Possibly the mortal remains of Mr. Carew would never have been disturbed at a post-mortem examination by a surgeon's scalpel had not two European nursemaids permitted their tongues to waggle. Of all the personalities in the case, probably the most despicable were those two European nursemaids, one English and the other Swiss. It had been the practice for the former to purloin the contents of Mrs. Carew's wastepaper basket and then to pass them on to her Swiss friend who fitted together the fragments of letters. Another little foible of the Carew nursemaid was to practice reproducing Mrs. Carew's handwriting. Her object in these activities and her relations, if any, with Mr. Carew were items of surmise. The defence sought to introduce those matters into the evidence, also to pin a case of forgery on her. Eventually counsel for the defence publicly apologised for any imputations that she had any illicit relations with Mr. Carew. He even admitted some of Mrs. Carew's Japanese servants had perjured themselves on that score. At least this pilfering pair of young women gained a short period of notoriety and fame, because it was they who furnished the prosecution with much of the written evidence that proved so damning to Mrs. Carew.
There were whisperings of arsenic by those two amateur spies, and then some one slipped Dr. Wheeler, the physician who was attending Mr. Carew, an anonymous note reading:
Three bottles of solution of arsenic in a week.
At no time after Mr. Carew was removed to the hospital half dead did Mrs. Carew attempt to hide having purchased a considerable quantity of arsenic and in addition a bottle of sugar of lead. But later it came out at the inquest that Dr. Wheeler had himself prescribed arsenic for Mrs. Carew, who was suffering from malaria, which in part accounted for the purchases. The last occasion on which he did so was a couple of weeks earlier on the verandah of the Yokohama Amateur Rowing Club. Mrs. Carew was able to produce the prescription scrawled out on a piece of paper torn from the regatta programme.
Mrs. Carew was also able to offer the Coroner an explanation for the large quantity of arsenic found in her husband's body, by explaining that for years he has been dosing himself with arsenic for a certain complaint and had been applying sugar of lead externally. It was established that some years before Mr. Carew had secretly consulted a doctor, other than the family physician, but that he was habitually taking arsenic was not known to anyone other than Mrs. Carew, not even to his medical advisers. It was fortunate she knew. It was also fortunate that at least one other person seemed to have had an inkling of it, if we are to believe the evidence, which of course I do! That person had already been able to soothe the nerves of the Japanese chemist who had sold the poison and was suffering from jitters at having failed to comply with all the regulations governing the sale of poisons. The Japanese chemist revealed that circumstance at the inquest, but then did not want to mention the person's name. The coroner insisted on knowing it. The Japanese chemist with much reluctance said that it was one Kobayashi Beika—a naturalised Japanese, previously known as Dr. J. E. de Becker. It so happened that Mr. Kobayashi Beika was present in the public seats in the coroners court. After the session he privately approached the British Consul, who was acting as coroner, and volunteered an explanation. He was, however, informed that he would be called as a witness and required to make his explanation under oath in open court. On doing so he related that whilst tiffining at the Yokohama United Club about a year before, the subject of medicinal poisons had cropped up and Mr. Carew had boasted:
Oh! That's nothing. I take enough poison to kill six men. I am obliged to do so.
Fortunately for Mrs. Carew other witnesses were forthcoming, later at the trial, who were prepared to swear under oath that about a year or so before his death, Mr. Carew had boasted of having taken arsenic in large quantities.
What arsenic? Why I have taken tons of it.
Furthermore it was proved that Mr. Carew had been medicating his pony with arsenic and sugar of lead. All in all, even at the inquest, it was abundantly clear to Mrs. Carew's friends, but perhaps not to the Coroner, that there could hardly have been a family more arsenic conscious than the Carew family. If all the evidence were truthful—a point on which there was some difference of opinions—there could hardly have been a house where more arsenic was "kicking about" than in the Carew home.
To my simple mind the whole matter of the poisons was thus satisfactorily accounted for, although perhaps not to the coroner or to Mr. Carew's friends.
