True Stories of Crime From the District Attorneys Office | Page 7

was that the detective succeeded in giving
the unqualified impression that he was drawing the long bow in a most
preposterous fashion.
At the conclusion of the People's case the evidence that Mrs. Parker
had forged the checks amounted simply to this: That an officer who
was greatly interested in her conviction had sworn to a most
astonishing series of facts from which the jury must infer that this
exceedingly astute young person had not only been entirely and
completely deceived by a detective, but also that at almost their first
meeting she had confessed to him in detail the history of her crimes.
Practically the only other evidence tending to corroborate his story
were a few admissions of a similar character made by her to newspaper
men, matrons and officers at the police station. Unless the jury were to
believe that Mrs. Parker had actually written the signatures on "the
Peabody sheet" there was no evidence that she was the actual forger;
hence upon Peabody's word alone depended the verdict of the jury. The
trouble with the case was that it was too strong, too good, to be entirely

credible, and had there been no defense it is exceedingly probable that
the trial would have resulted in an acquittal, since the prosecution had
elected to go to the jury upon the question of whether or not the
defendant had actually signed the checks herself.
Mrs. Parker, however, had withdrawn her plea of insanity and
determined to put in a defense, which proved in its turn to be even
more extraordinary than the case against her. This, in brief, was to the
effect that she had known Peabody to be a police officer all along, but
that it had occurred to her that if she could deceive him into believing
that it was she herself who had committed the forgeries her husband
might get off, and that later she might in turn establish her own
innocence. She had therefore hastily scratched her name on the top of a
sheet already containing her husband's handwriting and had told
Peabody that the signatures had been written by herself. That the sheet
had been written in the officer's presence she declared to be a pure
invention on his part to secure her conviction. She told her extremely
illogical story with a certain winsome naïveté which carried an air of
semi-probability with it. From her deportment on the stand one would
have taken her for a boarding school miss who in some inconsequent
fashion had got mixed up in a frolic for which no really logical
explanation could be given.
Then the door in the back of the court room opened and James Parker
was led to the bar, where in the presence of the jury he pleaded guilty
to the forgery of the very signature for which his wife was standing trial.
(Kauser check, Fig. 6.) He was then sworn as a witness, took the stand
and testified that he had written all the forged signatures to the checks,
including the signatures upon "the Peabody sheet."
The District Attorney found himself in an embarrassing position. If
Parker was the forger, why not challenge him to write the forged
signatures upon the witness stand and thus to prove his alleged capacity
for so doing? The obvious objection to this was that Parker, in
anticipation of this test, had probably been practicing the signature in
the Tombs for months. On the other hand if the District Attorney did
not challenge him to write the signatures, the defense would argue that

he was afraid to do so, and that as Parker had sworn himself to be the
forger it was not incumbent upon the defense to prove it further--that
that was a matter for cross examination.
With considerable hesitation the prosecuting attorney asked Parker to
write the Kauser signature, which was the one set forth in the
indictment charging the forgery, and after much backing and filling on
the part of the witness, who ingeniously complained that he was in a
bad nervous condition owing to lack of morphine, in consequence of
which his hand trembled and he was in no condition to write forgeries,
the latter took his pen and managed to make a very fair copy of the
Kauser signature from memory, good enough in fact to warrant a jury
in forming the conclusion that he was in fact the forger. (Fig. 7.) This
closed the case.
The defense claimed that it was clear that James Parker was the forger,
since he had admitted it in open court, pleaded guilty to the indictment
and proved that he had the capacity. The prosecution, upon the other
hand, argued that the evidence was conclusive that the defendant
herself was the writer of the check. The whole thing boiled