Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/132

 lady, the mother of Twitchell's wife, lived in the house with them. She lay on the sofa in the sitting room with a roll of money in her bosom and while there some one beat her to death by repeated blows over the head. The blood flew in curved streams over the paper of the wall. The next morning her body was found in the yard, where it had been thrown from a window; alongside of it lay the long bloody poker with which the detectives concluded she had been stricken. Twitchell was accused of the crime. Henry S. Hagert and Furman Sheppard represented the commonwealth, and William B. Mann and John O'Byrne, an eloquent Irishman, who had been a hatter, who went to Delaware afterward in an effort to reach the senate, and who, failing, closed his career in New York, represented the defendant. The commonwealth contended that Twitchell, in financial straits, quarreled with his mother-in-law over money. The defense contended that a robber found his way into the house from the street, and they had some evidence to support the theory. Mann spent the most of his time in an effort to convince the jury that the poker could not have produced those curves of blood drops on the wall, and he illustrated his argument with all sorts of weapons. Some long and stiff like a poker and some made of leather and twine, to be limber and swinging. As I listened I did a piece of analytical work and reached the conclusion that Twitchell had killed the woman and that he had not done it with the poker. Mann would not have spent so much effort upon what, after all, was a mere detail, unless he had been sure beyond doubt that in this respect the case of the commonwealth was at fault and he could only be so sure because of information from his client. Twitchell was convicted, and years afterward it was told that Mann and O'Byrne had gone to the house and secured from its hiding place the “billy” with which he did the deed. Mrs. Twitchell mortgaged the house to counsel to pay their fees. A friend of Twitchell stood by him faithfully at the dock through the whole trial, 122