The Case Against Owen Williams

by Allan Donaldson

  “No,” Dorkin said, turning away with contempt. “No, your Honour, I do not.”

  “Very well,” Dunsdale said. “You may step down, Mr. Whittaker, and we will have your next witness, Mr. Whidden.”

  Like the Mounties, Dr. Martin Sachs had not been sitting at the back with the commoner class of witness but had a place just behind Whidden. He was a small, middle-aged man in a dark pinstripe suit. His head was bald almost to the crown and the few strands of black hair that were left were combed straight across the top. He had a small moustache and wore round, steel-rimmed glasses, a combination that gave him a superficial resemblance to Heinrich Himmler.

  As he took his place in the witness box, he studied Dorkin briefly, then looked calmly away, as if to say that none of this was about any of that. Whidden led him through the credentials that established his status as an expert witness: degree in Psychiatry from the University of London, two years of study in Vienna, several years work as a consultant in London, now for some twelve years a psychiatrist in practice in Montreal and a consultant with a special interest in criminal psychiatry, in which capacity he had appeared as an expert witness in trials in various parts of eastern Canada.

  He answered Whidden’s questions in a precise, measured voice with a trace of a British accent but also with something slightly guttural as if his native language had been something other than English—German perhaps. Or Austrian? As he spoke, his eyes moved about the courtroom, fixing one point after another, then, as if having categorized them to his satisfaction, moving on: Williams, Dorkin again, the crowds behind and above Dorkin, the jury, Whidden’s entourage, and back to Whidden himself.

  “Now, Dr. Sachs,” Whidden said, “I would like to pose a number of purely theoretical questions before we turn to pertinent areas of the present case. First of all, I would like to ask you if it is possible for someone to commit a murder—even a very violent murder— and then to all appearances behave normally.”

  “Yes, that is certainly possible. Not common, but possible.There are numerous authenticated cases of this phenomenon.”

  “Perhaps you could explain what sort of person would be capable of this.”

  “Certainly,” Sachs said, settling himself in. “It requires a personality which is capable of profound acts of repression. He div-ides his mind into two compartments, and he relegates to one part anything which is inconsistent with the image he has of himself in the other part. It will be easier to understand this if I point out that we all do this in some measure. We all create a certain image of ourselves and try to realize that image in our lives, or at least in our fantasies, but we all do things which are inconsistent with that image and which therefore we do not approve of. We then employ various mechanisms to reconcile ourselves to these actions. The simplest mechanism is just to forget what we have done. Another mechanism is to dissociate ourselves from the action. One often hears people say, ‘I don’t know what made me do that.’ Or more significantly, ‘I was not myself when I did that.’ In the case of someone continuing to behave normally after committing a murder, you have an extreme case of that. The murderer has convinced himself that it was not really he who committed the murder, and so afterwards he behaves as if indeed he had not. Needless to say, such a person is extremely dangerous since he has no moral controls placed upon his actions.”

  Sachs delivered all this in a formal, academic tone, looking slowly back and forth over the crowd as if giving a lecture to a class of low-level undergraduates. Dorkin wondered if he were, in fact, repeating one of his own lectures.

  “Would such a person remember what he had done?” Whidden asked.

  “Generally, yes. But he has dissociated himself from it. He knows that it happened, but does not regard himself as having done it.”

  “And at the time of the murder, would such a person be aware of the criminal nature of what he was doing?”

  “Again, I would say generally, yes. In some cases, it would be precisely because he regarded the act as criminal that he was doing it. It would represent an escape from the restrictions which he normally places upon himself. I should perhaps have explained that one of the mechanisms behind such a person’s ability to dissociate himself from actions he disapproves of is that he has been brought up in an intensely repressive environment. He will have been brought up to believe that so many things are wrong that the only way he can live with himself and his own frailties is to develop an extreme capacity for dissociating himself from his own actions.”

  “A number of witnesses in the present case,” Whidden said, “have commented on the fact that in the days immediately after the dance, Private Williams behaved perfectly normally. I take it that this does not preclude the possibility of his being the murderer.”

  “No, it does not. But I could not say with any definiteness whether Private Williams would have been capable of behaving in such a way without conducting a detailed examination.”

  “I understand. Now another question. You have familiarized yourself with the facts of this case. On the basis of these facts, what would you conclude about the personality of the murderer?”

  “Most obviously, the degree of violence done to the body was far in excess of what was needed merely to kill the victim. It seems evident that the murderer was not merely concerned with preventing her from identifying him as having raped her. He was clearly activated also by a violent, irrational hatred. Such violence is not uncommon in cases of rape.”

  “Could you explain the reasons for this?”

  “There can be many. But the most common is that the rapist has a fundamental hatred of women. After the sexual act is completed, he experiences a violent sense of revulsion, but instead of directing this against himself, he displaces it and directs it against his victim.”

  “Perhaps you could explain the kind of background that is likely to produce such attitudes.”

  As Dorkin studied him, Sachs sat up a little straighter in his chair and launched into another lecture.

