THE CONVICT BUTLER.

Evening Star, Issue 6096, 25 September 1882, Page 4

THE CONVICT BUTLER.

A series of articles headed "Prison Portraits'' is being published in Christchurch ' Society.' The last subject is Robert Butler, who is termed "The Cumberland street Tragedian." From the article we make the following extracts, having omitted some which insinuate charges against various people : Society is sometimes as much moved by the acts of a great villain as by those of a great hero, so my sitter, though he has not acquired fame, has, at least, achieved that infamy which ensures interest with the same certainty that it forfeits esteem. He is the amiable Robert Butler, the Nero of the Cumberland street tragedy, Dunedin. Let no one quarrel with me for focussing him. The effect will not be to inspire emulation, but execration. However inartistic my work may be, it shall be at least faithful to life. Before attempting to portray the inner, I will describe the outer man. Robert Butler is now about forty years of age, he is sft f>in or Gin in height, siightly built, and, as one might suppose, from sheer force of intellect, getting bald ; this, for two reasons, I take to be the cause of all, or nearly all, baldness. Ist, all, or nearly all baldies are, or look to be, highly intellectual. 2nd, the more shock headed —■ myself included are as noted for apparent, or real want of inteli ct. Robert Butler's face is thin and cadaverous, his nose rather aquiline, eyes grey and restless, mouth rather large and sensuous; the tout ensemble, of the features at once inspires with caution if not distrust; his walk is as ungraceful as bandy legs and splay feet can make it, something like the waddle of a lame Muscovy duck. The operator's acquaintance with Mr B, began some six years since, and, as the policeman would say, " Yer Worshup, I've 'ad my eye on 'im ever since." Two of these six years we were close, if not intimate acquaintances, staying in the same hotel, eating at the same table, and belonging to the same Christian Young Men's Association and Mutual Improvement Society. There, don't laugh, for is it not an aphorism that truth is often stranger than fiction ? This length of companionship will, I think, be allowed sufficient for an observant man to have got a pretty accurate gauge of his moral and mental calibre ; and supplementing this, I have from others, who knew him earlier and elsewhere, slight sketches of his private life, and to tfiis again I have his own previous confessions, in giving which, I trust, I shall be guilty of no breach of faith. What his parentage may have been I never learned either from himself or others, but that he received a good education in the Catholic Grammar School, Melbourne, is certain. From boyhood lie was one of the fastest of that fast class—the peculiar production of the present age—larrikins. In this lie earned a reputation surpassed by none, and through this he gradually, perhaps almost naturally, developed into a professional chevalier d'induxtrte, and took his degrees in the great penal college of Victoria. After several terms there, hard study or work and the warm climate made a change of air necessary, and he migrated to the more temperate climate of New Zealand, bringing with him a rather large quantity of valuable jewellery, the proceeds of ins last raid.

Arriving in Dunedin, he made the acquaintance of a young woman, to whom, for .-afei.y, lie entrusted the jewellery while he plied his calling, with strict injunctions not to sell or wear it. That grand old patriarch Job declares that " man is born to trouble, as the sparks (ly upward " ; and if this was the experience of Job and his class in days when there were no detcethe police and no penal prisons, how much more so is it in these days, and to men of that class into which K. B. has with so much honor worked himself '!

After many ventures —sonic profitable, some profitless—ll. 1). and misfortune met. iLe rol)l»e<l ami tried to fire the Bishop's residence, firing being his own peculiar practice. As in the last great Cumberland stroot aifuir, tUo Hre -\voukl not burn ; and some of tlio.se troublesome fellows yclept pushing their impertinent inquiries, part of the loot from the Bishop's house was discovered, where B. had left it for a consideration with a relative called "my uncle." This occasioned an interview with wigged officialism, which resulted in a four years' residence with host Caldwell, Provincial Hotel, .Stuart street, Dunedin, where we first became acquainted, J [ere was formed that Mutual Improvement Society of which I have spoken, and of WJiieh each in turn rose to the dignity of chairman. And here it was that for two years and a-haff I had ample means of testing Mr B.'s powers as a speaker, and, with others, formed no very exalted idea of them. Jt is said that ingratitude is a crime of so dark a hue that no man ever confessed himself guilty of it. To this I will add an assertion of my own—the teaching of much experience : There are men whose gratitude, like their honesty, is a thing of mere policy —practised only when convenient or profit.Vijlo. Where it is neither, they have no giatitude. Robert Butler is one of these ni'-i!. Self, self is his only creed. He would sacrifice and he would trample under foot for cither profit or revenge. Frequently f has. ..■ lifiii-rl him declare what others w.-uid hide—"that to gain the good-will of the gaoler and the gaol chaplain he would saeri lice all. as they only eoidd serve him " ; and this he conclusively proved ore; he and I parted, but the story belongs to something el-.-.: rather than tin's. During my enforced companionship with Robert J.Sutler I and all near him experienced in many ways the irascibility and treachery of his disposition. Truly he is as void of remorse as of principle—as wanton as malignant; no reproof could shame, and no obligation bind him. Vanity and envy (seldom found together) both dwelt in him. The llrKt blinded him to his own faults or another's

