LEAP TO DEATH IN GAOL.

Auckland Star, Volume XLII, Issue 287, 2 December 1911, Page 17

LEAP TO DEATH IN GAOL.

ALLEGED MURDERER'S FOURFOLD SECRET. CARRIED TO THE GRAVE. A voluntary icap to death at Newcastle; gaol on October la brought, to an end the ■career of Alexander Ingram, the mau accused of the murder at uyser, Newcastle, of his wife ami two stepdaughters. i Just after lo o'clock on the completion ' of a period of exercise, Ingram was walking with a warder along a passage protected by a railing from a court twenty feet below. Suddenly he tried to c.imb the railing. The warder closed with him. Ingram Hung him aside, then pitched himself head lirst over the railing. He crashed on to the cement flooring twenty feet below. His skull was fractured and. he died in half an hour. ■ Alexander Ingram was a barman, aged twenty-seven, aud he lived with ibis wife and two little stepdaughters. The woman a"nd the two children were found dead with their throats cut on the morning of October 5. and Ingram, who, it was stated, had spent the right at his mother's house and not at home, was greatly upset at the discovery. He pointed out that £10 was missing from the house and suggested that the thief was also the murderer. : THE FIRST MYSTERY. | Ingram was nevertheless suspected and arrested. Human blood was found on his clothing, and ho was committed for trial. On the same day the inquest on Mrs. Ingram and the two children was completed. "llem-arknble evidence was forthcoming. Mrs Ingram's first husband, a man named Ncsbit. was fuuntl dead with his throat cut lv January last year, and Ingram, according to his brother's evidence at the inquest, married Mrs. Ncsbit leu or twelve months after Xesblt's death. During that time he lodged with Mrs. Nesblt. . "Did Mrs. Ingram," asked tlie coroner, "ever tell you of the circumstances of the death of her first husband*" "No, sir." "Did she ever tell you how they spent the night before Nesblt's death?" "No." In reply to a question by the coroner, the prisoner's brother said he had not : heard Mrs. Ingram threaten her husband that she would tell - something unless he was careful. By the suicide of Ingram, the story that lay behind these questions will never be : given to the world. j