Adolph Beck case
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The Adolph Beck case was a notorious case of wrongful conviction by mistaken identity, brought about by unreliable methods of identification, erroneous – though probably sincere – eyewitness testimony, and the failure of the English legal system to seek out the truth in its rush to convict. As one of the most famous causes célèbres of its time, the case led to the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907.
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[edit] About Adolph Beck
Adolph Beck, born in Norway in 1844, went to sea at an early age and moved to England in 1865, working on several occasions as a shipping broker. Later, he went to South America, made a good living there, then again in Norway, and did not return to England until 1885, where he worked as a mining engineer and had an interest in mining properties. However, despite his various business ventures, Beck was chronically short of money: he was in debt to his hotel, had borrowed from his secretary, and had not been very circumspect with women. Nevertheless he tried to keep appearances by dressing in a frock coat and top hat whenever he went out, looking very much a dapper gentleman.
[edit] The arrest
On December 16, 1895, Adolph Beck was stepping out the door of 135 (or 139, as in at least one account) Victoria Street, when a woman blocked his way. She accused him of having tricked her into parting with two watches and rings.
Beck brushed her aside and crossed the road. When the woman followed, he complained to a policeman that he was being followed by a prostitute who had accosted him. Wildly the woman demanded his arrest, in turn accusing him of having swindled her three weeks earlier.
The policeman took them both to the nearest police station, where the woman identified herself as Ottilie Meissonier, unmarried, and a language teacher. According to Ottilie, she had been walking down Victoria Street toward a flower show when Beck allegedly accosted her, tipping his hat and asking if she was not Lady Everton. She replied in the negative, but she was impressed by his gentlemanly manner, and they struck up a conversation. He introduced himself as "Lord Willoughby," and advised her that the flower show was not worth visiting — and he knew a thing or two about horticulture, for he employed six gardeners on his Lincolnshire estate. Ottilie mentioned that she grew chrysanthemums, whereupon he asked whether he might see them. She invited him to tea the following day.
Before the afternoon was over, he had invited her to go to the Riviera on his yacht. However, he insisted that she allow him to provide her with a more elegant wardrobe for the voyage, to which suggestion Ottilie agreed. He wrote out a list for her and made out a cheque for £40 to cover her purchases. Then he examined her wristwatch and rings, and asked her to let him have them so he could match their sizes and replace them with more valuable pieces.
It was after he left that she discovered that a second watch was missing. Suspicious, she hurried to the bank to cash the cheque; sure enough, it was worthless. She had been swindled — and she could swear that it was by Adolph Beck. He was promptly arrested.
The inspector who was assigned to the case found out that in the past two years twenty-two lonely women had been defrauded by a gray-haired gentleman who called himself "Lord Wilton de Willoughby" and generally used the same modus operandi. When word got around that Beck was arrested, these women were confronted with Beck, in a lineup of ten or fifteen men who had been simply picked up off the street. As he was the only one with gray hair and mustache, he was easily identified by the women as the man who disappeared with their clothes and jewelry.
Despite Beck's protestations of innocence, he was charged with ten misdemeanor offences, and four felony offences. The felony offences depended on Beck having been convicted of similar offences in 1877, for it was pointed out that a man named John Smith had been sentenced for five years for swindling unattached women; after his release he disappeared. He had used the name Lord Willoughby, given them worthless cheques and taken their jewelry; surely Beck and Smith were one and the same. At the committal hearing in late 1895, one of the policemen who arrested Smith eighteen years before was called to testify. PC Elliss Spurrell gave his account as follows:
- "In 1877 I was in the Metropolitan Police Reserve. On May 7, 1877 I was present at the Central Criminal Court where the prisoner in the name of John Smith was convicted of feloniously stealing ear-rings and a ring and eleven shillings of Louisa Leonard and was sentenced to five years' penal servitude. I produce the certificate of that conviction. The prisoner is the man.
- "There is no doubt whatever — I know quite well what is at stake on my answer and I say without doubt he is the man."
Beck protested, and cried out in despair that he could bring witnesses from South America to prove that he was there in 1877. A handwriting expert named Thomas H. Gurrin now compared the lists of clothing Smith had given his victims in 1877 with that of the lists given in 1894-95, as well as samples of Beck's handwriting. While Beck's handwriting looked different, Gurrin gave the opinion that Beck had written the lists "in a disguised hand." All this seemed so convincing that no one even bothered to compare the description of John Smith in prison files with the current appearance of Adolph Beck.
