Truly Criminal by Martin Edwards

Author:Martin Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750964432
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2015-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

Means, Motive, Opportunity

Fitzgibbon’s further enquiries went nowhere but McDowell and Vaughan had been busy with Buchs and now believed that they could prove he had the means, motive and opportunity to murder Eliza Shapera. Buchs was living at No. 58 and so could access the rear of No. 56 without being seen. He knew Shapera, could watch the house and know when she was alone and had probably heard the same gossip Vaughan did about the $200 she kept about the place – the means. They soon found that he had motive too. McDowell had visited a local Chinese general store and discovered that earlier in the month Buchs had signed chits (promises to pay) for $102.80. The shop assistant he questioned, Kwang Ling, hadn’t been authorized to extend credit to Buchs as his boss thought the Indian unreliable, but he had done so anyway. Buchs owed the money and had not been able to settle the bill. He was broke.

And Buchs had opportunity. Asked about his whereabouts on the Wednesday Shapera’s body was discovered, Buchs claimed that he had gone to an Indian food store in the French Concession to collect food he had previously ordered on Tuesday evening. He claimed to have arrived there at 1 p.m. and remained for six hours, meaning he would have returned home to Lien Yow’s about 7 p.m., as she had claimed. However, the Indian shopkeeper told Vaughan when he visited the store that Buchs had left at 4 p.m. This left the hours between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Wednesday unaccounted for.

Buchs claimed he had gone to the house of some fellow Indians on Hongkew’s Sawgin Road for a bath, a winding road that ran alongside the rather fetid and stinking Sawgin Creek. McDowell and Vaughan visited the house on the street that was well known to them as one that housed generally undesirable and indigent Chinese and foreigners – a few months before, a major gang of Chinese armed robbers had been arrested holed up in a house on Sawgin Road. The Indians at the house denied that Buchs had come there for a bath, indeed they denied ever knowing him. His alibi was shot through with holes he couldn’t explain.

Means, motive, opportunity. McDowell prepared the prosecution case for Rex v. Buchs at the HM Police Court before Police Magistrate J.C.E. Douglas. The British Police Court was part of the British Supreme Court for China and Korea. It dealt with minor criminal cases and committal hearings involving British subjects.

Infuriatingly, while Douglas decided there was a case to answer and agreed to a committal hearing, the Court’s appointed doctor felt Buchs should go to a hospital first for psychiatric tests to assess his worthiness to be tried. The case was postponed for a week.

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