PROBLEM OF A CONVICT.

Mataura Ensign, 2 November 1911, Page 8

PROBLEM OF A CONVICT.

CLAIMANT'S ADVENTURES. PRISON AND ASYLUM. After 13 years spent in lunatic asylum and prison a man claiming to be George Alfred Kimmel, a banker, who disappeared in 1898, readied his native town of Niles, in Michigan the other night. Mr Kimmel, a prosperous and! healthy banker, disappeared after taking out a life insurance policy for £SOOO with the New York Life Insurance Company. His mother brought a series of actions against the company to enforce payment. After years of litigation the money was about to be landed to Mrs Kimmel when the company received a letter from a lunatic asylum written by a man named: White, who claimed that he was the triissing banker. White related that after drinking with some men he found himself in a. strange room in a distant town guarded by some men. He escaped, but was attacked! in the street, by two men, who beat him into insensibility, and when he awoke he was in a lunatic asylum. White was released from the asylum, but subsequently forged a cheque and was sentenced to five years' imprisonment. A strange feature in the case is that while White beaTs an extraordinary resemblance to the missing banker, his eyes are light blue, whereas those of the banker were dark brown. W|hite is now the guest of Mrs Harry L. Fox, a cousin, who had visited him in prison. A large number of former friends have already seen him, and in every case he has recognised | them, greeting them by their christian names, and they all agree that he is the missing banker. On tihe other hand, Mrs Kimmel, the banker's 70-year-old mother, persists in stating that the released convict is an impostor, and claims the £SOOO under the life insurance policy. Change of Eye Color. The possibility of a man's eyes changing color as the result of mental shock or physical ill treatment was the subject of an interesting discussion by a number of surgeons in the eye ward of one of the great London hospitals. One of the surgeons stated: "It is common knowledge that great physical hardships may suddenly turn the hair white. The ioss of color here follows on certain chemical changes, due to disturbances of nutrition, taking place in the tiny particles of coloring matter which give the hair its color. "All infants at birth have blue eyes. In some babies, immediately after birth pigment granules begin" to develop in the iris. Thus they become brown or black eyed. In others, however, no such pigment formation takes place, and the eyes remain blue or grey throughout life. ."If this at present blue-eyed exconvict is really the missing browneyed banker, a reasonable explanation of the discrepancy in the eye colorings would be that under the stress of physical and mental shock the coloring matter which had in early life developed in such iris had atrophied or disappeared, leaving tlie eyes the blue coloring present at birth."