The Case Against Owen Williams

by Allan Donaldson

  Dorkin took it slowly, carefully, little by little, the easy things first, the date and place of his birth, the names of his mother and father, the fact of his growing up an only child, the death of his father of lung disease as result of gas, the prior deaths of the uncles, his schooling, his job in the lumber yard, his conscription.

  “And why did you not volunteer for overseas service?”

  “I was helping to support my mother. She didn’t want me to. And she remembered what happened to the others.”

  “And after your mother died?”

  “I felt that if they wanted me to go overseas, they should have conscripted me.”

  “If the government ordered you to go, you would go?”

  “Yes.”

  Then on to the night of July 1, following the group of them going to the dance, recounting the dances with Sarah, following them on their walk along the path behind the dance hall and along Birch Road, coaxing him gently through the humiliations of their three-quarters of an hour of abortive lovemaking and of her leaving him angrily to walk away by herself towards the Hannigan Road. Finally, he took him through his interviews with the Mounties.

  As the questioning went on, Dorkin glanced now and then at the jury. They were listening intently. He couldn’t tell whether they were believing what they heard or not, but it seemed to him to be unfolding with the ring of truth. He began to hope.

  It was not Whidden, but McKiel, who rose to cross-examine. He walked slowly around the table and stood in front of it with a pad of long, legal-size paper. He scanned the top page once, then a second time, before turning to a second and then a third page. Finally, after a minute of silence, he turned to Williams.

  “Well, Private Williams,” he said in his toneless, clinical voice, “we have seen a very polished performance here in the last hour or so. I must congratulate Lieutenant Dorkin. I don’t think that the most experienced criminal lawyer in Montreal could have done it better. But I do have a few trifling reservations about what we have heard you say under the expert guidance of your learned counsel. A few trifling reservations and a few trifling questions.”

  He studied the notepad again, more briefly, then put it down on the table behind him.

  Then for a quarter of an hour, he made Williams repeat his account of his abortive lovemaking with Sarah, spinning out the episode of the condom, peppering him with questions about every detail, pretending not to understand answers, forcing him to repeat them, reducing him to a state of incoherence.

  “Well,” McKiel said, “perhaps we’d better go on. Now let me see if I’ve got this straight. Miss Coile left you for whatever reason and walked away, and you never saw her again. But when the RCMP first questioned you, that is not what you told them.You told them that you left the dance hall and walked Miss Coile straight out to the Hannigan Road and left her there. Why did you tell them that?”

  “I didn’t think it made any difference. I didn’t know anything had happened to her.”

  “But why not tell them the simple truth—if it was the truth— even if you didn’t think it made any difference? What would have been wrong with that?”

  “I didn’t like to.”

  “But tell me, Private Williams. Why the additional lie of saying you walked with her as far as the Hannigan Road? Why not say that you walked her partway there and that you left her to walk the rest of the way by herself? Why the extra lie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Or perhaps you really did go to the Hannigan Road with Miss Coile, where you were seen by the Reverend Clemens, and that little bit of the real truth remained embedded in your lie. So anyway your story is that when you first talked to Corporal Drost you lied because you were too embarrassed to tell the truth.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you lied again when you were interviewed by Sergeant Grant. Why was that?”

  “I didn’t know there was anything wrong.”

  “You also signed a statement attesting to all these lies and saying that you left Miss Coile on the Hannigan Road. By that time, surely, you had been told what had happened and warned that what you said might be used in a criminal prosecution against you.”

  “No, I still didn’t know anything.”

  “You’re telling me that you signed the paper without being warned that it might be used in a criminal proceeding. But the clear evidence of the RCMP officers is that you were warned. They have no particular reason to lie. Are you sure you have not forgotten the sequence in which things occurred?”

  “I don’t know. There were a lot of policemen. They confused me. They told me if I changed my story I would be in trouble.”

  “When did they tell you that?”

  “I don’t know. After a while. It was a long time before they told me about Sarah Coile. I didn’t understand what it was all about.”

  “And you are telling the court that when you signed that statement, you had not been warned? You yourself have just said that you were very confused. Are you sure of that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t hear it. Maybe I didn’t under-stand.”

  “I see. I suspect you understood perfectly well. But however that may be, you did sign a false statement?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Never mind the ‘buts.’ We have heard them already. You knowingly signed a false statement?”

  “Yes.”

  “But the statements you have made here today are true?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I just wanted to be sure. When I talk to you I sometimes find it difficult to keep track of what is supposed to be true at any given moment and what isn’t. The statement that you walked with Miss Coile out to the Hannigan Road is false, but the statement that she left you and walked out there by herself is true? Have I got it right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see. So the true statement is the one you made after you learned at the preliminary hearing that the Reverend Clemens had seen you at the corner of Broad Street, fifty yards further up the Hannigan Road than you would have been if you had left Sarah Coile where you said you had. I presume this statement was made first to Lieutenant Dorkin?”

  “Yes.”

  “After you had come to realize that your first statement could not be made to seem true? Is that correct?”

