Ephriam Cooley entered between two officers, handcuffed, his bold,
insulting eyes wearing a look of sullen defiance, his unkempt beard
lending more than ever an animal look to his face.
The selection of the jury occupied the greater portion of the morning,
but at length twelve citizens were impaneled and listened to the
reading of the indictment.
The temper of the people might be seen in the burst of rage that swept
over the crowd when the atrocious deed was described.
Elliott Harding, with his usual aspect of dignity, had schooled his
face into a cold passiveness, but though outwardly calm, his pulse was
throbbing with the fierceness of fever beats. A stranger entering the
courtroom would never have selected him from the group of men as the
one whose life had been crushed out by the object of this trial.
When the reading was finished, the witnesses for the state were called.
The first name which rang through the courtroom was that of John
Holmes. The prisoner drew himself together and watched him keenly as
the oath was administered; his face, despite its defiant mask, had a
restless, haunted look which sat strangely on his hard, grim features.
Skillfully aided by questions from the court, Holmes unfolded the whole
awful story of the first discovery of the dead body of Dorothy Carr.
Passing rapidly over the painful details, the sheriff told then of the
man-hunt, of the finding of the bloody razor as it had dropped from the
pocket of the prisoner’s coat.
The negro cook of the Carrs swore that the prisoner was the man to whom
she had given a drink of water about half an hour before her mistress
had been brought home.
Toward the close of the State’s evidence, the chain binding the
prisoner to the gallows had become all but complete. In the face of
such evidence and in the atmosphere of such bitter resentment, the
counsel appointed for his defense struggled against overwhelming odds.
He contented himself with belittling the value of circumstantial
evidence adduced by the prosecution, and presenting the argument that
the prisoner’s education and his social position as a school teacher
attested to his inability to commit a crime so revolting in its
conception and so brutal in its execution. He stated that the woman at
whose house the prisoner had been arrested, had repeatedly said that he
had been at her house, some fifteen miles away from the scene of the
crime, at the very hour the deed was said to have been committed, that
she would testify to that statement here if she had not moved away and
could not now be located. Whatever effect the counsel thus produced was
more than neutralized when the prisoner was called to the stand for a
specious denial.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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