123 is unnecessary, though, of course, always useful. What has to be proved by the prosecution, before there is a verdict of guilty, is that the accused committed the act in circumstances amounting to murder, not why he did so',16
As there was no reason to doubt that Lock committed the three murders he never denied that and it was certain he was not legally insane under the M'Naghten Rules, the verdict was a proper one. So Lock was executed on March 23, 1926, at Walton Gaol, Liverpool. A French court would have spent much time exploring the problem of motivation; and in the pre-trial period, a French examining magistrate would have rigorously questioned Lock, and other witnesses and parties, and prepared a dossier on the history of the crime. But this is not English legal practice: an English court is concerned primarily with evidence, less so with obscure problems of why men act as they do.
Tennyson Jesse maintains that all murders may be reduced to one of six types: murder for gain, for revenge, for elimination, for jealousy, or as a result of lust of killing, or from conviction (such as Orsini's attempt to assassinate Napoleon III, which failed, but led to the death of a number of bystanders).17 She does not include insanity in her typology because a madman is presumed to act irrationally, and it is not easy to unscramble a deranged mind. But if we accept her classification, then we must exclude Lock: he does not fit apparently into any of her divisions.
If we return to Lock's biography, we may discover clues that could account for his behaviour. As outlined above, Lock settled in England when he was twenty-three; worked for a time as clerk or assistant for a shipping agency until he became an independent businessman and an agent for three British shipping lines employing Chinese seamen. By hard work and frugal living, he amassed a small fortune, and became a spokesman community leader for the Liverpool Chinese community and, later, a spokesman for all Chinese in England. By 1924, when he was to lose most of his fortune, he was the most respected Chinese in England, certainly on Merseyside where he saw to it