Certainly a few loose ends remained, but they were mostly tied up by the timely entry into the case of a mysterious veiled woman in black named Annie Luke, who suddenly appeared in Yokohama twelve days before Mr. Carew's death and as mysteriously disappeared again a week after his death, without having been seen by anyone other than Mrs. Carew and her Chinese houseboy, aged twelve. When Annie knocked at the door and asked to see Mr. Carew, the houseboy actually spoke to her:
"Arimasen. No have got."
To my mind that evidence certainly proved something. There were of course some who thought it proved perjury!
During her short sojourn in Yokohama, Annie Luke had been busy writing a number of letters. There was an appealing one to Mr. Carew; a threatening one to Mrs. Carew in which Annie wrote: "BewareI Dare to speak one word of the truth and you shall never leave Japan alive" In addition there were letters to Mrs. Carew's counsel and to the Coroner, both of which nicely tied tight a few other loose ends. In these Mrs. Carew was dubbed "a silly innocent" and "that little fool his wife."
Those letters also hinted darkly at Annie doing away with herself and others also:
"Dead men tell no tales, no nor dead women either...."
Then most inconsiderately Annie disappeared into thin air, and with her I fear disappeared most of Mrs. Carew's chances. Despite the most diligent search, and the offer of a $500 reward, no trace was ever found of Annie Luke, alive or dead.
I might add that there was no doubt whatever in Mrs. Carew's mind that the handwriting in all those letters was that of Annie Luke, although a so-called handwriting expert did succeed in confusing the court. Some people sniffed and thought it significant that Annie Luke and Mrs. Carew both used note-paper bearing the same watermark, but not Mrs. Carew's friends, nor those who had placed bets on her innocence.
Mr. Carew, unhappily being dead, could not be called upon for any biographical details concerning Annie, but fortunately Mrs. Carew was able to supply some information of how her husband had once played fast and loose with Annie.
To my simple mind everything had been nicely explained and all the loose ends had been neatly tied, but Her Britannic Majesty's Consul-General, who, as already mentioned, was acting as coroner, obtusely refused to be convinced even of the corporeal existence of Annie and, when instructing the jury, he stated:
Gentlemen. I take upon myself the responsibility of saying that in considering your verdict, you need not complicate your minds as to the share which such a person as Annie Luke may have taken in the tragedy.
On what grounds H.B.M. Consul-General made this amazing statement I do not know, for it is well-known that Maskelyne and young Houdini were at that time causing women to disappear almost nightly!
After an inquest which lasted five days, the calling of over twenty witnesses and the asking of thousands of questions the jury returned an open verdict that Mr. Carew "had died from the effects of arsenic, but by whom the poison was administered there is no direct evidence to show." For this verdict they were abused by that section of the Yokohama Press which had already decided Mrs. Carew's guilt.
Mrs. Carew, not Annie Luke, was thereupon committed for trial on the charge that she
... wilfully and of malice aforethought did kill and murder one Walter Carew against the peace of Our Lady the Queen, her Crown and dignity.
The pace of drinking then slackened at the bars of all the clubs in Japan, as the members argued the case. In the stately homes on the Bluff, the rattle of teacups was stilled as the ladies gave judgement even before the court had heard the evidence; chores were
forgotten in the servants quarters while the amahs argued with the cooks as to who had put arsenic in Mr. Carew's food.
The case became such a topic of conversation in Yokohama society and heated arguments developed to such a degree that social functions had to be curtailed. In the ensuing weeks, husbands and wives so disagreed as to the innocence or guilt of Mrs. Carew that many a wife developed homicidal tendencies and would have liked to poison her own husband.
All in all the Yokohama Foreign Concession gained so much notoriety over the case that the Kobe Foreign Concession developed a sort of inferiority complex which lasted for many years.
But let us return to Yokohama.