  “Your Honour,” Dorkin interrupted, “I must object. Prosecuting attorney is bullying the witness. Under the kind of questioning he is conducting, almost anyone could be made to seem confused. Private Williams is saying that at a time when he did not know it made any difference, he was embarrassed by the circumstances of his experience with Miss Coile and disguised some of the facts about it. When he came fully to understand what had happened and when he was not being bullied by the police who had not troubled to tell him what the inquiry was about, he told me what had actually happened, and that is the evidence which he is giving in this court. There is nothing very mysterious about that.”

  “Perhaps,” McKiel said. “But I would like to hear these things from the witness, not from his counsel, whose voice, it seems to me, I have heard speaking through the witness a good deal this afternoon already. Private Williams seems quite the ventriloquist’s dummy.”

  “The jury should note Lieutenant Dorkin’s objections,” Dunsdale said.

  “I am curious, Private Williams,” McKiel said, “about when exactly you did tell what you say is your true story to Lieutenant Dorkin. Was it two weeks after the preliminary hearing? Three weeks? Whenever, you would have had plenty of time to construct and ornament a more plausible story than the one you told to the RCMP. Tell me, Private Williams, did Lieutenant Dorkin rehearse you in the story you were to tell here today?”

  “He made me go over it.”

  “I object to this,” Dorkin said. “The prosecuting attorney knows perfectly well that every counsel has a witness go over his evidence in order to get it clear in his mind so that he will not be nervous in court. If I had asked the Reverend Clemens, for example, if he h
ad gone over his evidence with the prosecutors, I think you would find that he had.”

  “That is speculation, Lieutenant Dorkin,” McKiel said.

  “Would you like me to recall Reverend Clemens and ask?” Dorkin replied.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Dunsdale said. “The jury will note Lieutenant Dorkin’s objection.”

  “I don’t wish to prolong this unnecessarily,” McKiel said. “I am sure that by now the members of the jury understand clearly enough what has happened here, which is that Private Williams, however he managed it, lured Sarah Coile away from the dance hall and brutally murdered her in the gravel pit off the Hannigan Road. Is this not what happened, Private Williams?”

  Williams stared at him, but as Dorkin started to rise, he said, “No,” in a voice that was scarcely audible.

  “I have no further questions,” McKiel said.

  “Have you any other questions you wish to ask of this witness, Lieutenant Dorkin?” Dunsdale asked.

  “Yes,” Dorkin said. “I think that the jurors may not clearly have heard Private Williams’s reply to Mr. McKiel. Private Williams, did you murder Sarah Coile?”

  “No,” Williams said, once again almost inaudibly.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  It was the worst by far of the bad nights that Dorkin had spent in Wakefield. For four hours, he worked in his office on the speech that he would make to the jury the next day, carefully getting it all in order: heading, subheading, sub-subheading. He felt exhausted and oppressed, and the words as he looked at them on the paper seemed to have an existence only in a world of words, without any relationship to any reality, to any truth. But it wasn’t about truth anymore anyway, if it ever had been. It was a contest between him-self and Whidden, in which what was involved for Whidden was not the guilt or innocence of Williams but his own ego and reputation, as Magistrate Thurcott had suggested after the preliminary hearing.

  When he looked out the window, he saw that a rain that had been threatening all day had begun, very light, as yet hardly more than a mist.

  Near midnight, he went to bed and turned on his radio and waited through some cowboy music for the news. You are my sun-shine. The last paratroopers had been withdrawn from Arnhem, and someone British had issued a communiqué saying that the set-back had been a gallant success. In four weeks, a new victory loan campaign would begin. The Tigers had taken a one-game lead over the Browns. A barn and all its contents had burned in the village of Stanley. Private Owen Williams, testifying in his own defence, had proclaimed his innocence in the death of Sarah Coile. The case would go to the jury tomorrow.

  Dorkin turned off the radio and the light and let the demons of the darkness have their way. All the things that he ought to have done, all the things that he ought to have said, or ought not to have said, came swarming down on him. He woke and slept and woke and was not sure whether he had slept or not. The oppression that he had felt all evening was shot through now with vast, terrifying, insubstantial anxieties, and he thought that madness would be something like that. He remembered a house that he used to pass on his way to school where in warm weather they used to put out on the verandah a crazy old woman, who would sit all day rolling her head from side to side, in hell for the crime of having been born.

  After one final half-sleep, longer than most, he was awakened by the familiar clatter of metal-shod boots and the familiar mutter of voices. In intervals of quiet, he could hear the whisper of the rain. He tried to go back to sleep again but couldn’t and was at the same time exhausted and preternaturally awake when Smith knocked on his door an hour later to rouse him for the last day. One thing only gave his heart a faint lift, and that was the reflection that, however it turned out, in twelve hours or so, there would be an end.

  When he descended for breakfast in the mess, he found the armoury strangely deserted.

  “Where is everybody?” he asked the cook who made his break-fast. “They’ve gone on a route march, sir, around the island.”

  “In the rain?”

  “Yes, sir. Captain Fraser’s orders, sir. Wars don’t wait for the weather to be good, do they, sir?”

  “I suppose not,” Dorkin said. “Sergeant MacCrae too?”