[edit] The trial
On March 3, 1896, Adolph Beck was brought to trial in the Old Bailey. The Crown was represented by Horace Edmund Avory, a spare, frosty little man who later earned the title of "the Hanging Judge" and "Acid Drop", assisted by Guy Stephenson, while the defense was headed by an experienced barrister, Charles F. Gill, assisted by Percival Clarke. The Common Serjeant was Sir Forrest Fulton, who, as a prosecutor, was responsible for sending John Smith to prison in 1877.
The defense strategy was simple: mistaken identity. If they could prove that Beck was in South America at the time when John Smith was committing those crimes and went to prison for them, it would refute the assumption that Adolph Beck was John Smith, as alleged.
Gill thought that he would have his chance in proving it when it came to cross-examine the handwriting expert Thomas Gurrin; for if Gurrin testified in court, as he said out of court, that the writing of the 1877 and the 1894-95 swindlers were identical, Gill could bring witnesses that would prove that Beck was in Buenos Aires in 1877. But Avory, foreseeing this tactic, asked the witness only about the later lists. These, Gurrin said, had been written by Beck with a "disguised hand," as he had stated before.
Gill thereupon asked Justice Fulton's permission to question Gurrin about the 1877 lists. But under British procedures earlier convictions of a man cannot be mentioned in court until the jury had given its verdict. Gill protested that the past was vital to his defense, in order to prove that Beck could not have been Smith, but Fulton still would not allow questions about the 1877 case. This meant, of course, that Avory could not call Elliss Spurrell to the stand to give evidence. Avory later explained that even without Spurrell's testimony, he could still afford to try Beck under misdemeanor charges, which did not require proof of prior conviction. He chose not to proceed with the felony charges, because that would have required Spurrell to take the stand and give Gill the opening he needed to cast doubt on Beck's guilt. That decision was made despite the fact the prosecution was based wholly on the unstated premise that Adolph Beck and John Smith were the same person.
And Avory had his eyewitnesses as well: Beck's alleged victims that were paraded one after another and pointed at Beck as the swindler. However, there were certain notes of doubt. One mentioned that the swindler talked differently, peppering his speech with "Yankee" slang. Ottilie Meissonier remembered that the swindler has a scar on the right side of his neck, but was otherwise convinced that it was Beck. Another testified that his moustache was longer, and waxed. But these went unheeded by the jury. Nor, apparently, did it occur to the jury to question how the original police lineup was prejudiced against Beck, for the other men who were arrayed with him in no way resembled the suspect. As one witness remarked: "I know a man has been arrested, and he had to be an elderly man with gray hair."
[edit] Conviction and doubts
On March 5, Adolph Beck was found guilty, and despite maintaining his innocence throughout, was sentenced to seven years of penal servitude at Portland Convict Prison in Portland, Dorset. In prison he was given John Smith's old prison number, D 523, with the letter W added, indicating a repeat convict.
England did not yet have a court of criminal appeal, but from 1896 to 1901 Becks' solicitor presented ten petitions for reexamination of his case. His requests to see the prison's description of John Smith were repeatedly denied. However, in May 1898 a member of the Home Office asked for the Smith file. He found that Smith was Jewish and thus had been circumcised, while Beck was not. The Home Office asked Sir Forrest Fulton of his opinion of this new evidence. Fulton wrote a minute dated May 13 in which he acknowledged that Smith and Beck could not be the same person, but he added that if Beck was not Smith, he was still the imposter of 1895, viewing the South American alibi "with great suspicion." As a result the letter W was removed from Beck's prison number, but nothing else was done regarding the case.
In the meantime, while Beck was in prison, a journalist with police contacts with the Daily Mail, G.R. Sims, got wind of the details of the case. He was disturbed by the fact that Beck was tried under the assumption that Beck and Smith were the same person, although no evidence to support that assumption was allowed by Justice Fulton. If evidence of this had been allowed in the first place, it could have been easily refuted and Beck would have been exonerated due to mistaken identity. He wrote about this in the Daily Mail and agitated for a review of the case. Slowly, public opinion was swayed to the view of Beck's wrongful conviction (one of Beck's more famous supporters was Arthur Conan Doyle). This cause was joined by Adolph Beck himself, when he was paroled in July 1901 for good behavior. Despite his dogged efforts to prove his innocence, fate was about to play another cruel joke on him.
