DETECTIVE'S TIP.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 43, 20 February 1940, Page 8

DETECTIVE'S TIP.

LITTLE THINGS COUNT I DECAYED TOOTH WAS CLUE. i NO " CRDONAL TYPE." » (Frini Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, February 15. "A wise detective always lets the big things look after themselves and looks after the little ones." This is the judgment of one of Australia's most brilliant detectives. Mr. T. J. Lynch, who has just retired as Deputy-Commissioner of Police in New South Wales. The story of his career, which began in the days when streets were gaslit, showing his flair for the dramatic action oil impulse and intuition, and painstaking attention to apparent trivialities, would read like detective fiction —if he would allow it to be told. Some incidents, however, are known to the police reporters on the newspapers which illustrate the good use he made of attention to details. Early in his career he came on a man choking in a lane. Two men were disappearing on the run and Lynch chased them and captured one whom he took to the police station. Lynch insisted on the station sergeant entering up on the list of the captured property a piece of a decayed tooth. It transpired that the man who had been assaulted had come to Sydney to lftive some teeth extracted and had kept this piece as a souvenir. The finding of that piece of tooth in the captive's pocket was enough to convict him. Sand Gave Him Away. Many years later tho detective was interviewing a man in a Darlingliurst residential whom he suspected of a safeblowing job at Daceyville. The man protested his innocence, but Lynch noticed something and made him go to the police station. That something was sand oil the man's shoes, and Lynch knew that there was no sand in Darlingliurst, but plenty in Daceyville. At the police station Lynch found in the man's pockets tram tickets, whose numbers proved that the man had been at Daceyville the niglit of the "job." Standinjr on the verandah of hi* home in Woollahra one day, with a baby in his arms, when he Was on leave. Mr. Lynch noticed a man running with his feet out like a Chinaman to catch a tram. Soon after a rfbighbouriug guest house was robbed and three months later an estate agent wa» held up and. shot. The nest night the guesthouse was robbed

again and two women battered almost to death. Lynch was assigned to the case, and for three days and nights stuck to it without any sleep. At 2 a.m. he went into a Darlingburßt room and ordered a man to dress and accompany him outside. "Run along in front of me," he told the man, who bolted, thinking he might get away. Lynch soon overtook him, having 1 observed meantime that this man, too, ran like a Chinaman. "You're my man," he said—and he was.

This experienced detective believes that there is no such thing as a criminal type and that environment i* the biggest factor in the making of criminals. Even in (the most vicious of them, he says, he has found some virtue and he has never known a crook to go back on his word. He has made loans to many men after they have come out of the gaols to which he sent them, and has always had the money repaid. And many men whom he has sent to gaol for long terms have expressed to him their appreciation of the square deal lie has given them.

He hardly ever carried a gun, because he knew that after lie went out his wife lined to look to see if he had taken it with him. So he just got into the habit of leaving it behind to save her anxiety. He has had to dodge bullets in his time, but believe* that few inen who carry guns ever have any intention of using them.