CURIOSITIES OF MURDER TRIALS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 161, 10 July 1928, Page 6

CURIOSITIES OF MURDER TRIALS.

The acquittal of Mrs. Pace on a charge of murdering her husband is noteworthy because of the exceptional time that has been taken over the preliminary trials, the weakness of the evidence for the prosecution, and the direction of the judge that there was no case to go to the jury. Six months have elapsed since the coroner's inquest, which itself occupied nineteen weeks. There was some evidence of motive, but none of the administration of poison by the wife. Murder trials have presented more curiosities than any j other. In one ease an agent who had been collecting rents disappeared. Suspicion fell on a band of gipsies in the neighbourhood and they were accused of having murdered the agent. One of them confessed to the crime and implicated two others. The three were hanged, but twelve months afterwards the agent turned up alive. He told the story of having been captured and carried off to a foreign country. His story was incredible, but no other explanation of his disappearance was forthcoming, nor was it ever explained why the gipsy confessed to a crime he had not committed. The Lam son case presented one very curious feature. Dr. Lamson had a relative boarding at a school in Wimbledon. If the boy died the doctor came in for about £1200. Lamson visited the boy one afternoon and gave him a piece of currant cake, also giving a piece to the schoolmaster and eating one himself. Some hours afterwards the boy was taken ill and died in the nijrlit. It was proved that he died from poison. This poison, however, acted quickly, and it was some hours after the doctor had ieft before the boy was taken ill. The defence, of course, was that if the doctor had given the poison the boy would have been taken ill sooner. The judge suggested that the poison might have been put into one of the currants, in which case it would not act so rapidly. This proved to be the case, but had it not been for the judge's suggestion in all probability the doctor would have been acquitted. He had apparently relied on this for his defence. In a case tried at Taunton a farmer of East Brent in Somersetshire was tried for the murder of his mother. It was proved that she was going into Weston the next day to alter her will, under which she had left property valued at £4000 to her son. The occupants of the house w r ere the mother, the son and a maidservant. In the evening the servant took some gruel to her mistress, who was taken ill soon afterwards and died before morning from strychnine poisoning. The evidence seemed so clear that the Crown sent down to conduct its case a barrister named Bompas whose practice had mainly lain outside criminal Courts. The prisoner was defended byone of the best criminal counsel of the day. The judge elicited the fact that the prisoner had gone into the kitchen, sent the maidservant out and had stirred the gruel, because the servant said the spoon was in the saucer when she went out and in the cup when she returned. He was acquitted, however. In the Mavbrick case Sir Charles Russell based his defence on the fact that there was no clear evidence that Mr. Maybrick had died of arsenic poisoning. The medical evidence conflicted on this point. After the verdict of guilty had been returned, many medical men contested it on the ground that the unfortunate man had been given so many medicines that he had been turned into a kind of druggist's waste pipe, and that this alone might have produced the sickness from which he died. The Home Secretary gave a reprieve on the ground that the evidence that death was due to arsenical poisoning was inconclusive, but a sentence of fifteen years was imposed because he held it proved that Mrs. Maybrick had administered arsenic and thus attempted to poison her husband. Sir Charles Russell rightly maintained that this action on the part of the Home Secretary amounted to a verdict of acquittal on the charge for which she was tried, and a sentence for a crime for which she had not been tried. Sometimes the slenderest clues have sufficed to convict a murderer. A toy lantern was the only clue in the case for which Fowler and Milsom were executed. This clue consisted in the fact that the wick had. been made from an old piece of rag, and a detective happened to hear two boys quarrelling over a lantern, one accusing the other of having stolen it and saying that he would know it again because he had made the wick from a piece of an old shirt. The detective traced the lantern to the two murderers. The most baffling cases are those, in which no motive can be discovered, and many of these have remained unsolved. —W.M.