WALLS HAVE EARS

Evening Star, Issue 19197, 13 March 1926, Page 11

WALLS HAVE EARS

FOR MUHOER SECRET “ETHER” ALSO TELLS THE TALE. Chance, that “ handmaid of destiny.” marching through Georgia, lias solved the mystery of a, murder that lor throe years 'hafiled the. best detectives. James Langdon, a rural postman, of Fayetteville, Georgia, was found, in October, 1922, mysteriously slain on a lonely road. Two years later a Mrs Euui Samuels, on a hospital operating table at .Fayetteville, recovering from the operation of an anresthetio (ether), murmured ; “The axe! I buried it. . . • Jim Langdon’s blood was on it. . . . Father, why did you give it to me? . . . 1 can’t rest. . . • W hat were you and Ora Whittle doing there?” Doctors and police thought little of the ether-induced gabble ot Airs Samuels; but Thomas Camp, a friend of the dead man, who later became sheriff of the county, investigated along the lines of the woman’s utterances. Then chance again became a factor. A Airs 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, and Dutton. It appeared that Langdon, the postman, had been suspected of revealing an illegal whisky still secret, and had been killed in a quarrel. But Airs Samuels was threatened by sonic of the moonshiners’ friends, ami for protection was installed temporarily in a room in the county prison. There a concealed dictaphone (placed within a wall of the rom during an .earlier case and since iorgotten) accidentally recorded some conversation ol Mrs Samuels and a friend who called on her. ■ When the dictapnono was recently taken out and revealed its secrets, a youth named Windham wits implicated. Windham was soon frightened into making a complete confession, which involved four other men. All these have now been taken into custody and convicted —making eight in all.