Chapter 6
Let us return to the romantic causes that could have motivated the poisoning of Mrs. Lewis. Neither the glacial indifference she had for her husband, nor the love conceived by Dockendorff, and cautioned by Captain Lewis, could make him homicidal. It was not from there that the crime came. The Captain, it is true, loved his wife, but when she returned to Peru, abandoning him and her own children, he was at liberty.
North American law, as we know, facilitated the adoption of a new marriage, since it authorizes the separated spouses to contract again with another person. If the Captain loved Mrs. Isabel very much, her actions must have extinguished in him the affection until it disappeared completely. Because far from grieving, he did not allow time to pass since he knew of her death in order to marry another woman.
Both had reached a state of repulsion. Isabel, encouraged by hopes of an uncertain but fortunate future, placed the depth of the sea as a sign of the immensity of her indifference. At the same time, the Captain let her leave California, settling for the separation he could not avoid and which took the last remnant of affection he could have had for her. In the letter to his friend in Callao, there is not a single word that manifests in his heart something of the old affection, nor a complaint that brings to mind the sorrow left by the disloyalty of the woman he has loved.
Although there is no reason in acts of this kind of crime of passion, the Captain could not, in fact, be the author of the poisoning.
Any evidence would have to rest on the duration of the poison. Calculating the time measured from the departure of Isabel from San Francisco, California, to the day of her death, yields one month, seven days and some hours. So it would be necessary to find out if the effects of a poison can act during so long a time. And to find what the toxic substances were in the vial that was found in the room and those that were found in the iron box of Bacigalupi. This information would separate a homicide originating with the husband from Isabel’s presumed suicide.
One of the most notable penal lawyers of our times, in an effort to explain crimes of passion, says that a large part of homicides and murders occur due to love, especially poisonings. Examining statistics later in the course of his psychiatric studies, he adds that poisoning is precisely the crime to which spouses, especially women, prefer to free themselves from a marital union that has became unbearable.
Now we are touching on psychological issues. As we go deeper into it, the investigation is presented with details and seemingly insignificant facts that disappear completely when they lose connection with the plot of the crime. This is particularly true with facts and details collected during the first inquiries. They tend to get lost as the investigation progresses.
To apply these ideas about poisoning produced by passion to the Lewis case, it would have been necessary in the beginning for the Chief to have interrogated all witnesses thoroughly. The statements taken by the Police Chief were isolated and, as we have seen, there was more than one moment in which they were about to be lost, making the events that occurred uncertain. There is no doubt that if there had been an Examining Magistrate, the work carried out by the Chief would have been easier and the results obtained would have been more substantial
Had the Chief been able to organize the investigation, he would have followed the incidents and connected them. Then he would have taken all the witness statements and confronted witnesses before they knew of the other people that participated in different ways and for different reasons. In short, he could have found the continuity of the plot early on.
Today, all that work concentrated in a single person by disposition of the Code weakens the action of the Judge. The efforts made by the police only serve as data that the judge can take advantage of without any legal value even though they contain the most precise and factual information. They do not produce evidence in front of the Judge. If the accused confessed to the police, or the witnesses claimed to have seen the crime to anyone but the Judge in the courtroom, it matters as much as if it did not exist.
Had an Examining Magistrate been able to take from all the threads of the crime at the moment of Mrs. Lewis’ death, it would not have been an anonymous crime, but would have been solved when it was perpetrated. Then the following would have happened. When the Police Chief got the report, the Examining Magistrate would have appeared at the scene and taken the statements of all those who were there, and of any other people who had any knowledge of the situation.
Six months would not have passed since the crime was committed until the first investigations made by the Chief, because the statements by the Examining Magistrate would have made it perfectly clear. He would have had the jurisdictional authority that the Chiefs lack today in Peru. He would have asked for the forced medical and legal recognition of the body still preserving that last heat of the body when decomposition just begins. He would have gone to the morgue, so that the autopsy could be done and, with it the chemical analysis of the viscera in order to discover the immediate and unequivocal traces left by intoxication or a heart condition.
None of this happened because the Chief lacked the authority to carry it out. Due to the police doctor’s certificate, and without authority to order the autopsy, he did not have the authority of a judge to carry out the prosecution of a sudden suspicious death. The Judge was unaware of these facts.
Thus, the deficiency of the law is palpably seen as the lack of an official investigator, an office already created by modern laws in other countries. This official could be a powerful auxiliary for criminal investigation as the person who is entrusted with the prosecution. The debate between defense and prosecution and the resolution of the trial is for the Judge, whose mission is to examine the evidence and apply the penalty determined by law for the evidence presented.
When we look closely at these unsatisfactory processes, in which this crime is apparent, and the lack of evidence, we are convinced of the importance of an investigator and of the need to create the position.
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Poisoning by degrees, that is, the ingestion of poison so that it produces its effects slowly and in such a fatal way after a long period of time was believed to be true in times past. The opinion about the remote effects and the gradual work of a poison on a person’s body is very general today. Cases are related with such vividness that the imagination takes hold of them and enlarges them, giving them outlandish proportions.
But toxicology has demolished this false idea and has proven with the accuracy of chemical analysis and observation of intoxications made in animals and people that poison has a rapid action and produces its effects in a short time. Death, then, caused by a poison, is not gradual, and the victim who absorbs it cannot walk around or indulge in long-lasting joyful scenes carrying it within his bowels.
There are certainly some substances whose attack is partial, either because of the small dose, or because of the lack of strength of the poison. When one of these cases occurs, it affects only one organ, producing disease that is an occasional cause of death untreated. But it is not a direct agent. The symptoms are obvious in the patient and medicine is able fight it effectively.
None of those symptoms were manifested in Mrs. Lewis until the very day of her death, when her close friends realized that she was poisoned and in agony.
She had been seen healthy and cheerful walking the central streets of the city, entering the store of Bacigalupi and celebrating the evening before in his house.