THEFT OF PENNIES

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 69, 14 December 1933, Page 14

THEFT OF PENNIES

Slot Telephones Rilled PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE Greatly-enlarged photographs of a screwdriver point and of marks on damaged telephone slot machines formed an important link in the evidence upon which a man was convicted in the Police Court yesterday of breaking open three street, telephones and stealing the pennies. George Henry Trillo, aged 2G, seaman, was charged with being a rogue and a vagabond in that he had had in his possession a housebreaking instrument; with stealing three lots of pennies amounting to • respectively 0/-, £l/2/6, and fl, and with committing mischief by doing damage valued at £2/10/- to each of three slot machines. On each of the first two charges of theft accused was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, the sentences to be cumulative, and on the remaining counts he was ordered to come up for sentence within two years if called upon. Detective-Sergeant Revell said that three boxes wei;e broken open on the morning of December 5. The first case occurred in Austin Street at 2.30, the second in Hawker Street at 2.50, and the third in Oriental Bay at 3.20. Short- . ly after that the accused was discovered by Sergeant Edwards with a screwdriver and gloves in his possession iii Roxburgh Street.

Stuart. Anderson, telephone faultman, produced the boxes, which he said lie had discovered with their fronts levered off and their cash boxes missing. Sergeant Edwards said that upon receiving a complaint that a box in Hawker Street had been broken he cycled to the spot and arrived at. 3.4 a.m. He saw nobody in the vicinity until 3.30, when he left. As he passed the junction of Roxburgh Street and Majoribanks Street he saw two men coming, down the former street. He turned back and went up Roxburgh Street, but they had disappeared. He then waited round the corner, and upon accused appearing accosted him, finding on him the gloves and the screwdriver. Accused’s explanation was that he had been working on a car two days before and the screwdriver had remained in his pocket since. The gloves, he had said, he had brought with him from the house of a woman he had just been visiting, having left them there on a,former occasion. He would not tell the name of the woman or her address.

Detective Long said that he had found a quantity of pennies and copper discs, which the Post and Telegraph Department used in testing slot telephones, in the vicinity of Caroline Street (off Roxburgh Street). <The screwdriver, he pointed out, was bent and damaged as from use as a lever Mr. R. H. Boys, for accused, submitted that the evidence was insufficient to prove the vagrancy charge, but Mr. Revell agreed to withdraw the vagrancy charge if the pleas of not guilty on the others were to be reversed, which was done.

Remarking that the photographs showed unmistakably that the screwdriver found on accused had been used to break open the boxes, Mr. E. Page. SAL. said that a conviction would have to be entered.