The Sun.
London, England, 1853-01-27 00:00:00

THE CONVICT KIRWAN.

DUBLIN, JAN. 25.—The follower letter, from "One
of the Jury," and published in the Weekly Freeman, of
Sunday last, having created quite a sensation here, as
being the most conclusive evidence of Kirwan's guilt yet
published (if any such thing were required after his trial),
We give it in extenso :
" THE CONVICT KIRWAN.

"TO THE EDITOR OF THE FREEMAN.

"Sir,—As one of those whose decision and conduct
in the case of Kirwan have been made the subject of so
much unfair animadversion and wicked misrepresen-
tation, I claim a portion of your space to vindicate the
verdict, and my own honesty as well as humanity. It
might have been fairly supposed that Mr. Dennis' letter
would have set these questions at rest for ever, but the
subsequent renewed attacks upon us render another
answer necessary.
" Two main points were submitted by the learned
judge for our consideration. First, was the deceased
lady murdered ? Second, if she was murdered, whose
hand did the deed ?

"On considering the first question we had the fol- I
lowing circumstances laid before us on the oaths of the
fairest and most perfectly indifferent witnesses I ever
knew produced upon a trial, not one of them having had
any previous knowledge of the parties which would lead
them either to favour or to condemn the accused. The
unfre-
quented for such
and at
dpawas
place,
caafehad been
veryu which singularlynd
different
gaeewcelr
accustomed
are
ues adaptedwnsattaso
vpmeanerr
no
body was found in a place unfit for bathing and
eahe u
sr
ep;pnuuutieoebosdasbete:oh,cdieabnyanugs
oftniceoof r
theba
bathing cap on, and there was a sheet partly about it.
Every effort was made by the prisoner's counsel to
he
shake this part of the case, but he only proved it the
ast
placeenat
island.
forut hrwtdeh
more indisputably. The woman who washed the body,
as well as the men who found it, proved that one
eye was closely shut, the other partly open, starting
in fact from the socket, the whites of both suffused
with blood—the nose bent 'over on one side of the
face—the tongue protruding from the mouth, and bitten
by the teeth above and below—the hair filled with sea-
weed, there being no seaweed near where the body was
found, and none nearer than high-water mark—the
hands were turned back and clenched—the belly so hol-
low that the women described it as sticking to the
back bone,' although tha,deceased was alleged by pri-
soner's counsel to have eaten a very full meal shortly
before she was found—the sides blackened uniformly
from the armpits to the hips, not bruised in patches or
spots from knocking against rocks,. but uniformly dis-
coloured from the effects of violent congestion, one of
the earrings torn out of the ear, and the piece of the
lobe hanging on—several scratches about the face and
neck, and blood issuing from the ears, nipples, and lower
part of the person. Such were the marks, and, as an
additional circumstance, the deceased's bathing cap was
found a few days after amongst the seaweed and sand
above high-water mark some score of yards from where
the body was found.
" Now, sir, these circumstances are totally incompa-
tible with accidental drowning or death from epilepsy.
They were compatible with only one state of things—
death by suffocation and compression on dry land, where
the seaweed lay upon the sand. The hour of the death was
proved by several independent witnesses, who accurately
time the three horrible shrieks of the dying woman as
having been uttered a few minutes after seven o'clock
in the evening. It was evident at about that hour the
unfortunate lady had been decoyed to the spot where
her bathing cap was found, and there thrown down, the
damp sheet held fercibly down upon her face, whilst her
murderer knelt upon her belly ; and that in her struggles
to tear down the sheet from her mouth, she tore the ear-
ring out of her ear, and scratched her own face and neck ;
that she succeeded three times in freeing her mouth for
an instant, and that it was then she uttered those fearful
shrieks which were described by the witnesses as having
been cut off.' Thus, and thus only, could her nose
have been bent, and one of her eyes kept from bursting
out with congestion—thus was her belly stuck as far at
least as the depth of his own knees, and her body com-
mitted to the ebbing tide, he not seeing the little rock
which finally stopped it, and over which there was then
21 inches of water. When he returned to gather up the
clothes and put them where they were to be found, he
lost sight of or dropped the bathing cap, which too much
resembled the seaweed to be readily noticed.
" Thus, sir, of the fact of the lady having been mur-
dered and most cunningly murdered, there was not the
shadow of doubt. The next question was—Who was
the murderer I
"Her husband stood before us charged with being the
man. Under what circumstances charged ?
"He was a bad husband. That was not muoh in
itself.
" It is false to say we were prejudiced by hearing that
he had borne a bad character. We did not know that
he was charged with having previously murdered and
robbed three or four other persons—with having been a
notorious seducer—with having been posted in Dublin as
a seducer and a coward, and having been beaten nearly
to death by the brother of one of his many victims. All
those things have come to light since the commuta-
tion of his sentence. Not one of them was laid
before the court and jury at the trial. It was merely
proved that by one woman (not his wife) he had seven
or eight children. We judged rather of his conduct,
than his possible or probable motives. We looked at
these facts.
"That eight o'clock in the eve= • g of the 6th of Sep-
tember, when the sun set at twenty-two minutes after
six, and when the weather was cold, showery, and, un-
inviting, was a strange time to appoint for the boatman
to call for a party who would then have been 10 hours
in the open air on that bleak island ; that there was
scarcely light at seven o'clock for an artist to work by ;
that, consequently, at five or ten minutes after seven,
Kirwan must have been perforce unoccupied, and
relaxed from his occupation, and he could not but have
heard those frightful death-shrieks of his wife, which
after passing right over the whole of the island, startled
a seaman in his boat and made him call to his mates
who were in the cabin ; that when he must have been
altogether idle from a quarter past seven until eight
o'clock, twilight having faded into night, he did not seek
for his wife, who was to return with him, and with whom
it was pretended he had any quarrel, his defence being
that, on the contrary, he was most particularly fond of
and kind to her ; that from the position in which she lay
he must have readily and at once found both her body
and her clothes, had he looked for her before night closed
in • that when the boatmen came he was waiting at the
landing-place, and that they—not he—were the first to
ask where she was ; that when the search was com-
menced, his stumbling near where the body was found,
and where there was nothing to account for it, was sus-
picious, especially when its effect was to put forward
Nangle, so as that he should have found the body ; that
the finding of the clothes was also surrounded by suspi-
cion ; that his throwing himself upon the body and ex-
hibiting frantic grief was so extreme a contrast to his

