Anna Frizell believed the carriage was conveying her towards Molesworth Street. Yet it drew up before a dwelling in Capel Street. Luke Dillon had promised she might return home after partaking of some refreshment. That halt, however, unsettled the course of the evening: returning after an absence of a quarter of an hour, he pressed her to drink a glass of mulled wine and water. According to the testimony Anna gave five months later, he held her head and forced her to swallow roughly half the glass. A sudden faintness and dizziness overcame her. Her memory ceased.
On the 13th of April, 1831, in Dublin, Anna appeared as a witness at the trial of Dillon, who stood indicted for rape. She was twenty years of age. Her deposition retraced the path that had led her to that house, and the promises that had induced her to enter the carriage. She had been educated in a French convent, returning to the house of her father at Slapolin, near Howth, in 1828. Whilst visiting relatives in Dublin, Dr. and Mrs. O’Reardon, she had made Dillon’s acquaintance. An intimacy had grown between them.
In the autumn of 1830, she met him once more at the MacDonnels’ in Stephen’s Green. He presented himself as an ardent suitor. He was to call on the morrow to collect certain letters he had undertaken to carry to England on her behalf; yet Dr. O’Reardon opened the door and turned him away. On the 4th of November, Anna encountered him again at a dinner in company with Mrs. O’Reardon. Dillon solicited an interview for the following day, desiring to speak with her in private. She hesitated before consenting to meet him in Kildare Street.
Rain was falling. Taking shelter in a cottage they came upon during their walk, they remained there two or three hours. Dillon asked her hand in marriage. Anna replied that she would be happy to consent if her father approved the match; she added that if money were his object, she could bring him no considerable portion, her father having a numerous family. Dillon protested that he sought no fortune of hers, possessing sufficient means for their support, and expecting moreover an inheritance from his uncle. Ere they quitted the cottage, he kissed her twice. In the carriage he summoned on account of the rain, he urged an immediate, secret marriage, professing his conviction that her father would never sanction their union.
It was this carriage that conveyed them to Capel Street, rather than to the house whither Anna thought herself returning. A lad showed them into a back room and received orders to prepare fish. Dillon lingered with her a short while, then left the room, remaining absent some ten or fifteen minutes. Upon his return, he announced that the weather had cleared and that she might walk home. Observing that she had taken no punch, he renewed his entreaties that she drink the warm wine and water.
After that glass, Anna declared that she lost all consciousness. She related that she awoke in the night, stripped of her clothes and lying beside Dillon in an upper chamber. Seized with terror, she sprang from the bed, striking the wall in her efforts to find the door. Dillon seized her by the waist and sought to stifle her cries. She screamed aloud; he forced her back into the bed and held her there, swearing that he would make her his wife the following morning. She testified that he violated her afresh, keeping her beside him until daybreak.
At dawn, she at last left the house in Dillon’s company, he having pledged to conduct her to the Rev. Mr. Kenrick to be married. He did not redeem the pledge. Anna returned alone to Mrs. O’Reardon’s. She announced at first that she was married, then disclosed the violence she had suffered. Mrs. O’Reardon fainted, according to the narrative, whereupon Anna unbosomed herself to others. She swore she had never set eyes on Dillon after that night until she saw him in the dock.
The letter Anna addressed to him on the following day became a capital instrument of cross-examination. Its tone was affectionate: she implored him to see her again, painted her distress, besought him to buy a ring and fulfill his promise of marriage. She wrote, too, that she had told Mrs. O’Reardon they were wed, and trembled at her father’s wrath. Examined at great length upon this letter, she explained that she had been advised not to treat Dillon as a villain or a scoundrel, lest he should refuse to return. She had written it, she said, to draw him back and oblige him to honour his word. The letter appointed a meeting for the following noon at the upper end of Dawson Street. It retracted nothing of her deposition as to what had transpired in the house; rather, it bore witness to the dilemma in which she found herself on the morrow of the outrage.
Anna underwent direct and cross-examination for upwards of five hours. Her mother, Mrs. Frizell, and Mrs. O’Reardon then deposed to such facts as lay within their knowledge, corroborating her account on those points. For the defence, several persons connected with the house in Capel Street swore that Anna had been a consenting party and that no violence had occurred. According to Pelham, their testimony faltered under cross-examination, and they admitted having visited Dillon in gaol.
Mr. Justice Torrens summed up the evidence. After deliberating for an hour and three-quarters, the jury returned a verdict of guilty, accompanied by a strong recommendation to mercy grounded upon Dillon’s apparent youth. On the following day, when asked why sentence of death should not be pronounced, Dillon answered that it became him not to dispute the verdict of twelve sworn men, and that he submitted to the judgment of the court. The judge observed that he had weighed the case with anxious care, but felt unable to give effect to the recommendation. He pronounced the capital sentence, fixing the execution for the 7th of May.
Active exertions were immediately set on foot to preserve his life. Petitions bearing the signatures of persons described as respectable were laid before the Crown. The chronicler notes the jurors’ recommendation and records that even relatives of the young woman were desirous that he should not expiate his crime upon the scaffold. A respite was granted, and the sentence was subsequently commuted to transportation for life. Dillon was conveyed to Sydney among other convicts. Pelham writes that his family enjoyed high respectability in the county of Roscommon, and that an inherited fortune procured him in the colony privileges seldom accorded to transports. Accounts reaching the chronicler represented him as moving among the foremost circles of that society.
Anna died in June 1831 at Bangor, in Wales, whither she had repaired in the hope that a change of scene might alleviate her melancholy. Pelham speaks of a “broken heart.” She was twenty years of age.