Read The Ability to Kill for Free Online

newspapers which over-reported his case (with the eager assistance of the police and other prejudiced informants) before the trial began. It is possible that he will have sufficient nuisance value to succeed in obtaining settlements out of court. It is also possible that he will be so sick and tired of the whole ghastly episode, and so anxious to minimise the no-smoke-without-fire damage already done to his reputation, that he will decide to accept his loss, avoid further notoriety and efface himself as quickly as possible.
    For the social and psychological damage that may be done to the innocent man by due process of law there would appear to be no practical remedy. Obviously, the Crown must be privileged. Certainly, improved methods of criminal investigation and stricter police disciplines have tended to reduce the number of persons mistakenly indicted. But, when the inevitable mistake is shown to have been made, it would seem that the victim ought properly to be reimbursed for the costs of his defence, if he has had to pay them. Whether he is, indeed,lucky, or whether he has been most unlucky and much ill-used, the fact remains that a jury has found him to be not guilty. He is, at least, entitled to go financially unscathed.
    I have since learned more about the cost of being tried for murder. This is not only a British problem.
    In 1960, when I was in America,
Life
magazine asked me to write an article about a murder trial which had just began in Los Angeles. The defendants were Dr R. Bernard Finch and Miss Carole Tregoff. They were accused jointly of having murdered the doctor’s wife.
    The Finch-Tregoff trial (as it was called) was in the rich, rococo tradition of great American courtroom dramas. It had everything which that tradition demands: love, lust, passion, hate, greed, adultery, plots, counterplots, sensational disclosures. It had a cast of characters which included beautiful blondes, beautiful brunettes, Hollywood stars (or, at any rate, near-stars), hired killers, private eyes, and Perry-Mason-like attorneys. Los Angeles had given of its best; and intended to make the most of it.
    I had been told that it was a pleasure to do a story for
Life
, and so it proved. It was assumed that you knew what you were doing and you were left to do it. If you asked for help you received it, promptly. One day I called for the police record of an obscure Minneapolis gangster, as well as for the details of the private financial arrangements existing between the defendant and his lawyer. Both sets of facts were delivered without fuss the same afternoon.
    My only regret was that
Life
had decided to publish the piece before the trial ended. This meant that I had to be circumspect. Although I was allowed (as I certainly would not have been allowed in England) to use information not brought out in evidence at the trial, I could not say all the things I would have liked to say. It was not so much that the case was
sub judice
—the risk of being held in contempt of court was apparently slight—as the fear of attracting massive libel suits if the defendants were acquitted and advised that they had been given grounds. Obviously,
Life
was going to see that there were no such grounds. The number of ‘if-we-are-to-believe’s,’ ‘it-seems-that’s,’ and ‘according to’s,’ that I was obliged to use, gave the piece, I thought, a shifty air. It is possible, now, to be more explicit.
    The A6 murder trial interested me for a special reason.
    Some years ago, I became involved, as a witness, in a case concerning the ‘taking and driving away’ of a car. The car was mine. A question arose as to my identification of the driver. The circumstances were these:
    I was living in London at the time. One Saturday, two youths in their late ’teens knocked at the door and asked if I wanted my car washed. They regularly washed cars for several of my neighbours, they said. Their charges were reasonable. I told them that they could start the