CROYDON POISON MYSTERY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 21, 25 January 1930, Page 3 (Supplement)

CROYDON POISON MYSTERY.

PROBLEM FOR SCOTLAND YARD.

THREE VICTIMS IN ONE FAMILY—CORONER'S JURIES FIND FOUL PLAY IN TWO CASES—DETECTIVES RELENTLESS IN THEIR INQUIRIES—EDGAR WALLACE'S THEORIES.

A striking example of this is the case -j of Major Armstrong, who undoubtedly 1 poisoned his wife by administering arsenic 1 in champagne at her bedside. The nurse t who was in attendance on Mrs. Armstrong had so vague a recollection of this atten- c tion that she was not sure whether it t was she who opened the champagne or the c murderer, and therefore one of the most t important witnesses at the trial was not c called. I think that we can eliminate as a 1 motive the desire of any person to benefit j from the estate. No person who had access 1 to the three victims did benefit to any i appreciable extent. It. would be ludicrous 1 to suppose either that one of the serf vants or one of the relatives poisoned these i unfortunate people for pecuniary gam. ] We may also rule out the possibility that the poison was maliciously administered by servants, unless we can accept the wildly improbable theory that in the i Duff household and in the Sidney house- 1 hold were two servants, working in- i dependently of one another, who had designs upon the lives of their employers. , You may rule out the servants of both 1 houses for reasons I have stated. 1 . The coroner's jury has definitely dis- ] missed ■ the possibility of accidental i administration. Here again the very coin- j cidence of the circumstances makes it ! almost impossible that the deaths could , have been due to an accident. Weed-killer i is to- be found in thousands of homes, so | is carbolic acid, so are a -dozen other poisons. It is common knowledge that weed-killer is poisonous, and people who possess this commodity handle and store it with such care that the possibilities of an accident are reduced to a negligible quantity. On the balance of' probability it is a million to one against similar accidents occurring within a year in two families living in separate houses. What strikes me as being _ extremely probable in this particular case is that the murderer had an accomplice. Whether that accomplice was innocent or guilty will perhaps one day be known. I am satisfied in my mind that there is a third person, who, if he did not actively assist in the murders and was not actually privy in their committal, must, in the ease of Mr. Duff, be well aware of the unknown motive—unknown, if suspected by the police, but for the moment entirely unknown to the public. Mysterious Accomplice. That mysterious third person is in as dreadful a .position as the murderer, for any moment he may find his secret surprised, and, because of his very silence, go to the scaffold for the person who actually administered the poison.' He may have been entirely innocent, he may have been horrified to discover the tragic turn that events had taken and the terrible solution which the murderer had found for some.immediate problem.. Experience teaches us that men and women who occupy what is known as respectable positions in society will often risk the most ignominious of deaths to avoid any scandal being attached to their names, and I have an idea that something of the sort is happening here. It is a big price to pay for the illusion of respectability. Were the three people killed by weedkiller at all? Were they destroyed by a purer form of arsenic? And if so, how was that arsenic procured ? This may be the point on which the case will eventually turn. Was the third and unknown accessory, innocent or guilty, the agent from whom the poison was obtained on some pretext or another? " J My own view is that the murderer will never be discovered if weed-killer was the poison employed, unless the mania persists and the coroner's court exposures have not terrified the murderer to sanity. Otherwise there will be more deaths from poison, for a poison maniac's appetite is as insatiable as the drug fiend's. I am not in the confidence of the I police, but I imagine that they are concentrating at the moment upon only one of these deaths —that of Edmund Duff— for here may be discovered, and will be discovered sooner or later, a significant motive. In this case two people are directly and indirectly concerned, and when the ; crime is brought home to its perpetrator, ■ it will be on the evidence concerning the Duff murder. Mr. Duff died from poison which was administered to him after his return from ' the fishing excursion. The action of arsenic administered in quantities, which evidently was employed, is very swift and violent. It was therefore impossible that the i arsenic could have been taken while he . was in the country and the effects felt I when he returned to town. Here his wife I was practically never out of his sight, and ; she appears to have done everything that : was humanly possible for him during the '■ course of his fatal illness. There is no ; suggestion that any servant. owed him a grudge, even supposing that servants who • owe their masters a grudge are likely to take so awful a revenge. r , What was the motive here? To put ' out of the way a troublesome man? He 1 troubled nobody apparently; Mrs. Duff " testified to his being the best of husbands and the and indignantly j denied that he Was a man of bad temper I or that he was jealous. No suggestion was i made in court as to a cause of his T jealousy. 3 Not since the Borden case—which, in certain respects, except the method em--3 ployed by the destroyer, it resembles— > had a great body of public opinion been " unanimous in proclaiming the murderer's c name. In England,, where the law of libel , operates with disastrous results to the in- * discreet, no one- has yet printed it.