  “It arises most commonly from a situation in which the individual has a strong attachment to the mother. This precludes his having normal relationships with girls his own age, but the sexual drive is often still there and may be all the stronger for being re-pressed. In the event that he does have sexual relations, whatever the circumstances, he feels that he has been unfaithful to the mother and experiences a consequent sense of guilt. This he displaces by regarding the girl as dirty and as having led him into an act he is now repelled by. In the extreme case of the rapist, this often leads to murder, as I have already explained. I should say also, perhaps, that the individual who has this kind of strong attachment to the mother also in the unconscious part of his mind hates his mother because of her emotional domination of him, and the hatred and violence he may direct against other women is fuelled in part by this subconscious hatred of his mother.”

  “You have heard,” Whidden said, “that Private Williams was in effect an only child with a strong attachment to a possessive mother, who was also very strict about moral matters. Would you say that this is the kind of background which might produce the kind of psychological abnormalities which you have been describing?”

  “Yes, such a background does often result in this kind of psychological maladjustment, but it does not, of course, necessarily lead to the commission of violent criminal acts.”

  “I understand,” Whidden said. “I am merely trying to establish that the apparent normality of Private Williams’s behaviour after the dance is not necessarily inconsistent with his being the murderer and that his background is not inconsistent with his being the kind of person who might commit such a murder. Are those fair statements?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you,” Whidden said. “You have been most informative.”

  Dorkin had listened to all this with gathering anger. Just as Whidden had waved his magic wand and replaced the untidy chaos of the night of Sarah’s murder with the neatly defined world of Drost’s charts, so now he wa
s replacing the actual Williams with this fictional monster dredged up from Sachs’s psychoanalytic ideologies. Dorkin could not imagine that Whidden himself believed this windy bullshit. As for the jury, he could not be sure. In other circumstances, with their ploddingly literal view of the world, they almost certainly would not, but in these circumstances most of them would be prepared to believe almost anything that would help justify retroactively the condemnation of Williams that Dorkin felt sure they had decided on before they had ever entered the courtroom. All of this, Dorkin felt sure, Whidden would understand only too well.

  “Dr. Sachs,” Dorkin said, keeping his voice as level as he could, “this is a trial in which a human life is at stake, and you have consented to come here and with no examination whatever of the accused—without ever having so much as laid eyes on him until you saw him here this afternoon—you have used your professional stature to conduct a campaign of vicious innuendo designed to establish in the minds of the jury an image of him as a pathological monster.”

  “I have done no such thing,” Sachs said, his voice quite unruffled as that of someone long accustomed to attacks by the ignorant. “I have merely given answers to a series of hypothetical questions about the minds of certain kinds of murderer. I have said nothing whatever about Private Williams himself, as I was careful to point out.”

  “If you are giving testimony that is not supposed to relate to Private Williams,” Dorkin asked, “might I ask you what it is you think you are doing in this courtroom?”

  “I have already explained,” Sachs said, unperturbed.

  “Your Honour,” Dorkin said to Dunsdale, “I am astonished at the dishonesty of what is taking place here. I ask you to instruct the jury to disregard all of this testimony as having no basis whatever in fact.”

  “Well now, Lieutenant Dorkin,” Dunsdale said, “I do think that Dr. Sachs has made clear that what he has said doesn’t necessarily relate to Private Williams, and I am sure the jury will keep that in mind. Do you have any further questions, Lieutenant Dorkin?”

  “I have not,” Dorkin said.

  As he sat down, he saw that Whidden had leaned over to talk to McKiel. Watching them, Dorkin sensed the falsity in their manner, as if in a badly rehearsed play, and realized that something more was up.

  “Your Honour,” Whidden said, turning back to the bench, “we have decided not to wear out the patience of the court and of our good jurors with a parade of supplementary witnesses. This there-fore concludes the case for the prosecution. Tomorrow, we will turn matters over to the learned counsel for the defence.”

  It was obvious to Dorkin that, like the calling of Whittaker and Sachs, this had been the strategy all along and that the names that had followed theirs on the list of witnesses had been merely a blind. It was the latest move in a campaign in which he had been out-manoeuvred at almost every turn. And so, abruptly, a day or more before he had expected it to happen, he was going to have to fight his fight. Always, always, one of his instructors at officers’ training had said, keep your enemy off balance. Surprise. Surprise. That, gentlemen, is the secret of victory.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  Following his meeting with Meade the week before, Dorkin had done what he knew he should have done a long time before. Affirming the certainty of Williams’s innocence, cajoling, beseeching, some-times bullying, he had combed Carnarvon and Fredericton and had managed to assemble a little contingent of witnesses willing to testify on Williams’s behalf.

  Carnarvon had been settled by Welsh fleeing the depression that had overwhelmed their valleys at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Dorkin had imagined it as a neat little village, rather like the ones on the lids of cookie tins, but there was no village, only a ruined schoolhouse, a decaying chapel, and a succession of farmhouses strung out along two miles of road, most of them set among fields whose edges were being eaten away by the forest. Though he did not know then that Uncle Hubert had yielded up his services to the prosecution, Dorkin had avoided him and found instead a cousin of Williams’s mother. A pig-farmer, sixty years old, balding, greying, half-toothless, guileless, awkward, he was to tell again the story of the massacre of Williams’s family in the Great War, and Dorkin hoped that his rustic simplicity would strike some responsive chord in a rustic jury.

