LORD CAMPBELL. Whatever you have stated so far bears on the question the jury are to try. I suppose that this will have the same tendency?
THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL. If your Lordship trusts me, I will take care not to state anything that is not important.
LORD CAMPBELL. By our law we cannot allow one crime to show the possibility of another, but whatever may bear on the charge to be tried is strictly admissible.
THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL. I trust your Lordship will give me credit for the greatest anxiety not to bring forward anything unimportant. This seems to me a matter which may have a most important bearing by and by.
Gentlemen, the prisoner's attempt failed; and no money could be obtained on the security of that policy. The affair may be important in more ways than one, but it is important in this respect: that it shows the desperate pecuniary straits to which he had by that time been reduced.
Now we go back for a moment to the insurance on the brother's life. I find by the correspondence between Palmer and Mr Pratt, which will be produced to you, that Mr Pratt, having applied to the office at which the insurance on Walter Palmer's life had been effected, experienced difficulty in getting the money, and thereupon began to press Palmer for immediate payment of his bills. These letters are here in my hand; and before reading them, I will state what I shall by and by prove—that Palmer had the Postmaster at Rugeley completely under his influence, and that the letters addressed by Pratt to his mother, Mrs Sarah Palmer, were intercepted in the Post Office and handed over to Palmer himself.
The learned Attorney-General then read extracts from certain letters that passed between Mr Pratt and Palmer in September and October, snowing the manner in which Mr Pratt was pressing Palmer for the payment of various overdue bills and the interest upon them.
Gentlemen, on the 6th of November two writs were issued for four thousand pounds, one against Palmer, the other against his mother. Mr Pratt wrote on the same day, informing Palmer that he had sent these writs to Mr Crabb, but that they would not be served without further direction; he therefore strongly urged Palmer to raise the money, and also to visit him in London and make an arrangement regarding a bill for one thousand five hundred pounds, which would fall due in three days' time. On the 10th of November, the day to which Pratt had said he would delay the service of the writs, Palmer visited London and paid Mr Pratt a sum of three hundred pounds which, with two sums of two hundred and fifty pounds, already paid, made up a total of eight hundred pounds. Mr Pratt deducted two hundred pounds from this, for two months' discount, thus leaving six hundred pounds to the credit of the two-thousand-pound bill falling due on the 25th of October. On the 13th of November, which is a very important day, for it is the one on which Polestar won at Shrewsbury, Mr Pratt writes a letter referring to The Prince of Wales policy, and saying that steps will be taken to enforce its payment by the company.
That, gentlemen, was the state of things in which Palmer was placed on the 13th of November. You will find from this correspondence that Mr Pratt, the agent through whom this bill had been discounted, held at that time twelve thousand five hundred pounds of bills in his hands, minus the six hundred pounds which had been paid off on this, the whole of which bore the forged acceptances of Palmer's mother: acceptances either forged by him or by someone at his desire, and for which, in consequence, Palmer was criminally responsible. You will also find that since The Prince of Wales' Office declined to pay the sum for which Walter Palmer's life had been insured, namely thirteen thousand pounds, Mr Pratt, who held that policy as a collateral security, would not have been justified in furdier renewing these bills. He had therefore issued writs against the mother, which were forthwith to be served in case Palmer could not, at all events, discharge part of his debt.
Now we come to the races at Shrewsbury. Mr Cook was the owner, as you are aware, of a mare called Polestar, which he had entered for the Shrewsbury Handicap. She was very advantageously weighted. The race was run on the 13 th of November, the very day on which Mr Pratt's last letter was written, which would reach Palmer on the next day, the 14th. Polestar won the race. Cook was entitled in the first place to the stakes, which amounted to £424, subject to certain deductions, leaving a net sum of £381 19s. to Cook's credit. He had also betted large sums upon the race, partly for himself and, I am told, partly on commission. As a result, his betting-book showed a winning which amounted, together with the stakes, to two thousand and fifty pounds. Cook had also spent the previous week at the Worcester Races, and by the end of the Shrewsbury Meeting had a sum of seven or eight hundred pounds in his pocket, mainly from bets paid there on the course. Other bets, which he was entitled to be paid at Tattersall's, on the ensuing Monday, amounted, as we shall afterwards find, to one thousand and twenty pounds. He would receive the stakes through Messrs Weatherby, the great racing agents in London, with whom he kept an account, as many betting men do.
Now, within a week of that time, Mr Cook died, and the important inquiry of today is how he met his death; whether by natural means, or whether by the hand of man; and, if the latter, by whose hand?
Chapter XV
DEATH AT THE TALBOT ARMS
THE evidence elicited at the Coroner's inquest on John Parsons Cook, who died at The Talbot Arms Hotel, Rugeley, on November 20th, 1855, exactly a week after Polestar's capture of the Shrewsbury Handicap, has now been supplemented by further evidence elicited at Dr Palmer's trial for murder—some of it, however, plainly irreconcilable with the original depositions made by the same witnesses.
Dr Palmer, it appears, owned so little ready cash on the opening day of the Shrewsbury Meeting, that he borrowed twenty-five pounds for the trip from a Rugeley butcher. He later claimed to have put himself in funds by borrowing another hundred and fifty on the racecourse and laying it on Polestar at seven to one; yet, in fact, he made no cash profit at all, only winning back two hundred and ten pounds from a Mr Butler to whom he had owed seven hundred since the Liverpool Meeting. As soon as the race had been run, Dr Palmer took train back to Rugeley, where he found two letters waiting for him at his house. There was the one from Pratt (mentioned by the Attorney-General), threatening legal proceedings against his mother, if he would not at once pay the fourteen hundred pounds now due and covered by her acceptance. The other came from a Stafford girl named Jane Bergen, whom he had got with child during Eliza Tharm's pregnancy, and for whom he had procured an abortion. She possessed thirty-four love-letters written by him in most lascivious language, and threatened that she would show them to her father unless he paid fifty pounds for their return. At first, she had priced the collection at one hundred pounds—a sum which, he told her, far exceeded their worth.