s knife had been brought there by the murderer: "Horrible though
it may be, my conclusion is that he brought it with the intention of
cutting the throats of his victims, and that, finding they lay in rather
an untoward position, he changed his mind, and, having carried out the
object with which he entered the house, left the knife and, going back,
brought the axe with which he effected his purpose. What was the purpose
of the murderer? Was it the robbery of Dewar's paltry wages? Was it
the act of a tiger broken loose on the community? An act of pure wanton
devilry? or was there some more reasonable explanation of this most
atrocious crime?"

Butler rejected altogether the theory of ordinary theft. No thief
of ambitious views, he said, would pitch upon the house of a poor
journeyman butcher. The killing of the family appeared to him to be
the motive: "an enemy hath done this." The murderer seems to have had a
knowledge of the premises; he enters the house and does his work swiftly
and promptly, and is gone. "We cannot know," Butler continues, "all the
passages in the lives of the murdered man or woman. What can we know of
the hundred spites and jealousies or other causes of malice which might
have caused the crime? If you say some obscure quarrel, some spite or
jealousy is not likely to have been the cause of so dreadful a murder,
you cannot revert to the robbery theory without admitting a motive much
weaker in all its utter needlessness and vagueness. The prominent
feature of the murder, indeed the only feature, is its ruthless,
unrelenting, determined vindictiveness. Every blow seemed to say, 'You
shall die you shall not live.'"

Whether Butler were the murderer of the Dewars or not, the theory that
represented them as having been killed for the purpose of robbery
has its weak side all the weaker if Butler, a practical and ambitious
criminal, were the guilty man.

In 1882, two years after Butler's trial, there appeared in a New Zealand
newspaper, Society, published in Christchurch, a series of Prison
"Portraits," written evidently by one who had himself undergone a term
of imprisonment. One of the "Portraits" was devoted to an account of
Butler. The writer had known Butler in prison. According to the story
told him by Butler, the latter had arrived in Dunedin with a quantity of
jewellery he had stolen in Australia. This jewellery he entrusted to a
young woman for safe keeping. After serving his first term of two year