A MYTHICAL LEGACY.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 48, Issue 74, 7 January 1928, Page 7

A MYTHICAL LEGACY.

MAN'S FICTITIOUS STORY. Posing as a bachelor, Walter Horace Francis, landscape gardener, of Richmond Hill, Surrey, took a, young woman to the Richmond Register Office and gave notice of marriage. But on the eve of the, wedding his difficulties were so acute that he had to conceive a scheme to avoid matrimony. He therefore showed the prospective bride, a letter purporting to come from his father, saying that an aunt was leaving him large sums of money on condition that he was single when she died. ' . Francis stated that the aunt's death might be expected shortly, and that the girl would get £2OOO if she consented to the postponement of the wedding. Consequently the marriage did not take place. This was only one of the man's many pieces of deception before he finally found himself in the Police Court at Barnet, where he was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment for obtaining money by false pretences and fined £25 or three months for making a false declaration to procure a marriage. . . It was stated that during xiugust, Francis passed over twenty worthless cheques for many hundreds ctf pounds. He was a man with a past, as, accordino- to a dete-jfcive officer, he had been convicted of selling liquor during prohibited hours when he ran a night club at Covent Garden.