MURDER AT GORSE HALL.

Gisborne Times, Volume LXXXI, Issue 12398, 10 November 1934, Page 9

MURDER AT GORSE HALL.

FOUR EYE-WITN ESSES TESTIFY.

EVIDENCE COUNTED FOR NOTHING!

QjN the night of September 10, IPSO, Mr, George Storrs, a Lancashire building • contractor and cotton manufacturer, was talking to his wife in the dining-room of Gorse Hall, a largo house standing in heavily wooded grounds near Dunkinfield, in the County of Cheshire, England , when a voice outside the window said, “Hold up your hands or I’ll shoot !” Mr Storrs turned round quickly, and as he did so a shot was fired, breaking the glass Although startled, Mr. Storrs was a man of stout heart and entirely fearless. Swinging forward, he tried to seize the barrel of a revolver which was protruding through the hole in the window pane. The marksman was too quick for him. The revolver was withdrawn like a flash, and the sound of running feet told Mr. Storrs that someone was flying for his life down the' avenue, a mile long, that led to the lodge gates.

In the excitement of the , moment Mr. Storrs dashed for the door, intending to give chase, but he was restrained by his vile, who was nervous tor his safety. With. astonishing self-possession, Mr. and Mrs. Storrs resumed their seats, finished their conversation, and went- to bed without telling anyone of their disturbing experience. That was the prelude to one of the most baffling murders in the history of English crime—a. grim tragedy which, in spite of two trials and the accumulation of a mass of evidence which placed two young men within the shadow of the gallows, • remains to this day a mystery. The morning following the attempt upon Mr. Storrs’s life his wife persuaded him to toll the police about it, and to ask for protection against a p-ossible repetition of the attack. .A policeman was directed to patrol the grounds of Gorse Hall at night. The window shutters of the • house were closed cacli evening, and an alarm he'll, which could be set ringing by pulling a cord in the upstairs bedroom, was installed. Ihiring "the trial Mrs. Storrs said that she askode her husband whether he had any suspicion who the intruder of September 10 might he, But Mr. Storrs could think of no one hut two former millhands whom he had discharged. Police inquiries showed that both men were innocent.

NIGHT OF THE CRIME. Tor seven weeks Mr. and Mrs. Storrs and their staff of servants dwelt at peace in a barricaded and guarded house. Not that Mr. Storrs was a coward, for he persisted in his custom of going for long walks in the evenings, but Mrs. Storrs was frankly nervous, and the precautions Wcto taken to allay her apprehension. On November 1 municipal elections were held in England, and the policeman who had been patrolling the grounds of Gorse Hall was ,withdraw7i on that night-for duty in the village. It was during his absence that a crime occurred which made the Hall a house of ' mystery and dread for years afterward. _ Mr. and Mrs. Storrs were again sitting in the dining-room, Together with their niece, Miss Marion Lindley. The women were sowing and Mr. Storrs was .playing patience. While they were so occupied a man, holding a revolver, opened the hack door, thrust aside the cook, and walked through the kitchen into the dining-room, where he aimed the revolver at Mr. Storrs, saying, “Now I’ve got you!” There, began an amazing struggle, the more extraordinary ' because there were four eye-witnesses of it, all of whom were able not ord.v to do-, ecribe it during the trial, but to give the police a-reasonably good'description of the murdcre.. -r. Storrs, in his typically fearless man «er, closed wih his assailant, and (tried to wrest the revolvei f r ° ! '‘ Iw JV Mr. Storrs was more than 6 feet m height, and . he was' powerfully bunt, r Thc women who watched toe strll y ode seemed to think t’n.n he won overpower hi 3 smaller and mss sxon l y built adversary without trouble.. Mrs. Storrs picked up a heavy stic v and wont to her husband's assis Mice. To hor surprise the man one tor merer, and allowed her to taho the revolver from him, - whereupon Sir Storrs shouted, “R™ and ring the alarm!” Mrs. Stone did as she was bidden, rang the bed. and hid the revolver under the be,, room carpet lest hor hus .ant s tocher should come upstairs lootaig for it. "While she was away the - drew a knife from his waistpoat pocket, and a grim fight ensued, waked for part of the time by Mnw Storrs, ■ Miss Lindley, the cool,, and. -L housemaid. As Mr. tied with Ms opponent in " room and in the hall be received U wounds in the chest «■*!»*, £ such an unequal struggle 1 s - credible that he at aef eontrrmhto, push his murderer into the scullery and lock tie door on turn. _ - While this terrible handencounter.- had been m ran" lindley, the cook, -and jbe .ma ; of the house it to. obtain assist,; .raose to the ledge" gates w- n hall in which a crowd of _ men waiting to learn the _ 11P - the election’. : A dozen men -ran drive to the house, but wheait Y got there the slayer had. escaped by smashing the scullery «vwindow and ZSMtotheyard B,ee .ng p»- . fusely from his jpen, including a- P olirpTna ’

