ENEMY OF CRIMINALS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 189, 12 August 1933, Page 4 (Supplement)

ENEMY OF CRIMINALS.

BAFFLED BUT NOT BEATEN. TRIALS OF SCOTLAND YARD CHIEF. ADVENTUROUS CAREER NEAR END. Five or six keen-faccd men gathered together in a room at New Scotland Yard. Their faces are set. With eyes that miss no detail, tlicy follow every movement made by the grey-haired, rugged-featured man who is addressing them. He is bending over a huge leather trunk that stands with lid thrown back upon tho floor. Then the rugged-featured man purses his lips and emits a low whistle. It is a little trick of his own, this queer, low whistle. It means, usually, that he has found a clue. "Here is something!" says Superintendent George Cornish, of the Criminal Investigation Department at "The Yard." And he glances at the faces of the men around him. "This piece of cloth" —he holds up a faded portion of fabric which ho has lifted from tho depths of the trunk —"This might be washed. . One of the waiting detectives takes from his chief the piece of soiled cloth. Three minutes later lie is back again, tho washed and still damp cloth in his hands. "Look at this, sir," he cries. "The word 'Greyhound' is stamped upon the cloth. You can see it with the glass. . . . ! "Greyhound"-—just that one word. But if is enough for_ George Cornish. Enough to make him feel that he is almost within striking distance of the man who committed the Charing Cross Trunk Murder.

With characteristic thoroughness he goes to work. Every "Greyhound" hotel in London must be searched. That there are several hundred inns of that name matters not a whit to George Cornish. His seemingly hopeless plan bears fruit. In a list of employees at one such hotel is found the name of "Robinson." And a little while later a man bearing this namo stands before the Superintendent. Later he is charged with murder, and in due course he is hanged. Another Triumph Scored. George Cornish, of "The Yard's" Big Six, has scored another triumph. Now the Yard is to lose in a few months the services of this fearless, alert-minded man, tho capturer of Robinson, tho Charing Cross "trunk murderer"; of Samuel Furnace, perpetrator of tho Chalk Farm blazing shed crime; of Jacoby, the young pageboy who slew Lady White; and of Stewart, who shot Alfred Webb at Notting Hill; and of scores of other notorious criminals. For Superintendent Cornish is to retire under tho age limit towards the end of this year. Ilis passing from the active list will rob the Yard of one of its keenest brains. Had Fate not led his steps to the Yard, Cornish might have become a prosperous Wiltshire farmer. For he is the son of a farmer, and it was a chance meeting with a London detective who was visiting his part of the country that resulted in his joining the police force. But, while amazingly successful in the number of cases in which he ran his man to earth, George Cornish, like many another crime investigator, has had his runs of bad luck". " Hard Luck" Cornish.

At one period they called him "Hard Luck" Cornish, because of the sequence of hard fortune that befell him. Faced with the problem of unravelling three of the mast difficult murders of recent times, he had. in the end, to confess himself baffled. And the cases which baffled him defied also the united efforts of the entire police of London.

These were the death of Nora Upehufch, found strangled in an empty Soho shop; the mysterious fate of little Vera Page, the Notting Hill school girl; and the murder of Dora Alicia Lloyd in the bedroom of a Maida Vale lodging house. But in none of these eases has George Cornish acknowledged defeat. lie never gives up. And the world may yet hear from him in connection with these three eases, which, up to now, remain on the list of Britain's unsolved crimes. Cornish is a master of the art of disguise. And he is expert, too, at the business of passing himself off with the toughest characters of London's underworld as a simple "man in the street." His frank, open face, and his modesty of demeanour—characteristics which hide the real Cornish —have helped him in the past to worm his way into the confidence of men and women who, had they known his real identity, would undoubtedly have revenged themselves upon him.