to a man of butler's egregious vanity his trial was a glorious opportunity for displaying his intellectual gifts, such as they were. one who had known him in prison about this time describes him as a strange compound of vanity and envy, blind to his own faults and envious of the material advantages enjoyed by others. self-willed and arrogant, he could bully or whine with equal effect. despising men, he believed that if a man did not possess some requisite quality, he had only to ape it, as few would distinguish between the real and the sham.
but with all these advantages in the struggle for life, it is certain that butler's defence would have been far less effective had be{sic} been denied all professional aid. as a matter of fact, throughout his trial butler was being advised by three distinguished members of the new zealand bar, now judges of the supreme court, who though not appearing for him in court, gave him the full benefit of their assistance outside it. at the same time butler carried off the thing well. where imagination was required, butler broke down; he could not write sketches of life in prison; that was too much for his pedestrian intellect. but given the facts of a case, dealing with a transaction of which he alone knew the real truth, and aided by the advice and guidance of trained intellects, butler was unquestionably clever and shrewd enough to make the best use of such advantages in meeting the case against him.
thus equipped for the coming struggle, this high-browed ruffian, with his semi-intellectual cast of countenance, his jerky restless posturing, his splay-footed waddle, "like a lame muscovy duck," in the graphic words of his gaol companion, stood up to plead for his life before the supreme court at dunedin.
it may be said at the outset that butler profited greatly by the scrupulous fairness shown by the crown prosecutor. mr. haggitt extended to the prisoner a degree of consideration and forbearance, justified undoubtedly towards an undefended prisoner. but, as we have seen, butler was not in reality undefended. at every moment of the trial he was in communication with his legal advisers, and being instructed by them how to meet the evidence given against him. under these circumstances the unfailing consideration shown him by the crown prosecutor seems almost excessive. from the first moment of the trial butler was fully alive to the necessities of his situation. he refrained from including in his challenges of the jury the gentleman who was afterwards foreman; he knew he was all right, he said, because he parted his hair in the middle, a "softy," in fact. he did not know in all probability that one gentleman on the jury had a rooted conviction that the murder of the dewars was the work of a criminal lunatic. there was certainly nothing in butler's demeanour or behaviour to suggest homicidal mania.
the case against butler rested on purely circumstantial evidence.
no new facts of importance were adduced at the trial. the stealing of dewar's wages, which had been paid to him on the saturday, was the motive for the murder suggested by the crown. the chief facts pointing to butler's guilt were: his conversation with mallard and bain previous to the crime; his demeanour after it; his departure from dunedin; the removal of his moustache and the soles of his boots; his change of clothes and the bloodstains found upon them, added to which was his apparent inability to account for his movements on the night in question.
such as the evidence was, butler did little to shake it in cross-examination. his questions were many of them skilful and pointed, but on more than one occasion the judge intervened to save him from the danger common to all amateur cross-examiners, of not knowing when to stop. he was most successful in dealing with the medical witnesses. butler had explained the bloodstains on his clothes as smears that had come from scratches on his hands, caused by contact with bushes. this explanation the medical gentlemen with good reason rejected. but they went further, and said that these stains might well have been caused by the spurting and spraying of blood on to the murderer as he struck his victims. butler was able to show by the position of the bloodstains on the clothes that such an explanation was open to considerable doubt.
butler's speech in his defence lasted six hours, and was a creditable performance. its arrangement is somewhat confused and repetitious, some points are over-elaborated, but on the whole he deals very successfully with most of the evidence given against him and exposes the unquestionable weakness of the crown case. at the outset he declared that he had taken his innocence for his defence. "i was not willing," he said, "to leave my life in the hands of a stranger. i was willing to incur all the disadvantages which the knowledge of the law might bring upon me. i was willing, also, to enter on this case without any experience whatever of that peculiarly acquired art of cross-examination. i fear i have done wrong. if i had had the assistance of able counsel, much more light would have been thrown on this case than has been." as we have seen, butler enjoyed throughout his trial the informal assistance of three of the most able counsel in new zealand, so that this heroic attitude of conscious innocence braving all dangers loses most of its force. without such assistance his danger might have been very real.
