A Terrible Case of Murder.

Hastings Standard, Issue 118, 11 September 1896, Page 4

A Terrible Case of Murder.

In De Qumcev's '• Murder a Fine Art," we have a thrilling account of the celebrate-:! Marr murders, and the tragedies which followed. A draper named Marr lived with his wife and baby 111 a house in Batcliff Highway. There were also dwelling with them an apprentice lad and a young servant girl, both treated as members of the family. The girl was sent out one foggy night to buy some oysters. She lost her way, and returned unsuccessful to the door at eleven, to find all shut, dark, and silent. Listening for an answer to her knock she heard stealthy steps in the passage, and, already nervous with her mishap, she sprang back, and called " Murder ! " A blacksmith next door, with that two o'clock in the morning courage " which the great Duke of Wellington said was one of the rarest things in the world, promptly gripped a peker, and in his nightshirt scaled the garden wall at the back, and entered the Marr's dwelling by an open door. There he found husband,wife, apprentice, and baby smashed to death with a shipwright's hammer which the assassin had left behind. A few days later, and a few doors away, a similar thing happened. An old respectable couple kept an alehouse. There was also a sen-ant-girl, and on the night in question a baby was sleeping in a cot upstairs, whilst in the next room was a journeyman baker, who had gone to bed early in order to get to his work in the morning. At eleven or thereabouts, the baker heard the side door slam, and at once " something told him that Marr murderer was at work." The baker crept downstairs, and, leaning over the banisters, saw a stranger ransacking the back parlor. The landlady and servant lav dead in the room. As for the husband, „ he was stretched a corpse at the foot of his cellar steps. The baKer hastily crept upstairs tin, hastily converted the bedclothes into a rope, which he fastened to a bedpost ; then he lowered himself from the window through the dense fog on to the street pavement. The alarm was given, and in a few seconds Batcliffe Highway was a sea of humanity on the keenest of hunts—a man-hunt. The front door was burst open. The foremost rushed upstairs, and there by the baby's cot stood the murderer. In a second he had sprang through the window, followed in mad chase by two 01* three of the pursuers. The latter lost their footing in the wet clay, and the fugitive escaped in the darkness. The baby was fortunately safe and sound. Next day a man was arrested in a sailor's lodging-house near the Tower. He hanged himself in prison before his trial, and by a grim coincidence Ms skeleton, with the stake which used to be driven through the body of a suicide, was found during the height of the "Whiteehaple murders when a roadway in the neighbouring Minories was undergoing repairs. One cannot help thinking that Dickens in his tale of Oliver Twist, when describing the ghastly end of Bill Sikes, had De Qaincey's weird narrative in his mind's eye.—London Society.