SENTENCED TO DEATH

Evening Star, Issue 20987, 29 December 1931, Page 9

SENTENCED TO DEATH

DETECTIVE’S CLUE DIRTY BUSINESS CARD A thumbed and dirty card which had been pushed behind a diningroom overmantel and then had dropped down to be lost! Without the_ clue of that visiting card Henry Daniel Seymour would not have been convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Mrs Annio Louise Kempson in her home at St. Clement’s, Oxford, on August 1. The discovery of the card by a young detective-sergeant of the Oxford city police was the first pointer which led Chief-detective Inspector Horwcll, of Scotland Yard, to begin the painstaking inquiry that eventually led to" the arrest of Seymour at the door of his flat in Brighton, and bis conviction at the Oxford Assize Court. After the murder of Mrs Kempson. the police were working for several days on the theory that she was killed by a door-to-door peddling tramp, who called by chance at the nouso on the morning of August 1. They had a description given them of a particular man, and they wanted to interview him. He came forward, and explained with complete satisfaction his movements that day. So the detectives had to begin all over again. DISCOVERY OE THE CARD. A new search of the murder house was ordered, and as a result Seymour’s card as the representative of a vacuum cleaning company was found between the overmantel and the wall. It was a card he had given to the dead woman many months before, when he sold her a vacuum cleaner. She had poked it behind the overmantel and it slipped out of sight. Excellent detective work started from that stage. Seymour was known to many people in Oxford, and with infinite pains his movements in the city on July 31 and August 1 wore traced. A speech of dramatic protest against the conviction was made by Seymour after the jury returned their verdict of “Guilty.” The prisoner stood at the dock rail in the dim-lit court that was hushed to a tense silence and said:—“l am convinced that sooper or later the real truth will bo revealed, and you all, when the time comes, will remember my last words.” Here Seymour paused. Raising his right arm with open palm and pointing towards heaven ho added:— “Before God and my fellow-men I swear that 1 did not kill or hurt Mrs Kempson, and further that I cannot conceive of any question of difficulties, financially or temptation of money or anything else, that would have tempted me to commit this fiendish murder. I could not have done it. I can say no more.” WOMAN JUROR FAINTS. At this moment a woman juror fainted and the other woman on the jury burst into tears. The age of Seymour was set down in the court calendar at thirty-nine, but his birth certificate show’s that he was born in Birmingham fifty-three years ago. He spent many years of his life in South Africa, and returned to England after the w'ar. He married_ in England, and has one son, aged nine. His wife is now in employment in London as a companion-help. _ His son is at an institutional school in the Midlands.

Mrs Seymour has been writing to her husband regularly since his arrest, begging- him to be of good courage, and declaring that everything would come right in the end. There was one witness whom the prosecution were anxious to call, hut they could not trace her. She was a young Austrian woman who had been living at Brighton,_ and had mob Seymour. She left Brighton to return to the Continent, and disappeared. The most searching inquiries which the police made through the police in Franco and in Austria failed to find her.

Seymour intended to appeal against the conviction to the Court of .Criminal Appeal*