over him, and asked him, “Who was the'man?’’ to each of whom Mr. Storrs replied, .‘‘l don’t know.” He died asking for his wife To complicate the police investigation, which began with great thoroughness, Mr. Storrs’s coachman, AVorrall, hanged himself from the loft in the stables at Gorse Hall" a few days after the murder. It was proved that he had nothing to do with the killing.

THE TWO TRIALS. Few more remarkable murder trials can be recalled in the annals of English justice than the two trials which followed. They tell a pretty story of the dangers and difficulties of identification. Two young men were tried separately for the same crime, both were identified as the murderer by the four women who watched the fatal struggle, and both were acquitted in the face of evidence which would have banged many another, prisoner. Cornelius Howard, a. reserviset in the Royal Field Artillery, and a cousin of Mr. Storrs, was defended by Messrs. Trevor Lloyd and Austin Jones. The trial, as well os the one which followed it, is graphically described by Miss Winifred Duke in her latest collection of noteworthv British murder trials. When How ard was arrested the police found in his pocket a pair of blond-soaked socks, which it was alleged, could have been stained hv abrasions caused by the broken gloss of the scullery window, but which the prisoner attributed to leg wounds received at his lodging-house, when a window he was repairing fell upon him. His alibi that he. spent the evening of the murder in an hotel bar-room was supported by unsolicited evidence, but his defence was weakened by a series of obvious untruths which he had told the police, thinking that they had come to arrest- him on a charge of breaking and entering a warehouse. The evidence of the four women witnesses would have been sufficient to convict him—each of them pointed him out in an identification parade, at the police station—hut for the circumstance that on the night of September 10, when the shot had been fired at Gorse Hall. Howard was a prisoner in Wakefield Gaol on a house-breaking charge. The jury, acting on the assumption that the man who killed, George Storrs was the same man who threatened Storrs with a revolver five weeks earlier, had no hesitation in acquitting him.

CASE AGAINST MARK WILDE. Nothing more was heard of the murder at Gorse Hall for several months, but in August, 1910, the police made another arrest. Mark Wilde, a. former soldier in tlie Worcestershire Regiment, was placed on trial for the crime for which Howard had been acquitted. A suit of bloodstained clothing and several revol-vers-had been found in Wilde’s house. At his trial three of his fern er comrades-identified the revolve which' Mrs. Storrs had hidden on the tiiglit of September 10 as the piopcrty of Wilde. They recognised it because Wilde had passed it round to several of his companions to see when he was on duty at Malta in 1906. It-.then had and still'had certain peculiar markings. Waldo’s alibi was faulty. He said that on the night of the murder he had been drinking at an hotel, and when going home he had had a fight with a drunken man—a circumstance which accounted for the bloodstains on his clothes. The drunken man was never found. Once again the four women went into the"witness-box and swore that they -could identify the murderer. This time,’ however, it was Wilde to . whom they pointed as the man. In spite of the many awkward aspects of Wilde’s defence .the jury again acquitted, taking the line, presumably, that the evidence could not be trusted of four women who could say that two different men were one and the same. Amid scenes of wild enthusiasm in court the curtain fell on a. drama the secret of which has resolutely defied all attempts to .fathom it. The forces of the Crown had made two exacting efforts to sheet the crime home' and twice they' failed, largely because they could not discover, the slightest motive -why anyone, including Cornelius Howard and Mark Wilde, should want to take the victim’s life. Somewhere, if he still lives; a man walks with a guilty conscience, hut. whoever he is he has kept silent counsel, for; 25 “years.' • ‘