A WOMAN'S CRIME

Evening Star, Issue 14535, 10 December 1910, Page 12

A WOMAN'S CRIME

At Bodmin, Cornwall, on Monday, October 24, there ciiino to an end a criminal trial which, had it not been for the intervention of the notorious Crippen case, would havo attracted a great deal of public attention. Tito prisoner in ihe dock was .Mrs Oiivo Willyams, sometime tenant with her husband, Captain Hugh Willyams, of Tregorland St. Justin-the-I'osc, and she pleaded guilty to four indictments charging her with forging the name of her husband's uncle (Mr Brydges Willyams, an ex-High Sheriff of Cornwall, and formerly M.L\ for the Truro division). Mrs Wiilyams's crime was a particularly wicked one. This tenderly-nurtured, highlyeducated lady not only stooped to wholesale forgeries of promissory notes, dr-eds, and letters, but deliberately set tip the story that, the promissory notes were the wages of her own shame, leaving it to be inferred that she was the mistress of her husband's uncle, and that her husband was cognisant of the fact. Moreover, she contrived her forgeries in such a way as to implicate her husband, who found hint-elf charged with uttering one for £2,000. He, however, wa.s ablo to prove to the satisfaction of Judge, and jury th.it he was the innocent dupe of his wife, and was discharged amid.-/,, loud cheers. Altogether .Mrs Wiilyams's forgeries in promissory notes amounted to over £lll,OOO, and in addition she had forged a mortgage deed for £I.OOO in her husband's name, and had forced his name so often that, ihe captain admitted that lie had now gravo difficulty in swearing to any signature purporting to be his.

The pica made on behalf of Mrs Willyams amounted to asking the jury io treat, her as a woman rendered irresponsible for her actions through over-indulgence in morphia. Her counsel declared that tho look vim almost unheard-of quantity of between 45 and 60 grains a day, and stated that all the parts o: her body which could bo reached by tho hands were covered with tho pricks of the hypodermic syringe. Ho maintained that although not insane. -Mrs Willyams and other victims of the morphia habit aro not quite on the same piano as tho person who sits down in cold blood to pian a crime, and that one of ihe. urn things thai happens to them is that they lose all sense of truth. They seem to live in a complete, dream of their own, and in time come to believe what is simply the product of their own imagination. }.lrs WiJlyams's plots, lie paid, were of ihc kind which would be woven by a person who had fancies in her mind, which in time she eaane to believe were facts. She invented a story which, if true, would brinj upon her infinitely more condemnation from her own people than if r,he had confessed to the forgeries. Ajid counsel w;u fain to confess that, having carefully investigated those stories, hcT lawyers hud found Lbem entire fiction from beginning to end. Mr Justice Eldon Bants—oirr newest Judje—did not pay much Ikccl 1o Mis Wiflyams's counsel's morphia plea. AtMrcssinq: tho woman, who sai cowering, shivcrinjr, sobbing, and in the dock, he said sternly:

I do not desire, to add by my words to the miscTy and degradation you must feel. You know as well as I do what a wickol woman you havo been. Yours was a carefully-thought-out plan not only for robbing your husband's relative, but for blasting his reputation in the most wicked manner one can conceive. I have been told that you are a victim of tho morphia habit, but I do not believe that you could have carried out these elaborate lorgo.rit-s and have kept it up as you havo done with such ingenuity and daring if your nerves had been worried in the way your counsel has suggested as some, extenuation of your guilC The sentence. I must now pass on you is that of three years' penal servitude.

Mrs Willyams made, an effort to rise as the Judge passed sentence. Her face was clay-colored, and her mouth twitched painfully. Her lips moved, but no sound came, and in a faint, she v,as carried from tho court as Captain Willyams was called up to Itear from the jury of his acquittal. —London correspondent, October 2iS.