The Trial of Elizabeth Cree Read Online Free PDF Page A

bordered with thin fur, and I wrapped it around myself before taking out my knife. That knife is a lovely object with a carved ivory handle; I purchased it at Gibbon’s in the Haymarket for fifteen shillings and the pity of it was that, after I had entered her, its shine would be lost forever. I remember in my schooldays how I mourned when my first line of ink spotted the purity of a new book of exercises—now I was about to write my name again, but with a different instrument. She only began to stir after I had taken out a piece of intestine and blown softly upon it; there was a moan or sigh coming from her although, on looking back and surveying the scene in my mind’s eye, I believe that it might have been her spirit leaving the earth. Her eyes had opened, and I had to take them out with my knife for fear that my image had been seared upon them. I dipped my hands into the chamber pot and washed off her blood with her gin; then, out of sheer delight, I shat into it. It was over. She had been evacuated from the world, and I had evacuated. We were both now empty vessels, waiting for the presence of God.
    S EPTEMBER 7, 1880: May I quote Thomas De Quincey? In the pages of his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” I first learned of the Ratcliffe Highway deaths, and ever since that time his work has been a source of perpetual delight and astonishment to me. Who could fail to be moved by his description of the murderer, John Williams, who committed his acts out of “pure voluptuousness, entirely disinterested” andwho provoked an exterminating tragedy worthy of Middleton or Tourneur? The destroyer of the Marr family was “a solitary artist, who rested in the center of London, self-supported by his own conscious grandeur,” an artist who used London as the “studio” to display his works. And what a marvelous touch by De Quincey, to suggest that Williams’s bright yellow hair, “something between an orange and a lemon color,” had been dyed to create a deliberate contrast to the “bloodless ghostly pallor” of his face. I hugged myself in delight when I first read how he had dressed for each murder as if he were going upon the stage: “when he went out for a grand compound massacre he always assumed black silk stockings and pumps; nor would he on any account have degraded his position as an artist by wearing a morning gown. In his second great performance, it was particularly noticed and recorded by the one sole trembling man, who under killing agonies of fear was compelled (as the reader will find) from a secret stand to become the solitary spectator of his atrocities, that Mr. Williams wore a long blue frock, of the very finest cloth, and richly lined with silk.” But no more now: I can heartily recommend this work. Is that not what they say?
    S EPTEMBER 8, 1880: Rain all day. Read some Tennyson to my dear wife, Elizabeth, before we retired.

EIGHT
    ELIZABETH CREE : I believed that my husband had come down with a gastric fever. So I recommended that he send for a doctor.
    MR. GREATOREX : Was his health good usually?
    ELIZABETH CREE : He always had a bad stomach, which we took to be the gases.
    MR. GREATOREX : And did he have any medical attention that night?
    ELIZABETH CREE : No. He declined it.
    MR. GREATOREX : He declined it? Why?
    ELIZABETH CREE : He told me that it was not necessary, and asked me instead for a lime cordial.
    MR. GREATOREX : That was a very extraordinary request, was it not, for a man in such severe pain?
    ELIZABETH CREE : I believe that he wished to bathe his forehead and temples with it.
    MR. GREATOREX : Can you tell the court what happened next?
    ELIZABETH CREE : I had gone downstairs to prepare the cordial, when I heard a sudden noise from his room. I returned to him at once, and saw that he had fallen from his bed and was lying upon the Turkey carpet.
    MR. GREATOREX : Did he say anything to you at that point?
    ELIZABETH CREE : No, sir. I could see that he was breathing