Manuel has saved his mother’s life.
Peter and William both feel sad that it had to be him. It was always going to end here.
20
Tuesday 27 May 1958
IT’S THE FINALE. Peter Manuel is going to give evidence on his own behalf. He gets up, unbuttons his jacket and almost runs up to the witness box. He turns to face the court. The balcony, the lawyers, the journalists are mesmerised. Unlike most of the witnesses, he doesn’t avert his eyes but has a good look at everyone. He’s excited. He has been waiting to do this for a long time.
Now they will get to know the real him.
John Wayne Gacy wanted to write his own story. Ted Bundy wanted to be a writer and represented himself in court. Carl Panzram wrote his autobiography and represented himself at trial. Panzram had sailed the world raping and killing men and boys, he sailed full crew up the Congo from Lobito Bay and returned alone, yet satiated. When Panzram didn’t like a witness’s evidence in court he stared hard at them and drew a finger along his throat. Peter Manuel wrote fiction. All his life people commented on how much he liked to tell stories. Even early borstal assessments noted how much he liked to tell stories.
This is it. He’ll never have a bigger audience, and they’re discerning. They’re actual writers: journalists, newsmen, novelists. Compton Mackenzie is here. He’s been reading Lombroso. He notes the likelihood of Manuel having a ‘Spain or Sicilian strain in his blood’. These people will see what the magazines couldn’t. They will see Other Possible Peter.
Manuel speaks so fast at the beginning that Lord Cameron asks him to have mercy on the stenographer. Manuel smiles kindly down at the expressionless man who is tip-tapping out his every word for the record. He slows down.
Then he talks for six hours, largely without notes.
He tells all the stories of each of the murders individually. As he does this he recalls witness statements, word for word, stages small vignettes, recounts dialogue. Sometimes, to establish a new chapter, he reads the details of a particular charge before addressing the case against him.
In the defence’s favour is his confident delivery, the fact that he is charged with horrific crimes but is just standing there, with legs and hair and a jacket on, speaking, doing normal human things. He couldn’t have done those awful things, could he? But then, who could? Well, somebody did.
Against his defence is just about everything Manuel says, how he behaves and what he means. Ten minutes into the six-hour monologue everyone in the courtroom knows that Manuel has made a catastrophic mistake. He should not be speaking.
Peter Manuel does not know how other people feel. He has never known that. He can guess. He can read a face and see signs that tell him if someone is frightened or laughing. But there is no reciprocation. He feels no small echo of what his listener is feeling.
Anne Kneilands: it wasn’t him. Sure, he was working nearby at the time, for the Gas Board. The only reason the cops liked him for it was the foreman on that job phoned them and telt them Peter appeared for work the day after the murder with scratches on his cheek and blood on his boots.
Now, Peter is a straightforward kind of person. He will not be spoken about behind his back. So he went to see the foreman and had a few words with him. Everyone knows what he means by ‘a few words’. The guy, he says, walked off the job and went away to work somewhere else. Somewhere quieter. He snickers.
To Manuel this is how real men resolve disputes. He thinks he is telling them that Peter Manuel is a man in charge of situations, that other men respect him. Other men don’t respect him. They are afraid of him because he is nuts.
Sure, he says, a witness claims to have seen him in East Kilbride that night, but they couldn’t have seen him because he wasn’t there.
The police were all over him at the time, searching his house, confiscating his clothes, bothering him, bothering his mother. His voice breaks when he says ‘mother’. Jury members look up, hopeful. They want to find humanity in the man. But Manuel has moved on. He wasn’t going to be harassed by the police. He decided to take action. He told a journalist to take his picture and to publish a story about the murder on the front page of the local paper with the picture. He holds up the page for them to see. Under the headline, local man questioned, is a photo of Peter standing in front of a car in his workman’s clothing. He is smiling for the camera. This was published but did anyone come forward and identify him after that? No. Why? Because he wasn’t there.
He moves on to the Isabelle Cooke murder and reads out the charge. He reads this out in a low, slow voice, hoping perhaps to sound sombre. He doesn’t sound sombre, he sounds mocking.
‘“On 28 December 1957, on the footpath between Mount Vernon Avenue and Kenmuir Avenue, Mount Vernon, you did assault Isabelle Wallace Cooke (17), 5 Carrick Drive, Mount Vernon, and did seize her, struggle with her, drag her into a field, tear off her clothing, tie a brassiere around her neck and a head square around her face and mouth, rob her of a pair of shoes, a brush, a fan, a stole, a pouchette of cosmetics and a handbag, and you did murder her, and such is a capital murder within the meaning of the Homicide Act 1957, Section 5 (1) (a).”’
The jury have already heard poor Mr Cooke talking about his daughter’s disappearance and the discovery of her body. They’ve been moved by his quiet dignity. Now Manuel is doing silly voices.
Well, Manuel didn’t do that murder. He wasn’t there. He didn’t know where the body was. Goodall and Muncie knew where it was buried all along and they just took him there in the middle of the night and said he’d told them where it was. ‘I am standing on her.’ Who actually says that? One might say ‘I am standing on it’, or ‘I am standing on the grave’, but ‘I am standing on her’? No one would say that.
He doesn’t say anything compassionate about Isabelle or Anne, two dead seventeen-year-old girls. To him they are no more than skin-covered stage flats in a play about him.