  “Yes, sir. Everybody but me, sir. I’ve got a bad knee. That’s why I’m a cook.”

  When Dorkin entered the courtroom with Private Smith following dutifully a pace behind, he noticed that for the first time they had allowed spectators to stand, two deep, along the back of the court. The second thing he noticed as he walked down the centre aisle was the row of brass in the seats behind Whidden’s entourage. Colonel Meade. Another, heavy-set lieutenant-colonel whom he had never seen before. A moustached lieutenant who had the air of an aide-de-camp. Captain Fraser, in the presence of all this authority, sitting hunched and obsequious. Behind them was a second row of vips, this one made up mostly of what were evidently men of the law who had come for the show.

  Meade and his party were standing, and Meade was talking to Whidden across the little oak fence that separated the public from the official area of the court, introducing the others, chatting. Feeling that it would seem impolite not to acknowledge Meade’s presence, Dorkin hovered, awkward and uncertain, waiting his opportunity. Finally, Whidden turned back to his place, and Dorkin came forward. He saluted the four officers, and Meade made introductions. “Lieutenant-Colonel Hepworth. Lieutenant Keys. Captain Fraser, of course, you know.”

  Hepworth’s manner was distant, and Dorkin guessed that he had been one of the officers who had not wanted the army involved in Williams’s defence.

  “So,” Meade said. “Good luck. I’m sure you will acquit yourself well.”

  Hepworth stared straight ahead.

  Sometimes over the previous two weeks, in the watches of the night, or in the interval between the dawn uproar of the soldiery and Smith’s discreet tap on his door, Dorkin had fantasized eloquent speeches about such things as the presumption of innocence, and reasonable doubt, and the high principles of the British system of justice above all mere prejudice and personal inclination. But in the cold light of morning in front of his shaving mirror with his real self staring back at him, he knew that he was not an orator. For one thing, he was too young to mouth such high sentiments and make them credible. For another, he had come no longer to believe them.

  And this morning, beneath the surface nervousness, he felt flat, uninterested, dead. Partly it was the lack of real sleep over the last couple of weeks, and especially over the last four days. Partly it was that he had been over it all too many times. If he was not an orator, he was evidently not an actor either with the talent to speak the same lines a hundred times as if the words had just that moment flooded into his mind.

  Williams arrived, looking small and frightened, as usual, between Carvell and the Mountie. The jury filed in and were polled, the murmur of conversation faded, died, and Dunsdale entered through his little door behind the bench. All rose, all sat.

  Dorkin had never addressed a jury before. The simple crimes of his innocents at Utopia did not warrant such an outlay of public money and were dealt with by a magistrate.

  He went through it all again, slowly, reasonably, logically, point by point. It was the only choice he had anyway since the weight of feeling was going to be all on the other side. That morning on the front page of the local weekly paper there had been the faces of two more dead soldiers, and inside a last letter to his mother from a soldier now dead these two months outside Caen.

  He talked of the unethicality of the RCMP interrogation of Williams, of the absence of any physical evidence connecting Williams to the murder, of the normality of his behaviour in the days following the murder, of the improbabilities inherent in the prosecution’s contention that it was Williams who brought Sarah Coile to the gravel pit, of the grave potential for error in the evidence of Reverend Clemens, of the absence of any evidence whatever other than that of Clemens which was inconsistent with Williams’s later account of h
is activities that evening, of the failure of the RCMP to locate as a potential murderer the father of Sarah Coile’s child, of the numerous possible explanations of the indisputable facts other than that offered by the prosecution, of the airy insubstantiality of Dr. Sach’s testimony and of the prosecution’s attempt to create a profile of Williams as a psychopath.

  It took him over two hours to cover the ground, and he knew that he was not doing it well. Now and then, he had the sense of listening to his own voice as if he were detached from it, and he was struck by how curiously flat it sounded. Looking at the members of the jury, he found it difficult to read their reactions, but the signs did not seem propitious. Most of them looked away after a moment whenever he met their eyes, and the three businessmen whom he had judged to be the hard cases made it clear from small signs—a pursing of the lips, a slight, abrupt tilt of the chin—that they did not care much for what he was saying.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he was conscious of Whidden, his bulk sprawled casually in his chair, sometimes looking down at the table, sometimes upward at the high ornamental ceiling, with an air of indulgent amusement.

  Twice he was aware of jurors watching Whidden rather than himself and realized that he was being upstaged. Now and then, he allowed himself a glance at the row of vips. Meade looked attentive and thoughtful, the other colonel impassive and stern. Fraser watched him with a kind of skulking hostility.

  Towards the end of his speech, some of the spectators, even some of the newsmen, began slipping out. He finished and stood in a cavern of silence, the jurors in front of him looking down at their hands or their feet or the floor or at Dunsdale or Williams, anywhere but at him.

  Dundsale tapped his gavel and adjourned the trial until two o’clock that afternoon.

  At ten minutes past two, Whidden rose to a packed house. He waited for the stir he had created to wash back and forth across the courtroom, and then in an expectant silence moved out from behind his table like a great actor coming onto the stage.