a great deal of the evidence as to his conduct and demeanour at the time of the murder butler met by acknowledging that it was he who had broken into mr. stamper's house on the saturday morning, burgled it and set it on fire. his consciousness of guilt in this respect was, he said, quite sufficient to account for anything strange or furtive in his manner at that time. he was already known to the police; meeting bain on the saturday night, he felt more than ever sure that he was susspected{sic} of the robbery at mr. stamper's; he therefore decided to leave dunedin as soon as possible. that night, he said, he spent wandering about the streets half drunk, taking occasional shelter from the pouring rain, until six o'clock on the sunday morning, when he went to the scotia hotel. a more detailed account of his movements on the night of the dewars' murder he did not, or would not, give.
when he comes to the facts of the murder and his theories as to the nature and motive of the crime—theories which he developed at rather unnecessary length for the purpose of his own defence—his speech is interesting. it will be recollected that on the discovery of the murder, a knife was found on the grass outside the house. this knife was not the property of the dewars. in butler's speech he emphasised the opinion that this knife had been brought there by the murderer: "horrible though it may be, my conclusion is that he brought it with the intention of cutting the throats of his victims, and that, finding they lay in rather an untoward position, he changed his mind, and, having carried out the object with which he entered the house, left the knife and, going back, brought the axe with which he effected his purpose. what was the purpose of the murderer? was it the robbery of dewar's paltry wages? was it the act of a tiger broken loose on the community? an act of pure wanton devilry? or was there some more reasonable explanation of this most atrocious crime?"
butler rejected altogether the theory of ordinary theft. no thief of ambitious views, he said, would pitch upon the house of a poor journeyman butcher. the killing of the family appeared to him to be the motive: "an enemy hath done this." the murderer seems to have had a knowledge of the premises; he enters the house and does his work swiftly and promptly, and is gone. "we cannot know," butler continues, "all the passages in the lives of the murdered man or woman. what can we know of the hundred spites and jealousies or other causes of malice which might have caused the crime? if you say some obscure quarrel, some spite or jealousy is not likely to have been the cause of so dreadful a murder, you cannot revert to the robbery theory without admitting a motive much weaker in all its utter needlessness and vagueness. the prominent feature of the murder, indeed the only feature, is its ruthless, unrelenting, determined vindictiveness. every blow seemed to say, 'you shall die you shall not live.'"
whether butler were the murderer of the dewars or not, the theory that represented them as having been killed for the purpose of robbery has its weak side all the weaker if butler, a practical and ambitious criminal, were the guilty man.
in 1882, two years after butler's trial, there appeared in a new zealand newspaper, society, published in christchurch, a series of prison "portraits," written evidently by one who had himself undergone a term of imprisonment. one of the "portraits" was devoted to an account of butler. the writer had known butler in prison. according to the story told him by butler, the latter had arrived in dunedin with a quantity of jewellery he had stolen in australia. this jewellery he entrusted to a young woman for safe keeping. after serving his first term of two years' imprisonment in dunedin, butler found on his release that the young woman had married a man of the name of dewar. butler went to mrs. dewar and asked for the return of his jewellery; she refused to give it up. on the night of the murder he called at the house in cumberland street and made a last appeal to her, but in vain. he determined on revenge. during his visit to mrs. dewar he had had an opportunity of seeing the axe and observing the best way to break into the house. he watched the husband's return, and decided to kill him as well as his wife on the chance of obtaining his week's wages. with the help of the knife which he had found in the backyard of a hotel he opened the window. the husband he killed in his sleep, the woman waked with the first blow he struck her. he found the jewellery in a drawer rolled up in a pair of stockings. he afterwards hid it in a well-marked spot some half-hour before his arrest.
a few years after its appearance in society, this account of butler was reproduced in an auckland newspaper. bain, the detective, wrote a letter questioning the truth of the writer's statements. he pointed out that when butler first came to dunedin he had been at liberty only a fortnight before serving his first term of imprisonment, very little time in which to make the acquaintance of a woman and dispose of the stolen jewellery. he asked why, if butler had hidden the jewellery just before his arrest, he had not also hidden the opera-glasses which he had stolen from mr. stamper's house. neither of these comments is very convincing. a fortnight seems time enough in which a man of butler's character might get to know a woman and dispose of some jewellery; while, if butler were the murderer of mr. dewar as well as the burglar who had broken into stamper's house, it was part of his plan to acknowledge himself guilty of the latter crime and use it to justify his movements before and after the murder. bain is more convincing when he states at the conclusion of his letter that he had known mrs. dewar from childhood as a "thoroughly good and true woman," who, as far as he knew, had never in her life had any acquaintance with butler.
