TRUE DETECTIVE STORIES.

Auckland Star, Volume LIII, Issue 95, 22 April 1922, Page 19

TRUE DETECTIVE STORIES.

REMARKABLE CRIMES RECALLED.

XX*_IV.—THE KED HAND.

(Copyright, 1020, by the Wheeler Sydnicats Inc.).

"All aboard! All aboard!" The guards who had charge of the London local which was due to stop at Hackney shortly after six o'clock In the evening, were even more insistent than usual in their demands one night In early summer, for the train was already late and trying to make up time. But a cry of consternation from one of the men who was boarding the train brought the attendants closing around him.

"Look," he cried, pointing through thr glass of the compartment toward the cushions of the seat on the far side. "My God, man! Don't you see? They are soaked with blood. And there's a man's walking stick and a black leather bag. Where Is the occupant of this compartment?"

That was the question which puzzled every member of the London Police Force, and especially Colonel James Fraser, head of the department.

Where was the man who had very evidently been murdered in the coach? Who was he?

The black bag contained no information whatever, and the walking stick was merely an ordinary one, lacking even Initials. The guard who had charge of that car said that he "seemed to recall two men getting into that compartment at Fenchurch Street, in London," but he couldn't be sure. The train had been quite crowded, and he had been too busy with his own duties to pay any attention to the individual passengers.

When Colonel Fraser examined the car carefully, however, he found the print of a bloody hand—a band with short squat fingers—on the wall of the coach, evidently where the murderer had steadied himself after committing the crime. But where was the body?

This angle of the case was soon cleared up by the discovery of the body of a man neap the railroad tracks in Victoria Park. The head and the face had been so disfigured that identification would have been almost impossible, had it not been for the card which was found in his vest pocket By means of this it was found that the dead man was a certain Thomas Brigga, chief clerk of a London banking house, who had been on his way to visit his daughter in Peckham. According to his associates, he was in the habit of carrying a considerable sum of money with him, and also wore a very handsome watch and chain. When the body was discovered, however, both the watch and the money were missing, and the murderer had evidently gone through the clothing in an attempt to remove all papers or other means of identification.

Immediately after the body was discovered, Colonel Fraser measured the fingers of the left band, but found that they were entirely too long and well-shaped to fit the bloody imprint on tbe wall of the coach.

Pinning their faith to the fact that the murderer would probably try to sell Brlggs' ! watch and chain, the police settled down to watch all the pawnbrokers in and around London, but days passed without any developments from this end of the case — days in which the police were ridiculed and censured for their inability to find a man who committed a crime on a railroad train in broad daylight.

I Finally, just as Fraser was nearing the [ end of his patience, a second-hand dealer in Cheapside reported that a chain, similar to the one worn by the dead man, had been brought into his establishment on the day after the murder. The chain, he said, had been placed in with some others and had slipped his mind until he commenced to go over his stock. The only description he could give of the man who sold it was that he was "foreign-looking," in fact, he felt certain that he was a German.

More in order to quiet the Press than because he attached any importance to the discovery, Colonel Fraser made public the details of the dealer's story, and the following morning a man called at police headquarters, bringing with him a card which he said his daughter had found on the floor of the room recently, occupied by Franz Muller. The card bore the name of the second-hand dealer who had purchased the chain.

Mailer, stated Fraser's informant, was a German who had boarded in his honse for some time past, bnt who had suddenly disappeared, leaving most of his effects behind him.

"Didn't happen to leave a photograph, did he?" inquired Fraser.

"Yes sir, he did. Here it is," and the man produced a picture wbich the secondhand dealer immediately identified as tbe man who had sold him the chain.

It was a matter of only a few hours to trace the German to a steamship office, and to find that he sailed, forty-eight hours before, for America. Wishing his own men to have credit for the capture, Fraser dispatched two of them to New York on a fast boat, and when Muller stepped off the gang plank he was arrested for the murder of Thomas Briggs, although he vigorously protested his inocence and stated that he bad bought the chain from a man on the street. As further proof of his assertion he produced Briggs' watch, which, he said, he had bought at the same time as the chain.

Inasmuch as the guard who had seen the man enter the coach at Fenchurch Street could not positively identify Muller, the case against him appeared to •be very flimsy—until Colonel Fraser compared the man's hand with the bloody outline on the wall of the coach. The two were identical to the thousandth part of an inch.

Some months later Franz Muller paid the penalty for his crime on the gallows.