merits. How then, it might be asked, could he envy what he could not see or appreciate? My answer is: It was not the. mental or physical superiority of another he envied, for these he could never discern, nor admit if he did discern. It was the material good that others enjoyed and he did not; here envy gnawed his very vitals. What he himself did not enjoy, he hated ami would destroy if opportunity allbrded. Whilst in Dunedm Caol his virulent nature was ever quarrelling with someone, fellow-lodger or official; hence he was always what is termed "in hot water"; but the cowardly craven with, which he always begged for release from punishment was equalled only by the folly and recklessness with which he incurred it. At last ho earned his discharge by an act as infamous as the Cumberland street murder was atrocious.

Discharged from gaol, he naturally inquired for, and found the person he had left tho Melbourne jewellery with. She had become the wife of the man Dcwar, and on being asked to return the jewellery, though admitting to still having possession of the property, she refused to restore it. Fatal admission ! The loss of the lady, Butler says, he could have borne, but not so the loot. Repulsed, reviled, sneered at, and threatened, it was more than his greedy, unscrupulous, and malignant nature could endure ; he determined to re-possess himself of the jewellery at any cost, and for this purpose, took lodgings near his victims' residence.

On the very night of the murder he says he made another demand for the things, but was again ballled, but while in the house he noted well the best means of entrance and the place where the axe was kept. While waiting to perpetrate the deed he was seen by Detective Bain, as told on trial, The meeting on Butler's part was unwelcome, and he"tried to avoid it, but could not. This meeting, as it might have done, did not deter him from his purpose ; but he had to wait, he said, until the streets got clear. He saw the husband return, and it but added another victim at the cost of another blow of the axe. What odds ?he argued with himself. There may be his week's, perhaps a fortnight's wages, and I could not earn a couple of pounds as quietly or easily by honest labor. So he reasoned, and so the husband fell. The knife by which he opened the window, and which could not be identified, he says he says he got from some hotel back-yard. After entering he proceeded at once to kill the sleepers to prevent their waking, striking the husband first and next the wife, who, he says, was awakened by the blow. How he killed the child he is silent about.

The occupants disposed of, he searched and found the jewellery rolled up in a pair of stockings; then, according to his regular custom, he thought to remove the evidence of the murders by firing the house. He cut open the bed and set it on fire. Calculating as he was, he thought not that, though calcined and charred, the cloven skulls would speak. But the fire did not burn, it only smouldered ; and he states his feelings as he saw this from where he was watching. The fire not destroying the house determined him to leave Dunedin. Ho did so, and at the road-side hotel learned that the telegraph had flashed the news of the murders through the land.

Ho abandoned the clothes he had worn, feating they might be blood-stained ; but he regretted that he had done so, and to account for the blood marks of the murder he purposely lacerated his hands with the lawyer brambles. Certain of arrest, he hid the jewellery at a well-marked spot, not half-an-hour before capture, lie states that from the moment of his arrest ho had a conviction they would not bo able to fasten the crime upon him, . c ;o well had he laid his plan and done his work. This feeling increased to a certainty as soon as he arrived in Dunedin, for there he was rendered that aid without which he later on felt he should have been lost.

A legal gentleman whom a friend engaged for him declined to openly defend him, yet advised him how to shape his own defence, and above everything, against giving the prosecution tho right of reply, as his acquittal or conviction depended on this. In regard to what I have indicated of B.'s powers of speaking, it may be thought I hare much under-rated them, and it may be that I have. But I only rpoke of those of his efforts to which I have been a listoner. In these I repeat there was nothing in his speaking above mediocrity, and no one who heard him would argue that the talents of Butler were anything great. When we come to his defence on his trial for tho Cumberland street tragedy, there are several things to be considered all tending to make clear what it is, but which were wanting in those other efforts I have alluded to.

