A MAN OF HIS WORD.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLI, Issue 9135, 7 February 1910, Page 2

A MAN OF HIS WORD.

SAN FRANCISCO OUTRAGES

Tho San Francisco police are looking for a desperado who caused a reign of terror by the commission of two desperate hold-ups and a murder, and a week later duplicated the first of that series of crimes. Within a week, almost to an hour of the time, he held up one Edward H. Gleason in the Gleason-Courneen drug store at Market Street, the thug entered the store, covered another employee of the store with a revolver, robbed the cash register of 200 dollars, and again made his escape through-the early evening crowds in Market Street. Gleason, the first,of the victims of a week ago, was in the rear of the store at the time of the hold-up, had a good look at the thug and identified him beyond question as the same man for whom the police had been fruitlessly ransacking the city for seven days. the desperado who perpetrated the outrage has mystified and baffled the Police Department as no other criminal of his kind has done since the days of Siemsen and Dabner. On the first occasion he secured 40 dollars from Gleason out of a cash register, and within 30 minutes after the commission of that crime held up David B. Greene in a pharmacy at Turk and Franklin Streets, murdered William H. Schneider in the Burnshammam baths in Eddy Street, and finally escaped, after a hand-to-hand 1 fight with William H. Hawkins in Van Ness Avenue, , between , Eddy and Ellis Streets. . The robber made good his threat to return. As he left the store after the * earlier robbery, with 40 dollars of booty in his pocket, he cried out "to Gleason, 'Til come back again, and next time I'll kill you if you squeal." ■ , ~ That was not all. He made the first threat good, and replaced it with another. Two hours after the second holdup a man, supposed to be the desperado himself, called up the drug store on the telephone, and was answered by H. J. Courneen, one of the proprietors, who heard these words, "I'll come back again. I want ydu to have more money next time, or I'll raise hell!" The telephone receiver was slammed on the hook at the distant end without another word from the mysterious caller. •

There was an exciting 'encounter at Coulsdon (Croydon) recently between an escaped female lunatic and an asylum attendant. Passengers awaiting an uptrain to Gharing. Gross on the local station saw a well-dressed woman, with her hair dishevelled and panting, rush up to the ticket office and ask for a railway ticket. Just as this had been given to her a man rushed 1 up, seized her, and dragged her into the roadway. The sta-tionma-iter and several persons .intervened, and the man explained that the woman had escaped from an adjacent lunatic asylum and that he was taking her back. The woman was taken care of until a vehicle and a female attendant could be procured, . and she was then taken back to the institution. It is said that escapes from the large asylums close by are frequent, and that the stationmaster is frequently .oalled upon to deal with these cases. Quite recently two lunatics in a state of nudity asked for tickets for the North Pole, ahd executed a weird dance outside the ticket office until they were secured.