AFTER 14 YEARS

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 39, 15 February 1930, Page 23

AFTER 14 YEARS

DEATHBED CONFESSION

OLD BOMB OUTRAGES

Louis J. Smith, who made a deathbed confession on tho Preparedness Day bomb outrage, has been positively identified as the Louis Smith involved in Pacific Coast bombings in 1915 and 1916 (says a San Francisco "Call-Bulletin" in a recent issue).

The identification was made by a fullbrother, Jess Smith, of Wheeling, W. Va.

This latest development is considered by the authorities to have proveir beyond all question of doubt that neither Thomas Mooney nor Warren K. Billings had anything to do with the explosion.

Mooney and Billings have served thirteen years in prison since their conviction on evidence that thousands now believo was perjured and framed.

More than . a mouth ago Smith's deathbed confession, made in 1922, was revealed by four persons to whom it was made.

San Franciscans remembered the Louis Smith who figur&d' prominently in the German neutrality and bombing cases there in 1916, and wondered if Smithj the confessor, -was the same Smith who was known to have participated in bombings. All doubt was settled by the identification of a picture of the San Francisco Smith by two brothers and a sister of Louis J. Smith, who died in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1922.

Louis Smith, according to the four witnesses, confessed that he'threw the Preparedness Day bomb from the roof of the saloon at Steuart and Market streets.

He also confessed to destroying a munitions barge in San Francisco Bay some time in 1916, and to bombing a second barge in Seattle a short time later.

These confessed activities check absolutely with the known activities of the San Francisco Smith now positively identified as the Smith who made the confession.

Louis J. Smith was indicated in San Francisco along with Franz Bopp (German Consul-General), Eckart Yon Schack (Vice-Consul), Lieutenant Wilhelin Yon Brincken, J. F. Yon Koolbergen, Mrs. Margaret Cornell (secretary to Bopp), and 0. C. Crowley (a private detective employed by the Consul). TURNED STATE'S EVIDENCE. They were charged with violating America's neutrality and interfering with munitions shipments. Smith turned State's evidence, and all other defendants were found guilty. According to Thomas Crowley, the widely-known shipping man C. C. Crowley, who is not a relative, told him that Smith was in his employ. Thomas Crowley also told of Smith's attempt to get on a munition barge, and of the innumerable facts that prove that the San Francisco Smith did place the bombs that caused destruction of the two barges.

More substantiation of the Smith confession has come from witnesses of the bomb explosion and experts in explosives.

Mrs. H. 0. Parrott, who was watching the parade from the Terminal Hotel across the street, declared positively that she saw a man drop the bomb from the roof of the saloon and then hurry across the roof and out of sight. This evidence was ignored by the

prosecutions, whose theory it was that Mooney and Billings had placed a bomb in a suit case on the sidewalk.

The prosecution also ignored the testimony of. experts that the fact that no clock was found near the scene of the explosion proved that the bomb was thrown, from the roof, and not placed on the sidewalk in a suit case.