previous carelessness, that it could not be considered as
sincere by any rational man, nor as anything but acting
a studied part ; that his pretending to have lain on the
body for an hour in the same position while the
boatmen were going round was an overdone piece ,
of the same acting, and afforded a strong con-
trast
to his subsequent conduct in the house at Howth, ,
when he told the women who objected to changing the
appearance of the body, because the police would not ,
like it, that 'he did not care a d—n for the police,' and
that they 'must Wash the body;' that he was wet above
the knees, the boatman having distinctly proved that he
got no wet whilst in their company, and that such wet-
ting would exactly correspond with the supposition of
his having carried the body into the water, and set
it afloat ; that when Michael Nangle, the boatman, first
asked him ' where the mistress was,' he replied he had not
seen her for the last hour and a half, adding, ' she went
in that direction,' pointing towards the Long Hole—so
that, by his own admission, he knew whither she had
gone, and he therefore could, had he chosen, have gone
straight to where her body lay, and have readily found
it at any time, instead of leading the men round about
it until he made Pat Nangle find it.
"To conelude, sir. Had Mrs. Kirwan died in a fit of
epilepsy where she worked the seaweed into her hair,
she could not have worked along the sand and stoiea 30
or 40 yards to the water. Had she swam out far and
taken cramps, and so been drowned, she would not have
had her drying sheet with her. Mind, there is and was
no mistake about the sheet being partly under her
when she was found. Pat Nangle had tied it round the
body before Michael Nangle and Kirwan returned with
the shawl. Had she gone down to the water to wash
her feet, and so had fallen in and been drowned at the
very edge, she would have had her boots off, whereas
her boots were on. Had she died of fit and drowning
together—partly one, partly the other—she could not
have got seaweed in her hair—she could not have had
one eye shut closely up, whilst the white of it was as
much surcharged with blood as was the other protruding
eye—her nose could not have been bent down to one
side of her face—blood would not have been forced out
of every pore of her body—her belly would not have
been sticking to her backbone—her sides would not have
been uniformly blackened, the more especially as she
could not have been bruised against the rocks, for it was
distinctly proved `that the water in the Long Hole was
as smooth as that in a well.' And as to the blood, the
prisoner's counsel proved distinctly, by the cross-exami-
nation of the nurse-tender of '4O years' experience,' that
Mrs. Kirwan was not in a condition which would have
been a complete bar to her bathing. Nothing could
have been more complete than the proof on that point,
which, of course, was not fit for publication. The sug-
gestion that the,scratches on her face and the torn lobe
of her ear were the effects of crab-bites is too silly to re-
quire observation. That she had been'forcibly smothered
on dry land where there was seaweed, her murderer
kneeling on her'belly, and pressing the sheet so forcibly
on her face as to shut one of her starting eyes closely,
bend her nose aside, and swell her under lip, and that
he afterwards carried her body into the water, was as
evident as if a score of eye-witnesses testified to it ; that
her screams were uttered when, during her struggles,
she thrice succebded in pulling down the cloth from her
face, was quite clear ; and equally clear was it that she
had had herself thus scratched her face and torn her ear.
" In the struggle, too, she would not have scratched or
torn her assailant or his clothes, because all her efforts
would have been directed to obtaining air for herself;
and it is most probable that he divested himself of coat
and waistcoat before attacking her, in order both to save