at the same time, the account given by butler's fellow-prisoner, in which the conduct of the murdered woman is represented as constituting the provocation for the subsequent crime, explains one peculiar circumstance in connection with the tragedy, the selection of this journeyman butcher and his wife as the victims of the murderer. it explains the theory, urged so persistently by butler in his speech to the jury, that the crime was the work of an enemy of the dewars, the outcome of some hidden spite, or obscure quarrel; it explains the apparent ferocity of the murder, and the improbability of a practical thief selecting such an unprofitable couple as his prey. the rummaged chest of drawers and the fact that some trifling articles of jewellery were left untouched on the top of them, are consistent with an eager search by the murderer for some particular object. against this theory of revenge is the fact that butler was a malignant ruffian and liar in any case, that, having realised very little in cash by the burglary at stamper's house, he would not be particular as to where he might get a few shillings more, that he had threatened to do a tigerish deed, and that it is characteristic of his vanity to try to impute to his crime a higher motive than mere greed or necessity.
butler showed himself not averse to speaking of the murder in cumberland street to at least one of those, with whom he came in contact in his later years. after he had left new zealand and returned to australia, he was walking in a street in melbourne with a friend when they passed a lady dressed in black, carrying a baby in her arms. the baby looked at the two men and laughed. butler frowned and walked rapidly away. his companion chaffed him, and asked whether it was the widow or the baby that he was afraid of. butler was silent, but after a time asked his companion to come into some gardens and sit down on one of the seats, as he had something serious to say to him. for a while butler sat silent. then he asked the other if he had ever been in dunedin. "yes," was the reply. "look here," said butler, "you are the only man i ever made any kind of confidant of. you are a good scholar, though i could teach you a lot." after this gracious compliment he went on: "i was once tried in dunedin on the charge of killing a man, woman and child, and although innocent, the crime was nearly brought home to me. it was my own ability that pulled me through. had i employed a professional advocate, i should not have been here to-day talking to you." after describing the murder, butler said: "trying to fire the house was unnecessary, and killing the baby was unnecessary and cruel. i respect no man's life, for no man respects mine. a lot of men i have never injured have tried to put a rope round my neck more than once. i hate society in general, and one or two individuals in particular. the man who did that murder in dunedin has, if anything, my sympathy, but it seems to me he need not have killed that child." his companion was about to speak. butler stopped him. "now, don't ever ask me such a silly question as that," he said. "what?" asked his friend. "you were about to ask me if i did that deed," replied butler, "and you know perfectly well that, guilty or innocent, that question would only be answered in one way." "i was about to ask nothing of the kind," said the other, "for you have already told me that you were innocent." "good!" said butler, "then let that be the end of the subject, and never refer to it again, except, perhaps, in your own mind, when you can, if you like, remember that i said the killing of the child was unnecessary and cruel."
having developed to the jury his theory of why the crime was committed, butler told them that, as far as he was concerned, there were four points against him on which the crown relied to prove his guilt. firstly, there was the fact of his being in the neighbourhood of the crime on the sunday morning; that, he said, applied to scores of other people besides himself. then there was his alleged disturbed appearance and guilty demeanour. the evidence of that was, he contended, doubtful in any case, and referable to another cause; as also his leaving dunedin in the way and at the time he did. he scouted the idea that murderers are compelled by some invisible force to betray their guilt. "the doings of men," he urged, "and their success are regulated by the amount of judgment that they possess, and, without impugning or denying the existence of providence, i say this is a law that holds good in all cases, whether for evil or good. murderers, if they have the sense and ability and discretion to cover up their crime, will escape, do escape, and have escaped. many people, when they have gravely shaken their heads and said 'murder will out,' consider they have done a great deal and gone a long way towards settling the question. well, this, like many other stock formulas of old world wisdom, is not true. how many murders are there that the world has never heard of, and never will? how many a murdered man, for instance, lies among the gum-trees of victoria, or in the old abandoned mining-shafts on the diggings, who is missed by nobody, perhaps, but a pining wife at home, or helpless children, or an old mother? but who were their murderers? where are they? god knows, perhaps, but nobody else, and nobody ever will." the fact, he said, that he was alleged to have walked up cumberland street on the sunday morning and looked in the direction of the dewars' house was, unless the causes of superstition and a vague and incomplete reasoning were to be accepted as proof, evidence rather of his innocence than his guilt. he had removed the soles of his boots, he said, in order to ease his feet in walking; the outer soles had become worn and ragged, and in lumps under his feet. he denied that he had told bain, the detective, that he would break out as a desperate tiger let loose on the community; what he had said was that he was tired of living the life of a prairie dog or a tiger in the jungle.
