CHEATED THE HANGMAN

Evening Star, Issue 17191, 5 November 1919, Page 7

CHEATED THE HANGMAN

At Mineola, New Jersey, Dr Walter Keene who was under sentence of deatn fur wife murder, committed suicide by hanging. himself in the Nassau County Gaol. He left behind him a long letter, in which he protested- his innocence, and declared his belief that he had not received a fair trial. The verdict of th.fi jury was Tendered exactly four months after the crime was committed. The jury him to mercy, but the presiding Judge informed the prisoner that the law did not allow clemencv to one convicted of murder in the first* degree The aged physician was alive in his cell when his plight was discovered, and he was cut down by the warders, but though the doctors worked hard at him for over half an hour they , could not save him his nook having been dislocated. All that morning he was occupied in the composition of a letter of self-vindication, in the course of which he wrote: “Rather than be driven across the State of New York by Carmen Plant (the Nassau County detective.) and delivered up to Sing Sine* Prison, I prefer to be my own executioner Besides, it will save Mr Justice Mannim* from looking into my face when he tells me that I have had a fair trial. I am absolutely innocent of the crime that the indictment charges me with.”