Page:The Great Harry Thaw Case.djvu/240



Mr. Thaw of the outrages at the hands of White were true?' Her answer was, 'Those things were true.'

"In corroboration of the statement that these things did take place, I beg to refer to the evidence and to the things that have occurred before your eyes. You have seen Evelyn on the stand for four days. You are men of the world—men accustomed to looking through the souls of men and analyzing their conversations—you are asked to judge if she were a clever actress as she sat in that chair and related the horrors of that night.

"You saw when she came to the final occurrence of that night—you saw her countenance—how the shadow of horror overspread it. Although the story was to save the life of the one person whom she loved, you saw how she shrank from telling it. You saw the drawn face, you saw the brave little girl struggling that she might save her husband, that she might overcome the objectionable features of the story.

"For days and days you have seen her undergoing torture of an examination unparalleled in the jurisprudence of this or any other country.

"Did the District Attorney of your city, to whom I gave the greatest acknowledgment of talent, confuse her? You saw him using all the arts, resorting to all the strategies of a practiced master to entrap a girl who had never testified before. Was she caught in a single falsehood, or contradiction?

"You have seen learned men on the stand—tell me, if you have ever seen a witness who has stood the excruciating tests of cross-examination as well as this child?

"Gentlemen, in that cross-examination the merciless District Attorney—I say merciless without offense, because his office is not one of mercy—you saw him extort from her truthful but unwilling lips the confession that the misdeeds of Stanford White did not stop with the first wrecking of