AN INNOCENT MAN'S PERIL.

Evening Post, Volume XXX, Issue 22, 25 July 1885, Page 1 (Supplement)

AN INNOCENT MAN'S PERIL.

On the 17th day November, 1883, a coloured desperado , named Charles H. Rugg strangled t.wo women named Maybee in a barn at Brookville, L.T. ; then entered the house, where a blind and paralytic old man, also named Maybee, sat by the fire. Rugg knocked him senseless, and then robbed the house. Farly in the following January the same negro, who had escaped arrest, went to the house of J. O. Townsend, ' at Oyster Bay, three miles from Brookville, where he made a murderous attack with a mason's stone-hammer upon Townsend and his wife. He" did not kill this couple, but Mrs. Townsend has since died of her injuries. He also robbed their bouse. Soon afterwards t-'ealey Sprague, living about four miles from Oyster Bay, was, assaulted by Rugg, robbed, and left for dead. Rugg afterward went iuto Sprague's house and robbed Mrs. Sprague, but did not injure her. He was pursued by the country people, and captured. He was duly tried, confessed his crimes, and was hanged at Woodside last Friday. But two innocent men narrowly escaped being hanged for the" crimes he had committed. The murder of the Maybee woman and the murderous assault on Mr. and Mrs. Townsend created a,, reign of terror in that part of Long Island. Rngg was unsuspected and unknown at the time. I etectives were busily at work attempting to solve the bloody mystery, and the public excitement was intense. Under these circumstances suspicion was directed towards a neigh boar of the Maybeos named Kdmund Tappan, although none of the circumstances tended to implicate him in the crime. But he told some incoherent stories aud the detectives " worked : ' him, with all the art of which they possessed the mastery. Among other things it is said that they kept him half drunk the whole of the time, and he appears to have not had a strong mind at the best. At length Tappan made a con-

fession, alleging that his brother John Tappan, living three miles distant, had killed the Maybee women and had assaulted th» Townsends, and that he had assisted in the crime and in the robbery. John Tappan was then arrested, and it was found he owned the hammer with which the Townsends had been assaulted, and a pair of bloody overalls found in the vicinity. There were also tracks leading from his house to the scene of the crime. The evidence against the Tappans, added to the confession of one of them, appeared overwhelming. Ifc was about that time that the Sprague assault and robbery led to Rugg's arrest ; and pawn tickets found on his person showed where he had disposed of the property including two watches which he had stolen at Maybee's and Townsend's. His subsequentiConfession, verified by every circumstance connected with the murder — including the fact that he had stolen John Tappan's hammer and overalls from the woodshed where they were kept, and had gone from there directly to iownseud's house, where he committed that assault — settled the case, dissipated the suspicions that 'lad been cast about the Tappans, and showed that Kdmund Tappan's confession, wrung by -the skill of the detectives from the harassed and tortured man's unsettled imagination, was a fiction and a vision only. The whole singular case is a warning to prosecuting officers in the matter of employing detectives, and as to the weight of circumstantial testimony. — Chicago Journal, • 19th May.