People v. Watters

RICHARDS, J.

This is an appeal from a judgment of conviction of the defendant upon the charge of murder and from the order denying the defendant a new trial. The homicide, if committed as charged in the information, occurred on the twenty-seventh day of January, 1926, in the city of Sacramento,, where at the time the defendant resided with his wife and their three minor children the eldest of which was a girl, at that time of the age of ten years, and was the main witness for the presecution and the only witness who testified to the direct act of killing. Immediately after the date of the alleged homicide the defendant, taking his three children, removed to, San Diego, where some four months later he was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife, upon information imparted to the arresting officers by his said daughter. He was brought to trial in Sacramento, where his daughter testified to the direct fact of having witnessed him shoot her mother and also to certain other facts having to do with his disposition of her body. The prosecution also produced at the trial a considerable amount of circumstantial evidence strongly pointing to the defendant’s commission of the crime. The defendant did not take the witness-stand in his own behalf, but rested his defense upon a statement given by him to the arresting officers shortly after his detention, in which he asserted his inno

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cence of the crime. The jury returned a verdict finding the defendant guilty of murder of the first degree without recommendation. The defendant moved for a new trial upon several of the statutory grounds, which motion was upon the hearing thereon denied.

The appellant’s first contention is that the evidence was insufficient to justify the verdict of conviction, and in support thereof he presents certain criticisms of the testimony of the ten year old daughter of the defendant, who was the only direct witness to the homicide, and which he insists would render her evidence unworthy of credence. He insists, for example, that the fact that this child who, according to her testimony, had seen her mother murdered, did not reveal her dreadful secret until about four months after the date of its occurrence, and then only after she had witnessed a serious quarrel between her father and her still older sister, who at the time of the homicide was living in San Diego, renders most improbable the truth of the story which she then told her sister and later repeated upon the witness-stand. The evidence, however, of the child discloses that the defendant, her father, directly after he had committed the crime had warned her not to tell of it or he would cut her throat. This if believed by the jury, would supply an ample excuse for her silence, at least while living daily with her father and up to the time when the terrified child first saw a ray of hope through the rift occasioned by the quarrel between the murderer and her elder sister. The story which the child told of the homicide and of the actions and conduct of the defendant in disposing of his wife’s dead body was consistent in its every detail; and coupled, as it was, with the other circumstances educed by the prosecution at the trial and which showed the sudden and entirely unexplained disappearance of the defendant’s wife on the very night of the alleged crime; and taken in connection with the defendant’s several lying statements regarding the whereabouts of his wife, supply ample evidence justifying the verdict of conviction. The appellant further, and in this same connection, contends that there was not sufficient evidence of the