Something New

  We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.   

 “OUTCAST – The Extraordinary Life and Death of Etienne Jean Brocher” by Brian Stoddart (Quentin Wilson Publishing, $NZ 35.00)

 

            In 1896, a married couple Mr and Mrs Jones were murdered in Petone in the Hutt, just a little north of Wellington. Stephen Bosher came to their house to collect some goods, but when he knocked on their door there was no reply. He asked a woman he knew, Mrs. Atkinson, to help him wake up the Joneses. She quickly found that there was a back door. Bosher said he had never known there was a back door. She went in, and found the Joneses, dead, their necks slashed by a knife. They alerted the police. The police brought in many officers, searched around the house and raked through the town, apparently incompetently. They could find no trace of anybody who might have been the culprit. When questioned, Bosher was able to explain to the police what he had been doing for the last few days, and his movements when the murder had happened. The police found him credible. Bosher said that he had seen two tramps lingering about the Joneses store the previous night, and he was able to describe them. The police did catch up with the tramps whom Bosher had described, but it was quickly proven that they had not committed any crime. There was a drunken young man, Jim Shore, who had got into a brawl in a local pub, and for a while newspapers suggested that he could have committed the crime. But then a better policeman got to work, a real detective, Peter Pender, who was able to gradually pull apart Bosher’s narrative. It became more and more probable that it was Bosher himself who had committed murder; and as his life was made known, Bosher was not whom he seemed to be. French born, he was Etienne Jean Brocher.

            All this we learn in the first part of Brian Stoddart’s non-fiction story Outcast. Does that mean that Stoddart has simply given us the story of a murder? Not a bit of it. Brian Stoddart’s aim is to tell us the whole story of Etienne Jean Brocher’s life. He does so by scrupulously using police files, newspaper reports, what was said at the bench and in trial, and accounts of the many crimes Brocher had committed.

            Born in 1857 in France on a border with Switzerland, Etienne Jean Brocher came to New Zealand as a teenager. He worked as a labourer in the South Island. His first [petty] crime was theft, for which he was fined. He did time in the Lyttelton  jail. Moving to the French settlement in Akaroa, he married Josephine Libeau, got on well with the people of Akaroa, and was almost seen as a model settler. But he found it hard to find work. He tried to be a photographer, but he got few appointments. So he abandoned his wife and child, left all his debts behind him, and headed for Sydney. Later he went back to France. He was to tell tall-stories about his life in France, but the fact was he committed crimes in France and [according to what was then French law] he had not done his Military Service… So, as a known criminal, he was put in the army, but in the toughest battalion in Algeria, the Bat.F. [French Battalion], known to be made of thugs and criminals. In comparison, the rough men in the French Foreign Legion were gentlemen. When he’d done his time [five years], he made it back to Akaroa. He lied about working on a ship which had run aground, and had taken all his assets with it. He claimed [untruthfully] that he had been wounded in the riots in Paris just after the Franco-Prussian War; but he said this because he had been involved in a criminal enterprise and he had been slightly hurt. He moved up north to Wellington and in 1892 he married Mary Ann Reece, without noting that he was officially already married. The record called him John Nathan Stephen Bosher. He joined the Salvation Army and, surprisingly, he proved to have great skill in playing instruments in their band… but he had hardly enough money to feed his wife and child.

            Now suspected as a murderer, the police ramped up their examination of Bosher’s house and they kept finding many incongruous things… and all this time Jim Shore, brawler  and drunkard, was still locked up in jail. The police were able to bring Bosher’s first wife, Josephine Libeau, up from Akaroa, who showed that Bosher was a bigamist. So Bosher was on the way to face a trial for bigamy and possibly a trial for murder. The bigamy was easily proven. Finally on 11 January 1897 he faced the Magistrate’s Court, which was simply to assess whether there was sufficient evidence to send Bosher to trial. However the magistrate was very biased and little had time for the defence. What many people found odd was that Bosher, even though  he was facing death, throughout the examinations he was neither angry nor aggressive, but was quiet, reposed, and sometimes laughed. Brian Stoddart notes [p.126] “Those behaviours  would surely attract commentary now, because, as a general reading suggests, he might well have suffered from some form of  anti-social personality disorder, as indicated by: a bloated  self-image; a highly developed sense of his own significance; little or no empathy for those he dealt with; constant disregard for the social rights of others; observing social norms only when it suited his purposes; a long-term disregard for the rights and feelings of others and at the expanse of his own condition, needs and demands.”

            And at this point, dear readers, I’m going to annoy you by not giving you all the details that follow. The fact is, Brian Stoddart makes it clear that the moment Etienne Jean Brocher went to trial in the Wellington Supreme Court, he had little chance of being acquitted. The judge was biased against foreigners anyway, and whenever the defence pointed out flaws in the prosecution’s arguments, the judge would draw into question what the defence had said. Stoddart never says that Brocher was innocent, but he also makes it clear that there was no definitive clue or discovery that could really damn him. Still, Brocher went to the gallows and a sadistic hangman. At the most, the outcome was ambiguous.

Brian Stoddart looks closely at the attitudes of New Zealanders in the 1890s with all their prejudices and all the sensationalism of the newspapers. He also examines the very-upper-class who were the judges - and the politicians of the time who often shaped popular views, including their comments on people at trial. And he tells us, in great detail, what happened to all the people who were involved in the case – the wives of Brocher, the police officers, the bench, the hangman,  In effect, Stoddart gives us a panorama of part of New Zealand.