HOPELESS INFATUATION LEADS TO MURDER

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 May 1929, Page 9

HOPELESS INFATUATION LEADS TO MURDER

Sensational Trial in Edinburgh ... Elderly Builder Sentenced to 12 Years’ Imprisonment . . . Fond of Quoting Burns’s Verses

A MASTERING passion for a woman much younger than himself, led to one of the most sensational trials ever heard in staid city of Edinburgh. James Brown Marr, the murderer of a young woman, Mary Ann Mills, was found guilty of "culpable homicide.” The story of their association revealed a hopeless infatuation, which unbalanced a n excitable brain and led to the persecution and death of a respectable girl. The man was sent to Peterhead Gaol for 12 years. He will at once be put under the observation of mental specialists. There were women on the jury. At the close of the trial there was a good deal of booing!

WHEN a foreman builder named Campball walked into his workshop in Edinburgh on the morning of November 9 he saw one of the employees —a man called James Brown Marr —standing near one of the benches swabbing his throat. There was a knife in his right hand. The startled foreman exclaimed, “My God, Jamie, what are you doing?’’ In strangled tones the wounded man replied, “It is all over now.’’. The foreman glanced round and saw a short distance away the form of a girl. He bent over her and noticed that her throat was Cut, and a brief examination revealed the fact that she was dead. He recognised her. She was Mary Ann Mills, a girl worker. Campbell ran out for help. When he returned it was to see that the man was lying at the girl's feet and that he had tried to clasp her as he fell.

Marr recovered. Recently he was charged with murder,‘and Edinburgh was stirred out of its accustomed sleepiness to the realisation that one of the most sensational crimes of passion of modern times had happened in one of its humble workshops. Close on 50 years of age, the man Marr had felt irresistible attraction for a woman some years his junior, a woman who had long been regarded as of exceptional loveliness and personal charm. The story of his pursuit of this woman was slowly but unfail' ingly disclosed to the police, and some of it was told when the man, having so far recovered as to take his trial, stood with warders on either side of him in the dock. Touch on the Shoulder Marr had been acquainted with the girl for some years. He followed her everywhere. He made passionate love to her. He said over and over again, “If I do not have you, none else shall.” And all the time he had a wife whose loyalty to him is unchallenged, and children who were such as any father could be proud of.

All the while, however, Marr was prepared to leave them and to migrate from the city of his birth if the girl would consent.

The girl refused. Straight, moral, unflinching in her sense of duty, Miss Mills told him that his pretences of affection were a pose, and that she would have “nothing to do with him.” He grew angry, refused to accept repeated rebuffs, and again declared that none but he should ever have her. And all the while he was dreaming strange dreams that made his sisters and brothers think he was “queer”— a person demented probably by the unrequited passion. Often he would, in a spasm of agony, scream out, “Molly! Molly! Where are you?” Then he would awake and ( seem normal. Sometimes he would wander abroad during the night and leave all thought of home behind . . . The girl complained of his constant attentions. She told her sister and her brothers about it. She said that he was always pestering her. “I have got the life of a dog with him,” she insisted several times. “He pesters me in the workshop; he follows me in the street; he always insists that he will have me someday.” Once he showed her a knife —the very knife which was the means of ending her life —and in Idw, penetrating tones exclaimed,' “O grave, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?” Two of the girl’s brothers interfered. He struck one of them in the face and then ran away. His continued cry was “I will hold her in my arms — or she shall be held in the cold embrace of death.” Then again and again the words, “O grave, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?” were on his lips. There is little doubt but that he intended either her acceptance of his suit—or death. All the evidence showed that the girl was good. Her character was above suspicion. She resented the attentions of this married man. She

told him so. And then she would be terrified by the “dreadful faces” he made.

Lurking in the Shadow

When she was going home he would follow her at a distance for a while, and then would run ahead and creep into the shadows, from which he would come with a cry of delight. He pursued her with pitiless eagerness; and he wrote, in such spare moments as he had, long letters, in which he referred to Mary as the “only woman he ever loved.” And he was fond of quoting Bobbie Burns’s pathetic poem to Mary, especially-the lines: — “Oh, Mary, dear departed,shade.

See’st thou thy lover lowly lajd: Hear’st thou the groans that rend his breast."

Miss Mills grew more and more alarmed. She complained to her relatives and to her fellow employees. She said that she must leave the workshop—she spoke of going to London where she would be free from the “persecution” of the man who was “mad for love of her.” But she remained on and treated him with gentle aloofness, hoping against hope that he would relieve her of his passionate declarations. Had she only gone her life might have been spared. His Wife’s Story Marr, this desperate, passionate pilgrim presented a melancholy spectacle as he stood in the dock and listened to the details of the tragedy. The defence was that he was insane and that there were traces of insanity in his family. His wife bravely gave evidence. She said that lately he had been strange in his manner. He was changeable and passionate. He had the obsession that “something was going to happen.” There were times when he would wander around exclaiming, “I have the power,” and then he would make strange, frightening faces. But, she added, that throughout the watches of the night he would repeat the name “Molly” like one obsessed. ‘“I tried him every way,” said the broken-hearted woman, “and that caused terrible rows.” There were occasions when he would weep like a child and as though his heart was breaking.

• Medical men gave evidence. One of them, a brain specialist, stated that “this is a case of a perfectly healthy young woman being molested by a lunatic.” But the opinion of others was that he had been driven mad by a hopeless love. The hearing of the case drifted over three days. Counsel for the defence, in a clever and convincing speech, told the jury “it would be wrong under the circumstances to send the accused to a dreadful doom on the gallows.” For three-quarters of an hour the jury sat in private considering their verdict. The lights had been turned up when they returned. The prisoner appeared unconcerned. He was a man in a dream. One of those in court who watched him closely declared that he muttered the first name of' the woman he had stabbed to death —“Mary.” There were two possible verdicts. One meant —unless the Home Office intervened —death. The other was a verdict of “culpable homicide,” which involved the possibility of penal servitude in Peterhead, once the most dreaded gaol in the British Empire. They accept majority verdicts in Scotland; and it was by a majority that this slave of mad passion was found guilty of “culpable homicide.” The judge, in sending him into penal servitude for 12 years, alluded to “the heinous character of the crime.”

Marr received his sentence with a vacuous smile; but behind those pale blue eyes there was a surging passion which only death can destroy. There was a great deal of boohing as Marr was taken away. Scotland can not condone crimes of passion.