The age of chivalry may not be dead, for when the Court opened and the roll of jurymen was called, four had failed to answer the summons and were promptly fined fifty dollars, while five others secured exemption by presenting certificates of sickness. Finally a jury of five was sworn in.
To many of the foreign residents in Yokohama in those days, their most important purpose in life had become the matter of pleasing the boss or not offending his wife, or some other social prominence in that caste-ridden society. A jury of five therefore did not offer much of a margin of safety to an accused, especially when he or she was persona non grata with the taipans' wives. Whether the final verdict was right or wrong, Mrs. Carew was unquestionably placed in a position of great hazard. Perhaps it was that circumstance that influenced her in taking some desperate chances, as will be related hereafter.
As already remarked the case caused a tremendous stir and while the top diplomats in Tokyo may not have deserted their embassies to attend the trial, certainly a number of them sent along their ladies, some of whom commented on the case in their diaries. One of them recorded how painful the trial was. Twelve years later, when Kobayashi Beika was writing some reminiscences, he also still remembered the pain.
The time has now come to introduce an unfortunate young man, the co-respondent, as it were, in this mysterious case. Baroness d'Anethan, wife of the Belgian Ambassador, in her diary refers to him as Mr. X "in order to spare pain" I, being fearful of offending the great British banking institution with which he was associated, will continue in this article to hide his identity under the same title. At this stage I should make clear that the only offence established against Mr. X, apart from writing some tender and indiscreet letters to a married woman, was that his handwriting was deplorable.
The moral of this story, if such writings could possibly have a moral, is that a person whose handwriting is as illegible as mine or Mr. X's should never get mixed up with women, and certainly not in murder trials. The unfortunate Mr. X was required to read out in Court his own love letters to Mrs. Carew, because nobody else in the Court could decipher his writing! Mr. X's behaviour in court certainly gave the impression that he was less willing to protect Mrs. Carew than she was seeking to protect him, and the Japan Mail, it is good to record, rightly scorned him as "a renegade lover."
Annie Luke was not the only disappearance. A most indiscreet letter from Mr. X to Mrs. Carew, which was about to be entered as evidence, mysteriously disappeared from the body of the Court before the eyes of all present. It was last seen on the barristers' table, then it was no more. The Judge thereupon ordered that nobody be permitted to leave the court without permission. When Mrs. Carew left she was searched by a wardress who found that the missing letter had become stuck in the cuff of Mrs. Carew's costume. This unfortunate happening cost Mrs. Carew one of her defending counsels who immediately withdrew from the case in a huff.
As I personally came to know some of the jurymen in later years I do now assert that the contretemps of the missing love letter must have made an undue impression on their dour and unimaginative minds, much to the disadvantage of Mrs. Carew.
A mysterious red herring, one of many, was drawn across the trails that the prosecution was endeavouring to build up, when a German resident of Yokohama and a friend of Mr. Carew related that while playing billiards with him just a week before his death, Mr. Carew kept repeating:
"Le moment est arrive on il faut fair la chose" (The moment has arrived when the thing must be done.) Whilst the defence sought to attach some special significance to this incident as indicating a determination to commit suicide, my own crude mind suggests that Mr. Carew was just drunk.
It must also be related either for or against Mr. X, according to whichever side our sympathies lie, that Mr. X swore he saw on the day of the funeral a lady loitering near the Yokohama Club who seemed to fit the description of Annie Luke. She appeared to be greatly agitated.
Among the large number of witnesses called was Her Britannic Majesty's Envoy, Sir Ernest Satow, who was entered as a witness in respect of a letter signed A. L. Price which was sent to him protesting against the "scandalous manner in which our Consul had conducted the inquest" It was proved by the prosecution that Price was not in Japan at the time that letter was written. The defence was eventually forced into the admission that the letter had, in fact, been written by Mrs. Carew in a desperate effort to clear herself.
