WALLS THAT “HEARD”

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 166, 10 April 1926, Page 22

WALLS THAT “HEARD”

Chance, that, "handmaid of destiny,” marching through Georgia (U.S.A.), has solved the mystery of a murder that for three years baffleci the best detectives. James Langdon, a rural postman, of Fayetteville, Georgia, was found in October, 1922, mysteriously slain on a lonely road, writes the New York correspondent of the "Daily Chronicle." Two years later Mrs. Eula Samuels, on a hospital operating table at Fayetteville, recovering from the operation at an anaesthetic (ether), murmured: “The axe! I buried it.' . . Jim Langdon’s blood was on it. . . . Father, why did you give it to me? ... I can’t rest. . . . What wore you and Ora Whittle doing there?” Doctors and police thought little of the other-induced gabble of Mrs. Samuels: but Thomas Camp, a friend of the dead man. who later became sheriff of the county, investigated along the lines of the womans utterances. Then chance again became a factor. Mrs. Jessie Dutton, the third wife of one Oscar Dutton, suspected a rival. For revenge she told the police that Dutton knew all about the murder of Langdon. This led to the arrest and conviction of Waller, Whittle, nnd Dutton. It appeared that Langdon, the postman, bad been suspected of revealing an illegal whisky-still-secret, and had been killed in a quarrel. But Mrs. Samuels was threatened by some of the moonshiners’ friends, and, for protection, was installed temporarily in a room in the county prison. There a concealed dictaphone (placed within a wall of the room during an earlier case, and since forgotten), accidentally recorded some conversation of Mrs. Samuels and a friend who called on her. When the dictaphone was recently taken out and revealed its secrets a youth named Mindham was implicated. 'Windham was soon frightened into making a complete confession, which involved four other men. AH these have now been taken into cus- ‘ tody and convicted—rualing eight in *D.