But murderers have no more need than prosecutors for a precisely defined motive. Life and intimacy and tensions...
In Leipzig, in 1821, a soldier-barber named Johann Christian Woyzeck was tried for murder, and upon his crime Georg Buchner (1813–1837) based the superb psychological drama Woyzeck — a work almost a century ahead of its time. From this play Alban Berg (1885–1935) adapted his atonal opera Wozzeck (1925), one of the most significant and influential works for the modem musical stage.
Play and opera tell the story of an ignorant and confused soldier who loves a girl named Marie and gets her pregnant. Marie is a girl of simple charm, with moments of remorse and depression and longing for death, but generally happy, whether reading her Bible or flirting with passing soldiers. The jealous Woyzeck stabs her, and later drowns himself accidentally in a frantic search for the weapon because “that knife will betray me.”
Both works express infinite compassion for tormented people in an incomprehensible world.
The real-life Woyzeck was unquestionably paranoid (though sentenced to death). August Sangret was un-arguably sane. The fair trial lasted from February 4 to March 2, 1943; and on March 2, after two hours of deliberation, the jury brought in the verdict: “Guilty, but with a strong recommendation to mercy.”
Previous commentators have expressed surprise at that rider.
Sangret appealed the verdict, apparently on his own. Defense counsel (Linton Thorp, K.C) flatly told the Court of Criminal Appeal that he could see no ground on which the verdict could be disturbed. The Court agreed: no point of law arose, and the adequacy of the evidence was within the exclusive province of the trial jury.
Higher authorities ignored the jury’s strong recommendation. On April 29, 1943, August Sangret was hanged at Wandsworth Gaol and his body turned over to Dr. Keith Simpson (and Molly Lefebure) for the post mortem.
Assassin
Fletcher Flora
Crossing the hotel lobby, Arley Sears descended two steps and pushed his way through a silent swinging door into the cool shadows of a cocktail lounge. He stood quietly for a moment while his eyes dilated in adjustment to the shadows, and then he saw Laurel sitting alone at a tiny table, designed for five-o’clock intimacy, beyond half-a-dozen other tables that were now unclaimed. She was wearing a black linen sheath that had drawn, in the way of sheaths, above her nylon knees, and her pale hair was a light in the ersatz dusk. He felt, seeing her, the familiar resurgence of lust and love and pity and pain that he always felt when seeing her anywhere at any time, or even when, not seeing her, he remembered the last time and waited for the next.
Making his way among the tables, he sat down across from her, the tiny table between them and their knees touching beneath. Her right hand lay beside her stemmed glass, palm down, and he dropped his own beside it in the opposite position. The hands lay at rest for seconds side by side, and then hers crept into his and was at rest again. The bartender, the only other person in the room, arrived and waited. Arley, suddenly aware of him, glanced up and down again, looking at the glass, half filled with amber, beside the clasped hands.
“What are you having?” he said. “A daiquiri?”
“Yes,” she said, “a daiquiri.”
“It looks good,” he said. “I think I’ll have the same.”
“A daiquiri is good on a hot day,” the bartender said.
He went back to the bar to make it, and Arley and Laurel sat silent, hands clasped, until he had returned and gone again. Laurel’s hand lay in his as still as a white stone, but Arley could sense, as he always could, the intensity of her excitement. He could measure it by the slow cadence of her controlled breathing and the brightness of her eyes and the barely perceptible rigidity of her thin face. It was more than excitement, really. Much more. It was a fever and a sickness, and it made him sick to see it. Perhaps she was not quite sane. Whatever you called it, sickness or insanity or dedication, she would never be well, the fever slaked, until he had done for her, after all these years, what he would surely do within the next half-hour.
An eye for an eye, he thought. A tooth for a tooth.
He rarely thought in biblical terms, and it disturbed him that he did so now. He did not wish to think in terms of retribution or primitive justice. He wished to think only in terms of what he must do for Laurel’s sake — and for his own, as a corollary, because he could never recover her if he did not.
“Have you been outside?” he said.
“No.”
“The streets and the square are packed.”
“I know. I watched from the window of the room.”
“Did you leave your key at the desk?”
“Yes. My door is unlocked.”
“Good. The clerk will remember that you were out of your room all the while, and the bartender will remember your being here.”
“At most, they’ll be able to estimate only the general direction of the shot. It may not come to what the clerk or the bartender will think or say.”
“Probably not, but it’s just as well to anticipate things.”
“Darling, I’ll kill myself if it goes wrong for you. I swear I will.”
“Don’t think about that. It will go well.”
“You must be careful that no one sees you when you go up.”
“It’s not likely. Everyone’s attention will be focused on the square within the next ten minutes. There should be no difficulty in slipping up the stairs. Afterward, I’ll simply come down the back way, as you directed, and around to the front entrance on the outside.”
“Suppose someone sees you coming down.”
“That’s a risk. A slight one. I told you that. Chances are, however, most of the hotel help will be around front in the crowd or up on the roof. It’s something we have to count on.”
“It seems very dangerous. So much depends on things going just right.”
“You wanted it this way. You said you wanted it just when everything was going big for him. All at once, you said, with a big crowd cheering.”
“Yes. That’s what I want.” The fever was raging now in her bright, bright eyes. “And later, darling, we’ll go away, you and I, and I’ll be so good to you, and always so grateful, and I’ll make you happy and never sorry for what you did. I promise.”
“Sure,” he said. “Everything will be fine.”
She withdrew her hand from his and lifted her glass, touching her lips with the thin edge of crystal. He lifted his own in response, and they drank together to everything being fine, and then they continued to sit in silence drinking the daiquiris slowly. After a while they became conscious of a kind of beating in their ears, the diminished waves of a giant sound a long way off, but it was actually the crowd in the bright, hot streets and square outside the closed and air-conditioned hotel. The bartender, leaving the bar, walked down the room among the tables and chairs to a window covered by heavy maroon drapes. He pulled the drapes back a few inches on one side and stood there with his back to the room, looking out across the street to the square beyond.
“He’s arrived,” Arley said. “You can hear the crowd now.”
“Yes,” she said. “He’ll begin speaking in a few minutes.”
“I’d better go up.”
“You remember the room number?”
“Yes.”
“You remember what to do and where to go afterward?”
“I remember.”
“Good luck, darling.”
“Good is our kind. We won’t change it now.”
“Hurry back, darling. I’ll be waiting here.”
He stood and turned and walked away without looking back, ascending the pair of steps into the lobby and crossing to the stairs beyond the elevator. The clerk and two other men were standing at the front entrance, staring out through the glass of the double door. They did not hear him or turn to see him as he went up the stairs to the first landing and passed out of view.