Gaslight Villainy by Grahame Farrell

Author:Grahame Farrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

If Franz Stumm had been cognisant with the Matilda Hacker murder of four years earlier, he might have been inclined, during his lengthy imprisonment, to reflect on the several similarities between the tale of Miss Hannah Dobbs and that of Mrs. Elizabeth Stanger.

In both cases, we have a woman who in all probability committed murder and who, despite powerful suspicion of guilt, avoided a date with the hangman. As a directly-related sequel, legal retribution was instead meted out to their respective lovers, both of whom were European immigrants, for a lesser, though still serious, crime. The judge was the same in both cases, as were several of the prosecution and defence counsel. The two murders remained unsolved, and of course two unsuspecting wives felt the sting of marital betrayal but nevertheless welcomed their husbands back after their release from prison. Unfortunately for Elizabeth Stanger, however, there was no George Purkess to transform her (as he had transformed Hannah Dobbs) from a murder suspect into a minor media-celebrity, and, after the imprisonment of her lover Stumm, the contempt in which Mrs. Stanger was held by her neighbours made it impossible for her to continue in business.

Despite Mr. Justice Hawkins’s insistence, in his final address to him, that the suspicion of being an accessory to murder had borne no relation to the harsh sentence, Franz Stumm was doubtless perfectly aware that the authorities had been determined to pin something on him in the absence of tangible evidence of the murder of Urban Stanger. He probably knew, therefore, that he was being punished indirectly for Stanger’s murder, and, more obviously, for profiting from that murder. Thinly-veiled references hinting that Stanger had been done away with were, in fact, heard several times during the trial, leading Montagu Williams to question whether this was a forgery trial or a murder trial.

There was, for instance, the letter from Kreutznach allegedly written by Stanger but thought to be in Stumm’s handwriting and which he presumably went to Germany for the express purpose of posting; the unspoken suggestion at the trial was that the letter can only have been intended as a cover-up for what had really happened to Stanger. As for Elizabeth, it was pointed out that she had made no attempt to look for her husband and win him back, but had immediately called for Franz Stumm to take over the bakery, which clearly suggests that there was no longer a husband for her to await the return of. And four months after Stanger’s disappearance, in answer to George Geisel’s question about what would happen if Mr. Stanger did eventually return, Stumm had replied, with the conviction of a man who knew his facts, “He’s never coming back.”

Stumm’s sarcastic comments about British justice came from the heart, and were clearly expressive of his sense of outrage at his predicament. He was, after all, innocent of murder, but it would certainly not benefit him to expose his lover as the perpetrator, since he would then have had

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