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experts, who’d each done their level best to reinforce the jury’s already strong inclination to find Libby Hatch not guilty. Albert Hamilton, the snake-oil salesman-turned-forensics expert, had managed to lay out enough confusing information about guns and bullets to make Lucius’s testimony seem, if not mistaken, at least unprovable. To start with, he’d said, the slug what the state’d found in the Hatches’ wagon might have come from Daniel Hatch’s Colt, or it might not have: because there was no central registry for firearms (just as Lucius and Marcus had told us) and because the Colt Peacemaker had been such a popular model of revolver for so many years, the odds that the bullet had in fact come from some other gun were nothing close to the million to one what Lucius had estimated. As for the identifying marks on the missile itself, Hamilton took great pains to explain just how high production standards at Samuel Colt’s factory were, and how the specifications of every piece turned out were consistent with all those of the same model. Even the nick inside the muzzle of Hatch’s gun what produced the small mark on the bullets that we’d seen could’ve been the result of a factory defect, “Dr.” Hamilton said, a defect shared by dozens and maybe hundreds of other Peacemakers. Mr. Picton, on cross-examination, had asked how a factory what had such high production standards could turn out hundreds of revolvers with the same muzzle flaw, a question what Hamilton hadn’t been able to answer; but, incompetent as the man obviously was to anybody who knew anything about ballistics, he’d done a lot of damage with the laymen of the jury, and Mr. Darrow’s claim that the state’s ballistic evidence was untrustworthy had seemed proved.

As for the Doctor’s associate, William Alanson White, it’d been his job to dispute the state’s contention that a sane woman could plan and carry out the murders of her own children—and he had, it seemed, seen to his task pretty effectively. He was helped by the fact that during his career he hadn’t dabbled much in the psychology of family relationships, certainly not in the controversial way what the Doctor and others of his breed (like Dr. Adolf Meyer) had; because White’s business was pretty strictly criminals and their mental disorders, he was seen from the beginning as less peculiar than the Doctor, and therefore more trustworthy. On top of that, he hadn’t done any direct personal work with Clara Hatch, a fact what under ordinary circumstances might’ve made him look something less than fully informed, but what in this troubling, topsy-turvy case made him seem more detached and reliable. On being asked by Mr. Darrow for his “educated opinion” about Clara’s mental condition, Dr. White’d answered that he didn’t really believe that the memories of a girl who’d been through such an ordeal—and who was still, after all, very young—could be relied on. Such was what the jury wanted to hear—it was a lot easier than accepting that what Clara’d said was true—and so they’d seemed to ignore Dr. White’s own statements about not being an expert on kids and accepted the rest of what he had to say.

The main part of his testimony, though, had focused on Libby Hatch herself, and on the notion of whether she was capable of the crime what the state’d charged her with. Dr. White said that, after spending some three hours with the woman, he’d formed the same opinion as Dr. Kreizler: that Libby, though emotional and impulsive, was free from any mental disease and was, especially as far as the legal definition of the word went, sane. But the conclusion Dr. White drew from this was the opposite of what Dr. Kreizler’s had been: Libby’s sanity was a very strong indication—if not outright proof—that she couldn’t have shot her kids. In his experience, he said, there were only three reasons women committed such crimes: insanity, poverty, or the children being illegitimate. Since none of these reasons was in extreme evidence in this case, the state’s explanation of what’d happened was “not credible.” “The very character of the crime,