NEW YORK MURDER TRIAL

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIII, Issue 116, 17 May 1902, Page 5 (Supplement)

NEW YORK MURDER TRIAL

ACQUITTAL OF A WRONGED GIRL.

Florence Burns, accused of the murder of her young lover Brooks, was released from the Tombs prison at New York on March 22, Judge Mayer having- declared the evidence against her not sufficient to warrant his sending her before the grand jury. The decision was hailed with loud cheers. The crime is a remarkable one. Walter Brooks (though hardly out of his teens) exercised the profession of a lawyer. He had, to the knowledge of his friends and family, played fast and loose with the affections of several women, and he had tired of his association with Miss Burns. Some weeks ago the body of Brooks was found in a bedroom at the Glen Island Hotel, a small and unfashionable " down-town " hostelry in New York. He had been shot with a revolver, which was missing. Suspicion at once fixed itself on a girl who had gone with t,he young lawyer to the hotel on the night of the anurcler, and, the relations of the victim to Miss Burns being no secret, a warrant for her arrest was issued. The evidence in the case was mainly circumstantial. Miss Burns denied that she was guilty, and declared that at the hour When the crime occurred she was at her parents' home in Brooklyn. Moreover, .she protested that she loved Brooks too well to injure him. It is alleged that another girl, said to resemble Miss Burns in appearance, had ousted the prisoner from her place in Brooks' heart, and that for some time past this person and her lover had been very much annoyed by the pertinacity of Miss Burns' attachment. On the other hand, a car conductor swore that at about the hour when the prisoner affirms that she was at home he saw her on his car. A negro bell boy, named George Washington, employed at th« Glen ' Island Hotel, also swore that Miss Burns accompanied Brooks to the hotel on the night of the murder. The extreme youth of the prisoner, her prettiness, her refinement, her wrongs, and the fact that, only a short time before the tragedy, she had accompanied her sweetheart to a church to be married and, but for the refusal of a clergyman to officiate, would have now been a wife, were sentimental arguments which, In the minds of many, greatly outweighed even the horror usu- | ally inspired by murder.