Adolph Beck

This article is about the businessman Adolph Beck. For other people see Adolf Beck .

Beck (above) and Meyer (below)

Adolph Beck or Adolf Beck (* 1841 in Norway ; † December 7, 1909 in London ) was a businessman and the victim of a known miscarriage of justice . Beck spent several years in prison between 1896 and 1904 for crimes committed by con artist Wilhelm Meyer alias John Smith due to false testimony and poor identification methods . Beck's case and similar mounted miscarriage of justice to the British George Edalji received great public attention ( Causes célèbres ) and led to the establishment of the Court of Criminal Appeal ( dt .: Criminal Law Court of Appeal ) in the year 1907th

Life

Adolph Beck went to sea as a young man and came to England in 1865. After a stay in South America , he moved to Norway again. From 1885 he stayed again in England, where he worked as an engineer. Despite his business activities, Beck was constantly troubled by money.

On December 16, 1895, Beck was approached in London's Victoria Street by an angry woman who allegedly reclaimed jewelry that Beck had stolen. Beck pointed out to the woman that there must be some mix-up and continued on his way. After the woman continued to persecute him, he complained to a police officer about an alleged "prostitute" who was harassing him. The woman, however, requested his arrest and insisted that Beck was a thief .

The policeman took them both to the nearest police station. The woman's name was Ottilie Meissonier and was an unmarried language teacher. According to her testimony, Beck had introduced herself as Lord Willoughby a few weeks earlier and stole her jewelry under some pretext. Beck was taken into custody.

After further investigation by the police, 22 women came forward who had been betrayed by an alleged Lord Wilton de Willoughby in recent years . In a hastily carried out confrontation , Beck was confronted with the women who had been betrayed, along with some men who were taken off the street at random. There was no man with gray hair or a mustache like Beck wore among the comparison persons. Accordingly, he was "identified" as a perpetrator by all women.

In 1877 a certain John Smith had been convicted. This had a similar modus operandi . Despite Beck's pledges of innocence, the court suspected that Smith and Beck were the same person. Beck protested, pointing to witnesses who could confirm that he was in South America in 1877. On March 3, 1896, the trial of Beck began at the Old Bailey . The prosecution was represented by Horace Avory and Guy Stephenson, with defense lawyers Charles F. Gill and Percival Clarke.

The handwriting expert Thomas H. Gurrin compared writings of Smith and Beck and came to the conclusion, Beck had written the earlier documents with a "disguised handwriting."

Witnesses or evidence that would have proven Beck's stay in South America were not admitted. All of the witnesses called by the prosecution claimed that Beck was the perpetrator. On March 5, 1896 Beck was found guilty and sentenced to 7 years in prison despite his pledges of innocence. In prison he was given John Smith's old inmate number D 523, supplemented by the letter W for a repeat offender. Despite several petitions from his solicitor to re-investigate the case, Beck remained in prison until 1901.

In 1898 Smith was found to be Jewish and circumcised as such , while Beck was not. After a request from the Home Office to the responsible judge Forrest Fulton, the latter merely stated that Smith and Beck may not be the same person, but Beck was definitely convicted for the acts of 1895. As a result, only the W was deleted from Beck's prisoner number, otherwise nothing was done.

Journalist George Sims published an article in the Daily Mail in 1901 about the inconsistencies of the case. Public opinion on the case slowly turned in Beck's favor. One of the most prominent proponents of re-investigation was the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle . In July 1901 Beck was released early because of his "good conduct".

From 1904, cases of women cheated on increased again. An inspector familiar with the Beck case introduced one of the witnesses to Beck. On April 15, 1904, Beck left his apartment, where he was accused of theft by the witness. Beck panicked and tried to escape the woman. He was arrested immediately. His panicked escape was interpreted as an admission of guilt. On June 27 of that year he was tried again. Five women identified him as a cheater. Despite these testimonies, the judge had doubts about the defendant's guilt and postponed the delivery of the verdict.

The real culprit was arrested on August 7th. He had tried to steal some of the ladies' jewelry under a pretext and sell it. When he was arrested, he gave his name as William Thomas . CID inspector John Kane, familiar with the Beck case , immediately recognized the obvious parallels between the two cases.

After a confrontation, all of the witnesses still available changed their minds and now accused William Thomas . He also appeared under pseudonyms such as John Smith , William Wyatt and William Weiss and, as it turned out later, was a certain Wilhelm Meyer .

Adolph Beck was pardoned on July 27, 1904 . He was offered £ 5,000 in compensation. An investigative commission examined both convictions and found misconduct by the police officers and judges involved.

Beck personally was not satisfied with this. He died lonely and a broken man in London's Middlesex Hospital in 1909 .

Aftermath

Beck's case was one of the factors that led to the establishment of the Court of Criminal Appeal in England in 1907.

literature

• Christian Heermann : The Strangler of Notting Hill - Great London Crimes. The New Berlin, Berlin 1983.
• Tim Coates: The Strange Case of Adolph Beck. Stationery Office Books, 2001, ISBN 0-11-702414-7 .
• Eric R. Watson: The Trial of Adolf Beck. William Hodge and company, Notable British Trials series, 1924.

Sound recordings

From Adolf Beck (here spelling with f) there are sound recordings on cylinders:

• Trial And Sentence , December 22, 1904
• Prison Experiences , January 12, 13, and 28, 1905

both at G & T (Gramophone and Typewriter), GC 1271-73

Web links

• Adolph Beck - Convicting the Innocent (PDF file; 482 kB, English)