The Case Against Owen Williams (33 page)

“I have not had the advantage of having coached this witness like my learned friend,” Dorkin said, borrowing Whidden's term a little sarcastically, “but perhaps I might use him to fill in some other aspects of Private Williams's background. You mentioned that Private Williams's father died when Williams was very young. Perhaps you might tell us what he died of.”

“He died from lung trouble.”

“As a result of being gassed in the Great War?”

“So they said.”

“I believe that two of the senior Williams brothers were also killed in the war, were they not? And a brother of Mrs. Williams also?”

“Yes.”

“All, I believe within a few months of each other, so that it is not perhaps surprising that Mrs. Williams may have discouraged her only remaining child from volunteering for another war.”

“Maybe not.”

“Tell me, Mr. Whittaker, what happened to Mrs. Williams's farm when she died?”

“It came to me.”

“What do you mean, it came to you?”

“I helped her out, and when she died the farm came to me to pay off the debt.”

“How much was that debt?”

“I don't remember.”

“You are under oath.”

“Three hundred dollars.”

“You already had a large farm of your own?”

“Yes.”

“It didn't occur to you that since this woman was your sister-in-law you might have let her son have the farm rather than seize it for debts which were a fraction of its worth?”

“I object,” Whidden said. “These are matters which have nothing to do with this trial.”

“I must agree,” Dunsdale said.

“I am establishing,” Dorkin said, “that this witness is hostile to my client as people often are towards those whom they have wronged and that his testimony, which has obviously been orchestrated by the prosecution, is not to be trusted. Reluctance or no reluctance, I ask the jury to reflect on the character of a man who would agree to come into a court of law in order to slander a nephew who is on trial for his life in the way that Mr.Whittaker has done here today.”

“You are out of order, Lieutenant Dorkin,” Dunsdale said. “Do you have any further questions for this witness that are of relevance to these proceedings?”

“No,” Dorkin said, turning away with contempt. “No, your Honour, I do not.”

“Very well,” Dunsdale said. “You may step down, Mr. Whittaker, and we will have your next witness, Mr. Whidden.”

Like the Mounties, Dr. Martin Sachs had not been sitting at the back with the commoner class of witness but had a place just behind Whidden. He was a small, middle-aged man in a dark pinstripe suit. His head was bald almost to the crown and the few strands of black hair that were left were combed straight across the top. He had a small moustache and wore round, steel-rimmed glasses, a combination that gave him a superficial resemblance to Heinrich Himmler.

As he took his place in the witness box, he studied Dorkin briefly, then looked calmly away, as if to say that none of this was about any of that. Whidden led him through the credentials that established his status as an expert witness: degree in Psychiatry from the University of London, two years of study in Vienna, several years work as a consultant in London, now for some twelve years a psychiatrist in practice in Montreal and a consultant with a special interest in criminal psychiatry, in which capacity he had appeared as an expert witness in trials in various parts of eastern Canada.

He answered Whidden's questions in a precise, measured voice with a trace of a British accent but also with something slightly guttural as if his native language had been something other than English—German perhaps. Or Austrian? As he spoke, his eyes moved about the courtroom, fixing one point after another, then, as if having categorized them to his satisfaction, moving on: Williams, Dorkin again, the crowds behind and above Dorkin, the jury, Whidden's entourage, and back to Whidden himself.

“Now, Dr. Sachs,” Whidden said, “I would like to pose a number of purely theoretical questions before we turn to pertinent areas of the present case. First of all, I would like to ask you if it is possible for someone to commit a murder—even a very violent murder— and then to all appearances behave normally.”

“Yes, that is certainly possible. Not common, but possible.There are numerous authenticated cases of this phenomenon.”

“Perhaps you could explain what sort of person would be capable of this.”

“Certainly,” Sachs said, settling himself in. “It requires a personality which is capable of profound acts of repression. He div-ides his mind into two compartments, and he relegates to one part anything which is inconsistent with the image he has of himself in the other part. It will be easier to understand this if I point out that we all do this in some measure. We all create a certain image of ourselves and try to realize that image in our lives, or at least in our fantasies, but we all do things which are inconsistent with that image and which therefore we do not approve of. We then employ various mechanisms to reconcile ourselves to these actions. The simplest mechanism is just to forget what we have done. Another mechanism is to dissociate ourselves from the action. One often hears people say, ‘I don't know what made me do that.' Or more significantly, ‘I was not myself when I did that.' In the case of someone continuing to behave normally after committing a murder, you have an extreme case of that. The murderer has convinced himself that it was not really he who committed the murder, and so afterwards he behaves as if indeed he had not. Needless to say, such a person is extremely dangerous since he has no moral controls placed upon his actions.”

Sachs delivered all this in a formal, academic tone, looking slowly back and forth over the crowd as if giving a lecture to a class of low-level undergraduates. Dorkin wondered if he were, in fact, repeating one of his own lectures.

“Would such a person remember what he had done?” Whidden asked.

“Generally, yes. But he has dissociated himself from it. He knows that it happened, but does not regard himself as having done it.”

“And at the time of the murder, would such a person be aware of the criminal nature of what he was doing?”

