MURDER MYSTERY

Greymouth Evening Star, 22 July 1936, Page 12

MURDER MYSTERY

CONFESSIONS AFTER 17 YEARS

After the lapse of 17 years, a perfect murder mystery has been solved in Canada, but the murderers will probably never be brought to book. Two men have confessed that Ambrose Small, a wealthy theatrical man, was strangled and his body thrown into a furnace, although they did not actually carry out the crime. His wile, so gangsters said wanted him out of the way. When she died recently she left an estate valued at £1.000,000. Seventeen years ago, in Toronto, Ambrose Small, aged 55, sold a chain of theatres, for which he received £lOO,OOO in cash. He placed this amount securely in a bank, called several friends together for a celebration .of the completion of the profitable deal, and then disappeared. The day following his final party he failed to turn up at his usual haunts, and the police were called in. The city was searched, then the continent, and finally for five years by means of advertisements in newspapers throughout the world the search was conducted, but without result.

There absolutely no clue. He had just walked out of his theatre office following party with friends, and then ceased to exist. There were hundreds of theories why he might have chosen to disappear, but none quite fitted with the fact that every shilling of his estate was accounted for and his financial affairs were in good order. The police concluded that nobody in his sane senses would leave a ho’Al-won fortune behind and efface himself without trace.

Murder theories were fully explored, and finally the police concluded that a perfect crime must have been committed and that Small had been completely erased from his physical being so that not the smallest clue or telltale mark was left. The mystery appears to have been solved by the recent confessions of two men. Osborne and Shields. They were offered £lOOO each to assist in killing Small, whose wife was jealous of his escapades with other women.

'The police believe to-day that Osborne and Shields, who were youths in 1.919. when Small disappeared, did not actually participate in the crime, which consisted of strangling Small in the passage-way of his own theatre and throwing his body into a furnace, where a fire was raging on the cold winter’s night when he disappeared. Unnamed gangsters, who proposed (he killing to Osborne, said his wife wanted him out of the way. Small, in his will, made several years before his disappearance, left his wife Therese his entire property and the story is that she was fearful that with a huge bank balance in his possession he would desert her or materially change tho terms of his will.

During the intervening years his widow held her head high, maintaining her first story that she knew nothing regarding her husband’s affairs or his death. In fortunate speculations she increased her estate, until at her death recently she left £1,000,000 all to the

Catholic Church. Then Small’s two sisters, seeking to upset the will reopened the whole police investigation of the crime of neariy two decades ago. and turned up this new evidence, which apparently solves the method of Small’s death. But the actual criminals may never be brought to justice.