“You ladies and gentlemen of the jury are mature people; you weren’t born yesterday; you know the habits of the police — when they have decided on a suspect, they marshal all the evidence indicating the guilt of that suspect, and all too frequently ignore evidence pointing to anyone else.
“I submit to you that the witness, Nadine Palmer, plunged in that swimming pool after she had learned the hiding place of the securities; that she put those securities in a plastic bag; that she started to swim back to get her clothes and found that Loring Carson had caught a glimpse of her as she jumped into the pool. Loring Carson ran back out of the house, and as Nadine Palmer tried to emerge from the swimming pool he grabbed her head and tried to hold her under water until she surrendered the bag of securities.
“How do we know this?
“Because both of Carson’s shirt sleeves were wet to the elbow. He didn’t get both arms wet opening the hinged tile. And when he reached for that hidden mechanism which raised the tile he did just what Lieutenant Tragg did when he reached for it. He did the only natural thing to do; he rolled up his right shirt sleeve.
“But even if he hadn’t rolled up his sleeves he couldn’t possibly have got his left arm wet reaching for that hidden release ring.
“The way he got both arms wet was by trying to grab a swimmer and hold her while she was in the pool. The swimmer got away from him.
“So what did Loring Carson do? He went into the house, found where she had left her clothes and stood guard over them, knowing that the swimmer wouldn’t dare go out in public attired only in filmy wet underthings.
“And presently I am going to prove to you that this swimmer was not the mysterious nude Nadine Palmer says she saw, but was Nadine Palmer herself.
“She was trapped. So she quietly went into the kitchen side of the house, picked up a knife and, in her bare feet, walked gently and silently to the fence where Loring Carson was standing over her clothes and with his back to the fence, and plunged that knife into his body.
“That one act disposed of everything that stood in her way, stood between getting possession of the securities and having a fortune in her own name on the one hand or being apprehended as a culprit on the other.
“So then the witness, Nadine Palmer, plunged into the swimming pool, again went under the barbed-wire fence, returned to the pile of clothes she had left in the living room on the bedroom side of the house and, in the presence of the corpse, stripped herself of her wet underwear, put it in her purse, put on her outer garments and then, and not until then, retraced her steps up the hill to where she had left her car, carrying the stolen securities with her.
“After regaining possession of her car, she went back to her apartment and was changing her clothes when I arrived. She was panic-stricken, particularly when she realized she had inadvertently given me an opportunity to see that the cigarettes in her handbag were soaked with water.
“She suddenly realized that she had to do something to account for a period of financial transition. She had been a woman in modest circumstances, getting along on a small salary, and now suddenly she had blossomed into wealth. How could she account for this wealth?
“I mentioned Las Vegas and that gave her the idea she needed. She would go to Las Vegas and cut a wide swath at the gambling tables. People wouldn’t know whether she was winning or losing over the long haul. Subsequently she could appear with this money and claim she had won it at the tables of Las Vegas.
“But she was too smart to bother with the securities because those could be traced, so what did she do? She put them in a briefcase, had the name ‘P. MASON’ stamped on the briefcase, took that briefcase to my room and planted it. Then she tipped off the authorities that I had a briefcase full of securities which had been given to me by my clients, the defendants in this case.
“Now, I can’t prove that irrefutably and beyond all reasonable doubt because I am but one man; I am an attorney; I do not have the organization of the police, I do not have their facilities, I do not have their numbers, I cannot as an individual count on the cooperation of the Las Vegas police.
“However, if I can’t prove it beyond all reasonable doubt, I can prove it to you to your satisfaction so that it will at least raise a reasonable doubt in your minds, and once I do that you must acquit the defendants. That is the law.
“You will notice in the exhibits in this case, exhibits of the briefcase containing certain latent fingerprints which the police say they were not able to identify. You will notice the photographic record of the fingerprints on the steel receptacle and on the lid of that receptacle that there are circled fingerprints which the police have determined, or at least they say they have determined, were the fingerprints of my clients.
“I am now going to ask you to take this fingerprint exhibit containing the known fingerprints of Nadine Palmer, fingerprints which have been testified to by the prosecution’s expert as being her fingerprints, take those exhibits to the jury room and there compare the recorded fingerprints of Nadine Palmer with the fingerprints shown on those photographs which the police have not been able to identify; fingerprints which they say were badly smudged on the one hand, or could not be identified on the other.
“You don’t need to be fingerprint experts to make this comparison. It is simply a question of looking for points of similarity. The police have shown you how this was done on the charts which were introduced showing the fingerprints of the defendants which were found on the lip of the tile — and of course the fingerprints of the defendants were found there. Why shouldn’t they be? This was a house that was owned by the two defendants. Vivian Carson owned one-half, Morley Eden owned the other. What would you do if you returned to your house and suddenly found a tile in the swimming pool was actually the lid of a hidden receptacle? Wouldn’t you wonder what had been put in there? Wouldn’t you go and bend over it and inspect it?
“The prosecution has claimed to show you that those were the fingerprints of the defendants on that receptacle, but they can’t show you when they were made.”
Mason paused dramatically. “They can’t show you whether they were made before the murder or afterward. They can’t show you whether they were made before Loring Carson came to that house or not. They can’t show you whether those fingerprints weren’t made the night before when the defendants first discovered the hiding place of those securities and then waited to bait a trap for Loring Carson. By that simple act when Loring Carson came to that receptacle he could be apprehended and brought into court and forced to account for this fraudulently concealed community property, and be judged guilty of contempt because of the concealment of assets.
“Let’s assume they tried that. Let’s assume that something went wrong with their plan and suddenly, and to their consternation, they found Loring Carson murdered.
“Now then, ladies and gentlemen, I have here twelve magnifying glasses. I am going to leave these with the clerk of the court. The Court will instruct you that you are entitled to take the exhibits in this case with you and consider them in your deliberations. All I ask you to do is to take these photographs and the undisputed fingerprints of the witness Nadine Palmer and—”
“Just a moment, just a moment,” Ormsby shouted. “I assign these remarks as misconduct. The jurors can’t constitute themselves as fingerprint experts. Fingerprinting is a science. It is something which only a competent observer can do.
“Now then, if there’s any question about it we’ll reopen the case and let the sheriff’s fingerprint expert demonstrate that the fingerprints which the police couldn’t identify are not identifiable; that they don’t have enough points of similarity to identify them with the prints of anyone. We can’t have these jurors going in and making a hit-and-miss comparison. Why, even a fingerprint expert can’t tell from only a limited number of points of similarity whether—”