The Long Arm of Coincidence. clothes consisted of a suit exactly like the one he was wearing, it was within the bounds of possibility that the witnesses, who swore that they had seen him at Reigate on the day of the murder, might have mistaken his double, Gertensberg, for him. But there was something else the prisoner had to explain. When his lodgings in Whitechapel were searched, there was found a woolen shirt which he admitted to be his — this shirt was tied up in a bundle with a piece of string, and this string was " rublay cord" of precisely the same manufacture as that which had been sold to the two foreigners at Reigate on the day of the murder. The prisoner's explanation was that he had picked up the bit of string casually in a street close to his lodgings — it was lying on the pave ment outside a tobacconist's shop. He re membered this, because it was on coming out of the shop, after buying half an ounce of tobacco, that he saw the string and picked it up. Here was the weak place in his story; for the manufacturer of the string was called and swore that it was the same uncommon kind as that with which the hands and feet of the murdered woman were bound — that it was his own special manufacture, unlike that made by any other manufacturer — that the woman who had sold the ball of string to the two foreigners was an old customer of his, and that he had recently sent her a con signment of that particular kind of " rublay cord." It was extremely unlikely that a piece of that peculiar string, his own special make, should be picked up casually in the streets of London where very little of it was used. The prisoner was also asked to say where he was at the time the murder was com mitted. He could not tell, but he supposed he must have been tramping on the road to London. He was not, however, able to prove an alibi, and there was no evidence but his own assertion that he had not been in the neighborhood of Reigate at the time
401
when several witnesses swore to having seen him there. The magistrates had no hesitation in com mitting the prisoner for trial, and there was little, if any, doubt in the minds of those who had heard or read the evidence that Johann Carl Franz was the murderer of Martha Halliday. The case came on for trial at the Croydon assizes on the 6th of August, 1861. Mr. Justice Blackburn was the judge: Serjeant Ballantine conducted the prosecution, and the Honorable George Uenn1an, Q. C. (afterwards justice of the common pleas), was specially retained by the Saxon em bassy to defend the prisoner. There were some discrepancies in the evidence adduced for the prosecution, of which the prisoner's counsel made the most in cross-examination. For example, the potman at the Cricketer's Inn, Reigate, swore that the two foreigners who stayed there on the Sunday and part of the Mon day, did not leave the inn, except for a few minutes, from the time they came till the time they left, and one of those foreigners he identified on oath as the prisoner at the bar. But another witness, a laborer, swore positively that the prisoner was one of the two foreigners whom he met, and spoke to at four o'clock on the Sunday afternoon four miles from Reigate. Clearly, then, the foreigners seen by the laborer could not have been the two who stayed at the Crick eters', and if the potman were correct in his identification of Franz as one of the latter, the laborer must be mistaken, and viee versd. Then the woman who sold the string would not swear positively to Franz as one of the men who came to her shop, though the servant, who only saw them through the glass door, identified Franz as the taller and fairer of the two foreigners without any hesitation. Despite the severe cross-examination of all these witnesses and the discrepancies