his clothes from marks, and to give himself more free-
dom and power.
" Had she been murdered by another person, not her
husband, her shrieks would have called her husband to
her aid. The ruin he pretended to have been sketching,
was not 80 yards—it was precisely 218 feet from the
Long Hole. He could not have been occupied at the
hour, between day and dark, when the shrieks were
heard by five different witnesses, at points west, south,
and south-west of the island, at distances of half-a-mile,
a mile and a quarter, and a mile and a half—the evening
being still, and the little wind there was from the north-
east. He would not have spent the subsequent hour in
darkness and loneliness, well knowing that not a soul
had been on the: island besides himself and his wife since
four o'clock that afternoon, if he had not some very
weighty reason for it, and neither he nor his counsel at-
tempted to suggest any reason whatsoever for such an
extraordinary proceeding.
"Above all, Kirwan being a thorough anatomist—
an anatomical draftsman—a student in schools of ana-
tomy for 16 or 18 years, must have seen in a mo-
ment that his wife had been murdered—that she
certainly had not been 'accidentally drowned !' yet
he aided, if he did not persuade, the coroner's
jury to return that verdict, which he could not have be-
li3ved to be true. No ordinary husband would have been
so easily contented. But even a bad husband, being
fairly rid of the wife he hated, would have, either in
hypocritical pretence of love, or in selfish fear of her
murder being attributed to himself—seeing that there
was no one else to do it—ha-re pointed out the strange
signs about her, and mentioned his suspicions eitherthat
she had died of epilepsy, or had been murdered by some
who had reached the island in a boat, killed her, and
returned unobserved. Of course, nobody believes that
the poor lady during her life ever had epilepsy. But
Kirwan never could have expected, in the ordinary
course of things, to have got such a coroner, such a jury,
and such a substitute for a doctor as chance provided
him with ; and, therefore, he would have provided for
his own security from the cl Large of murder if he had
not been guilty of it, and p referred leading all parties
astray. And, finally, he would not have left his coun-
' sel to flounder through his defence in the dark, and to
catch at accidents arising in the course of the trial. He
I
would have given them a plain, unvarnished tale—not
suffered them to guess, and question, and invent theories
to account for circumstances which could not have
escapedc en, ~ h
Sir,e his
doubt wouldobservation,
if t
theh a v e
evidence feareda n 4
i w
bheoi
fel dh
oney, to hadhe
who
grapplebeensa
ww
i inno-
cent,
him
doo-
thn.n
the deed could have added much to the crushing weight
of those circumstances. Taken together, they left his
innocence impossible. I, sir, have long had a conscien-
tious objection to death punishment. I would strain a
point to save a culprit's life, but I could not perjure my-
self to save him ; I could not, turn it as I would, find a
shade of a shadow of a doubt in Kirwan's favour. I
deny, sir, as a most foul calumny, that he was found
guilty because he bore a bad previous character. I deny
that he was found guilty of murder because he admitted
that he was a long-professed adulterer. I deny that he
was found guilty because of his previous treatment to his
wife, or his threats to her, or on account of any of the
motives that had been suggested for his being likely to
have planned her violent death. He was found guilty
because the circumstances immediately attending upon,
and connected with, her death, were wholly and entirely
incompatible with his innocence under any form of sup-
position or explanation ; and every honest man, of
average sense or judgment, in the kingdom, who has
read over the reported evidence, imperfect and incom-
plete as it necessarily was, must come to the same con-
clusion.—l am, &c.,

