Murder and Motive

On January 11, 1732, John Tapper was brought to trial for the murder, by stabbing, of Joseph Cannon.

The chief witness for the prosecution was Joseph Rohan, who claimed that the deceased got upset while playing cards and gambling. He wanted to pawn his vest to gamble some more, his wife got angry, he chased her out of the house to a neighbor's, where she may or may not have miscarried (later in the transcript at Old Bailey Online, it isn't clear that this happened). And then Rohan adds insult to injury: "By and by some-body came in, and told him (the deceased), his Wife was miscarried; What, says the Prisoner to the Deceas'd, was your Wife with Child? Yes, says the Deceas'd, and that's more than yours will ever be. How do ye know that? says the Prisoner. Because, Mr. Tapper, says the Deceas'd, I have tapp'd her many a time. Have ye so? says Tapper, Why then, G - d d - n ye, I'll tap you."

Council gets Rohan to admit both the men had been drinking, that the two men often quarreled, that the deceased had stumbled over the accused while the accused was sharpening his knife, which he'd just been using on his fingernails (!). Rohan then goes on to say that when he met the accused later, the accused said, "I am only sorry that I did not give him a prick on the other side."

Other witnesses for the prosecution are called and interestingly, all offer similar, yet slightly different reports of the accused's remarks after the incident. Ann Hoskins claims he said, "I am only sorry that I did not cut his Throat." Joseph Ackers credits him with declaring, "I'll go and pay the Surgeon the half Guinea, and then I'll stab him [Cannon] on the other side." Richard Austin says he said, "if any Body would give him a Quartern of Gin he would stick him on the other side, and send him out of the World." Mary Richards (yes, that gave me a Mary Tyler Moore vision) claims he said, "Damn him, I'll give him a prick on the other side, and that will set him upright."

Now, maybe I've seen too many episodes of Law and Order, but it was as if somebody told them to say the accused said he was sorry he hadn't also stabbed the victim "on the other side" as well, and each witness then came up with their own embellishment to the basic story.

And then nurse Margaret Roberts states, in what I cannot help but imagine is a melodramatic way: "A little before the Deceas'd dy'd, he took me by the Hand, and said, Tapper is the Man that has murder'd me, and I expect that you will see him brought to Justice, that he may suffer himself as he has made me suffer."

Is it just me, or does this seem a little over-the-top? And why on earth would the dying man say such a thing to the nurse?

Then we get the council for the defense asking questions, and lo and behold, a very different picture of the fight/quarrel/stabbing and the aftermath. It seems the deceased was surprised to learn of the wound and didn't consider it very serious, even saying at one point that "Damn it, I don't mind it, I'll drink it off." His main concern seemed to be getting the accused to pay the cost of his treatment from the surgeon, who likewise didn't consider the wound very serious at first. (It sounds as if he died from slow internal bleeding.)

It also seems the deceased blamed another person entirely for the cut: his wife. According to witness Thomas Williamson, the deceased said, "He told me, if it had not been for the Bitch his Wife, it had never happen'd, for he had never minded the Prisoner whetting his Knife, if she had not put him in a Passion, and that thereupon he push'd the Prisoner against the Table." Edward Wilcox repeated a similar remark. Nobody else heard the insult regarding "tapping" the accused's wife.

I notice Mrs. Cotton, wife of the deceased, was not called upon to testify. Neither was her mother, with whom they lived. I suspect, all things considered, Mrs. Cannon was not particularly sorry her drinking, gambling husband who had chased her with the intent of beating her was dead.

Several others were called to provide evidence of Tapper's generally benign temperament, and the death was ruled an accident.

If I were to make a romance out of this, I'd have Tapper the hero, falsely accused after accidentally killing another gambler. You could have him be Lord Tapper, and have the game at a gentleman's club, if you wanted to set this in the 19th century. Or at a house party, if you wanted to keep the cast of characters small and the setting claustrophobic, to make for more suspense and conflict.

Rohan seems to be have a beef against Tapper, because he's the only one who mentions the alleged insult to Tapper's manhood and that the deceased claimed he'd slept with Tapper's wife, in an attempt, or so it sounds to me, to give Tapper a motive for the stabbing, to bolster the notion that it wasn't accidental. There's something to think about. What reason could Rohan have to hate Tapper that much? And it's interesting that he comes up with adultery for a possible motive. You could probably get some interesting conflict, both internal and external, out of that.

And then we need a heroine. Tapper must have been married for Rohan to come up with that insult. Let's say Lord Tapper is married -- but estranged from his wife. His Grace, the Duke of Rohan, repeats the rumor that Earl Cotton claimed to have slept with her. Does Lord Tapper believe that, or not? Do other people? What of Lady Tapper? What does she do when she hears this rumor? What is her reaction to the notion that her husband's heard the rumor?

What does she think when she learns her estranged husband may have killed a man, and the very man to whom she's been scandalously linked? Does she think him capable of such an act? Is she afraid of what he might do to her?

At some point and fairly close to the start of the novel you'd have to get them together. Personally, I'd be tempted to have them in a relatively isolated setting (say, a country house), where they're forced to interact, so you could keep the emotional intensity at a pretty high level.

So you've got a hero, a heroine, a setting, a situation to get the ball of reconciliation rolling.

There's one other thing I get from this transcript and I do believe I'll keep in my mental file. That would be the nurse, the hopelessly melodramatic, romantic Margaret Roberts. I just love how she describes the deceased, who sounds like a drunken, vicious brute, holding her hand and expecting her to see that justice is done. I think she'd make a fun secondary character.

Or if humor's not your particular thing, she could be one seriously disturbed stalker.