MURDERERS WHO ESCAPE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3400, 30 July 1932, Page 8

MURDERERS WHO ESCAPE

ADVENTURES OF A CRIMT EXPERT. “Memory’s,” just published, is full of good things. The author (Mr. P. W. Memory) is known to a wide public as one of I the ablest special correspondents and j crime experts of our day. He has travelled far and wide and met many people. He has been engaged on dangerous work. He has investigated most of the crime mysteries of recent years, and it is safe to say that he knows more about their seci'ets than anybody outside of Scotland Yard. Suspicious “Accidents.” In the present volume he tells of some of his adventures and conclusions. One of the points which he discusses is whether many murderers escape detection — “I believe (he says) those qualified to speak on such a subject would reply in the affirmative. There have been many accidents which have given rise to suspicion. It is only necessary to recall the Rouse case to remember how, but for one slip, what was in fact a carefully planned and brutal murder might have passed for an accident.” Besides undetected murders, there have been too many cases of late where a crime has certainly been committed but where it has not been possible to convict the murderer. Perhaps the most extraordinary of these mysteries is that of the poisoning last year of Lieutenant Chevis by strychnine which had been introduced into a Manchurian partridge. Mr. Memory points out that the investigation of this crime compels the conclusion that “somewhere there is lurking a sinister figure with the lust to kill and so cunning as to elude suspicion and detection . . . not animated by any special grudge against a particular member of the Chevis menage, but simply desiring to cause death and suffering to someone.” Callous Murders. He has something to say of the callousness of some murderers. Thorne, who was convicted of killing and cutting up Elsie Cameron, “advanced theories of his own to account for her disappearance, including loss of memory and the possibility of kidnapping by gipsies, to say nothing- of the activities of White Slavers Almost nightly he sought me out at the hotel at which I stayed to ask for news and to suggest possible clues to the

mystery. Never once by actual sign or deed did he betray the anxiety which must have been consuming him.” Mr. Memory is able to reveal the true story of the trouble in the Atlantic Fleet at Invergordon last year. He tells us what is the undoubted fact that “the men as a whole had no idea of threatening the Government or of holding a pistol to the head of the nation; they were simply concerned with the welfare of their families consequent upon the reduction in their pay.” Smiling Admiral. One of the naval personages with whom the war brought Mr. Memory in close close touch was the famous Sir Reginald Hall, Director of Naval Intelligence—“l do not think,” the author says, “I ever saw the Admiral, even during the most anxious times, without a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eyes. A casual observer would have imagined that he took life as one huge joke, and certainly would not have believed that he was the one man in the British Empiie who knew the secrets of the German Fleet perhaps better than von Tirpitz himself.” Here, in fact, is good entertainment for the most captious reader, and in the Irish pages something more —a serious contribution to the history of our own times from one who watched on the spot the struggles between Black and Tan and Sinn Fein, and then between the supporters of the Treaty and the Republicans.