butler was more successful when he came to deal with the bloodstains on his clothes. these, he said, were caused by the blood from the scratches on his hands, which had been observed at the time of his arrest. the doctors had rejected this theory, and said that the spots of blood had been impelled from the axe or from the heads of the victims as the murderer struck the fatal blow. butler put on the clothes in court, and was successful in showing that the position and appearance of certain of the blood spots was not compatible with such a theory. "i think," he said, "i am fairly warranted in saying that the evidence of these gentlemen is, not to put too fine a point on it, worth just nothing at all."
butler's concluding words to the jury were brief but emphatic: "i stand in a terrible position. so do you. see that in your way of disposing of me you deliver yourselves of your responsibilities."
in the exercise of his forbearance towards an undefended prisoner, mr. haggitt did not address the jury for the crown. at four o'clock the judge commenced his summing-up. mr. justice williams impressed on the jury that they must be satisfied, before they could convict the prisoner, that the circumstances of the crime and the prisoner's conduct were inconsistent with any other reasonable hypothesis than his guilt. there was little or no evidence that robbery was the motive of the crime. the circumstance of the prisoner being out all saturday night and in the neighbourhood of the crime on sunday morning only amounted to the fact that he had an opportunity shared by a great number of other persons of committing the murder. the evidence of his agitation and demeanour at the time of his arrest must be accepted with caution. the evidence of the blood spots was of crucial importance; there was nothing save this to connect him directly with the crime. the jury must be satisfied that the blood on the clothes corresponded with the blood marks which, in all probability, would be found on the person who committed the murder. in regard to the medical testimony some caution must be exercised. where medical gentlemen had made observations, seen with their own eyes, the direct inference might be highly trustworthy, but, when they proceeded to draw further inferences, they might be in danger of looking at facts through the spectacles of theory; "we know that people do that in other things besides science—politics, religion, and so forth." taking the crown evidence, at its strongest, there was a missing link; did the evidence of the bloodstains supply it? these bloodstains were almost invisible. could a person be reasonably asked to explain how they came where they did? could they be accounted for in no other reasonable way than that the clothes had been worn by the murderer of the dewars?
in spite of a summing-up distinctly favourable to the prisoner, the jury were out three hours. according to one account of their proceedings, told to the writer, there was at first a majority of the jurymen in favour of conviction. but it was saturday night; if they could not come to a decision they were in danger of being locked up over sunday. for this reason the gentleman who held an obstinate and unshaken belief that the crime was the work of a homicidal maniac found an unexpected ally in a prominent member of a church choir who was down to sing a solo in his church on sunday, and was anxious not to lose such an opportunity for distinction. whatever the cause, after three hours' deliberation the jury returned a verdict of "not guilty." later in the session butler pleaded guilty to the burglary at mr. stamper's house, and was sentenced to eighteen years' imprisonment. the severity of this sentence was not, the judge said, intended to mark the strong suspicion under which butler laboured of being a murderer as well as a burglar.
the ends of justice had been served by butler's acquittal. but in the light of after events, it is perhaps unfortunate that the jury did not stretch a point and so save the life of mr. munday of toowong. butler underwent his term of imprisonment in littleton jail. there his reputation was most unenviable. he is described by a fellow prisoner as ill-tempered, malicious, destructive, but cowardly and treacherous. he seems to have done little or no work; he looked after the choir and the library, but was not above breaking up the one and smashing the other, if the fit seized him.
