not now. I may have more for you after the autopsy.”
I thanked him, slipped the notebook back in my pocket, and walked over to where my detective partner, Walt Logan, stood talking to the policewoman.
“How’d it go with your search, Rosie?” I asked. “You find anything Walt and I should know about?”
Rosie is rather plain and short and tends toward roundness. She shrugged. “Where would I find it? All that girl’s wearing is a dress and rolled stockings and shoes. Not another stitch.”
“What about her handbag?”
“I don’t think she had one. I found a handkerchief with a dollar bill and a lipstick tied in the corner. She wouldn’t have bothered doing that, if she’d had a handbag.”
“Uh huh. Well, thanks anyhow, Rosie. Sorry we got you over here for nothing.”
Rosie shrugged again, smoothed down the skirt of her uniform, and started toward the door. “Think nothing of it,” she said. “It’s all in the night’s work.”
I turned to Walt Logan. “The M.E. says the girl’s only fifteen, Walt.”
Walt is tall and thin and studious-looking. You’d think he was a little frail. Actually he’s as hard as a nightstick. “I’ll be damned,” he said, glancing over toward the girl. “I had her pegged for more than that.”
“So did I. She was strangled by hand, the M.E. thinks, and there’s no evidence of assault. She was killed somewhere between ten and eleven.”
Walt nodded. “Mrs. Boardman’s lying down, Steve. She’s still pretty shaky.”
“Her husband with her?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we might as well get started. You keep a watch on things here, and I’ll go back and talk to him.”