Further let me add that Mrs. Carew, or at least her counsel, set out to convince the jury that there was no motive for murder. Mrs. Carew stated that she and her husband were on good terms. He was receiving a salary as manager of the Yokohama United Club (and the perquisites that went with it) and she had an independent income of £500 per annum. Some evidence was also offered, although maybe not of a convincing nature to some of the merchant jurymen, that Mrs. Carew had almost completed arrangements to set her husband up in business as a silk merchant with a capital of £5000. Coroners and judges are never easy persons to convince, but what possible motive, I ask you, could she, in the circumstances, have had for murdering her husband?
When addressing the jury at the trial, Counsel for the defence admitted that Mrs. Carew had "a propensity to gratify her vanity by captivating the senses of the opposite sex "—What woman hasn't?—The jury had already heard that there had been other men who were known in the Carew family by the nicknames of the "Ferret", the "Ice Cream Vendor", and the "Organ Grinder", and finally Mr. X who was referred to as the "Youth". All of those friendships, it was said, were known to Mr. Carew.
Why, asked Counsel for the defence, should Mrs. Carew wish to get rid of a husband "who gave her every facility for amusing herself with light flirtations?"
The majority of the foreign community believed that Mrs. Carew would secure an acquittal, as was shown by the betting odds, although the odds did shorten as the trial proceeded.
For nineteen days, dozen of witnesses were called, most of them prominent members of the Yokohama and Tokyo foreign community; thousands of questions were asked; diaries, telegrams, chit-books, and letters from Mrs. Carew's wastepaper basket and elsewhere were produced in abundance. Certainly a doubt was raised as to the authenticity of some of the letters submitted in evidence by the prosecution, the inference being that they were forgeries and the work of the perfidious nursemaid. Experts gave evidence and dissertations on the various aspects of arsenic poisoning and notorious arsenic habitues of the past. Then two days were occupied by the counsels for the defence and for the prosecution addressing the jury, followed by the learned judge summing up the case.
Finally, after twenty-one days the jury retired to reach a verdict. Precisely twenty-five minutes later they were back again and announced GUILTY.
The judge thereupon donned the three-cornered black cap and pronounced:
The sentence of this Court upon you Edith May Hallow ell Carew that you be taken from the place where you now stand to the British Consular Jail at Yokohama and there remain interned until after a convenient time when, on a subsequent day appointed by the proper authority, you shall be led out to the place of your execution within the precincts of the Consular Jail and there hanged by the neck until you are dead and your body shall then be taken down and buried within the precincts of the jail and may God have mercy upon your soul.
The verdict was
argued in the clubs, in the tea-parties and in the papers. Brinkley, in the Japan Mail, sought to show that Mrs. Carew had never indulged in anything more serious than a mild flirtation, that she was on affectionate terms with her husband, and there was not a shred of evidence to suggest that she abhorred him as the father of her children, or that she was jealous of him—why should she have been, when he had no loves other than the Club bar! And so, argued Brinkley, love, hate and jealousy, the three mainsprings of crime, was each absent from this case. Sharp clashes on the subject took place as usual between the Japan Mail and the other Yokohama foreign newspapers—sure signs that, after all the excitement of a murder trial, the life of the community was slipping back into its normal sensitive grooves again.
It was about this time that the Empress Dowager of Japan died. An Imperial Proclamation was thereupon issued granting an amnesty to certain categories of criminals. A few days later, Sir Ernest Satow in his wisdom and discretion, thereupon decided that Mrs. Carew should not suffer a disadvantage because of having been tried in a British court, and that the same measure of grace should be extended to her as Japanese criminals were receiving. He thereupon directed that in lieu of capital punishment Mrs. Carew be imprisoned with hard labour for life.
Shortly afterwards she was transported to a jail in Hongkong and then some seven months later was sent to England to serve her sentence in the convict prison at Aylesbury. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council refused her leave to appeal.
And so Mrs. Carew, the once popular and vivacious member of the younger set of Yokohama, disappeared from the scene.
Shades of the Past Page 14
