MURDER BY A BOY.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVI, Issue 62, 13 March 1915, Page 15

MURDER BY A BOY.

TRASHY BOOKS AND. PICTURES BLAMED FOR CRIME. Trashy boots and nlcture shows were stated to have played their part in transformiug Sidney George Clements, an inoffensive office boy of fifteen, into a murderer. The victim was his little stepbrother, aged seven, who was stabbed with a carving knife. At the Old Bailey Clem r ents was ordered to be detained during His Majesty's pleasure. Mr. Muir, who prosecuted, said prisoner had a grievance against his step-mother because she appropriated the whole of his earnings. S/ a week, for the use of th« family, allowing him occasionally only a small sum for pocket money. The boy seemed to have had the question of murder by youths in his mind and had talked with a companion on the subject of the punishment in the case of such crimes. After the murder the boy ran away to Southend and wrote to his father as follows:— Dear Dad, —I am very, very sorry for what I done to Bert, but I hope be is all right. When I was cleaning knives and forks I seemed to have gone mad all of a sudden and done what I did do. And now I can hardly realise what I done. I am always thinking it was a dream Instead of being true. " Albert's handbook will, arrive on Tuesday. But I went to Southend to try and join the Navy. They told mc to go to Leigh-on-Sea, and that they would ask you for a report -of mc. -1 hope you will not tell what I done* because I want to join the Navy, and jt they find out I won't be able to get in the Navy, but in the cells. The boy was arrested at Southend, and in a statement to a detective he said that he thought the deceased would tell his father that lie had been looking for'some money. He added that he knocked him down, tied a cloth over his face, and stabbed him. The'boy's' mother, in giving evidence, said that the dead boy told her "some nasty man did it." She added that the prisoner spent a good deal of his time reading trashy books and going to the pic-