For months England has been stirred by the Croydon mystery murders, which now take their place at Scotland Yard as a famous case. An analysis of the baffling crimes has been written for the "New York Times" by Edgar Wallace, famous British writer of detective stories, and is presented below. Scotland Yard never drops an inquiry. Seventeen years ago an atrocious murder was committed, the perpetrator of which was not discovered. 'Scotland Yard is still working on that case; its well-thumbed dossier is examined by every newcomer to the records department. Scotland Yard has not dropped, nor will it drop, its inquiry into the Croydon murders—which all England discusses. The tragedy centres round one living individual —Mrs. Grace Duff, the aesthetic, clear-eyed woman of 40. She is the pivotal point in a circle of cold-blooded murders which removed her mother, her sister and her husband, in every case by arsenical poisoning, in every case in coincident circumstances. What is known as the Croydon poisoning mystery is in reality no mystery at all, except as to the identity of the person who administered the poison. According to the verdicts of coroner's juries, two. people have been deliberately done to death, and the third may have been done to death, by some person unknown, all three victims having been destroyed by the administration of arsenic. The three were members of one family. There were living in Croydon some months ago a widow, Mrs. Violet Amelia Sidney; her unmarried daughter, Vera Sidney; her married daughter, Mrs. Edmund Duff, who lived with her husband and family in South Park Hill road. Mrs. Sidney, whose age.was 69, was a woman ■of some means. In February, 1929, Mr. Duff, who was a retired commissioner from Nigeria, and whose age was 59, returned from a fishing excursion in Hampshire, and on the day of his arrival complained of feeling unwell. The doctor was called to see him; but could find nothing that was seriously wrong. Later the unfortunate man _ developed symptoms which were identified at the time as being consistent with an attack of ptomaine poisoning. He died within a few hours of his first attack, and at an inquest, which followed no trace of any malignant poisoning could be ■ detected by the analyst to whom certain organs were sent. In the following February Miss Vera Sidney was taken suddenly ill and died. There seemed to be no suspicion that she had died from any other than natural causes, and she was buried. Her mother, who was devoted to her, felt her daughter's loss deeply and a month later jhe also complained of violent pains after drinking some medicine and died ina very ahort space of time. The events preceding Vera's death are important. Vera had a special kind of soup made. The cook of the household, a Mrs. Noakes, prepared more than was sufficient; she herself took half a cupful and a visitor also was served with the soup. It was made on Tuesday and added to ,©n Wednesday, that is to say.some of the soup left over on the night before was the basis of Wednesday's stewing. Mrs. Noakes took half a cupful-on Tuesday, and was very ill the same.night. It was obviously poisoned not only am Tuesday, but on Wednesday; when the poisoned broth was diluted by the addition of .*; newly made "soup it was still bo strongly poisonous that a visitor who partook of a portion was ill for six days. Therefore the poison had not only been put in on the Tuesday, but the soup must have been redoctored on the Wednesday. Who Was In The House. Who came to the house? First, there were the children of Thomas Sidney and of Mrs. Duff, who often visited the place. Mr. Sidney's children were babies. Mrs. Duff's children were very young and could not have had the knowledge which the unknown poisoner possessed, and which enabled the. murderer to find one of those Secret Places which every kitchen poseesses where food is stored. Duff and Mr. Sidney had access to the case is there any outstanding motive, ,as the coroner very proper y pointed out, to suspect either of this awful The poison in Mrs. Sidney's case was 'obviously conveyed through her medicine, whYch "haSTnasty taste." She suspected poisoning without naming any suspected culprit. Mrs. Duff saw her immediately S lunch and administered an^emetic: of salt and water and telephoned for the doctor. The unfortunate woman died that 'be exact, this was three weeks after y There d 5 evidence whatever to show that there was ill-feeling between any members of the family. The poisorl from which Mr. Duff died was apparently introduced in beer or in spirits. ■ . Tinder the will of the two women tne «oS Thomas Sidney, and the widowed daughter, Grace Duff, benefited to the ?xte E nt of several thousand pounds By the death of Edmund Duff nobody seems , to have benefited financially. Subsequently on a Home Office £der the bodies of the two women were exhumea and later the body of.Mr.,Dufi! wasex amined. Analyses followed and arsenic was discovered in each body. £ After an almost interaupablejenw pi adjourned inquiries certain elicited, the most important °* w W n a d that in both houses-that of Mr. be that of Mrs. Sidney-admission could be obtained to the. house through a side goo *hich was always open. This m % £av_ been mere coincidence. There are a dreds of .t^»ft^ :^2£doSS S d d°aSimt aul wh|e"^ hility. But the fact that the doors we_ open" makes it possible thatthe^ ™«m and what is more food were accessible to tue *&*. another coincidence namely, that in all three cases .they were un before poison was administerea, * to say, they were under some sorfc tf t ment or on a. special diet, v« "poorly," Sidney f was stm prost by the tragic death of her °*J*°^. Duff had returned from the^couu, what was probably digestive £« no case were tbcy completely healtnyp pie struck down by was need In every case, therefore, there w for the special attention an mv or a semi-invalid, ° r JVente aud serreceives at the hands of fnends a a vants. That is very fW>l™r'° ive food well man or woman does °ot rec«v at any other than the hang oi vants. does not prepare food .lor v u -i members of the ScessibnVand ISSdSy&eSeS1SSdSy& eSe S Case of Major Armstrong. if i m*mm^s%£& friend of mine and he f**>J*. \ ni ymy trace the administration to me, Du^ g friend is sick and all wfJJJ {L nifl ser . being prepared for him bottjy vants and his misguided rnenns - is the he minimum, but the *»**"£ minimised the poison waa £ake&«