SELF-ACCUSED ASSASSIN

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 October 1929, Page 3

SELF-ACCUSED ASSASSIN

LIKELY TO BE REPRIEVED. The amazing murder of George Armstrong, the hermit shopkeeper of Rusholme, who was found battered to death, has been recalled in the Court of Criminal Appeal at London, when George Fratson, a cobbler, appealed against the sentence of death passed on him. The case —as the Lord Chief Justice, in announcing the decision of the Appeal Court, stated —is “peculiar, since it rests solely on the evidence of Fratson himself.” He added that it was also “peculiar by reason of the frame of mind indicated in certain letters which the man accused had written.” Fratson was arrested on the charge of embezzling £l, the money of a fellow worker in a boot factory. And while he was in prison he declared that he had “got in touch with a woman to whom he had promised marriage, and that he left his native town because he was married already and wanted to avoid her.” Then he made a number of varying statements, which included a confession that he had killed George Armstrong. A feature of the evidence at the trial was that he had wiped his hands after the murder on a fragment of linen which he then threw on the top of a case. Such a fragment of linen was found —and now it is suggested that he had read , of the detail in the newspapers, although no mention appears to have been made of it in any reports of the discovery of the tragedy. It was alleged at the hearing of the appeal that there were on a cardboard box that was produced certain crimson stains which were thumb prints. These were submitted to the finger print department of Scotland Yard, and the chief, Inspector Harry Batley, gave evidence before the judges of appeal. He stated that, the marks were probably not finger prints. The Lord Chief, in delivering judgment, said: “There is nothing to indicate that the marks are finger prints.” Then he referred significantly to the circumstances which led to the charge. He said it had been suggested that here was a man in a morbid state of mind, careless whether hiS life was ended by his own hand or otherwise, who there and then accused himself of a, crime which he did not commit. The Lord Chief went on: “These suggestions cannot be made to this court. We have to consider the question of law, and as there was a case to go to the jury the summing up in the view of: the Court was adequate, and the appeal is dismissed. If there are any other suggestions to be made these are to be considered elsewhere. What we have to consider is not the prerogative of mercy, but the rules of the law.” In view of this statement it is almost certain that Fratson will be reprieved.