#TAVERN KEEPER MEN OF MAYHEM SERIES#

Yet in 1931 he published Murders and Mysteries: A Canadian Series (Macmillan of Canada, republished in 1975 by Hyperion Press), a collection of sixteen stories of headline-grabbing murders and mayhem. Who wrote Notes on Military Writing for English-Canadian Soldiers? Now you know. A clergymanвЂ™s son, he was editor of the stuffy academic journal the Canadian Historical Review, compiler of CanadaвЂ™s first homegrown encyclopedia, and author of long-forgotten books on fur traders, politicians, and explorers. ItвЂ™s tough to imagine a more unlikely true crime writer than Canadian historian, professor, librarian, and bookseller William Stewart Wallace. He soon abandoned true crime, however, in favor of biographies of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln and other worthies. Morse, as a lawyer, focuses on the legal aspects of these cases but also offers blunt and sometimes colorful assessments of the players. The jury, bombarded with contradictory opinions, declared her not guilty. The prosecutionвЂ™s forensic team was certain the general had been poisoned with antimony, but the defence produced numerous doctors who challenged the laboratory results and attributed his death to natural causes. It was an early courtroom battle between opposing medical experts.

#TAVERN KEEPER MEN OF MAYHEM TRIAL#

The jury, more interested in his aristocratic status than the evidence, acquitted him.ДЄ standout in the collection is the trial of Elizabeth Wharton of Baltimore for poisoning her friend, General W.S. Bonaparte denounced a newspaper editor as a traitor during a public spat, and when an unfortunate man showed up at his office in 1870 to deliver the journalistвЂ™s challenge to a duel, the hot-headed prince literally shot the messenger. In 1869 Jean-Baptiste Troppmann murdered eight members of a single family, including a two-year-old child, in an act of вЂњcold-blooded ferocity.вЂќ He contrasts officialdomвЂ™s condemnation of Troppmann with the kid-gloves treatment afforded Prince Pierre-NapolГ©on Bonaparte, the nephew of you-know-who. Morse follows up the Tichborne marathon with accounts of two French trials. Orton was convicted and KenealyвЂ™s outrageous conduct earned from Chief Justice Alexander Cockburn what Morse terms вЂњthe longest, severest and best merited rebuke ever administered from the bench to a member of the bar.вЂќ When the tongue-lashing ended, lawyers in the gallery applauded. OrtonвЂ™s lawyer, the feisty Irish barrister Edward Kenealy, attacked Hawkins, bullied witnesses, and sparred with the judges even as his case became a shipwreck like the one that had claimed TichborneвЂ™s life.

Thousands thronged to theatres to hear Orton speak and cheered him on from outside the courthouse. Many refused to believe he was an imposter to LondonвЂ™s downtrodden masses, he was a victim of an upper-class conspiracy to deny him his birthright.

But the case became a study in popular delusion. A succession of witnesses swore he was not Tichborne or identified him as Orton. Prosecutor Henry Hawkins, soon to become a judge himself, systematically exposed Orton as a liar and a bad one at that-he knew little about the man he was impersonating. It takes up two-thirds of Famous Trials and provides a blow-by-blow account of the evidence, legal arguments, and the bitter verbal jousting between counsel and the three judges who presided. While his account is based on newspaper reports, he had so much material on вЂњthis greatest and most remarkable of all trials, ancient or modernвЂќ that he felt compelled to expand his original law review article. Morse did not attend the London trial on the criminal charges, which lasted an incredible 188 days. When the civil courts rejected his claim, he was charged with forgery and perjury. A brazen conman, he posed as Sir Roger Tichborne, the heir to an English fortune who was believed to have died in a shipwreck. He leads off with a lengthy account of the 1873 prosecution of Arthur Orton. MorseвЂ™s Famous Trials (Little, Brown & Company) appeared in 1874 and collects essays on high-profile cases of the time that he published in the American Law Review. ItвЂ™s one of four vintage collections of true crime cases-available as reprints or from used book retailers-that offer a trove of intriguing but long-forgotten tales from courtrooms in the U.S., Canada, Britain, and France.

Think the explosion of interest in true crime is a new thing? Boston lawyer and historian John Torrey Morse jumped on the bandwagon back in the 1870s when he published a compendium of six cases that run the gamut from fraud to murder. Arthur Orton, the Tichborne Claimant, as portrayed in Vanity Fair in 1871.

Tavern keeper men of mayhem