The trial of Anna Wetherell begins on 27 April 1866 as a public prosecution of a woman accused of forgery, intoxication, and assault, but it quickly becomes entangled with the case against Emery Staines and the disputed documents surrounding Francis Carver. Walter Moody’s defence contests not only the charges against Anna but also the assumptions about her character that threaten to decide her fate before the evidence is weighed.

The morning in court

The morning dawns clear in Hokitika. Moody rises early, takes care over his appearance, and reaches the Courthouse carrying a leather valise. A queue stretches halfway down the street, while a crowd gathers at the entrance. The scene makes the proceedings a public spectacle, a prospect the presiding Justice Kemp acknowledges directly: he instructs both sides to keep their questioning appropriate and not turn Anna’s former work into an occasion for prurient attention.

At nine, Justice Kemp opens the session. Moody appears for Anna; Lawrence Broham represents the plaintiff, assisted by Roger Harrington and John Fellowes. Kemp’s preliminary directions establish that the day will involve six charges across two defendants. Anna faces forgery, inebriation, and assault; Staines, in the afternoon, will face fraud, theft, and dereliction. Because the cases are interdependent, Kemp postpones Anna’s sentencing until Staines’s trial has also been heard, so that each case can be considered in the light of the other.

Anna enters from the cells wearing a black dress that had belonged to Aubert Gascoigne’s late wife. Her appearance has changed from the gauntness of her earlier detention; at the witness box she takes the Bible oath quietly and waits, hands loosely folded. She pleads not guilty to forging a signature on a deed of gift. The proceedings place a contested paper, her recent conduct, and the question of her mental state before the same court.

Anna’s account and Moody’s defence

Under questioning, Anna says she first learned of Staines’s intentions on the morning of 20 March, when the gaol-house chaplain brought the deed to the Wayfarer’s Fortune. She took it to the Courthouse, where Fellowes told her that it was a legal document and might give her a claim to the fortune. He agreed to take it to the bank on her behalf. They arranged to meet again at five o’clock; when Anna returned, she says, she fainted. Her testimony places the deed and its possible value at the centre of the events that led to her charges.

Moody’s cross-examination draws attention to George Shepard, governor of the Hokitika Gaol, who brought all three charges against her and had also made allegations about her sanity. Anna says she has no personal acquaintance with Shepard. Moody then establishes a connection through Ah Sook, whom Anna describes as a very dear friend. She testifies that Shepard shot him on 20 March while acting under a warrant. Broham objects that Moody is casting aspersions, but Moody argues that the acquaintance matters to the relationship between plaintiff and defendant.

Anna adds that she had seen Ah Sook vexed, perhaps frightened, on occasions she later understood differently; she says she learned about Shepard’s brother only after Ah Sook’s death. Moody submits a witnessed copy of a Sydney Herald transcript dated 9 July 1854, identifying an archival original at the Antipodean Archives on Wharf-street. Anna says her friendship with Ah Sook was no secret: she attended his den most days, and it was the only den in Kaniere. Justice Kemp notes the personal significance of the association to Shepard but declines to reopen consideration of the plaintiff’s motives, holding that the court is there to consider Anna’s conduct. The exchange gives Moody a limited victory: he has placed a connection before the court, even though Kemp will not let it redirect the hearing.

Witnesses and the attack on Anna’s character

Joseph Pritchard’s testimony supports Anna’s account of the incident at the Gridiron Hotel on 27 January. He confirms that the first bullet disappeared in the misfire and that Aubert Gascoigne fired the second into Anna’s pillow as an experiment. Asked why he had sought an audience with her that afternoon, Pritchard says he suspected there was another explanation for the apparent suicide attempt and wanted to examine whether her opium supply had been poisoned or altered. His evidence recasts the episode as an unanswered question about the drug, rather than proof, on its own, of Anna’s intent.

Dr. Gillies, Dr. Sanders, and police inspector Walsham also give expert testimony. Shepard is the plaintiff’s final witness. He dwells on Anna’s opium dependence, former profession, and earlier suicide attempt, describing her as a burden on police resources and an offence to moral standards. He urges that she be committed to the newly built asylum at Seaview. Moody’s earlier introduction of the issue of Anna’s sanity, together with the testimony concerning Ah Sook and Devlin’s evidence, makes Shepard’s intervention appear rancorous rather than detached. The trial thus exposes a conflict between assessing specific alleged acts and using a woman’s history to discredit her as a person.

The deed, the signature, and the linked case

Moody questions Shepard about whether Emery Staines’s signature on the deed of gift is demonstrably forged. Shepard calls it a near-enough replica, wording that leaves room for doubt rather than offering a conclusive identification. The question matters beyond Anna’s morning hearing: Kemp has already treated her charges as linked to the accusations against Staines, and the afternoon case will test the surrounding documents from another direction.

That documentary trail reaches back to June 1865. Benjamin Löwenthal recalls a scarred man entering his Weld-street office to advertise for a missing shipping crate, offering twenty pounds for its return or fifty if it came back unopened. The man gave an address on Gibson Quay and identified himself through a birth certificate as Crosbie Francis Wells. When Löwenthal set the notice, he removed the middle name Francis to prevent the final word, Wells, from being stranded at the top of a third newspaper column. The advertiser returned the next morning to insist that Francis be restored, then paid for the week’s notices. Löwenthal could date the encounter because the West Coast Times’s framed first edition marked its founding on 29 May, while his old hand-powered press was replaced on 1 July.

Moody later connects this remembered advertisement to Carver. Carver had used the name Crosbie Francis Wells while seeking the crate, which contained about four thousand pounds in gold sewn into five dresses. The birth certificate’s presence in Carver’s hands remains unexplained at that point. In another document, the bill of sale for the Godspeed, the purchaser’s signature is written as Francis Wells with a conspicuously ambiguous flourish that could make the initial appear to include a C. Moody sees the possibility that Carver intended the signature to be read either as Francis Wells or C. Francis Wells, leaving room to deny deliberate impersonation.

At the linked proceedings, Moody compares signatures in Alistair Lauderback’s private correspondence, the deed of gift witnessed by Crosbie Wells on 11 October 1865, and Lydia Carver’s marriage certificate with the signature on Carver’s Godspeed bill of sale. He argues that the first three match one another and do not match the bill of sale, establishing that Carver’s signature there is forged. This documentary comparison changes the trial’s implications: the questioned deed cannot be considered in isolation from the identity fraud and false sale that brought Carver into the chain of events.

Significance and limits of the hearing

The court day turns on the uneasy relation between personal reputation and documentary proof. Shepard presses Anna’s vulnerability and past as reasons to confine her; Moody answers with witness testimony, a transcript of an earlier trial, and a chain of papers whose meanings shift as their signatories are identified. Kemp’s decision to defer sentencing recognizes that the separate prosecutions cannot be fairly understood apart from one another.

The proceedings do not, in the evidence presented here, conclude with Anna’s verdict or sentence. Their decisive movement is instead from accusation toward comparison: a deed challenged as forged sits beside a bill of sale whose signature Moody identifies as Carver’s deliberate impersonation. By making the morning hearing depend on what the afternoon trial will reveal, the episode turns legal procedure into a test of how names, testimony, and material records can either obscure a person’s identity or expose a fraud.