“Again, I would say generally, yes. In some cases, it would be precisely because he regarded the act as criminal that he was doing it. It would represent an escape from the restrictions which he normally places upon himself. I should perhaps have explained that one of the mechanisms behind such a person's ability to dissociate himself from actions he disapproves of is that he has been brought up in an intensely repressive environment. He will have been brought up to believe that so many things are wrong that the only way he can live with himself and his own frailties is to develop an extreme capacity for dissociating himself from his own actions.”

“A number of witnesses in the present case,” Whidden said, “have commented on the fact that in the days immediately after the dance, Private Williams behaved perfectly normally. I take it that this does not preclude the possibility of his being the murderer.”

“No, it does not. But I could not say with any definiteness whether Private Williams would have been capable of behaving in such a way without conducting a detailed examination.”

“I understand. Now another question. You have familiarized yourself with the facts of this case. On the basis of these facts, what would you conclude about the personality of the murderer?”

“Most obviously, the degree of violence done to the body was far in excess of what was needed merely to kill the victim. It seems evident that the murderer was not merely concerned with preventing her from identifying him as having raped her. He was clearly activated also by a violent, irrational hatred. Such violence is not uncommon in cases of rape.”

“Could you explain the reasons for this?”

“There can be many. But the most common is that the rapist has a fundamental hatred of women. After the sexual act is completed, he experiences a violent sense of revulsion, but instead of directing this against himself, he displaces it and directs it against his victim.”

“Perhaps you could explain the kind of background that is likely to produce such attitudes.”

As Dorkin studied him, Sachs sat up a little straighter in his chair and launched into another lecture.

“It arises most commonly from a situation in which the individual has a strong attachment to the mother. This precludes his having normal relationships with girls his own age, but the sexual drive is often still there and may be all the stronger for being re-pressed. In the event that he does have sexual relations, whatever the circumstances, he feels that he has been unfaithful to the mother and experiences a consequent sense of guilt. This he displaces by regarding the girl as dirty and as having led him into an act he is now repelled by. In the extreme case of the rapist, this often leads to murder, as I have already explained. I should say also, perhaps, that the individual who has this kind of strong attachment to the mother also in the unconscious part of his mind hates his mother because of her emotional domination of him, and the hatred and violence he may direct against other women is fuelled in part by this subconscious hatred of his mother.”

“You have heard,” Whidden said, “that Private Williams was in effect an only child with a strong attachment to a possessive mother, who was also very strict about moral matters. Would you say that this is the kind of background which might produce the kind of psychological abnormalities which you have been describing?”

“Yes, such a background does often result in this kind of psychological maladjustment, but it does not, of course, necessarily lead to the commission of violent criminal acts.”

“I understand,” Whidden said. “I am merely trying to establish that the apparent normality of Private Williams's behaviour after the dance is not necessarily inconsistent with his being the murderer and that his background is not inconsistent with his being the kind of person who might commit such a murder. Are those fair statements?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” Whidden said. “You have been most informative.”

Dorkin had listened to all this with gathering anger. Just as Whidden had waved his magic wand and replaced the untidy chaos of the night of Sarah's murder with the neatly defined world of Drost's charts, so now he was replacing the actual Williams with this fictional monster dredged up from Sachs's psychoanalytic ideologies. Dorkin could not imagine that Whidden himself believed this windy bullshit. As for the jury, he could not be sure. In other circumstances, with their ploddingly literal view of the world, they almost certainly would not, but in these circumstances most of them would be prepared to believe almost anything that would help justify retroactively the condemnation of Williams that Dorkin felt sure they had decided on before they had ever entered the courtroom. All of this, Dorkin felt sure, Whidden would understand only too well.

“Dr. Sachs,” Dorkin said, keeping his voice as level as he could, “this is a trial in which a human life is at stake, and you have consented to come here and with no examination whatever of the accused—without ever having so much as laid eyes on him until you saw him here this afternoon—you have used your professional stature to conduct a campaign of vicious innuendo designed to establish in the minds of the jury an image of him as a pathological monster.”

“I have done no such thing,” Sachs said, his voice quite unruffled as that of someone long accustomed to attacks by the ignorant. “I have merely given answers to a series of hypothetical questions about the minds of certain kinds of murderer. I have said nothing whatever about Private Williams himself, as I was careful to point out.”

“If you are giving testimony that is not supposed to relate to Private Williams,” Dorkin asked, “might I ask you what it is you think you are doing in this courtroom?”

“I have already explained,” Sachs said, unperturbed.

“Your Honour,” Dorkin said to Dunsdale, “I am astonished at the dishonesty of what is taking place here. I ask you to instruct the jury to disregard all of this testimony as having no basis whatever in fact.”

“Well now, Lieutenant Dorkin,” Dunsdale said, “I do think that Dr. Sachs has made clear that what he has said doesn't necessarily relate to Private Williams, and I am sure the jury will keep that in mind. Do you have any further questions, Lieutenant Dorkin?”

“I have not,” Dorkin said.

As he sat down, he saw that Whidden had leaned over to talk to McKiel. Watching them, Dorkin sensed the falsity in their manner, as if in a badly rehearsed play, and realized that something more was up.

“Your Honour,” Whidden said, turning back to the bench, “we have decided not to wear out the patience of the court and of our good jurors with a parade of supplementary witnesses. This there-fore concludes the case for the prosecution. Tomorrow, we will turn matters over to the learned counsel for the defence.”