5
It is not, as the prosecution maintain, unlikely that a man wandering about at the dead of night should be murdered for his clothing; nothing is more likely. The fact that he was not stripped indicates nothing. If the approach of passers-by startled his assailants into quitting him before they had had time to strip him, they showed sense, not madness, in preferring their lives to their spoils.
6
Further, he may not in fact have been murdered for his clothing; he may have seen others engaged in some quite different outrage and have been killed by them to prevent his giving information of the crime; who knows? Again, were not those who hated him almost as much as I did—and there were a great many—more likely to have murdered him than I? It was plain to them that suspicion would fall on me; while I knew very well that I should bear the blame for them.