SISTERS LED ASTRAY.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 307, 28 December 1929, Page 3 (Supplement)

SISTERS LED ASTRAY.

THREE YEARS FOR THIEF. Herbert Harold Green, aged 30, a Leeds salesman, and Nellie Halow, aged 20, of Ilkeston, were charged at Folkestone Quarter Sessions with stealing 4000 cigarettes from a Folkestone tobacconist, and a suitcase and its contents, valued at £45, from the Southern Railway. Green pleaded guilty to both charges, but the girl, although admitting the charge respecting the cigarettes, pleaded not guilty (to the other charge, and the. prosecution withdrew it. Mr. A. S. Beesley, the chief constable, said that the girl had come under the spell of the man. Her parents were respectable, but she made the man's acquaintance during the time that her sister was living with another man. Both the girls had come under the influence of convicted men. Green had been convicted three times at Leeds for theft and fraudulent conversion. He was divorced from his wife, and was an inveterate liar and fond of the company of women. Since May he had gained his livelihood by crime. He brought the girl with him to the South Coast, and began a series of systematic and clever thefts, and he now asked for all those to be taken into consideration by the Recorder. He was wanted at Leeds, Nottingham, Brighton, Eastbourne and Hastings. Mr. Roland Oliver, after reading a statement by Green, said:—"Morally you have done nothing worse than taking this girl away from her home, ruining her, and teaching her to be a criminal. The one redeeming feature is that you ask me to extend mercy to her. I think you will carz - y to your grave the recollection of what you have done to her. I am sending you to penal servitude for three years." The girl, who wept bitterly when Green was sentenced, was bound over for 12 months.