Eirst, there was tin; legal aid he received, which comes out quite plain in the points of that defence ; second, there was the time lie had to prepare it; last, and greatest of all, there was the importance to Butler of the occasion. It was a matter of life or death ; his existence hung upon it, and so he concentrated all his energies upon a grand efl'ort; he had the whole bearings of the case mapped out and stamped upon his memory ; ho had written and read it over so often that he knew it just as he knew hispatf-r noxtr-r or the creeds. I used to see him walking about and mouthing it morning, noon, and night, Soon after his removal to Lyttelton he got a pamphlet of his trial, which, after first reading himself, underlining and filling the margin with notes of admiration, he put into the hands of his few admirers, and at last it came into mine. In it I at once recognised all the peculiarities of R. B. There was the same pantomime and posturing, the same tautology, the same drumming upon and lengthening out ideas, and most of them very foolish, lie seemed to be, as he ever was, talking against time. There was the same redundancy of similes and aphorisms, not always to the point. After hearing the whole of the evidence he saw at once, as did others, that there was nothing to link the crime upon him ; even the circumstantial evidence —and it was mostly circumstantial —was very weak and inconclusive. Had he been convicted on that evidence it would have been by the force of public opinion and prejudice, rather than by the evidence itself. Butler's one great aim was to impugn the whole evidence. All the witnesses were liars and perjurers, conspiring to hang an innocent man. But had not most of the witnesses, and the police in particular, been more scrupulous than they usually are, the circumstantial evidence might have been far more damning than it was. His cry of the treachery of springing fresh evidence upon him was puling in the extreme and something worse, for he who could murder sleeping people had little room to complain of surprise or treacheiy in others ; but, with such as lie, it is the peculiar policy to accuse others of their own crimes. To show that this Dunedin defence was an unusual effort and one not all Ins own way, I have but to ask Why did he not display—if not equal talent and ability—at least some little power in the other cases for which he has been sentenced ? Jle was unable, or he certainly would have done so. But, on previous occasions, he was like a burst bladder, empty. 'There was nothing left in him, and so he could bring forth nothing. But let me say a little more about his intellectual stamina and abilities. The police have said that, through them, he sought employment as a writer on the Tress. They procured him such employment, -which, when ohtained, he declined. Why so ? In reply, I have Ins own words, "that he felt himself quite unequal to the task ;" he dared not, with all his vanity and assumption, even essay it. He begged they would get him pick and shovel work instead. They got for him this kind of labor, but again he declined. This time he excused himself on the ground of physical incapacity. In the first case it was sheer inability, in the second it was sheer laziness or distate, for he had just done three years in the Government quarries. Those who recollect him at our society's table will no doubt remember that he (Butler) failed in every intellectual essay he attempted, and in one he shamefully and shamelessly utterly collapsed after three attempts, and in consequence retired angry, yet not abashed. Butler has shown the possession of the three great requisite qualilieations of 'Danton—"Audacity, audacity, and audacity." His own saying was: "If you have not some requisite quality, then ape it; few will distinguish between the real and the sham." Plenty of cheek he thought may sometimes be of more use in the world than modest ability. Judging his abilities fairly, he possesses a tolerable knowledge of music, but has a wretched voice, and is no instrumental performer. He is tolerably read in history, and has a good memory ; is well up in grammar and common arithmetic. Tr religion lie lias no God but himself. Soil-willed and arrogant, he cannot b.-e<>k eontiadiotion. Vain and affected bey,,ud mo-t men, he gives himself airs which rendi r him at once conspicuous and rhueuloiis. He fidgets and jerks as though he hud St. Yitus'a dance, and, standing or sitting, he is ever posing and attitudinising. In fact, as I have said of another, he is vanity personified, and it ia equally true of both.

Hargraves, in his " Blunders of Vice and Folly," saya "all criminals are fools;" and

someone else says "speech ia silvern, but silenco ia golden." It is a speeiea of gold Butler sadly lacks, for those ferocious threats of lu's made to the police he lias made to many others—myself included—many times. Ho not only speaks, but preaches to others, lie styles himself the apostle or schoolmaster of the period, and his doctrine to others is what he himself practises. It is " Kill, kill, and spare not." It is a divine command, he says, intended not for Joshua alone, but for men of all time. Ho teaches that his class ought to copy the examples of our rulers, and not be one whit more conscientious. Their orders in war run thus: "Kill, burn, and sink, and what you cannot carry away destroy ;" and why, Butler asks, should we not do the same ? Is it not our duty to do so ? Half measures are no good, but dangerous to those who adopt them; and he argues that ho is at present suffering for not having killed the Stampers and others be robbed, and vows should he ever have the opportunity again he will never again fail in carrying out this policy. Others, listening, admire and promise imitation. Should they do so, society will have something to fear. Since his removal to Lyttelton, the same amiable disposition displays itself—bludgeoning some and threatening others—he is striving to terrorise all. Twice he has made efforts to get poison into the gaol, but the authorities have taken the proper means to frustrate his design. Ironing, solitary confinement, separate treatment, gentle friendly reproof and advice, all fail to influence him for good ; he is, in fact, as impervious to good influences as is a duck's back to water. Yet Butler is leader of the gaol Hallelujah Band, org precentor of the choir, which, by the way, includes the honorable Mr Charters and others, all admirers of the " Philosophic Chicken," as R. B. has dubbed himself. If the career of R. B. has been so brilliant in the past, what may society not expect of him in the future, when—trebly indurated by his present sentence—he returns to its midst ? And what may not society anticipate from the converts he is continually sending out to practise his doctrines ? The only hope of the public is that this amiable and illustrious individual may in some way on an early day finish his career in the gaol, if not by disease, then at the hands of one of those public functionaries he has so lately evaded.