An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (i can read book club .TXT) 📕

the severest and most damaging testimony related to the camera and the tripod⁠—the circumstances surrounding the finding of them⁠—and on the weight of this Mason was counting for a conviction. His one aim first was to convict Clyde of lying as to his possession of either a tripod or a camera. And in order to do that he first introduced Earl Newcomb, who swore that on a certain day, when he, Mason and Heit and all the others connected with the case were taking Clyde over the area in which the crime had been committed, he and a certain native, one Bill Swartz, who was afterwards put on the stand, while poking about under some fallen logs and bushes, had come across the tripod, hidden under a log. Also (under the leadership of Mason, although over the objections of both Belknap and Jephson, which were invariably overruled), he proceeded to add that Clyde, on being asked whether he had a camera or this tripod, had denied any knowledge of it, on hearing which Belknap and Jephson actually shouted their disapproval.

Immediately following, though eventually ordered stricken from the records by Justice Oberwaltzer, there was introduced a paper signed by Heit, Burleigh, Slack, Kraut, Swenk, Sissel, Bill Swartz, Rufus Forster, county surveyor, and Newcomb, which set forth that Clyde, on being shown the tripod and asked whether he had one, “vehemently and repeatedly denied that he had.” But in order to drive the import of this home, Mason immediately adding: “Very well, your Honor, but I have other witnesses who will swear to everything that is in that paper and more,” and at once calling “Joseph Frazer! Joseph Frazer!” and then placing on the stand a dealer in sporting goods, cameras, etc., who proceeded to swear that some time between May fifteenth and June first, the defendant, Clyde Griffiths, whom he knew by sight and name, had applied to him for a camera of a certain size, with tripod attached, and that the defendant had finally selected a Sank, 3½ by 5½, for which he had made arrangements to pay in installments. And after due examination and consulting certain stock numbers with which the camera and the tripod and his own book were marked, Mr. Frazer identifying first the camera now shown him, and immediately after that the yellow tripod as the one he had sold Clyde.

And Clyde sitting up aghast. Then they had found the camera, as well as the tripod, after all. And after he had protested so that he had no camera with him. What would that jury and the judge and this audience think of his lying about that? Would they be likely to believe his story of a change of heart after this proof that he had lied about a meaningless camera? Better to have confessed in the first place.

But even as he was so thinking Mason calling Simeon Dodge, a young woodsman and driver, who testified that on Saturday, the sixteenth of July, accompanied by John Pole, who had lifted Roberta’s body out of the water, he had at the request of the district attorney, repeatedly dived into the exact spot where her body was found, and finally succeeded in bringing up a camera. And then the camera itself identified by Dodge.

Immediately after this all the testimony in regard to the hitherto as yet unmentioned films found in the camera at the time of its recovery, since developed, and now received in evidence, four views which showed a person looking more like Roberta than anyone else, together with two, which clearly enough represented Clyde. Belknap was not able to refute or exclude them.

Then Floyd Thurston, one of the guests at the Cranston lodge at Sharon on June eighteenth⁠—the occasion of Clyde’s first visit there⁠—placed on the stand to testify that on that occasion Clyde had made a number of pictures with a camera about the size and description of the one shown him, but failing to identify it as the particular one, his testimony being stricken out.

After him again, Edna Patterson, a chambermaid in the Grass Lake Inn, who, as she swore, on entering the room which Clyde and Roberta occupied on the night of July seventh, had seen Clyde with a camera in his hand, which was of the size and color, as far as she could recall, of the one then and there before her. She had also at the same time seen a tripod. And Clyde, in his curious and meditative and half-hypnotized state, recalling well enough the entrance of this girl into that room and marveling and suffering because of the unbreakable chain of facts that could thus be built up by witnesses from such varying and unconnected and unexpected places, and so long after, too.

After her, but on different days, and with Belknap and Jephson contending every inch of the way as to the admissibility of all this, the testimony of the five doctors whom Mason had called in at the time Roberta’s body was first brought to Bridgeburg, and who in turn swore that the wounds, both on the face and head, were sufficient, considering Roberta’s physical condition, to stun her. And because of the condition of the dead girl’s lungs, which had been tested by attempting to float them in water, averring that at the time her body had first entered the water, she must have been still alive, although not necessarily conscious. But as to the nature of the instrument used to make these wounds, they would not venture to guess, other than to say it must have been blunt. And no grilling on the part of either Belknap or Jephson could bring them to admit that the blows could have been of such a light character as not to stun or render unconscious. The chief injury appeared to be on the top of the skull, deep enough to have caused a blood clot, photographs of all of which were put in evidence.

At this psychological point, when both audience