TERRIBLE MURDER CHARGE.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXI, Issue 65, 17 March 1900, Page 5 (Supplement)

TERRIBLE MURDER CHARGE.

' YOUNG GIRL ACQUITTED

At Himtiufjton, Virginia, a 'few weeks back Miss Martha Daniels, a fair haired, blue eyed, handsome girl of seventeen years, refined, well educated, was acquitted of the murder o£ Mrs Anna Collins. The trial attracted a tremendous amount of interest.

Mrs Collins), a rich •widow, was stabbed to death last September.'The prosecution contended that Miss Daniels was in love with Mrs Collins's son, Samuel, but that his mother would not permit him to marry the young woman. THE ACCUSATION. The prosecution endeavoured to prove that alone, in a canoe, Miss Daniels crossed the Tug" Eiver, swollen by the autumn floods, from Kentucky to the West Virginia shore; that, knife in hand, she stealthily approached the Collins house, found Mrs Collins in the kitchen, sprang upon her, stabbed her again and again, took to her canoe, puddled down the river to Iron-ton, 0., where next day the canoe was found tied to the river bank, fifteen miles from the place of thte tragedy. Three months later Miss Daniels was arrest-, ed in the best hotel in Ironton, where , she was living-.

The defence was an alibi, which was the easier to prove because the only witness of Mrs Collins's death' was her two young- daughters, one four, one six years old. Both children knew Miss Daniels, who had ofteifc visited their home. The older childt thus described the frightful scene: STORY TOLD BY .THE CHILD. "Martha called mamma bad names, and said she came to kill her. Mamma pushed her once toward the door and tried to run out of the room, but Martha had a big- butcher knife in liter hand and she just kept cutting- potr mamma until she fell to the fiooi\ I ran in to mamma, but Martha just kept cutting- her with the knife. Poor mamma called for help, but there was no one near. Martha left the house just as soon as she quit cutting" mamma with the knife, and ran toward the river. The last we saw of her she ivas paddling' down the river in an- old canoe. We were afraid to leave Iriamnia, and it was a long- time before we' went to tell any one. Mamma couldn't' talk to us, for she was dead •wheitf Martha left the room. I think Martl/a, was mad at mamma- because she maile' brother quit calling- on her."