" ONE OF THE JURY."

A WORD FOR THE GRAND DUKE OF TUSCANY.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES.
sir,—The Grand Duke, I perceive, has been severely
censured for his imprisonment of the Madiais. The
fact is, he has acted in dutiful obedience to his ecclesias-
tical superiors, and the latter have acted in full consis-
tency with the obligations of canon law. The able Car-
dinal who represents the Church of Rome in Ithis coun-
try will tell you what Dr. Murray, late Roman Catho-
lic Archbishop of Dublin, stated before the select com-
mittees of the two Houses of Parliament, May 17, 1825,
—that the Bull Unigenitus is received by the Roman
Catholic Church. It is part and parcel of the canon
law, and obligatory on the whole Roman Catholic
Church.

In this celebrated document you will find the "crime'
of the Madiais and the " duties" of the Grand Duke.
The following propositions are selected for condemna-
tion :

" 84. Abripere °Christian- "To snatch the New Tes-
orum manibus Novum Tea-• tament from the hands of
tamentum est illis Christi os Christians is to close the
obtutaxe. mouth of Christ against
them.
" 80. Lectio sacra Scrip- " The reading of the sacred
tura3 est pro omnibus. , Scripture is for all men.
" 85. Interdicere "To inhibit to Christians
naffs lectionem sacra Scrip- the reading of the sacred
tune est interdicere lucem Scripture is to inhibit light
filiis lucis. to the children of light.
" 79. Utile et neeessarium "It is useful and necessary
est omni tempore, omni loco, at all times, and iii all places,
et omni personarum generi, for all sorts of persons to
r
strider° et cognoscere spin- study and know the spirit,
turn pietatem, et mysteries piety, and myste ies of the
sacra Scriptura3." sacred Scriptures.'!

These are very simple truths, and very dear to Pro
testants.

After them the Church of Rome adds the following
censure :

" We respectively declare, condemn, and reprobate the
above inserted proposition as false, scandalous, impio-as,
blasphemous, heretical," Sze.
Having done so, the Church adds what so far justifies
the Grand Duke :

" We charge our venerable brethren, the patriarchs,
archbishops,- and bishops to coerce and coamel all who
oppose or resist, the aid of the secular arm being called in
for this purpose if necessary."
From the above extract from the canon law your
readers will see that the ecclesiastical authorities of
Florence have acted canonically, and that the Grand
Duke has acquitted himself as becomes an obedient sub-
ject and son of Holy Church.—l ara, sir your obedient
servant,
Jan. 25. JOHN CUMMING.