  From Carnarvon Dorkin had also managed to pluck forth a Presbyterian minister, a short, black-haired, round-faced man, who in the twenties had fled another depression in the Welsh valleys and fired by some youthful Celtic idealism answered the call of Carnarvon’s little flock. He knew Owen for a good boy always, not drinking or fighting, a model son to his mother.

  In Fredericton, Dorkin had found a history teacher with socialist leanings (which Dorkin had prevailed upon him to disguise) who had taught Williams and was willing to attest to his character and conscientiousness, if not his intellect. He had also found a fellow worker from the lumber company where Williams had worked who was willing to testify that Williams had never exhibited any evidence of murderous intentions towards anyone. ( “Williams wouldn’t have lasted two minutes with my grandmother, or anybody else’s grand-mother.” ) But Williams’s boss had refused to testify, and when Dorkin had tried to pressure him had turned patriotic and ugly.

  When Dorkin had set about arranging for testimony from some of the soldiers in Wakefield, Captain Fraser had also turned patriotic and ugly, and it was only through veiled threats of court orders that Dorkin had persuaded him to grant the necessary leave from duties. Later, Dorkin knew, Fraser would make them pay, but there was nothing he could do about that. Only Sergeant MacCrae, the untouchable hero of Dieppe, would perhaps escape, and perhaps once again get a few others out with him.

  Now all of them, civilians and soldiers, sat in a row at the back of the court waiting their turn, a motley crew, badly coached, in-secure in their honesty.

  The preliminaries over, Dorkin rose and began working his way through his roster, beginning with the witnesses from Carnarvon and Fredericton. His purpose was to dislodge the image Whidden and Sachs had created of Williams as a subhuman monster and to replace it with the image of an ordinary human being, shy and awkward, but fundamentally normal.

  On his side, Whidden picked away, dressing up the image of Williams as the maladjusted outsider waiting only for the circumstances that would transform him into a homicidal maniac. But with the exception of the history teacher, whose social persuasions Whidden shrewdly intuited, these were witnesses with whom he had to go easy if he were not to alienate the worshipful members of his jury, and some of his darker hints about Williams’s suppressed perversions went over the heads of both the witnesses and the jury.

  With the outcast Zombies from the armoury he was on happier ground, and he once again played to a fully appreciative house as he swept back and forth across the front of the court, by turns whimsical, sarcastic, scornful, never for a moment letting his audience forget that these were the cowards who lounged in Wakefield while their sons and brothers were fighting and dying in Europe. What he sought to elicit from them without bewildering subtleties was evidence to establish Williams as a sullen and dangerous misfit.

  Dorkin’s concern was to emphasize once again that following his return from the dance Williams behaved normally and that no one saw any physical evidence of any kind that he had murdered Sarah Coile. He wound up the morning with Sergeant MacCrae. In his battledress uniform complete with his campaign ribbons and the ribbon of his Military Medal, he was a formidable presence— someone not even Whidden could cross with impunity. He had no evidence to add to what the other soldiers had said, but his saying it removed the taint that their being Zombies had given it.

  “So,” Dorkin said in conclusion, “as sergeant in charge of that platoon, you would be familiar with the behaviour of Private Williams, and you saw no change whatever in this in the days following the dance?”

  “No, sir,” MacCrae said. “None.”

  “Do you believe that Private Williams murdered Sarah Coile
?”

  “No, I do not.”

  “Thank you,” Dorkin said.

  “Sergeant MacCrae,” Whidden said, “as part of your training, did you have any training in psychology?”

  “No, sir,” MacCrae said.

  “So your assessment of Private Williams’s behaviour is not rooted in any kind of professional training?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Yesterday, Dr. Sachs, a professional psychiatrist, testified here that there was not necessarily anything inconsistent in Private Williams behaving normally and his having murdered Sarah Coile. I take it that you would agree that Dr. Sachs would be more knowledgeable about such matters than you would be?”

  “I suppose he would be.”

  “Thank you,” Whidden said.

  And then Dorkin had a stroke of luck. Not content to take what he had and run, Whidden pushed for more and made one of his rare false moves.

  “Sergeant MacCrae,” he said, “I think that almost everyone here must be aware of your heroic military record. I am wondering what you think of men who refuse to fight and leave men like yourself to bleed and die in defence of our country while they loaf and go to dances?”

  Before answering, MacCrae looked down at Whidden with a dislike that he was at no pains to diguise.

  “I don’t think that anyone should be forced to go overseas who does not want to, sir,” he replied. “And I don’t think that people who are not going themselves have the right to make judgements. Some of the men who do not go have very good reasons for what they are doing.”

  “Such as Private Williams?”

  “Private Williams’s father died because of the Great War, sir, and three of his uncles were killed. That seems to me enough for one family.”

  Somewhere at the back of the gallery someone—an old veteran perhaps of the Somme or Passchendaele—applauded briefly.