[edit] Rearrest and conviction
On April 15, 1904, as he left his flat, a woman ran up to him, and accused Beck of defrauding her of her jewelry. Beck, horror-struck, denied the charge. The woman repeated her accusations and told him that someone was waiting to arrest him. Dazed with panic, he ran — to the waiting arms of a police inspector, who arrested him at once.
The woman, a servant by the name of Paulina Scott, filed a complaint that a gray-haired, distinguished looking gentleman had accosted her on the street, paid compliments to her, and subsequently divested her of her jewelry. The inspector figured it must be Beck again, being familiar with the case as it was already well-publicized. So he sent Paulina to the restaurant where Beck took his lunch. She did not recognize him but the inspector was undeterred by the woman's uncertainty and set a trap for him. Sure enough, Beck panicked, like a guilty man.
He was again put on trial on June 27 at the Old Bailey before Sir William Grantham. Five women identified him; based on this positive identification he was found guilty by the jury. However, the judge may have had his doubts about his guilt and postponed sentencing; ten days later something occurred that threw London into a state of indignation.
[edit] The truth about John Smith
On a routine visit to a local police station on August 7, an inspector from the Criminal Investigation Department was told of an arrest of a man who swindled some rings from a pair of unemployed actresses that afternoon. An alarm bell went off in the detective's head, being familiar with the Beck case. He asked for details. The details were very familiar but the alleged culprit, Adolph Beck, was already in jail, awaiting sentencing.
The inspector went to the new prisoner's cell. It held a gray-haired man, about Beck's height, with certain features which made him resemble Beck. However, Beck was younger and frailer in build, and the man had a scar at the right side of his neck as Ottilie Meissoner had remembered. The prisoner had given his name as William Thomas, but the inspector, convinced that he was John Smith, informed Scotland Yard. The five women who identified Beck in his second trial were brought in to confront Thomas. With stunning realization, they pointed at him as the swindler. Other women were brought in as well and shamefacedly admitted their error in identifying Beck. And when the landlord of John Smith in 1877 identified Thomas as his former tenant, the prisoner broke down and confessed.
"John Smith," of course, was an alias. So was "William Thomas," as well as another name that he affected, "William Wyatt." According to documents that recently came to light, his real name was Wilhelm Meyer, a Jew who had been born in Vienna and had graduated from its University. He studied leprosy in the Hawaiian Islands under Father Joseph Damien. He later became surgeon to the King of Hawaii, engaged in growing coffee, as well as various businesses in the United States before moving to London. Apparently he fell upon hard times when he stayed there, and turned to preying on women through fraud. When Beck was sent to prison in his place, Meyer had gone back to the United States and did not come back until 1903, apparently when he thought Beck had served out his sentence, and resumed his swindling until he was finally arrested. When brought to trial on September 15, Wilhelm Meyer pled guilty to those offences.
[edit] Aftermath
Adolph Beck was pardoned on July 27, 1904, and in compensation for his false imprisonment was awarded £5,000 (about £300,000 today). But the public denunciations of those who were responsible were only beginning to grow.
Eventually a Committee of Inquiry was established, headed by the noted jurist and Master of the Rolls Sir Richard Henn Collins. It heard evidence from all those involved in the case, including Horace Avory and Sir Forrest Fulton. In its report, it concluded that Adolph Beck should not have been convicted in the first place due to the many errors made by the prosecution in presenting its case as well as the ineptitude of Justice Fulton, who should have recused himself in the first place because of his involvement with the 1877 case, which served to prejudice the proceedings against Beck. For once and for all, the committee was completely satisfied that Beck was not Smith. It also criticized the Home Office for its indifference in acting on the case despite the fact that it had already known that Beck and Smith were not the same man since 1898, as it sought to preserve the credibility of the judiciary rather than admit or correct its mistakes.
As a direct result of the case, important reforms resulted, including the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907.
As for Adolph Beck, his exoneration brought him little consolation. He died a broken man in 1909.
[edit] References
- The Strange Case of Adolph Beck by Tim Coates (Stationery Office Books, 2001). ISBN 0-11-702414-7
- The Trial of Adolf Beck edited by Eric R. Watson (William Hodge and company, Notable British Trials series, 1924).
