UNSOLVED MYSTERY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22398, 20 October 1934, Page 22

UNSOLVED MYSTERY

“POISON PEN” RIDDLE POSTMISTRESS ACQUITTED ORDEAL OF SEVEN DAYS’ TRIAL. After a trial lasting seven days, in which an extraordinary story had been unfolded of the activities of a “poison pen ” writer, a middle-aged village postmistress was recently found not guilty at the Winchester Assizes. As a result, the police have to start again their attempts to find the writer of the scores of anonymous letters which for four years made the village a place of suspicion and fear. The letters were penned by someone who had, in the ■words of counsel, “gone to the cesspools for a vocabulary.” The postmistress strenuously denied that she was the author of the letters. She is Mrs Edith Jane Creeth, of Brighstone, Isle of Wight. She was charged with sending obscene and offensive literature through the post. „ . . For four years the village of Bnghstone had been disturbed by anonymous letters. They were sent indiscriminately to the 500 inhabitants of the district, and no one knew who would he the next to be chosen as a victim. Police suspicion fell on Mrs Creeth, and she was charged with the offence. Pale but smiling, Mrs Creeth stood for a few minutes behind the dock after she heard the jury’s verdict. I thought I should be acquitted because I am absolutely innocent,” she said afterward. “ But it was a hard fight, anffi I do not want to go through such a terrible ordeal again. At first I thought the jury said guilty instead of not guilty and it gave me a terrible shock for the moment. TEACHER FORCED TO RESIGN. The first person chosen for persecution by the anonymous letter was Miss Willoughby, the village schoolmistress. She .was driven to resignation, and, to escape the offensive letters, she left the island with her mother, telling no one where she was going. Settled in the village of North Boarhunt, in Hampshire, she at first found freedom from persecution. Then in the ordinary way she sent an official form to Brighstone Post Office asking that any letters might be forwarded to her new address. That was the end of her peace, for the postmaster of North Boarhunt received an anonymous letter containing the sentence: “ Give three cheers for the Brighstone people now that the Willoughby woman and her wicked old mother have gone. Danger—beware of the husband-snatcher.” The prosecution alleged that the only person who knew Miss Willoughby’s address was Mrs Creeth as postmistress at Brighstone. Mrs Creeth herself received anonymous letters, some of them threatening, and the windows of her cottage were mysteriously broken, to say nothing of three outbreaks of fire in her home which could not be accounted for. In all, there were about 130 of these vile communications, and a writing expert who examined them declared that although the majority were the work of one person, there were doubts about some of them, and it was possible that there were two people hiding their identity. ELABORATE TRAPS PAIL. Elaborate schemes for running the culprit to earth failed. In one case it was announced that Mrs Creeth was ill in bed; the doctor attended at her home regularly; flowers were even sent to brighten her sick room. Actually, she was away from Brighstone, it being hoped that a clue might be obtained by this subterfuge, but it resulted in nothing. Mr T. J. O’Connor. K.C. defending counsel, in his final address to the jury emphasised that the anonymous letters had been going on for four years For upwards of three years, he said, Che documents had been under the scrutiny of a handwriting expert, and since the beginning of 1933 Superintendent Morrison had been reporting on the matter and deciding there was a case for the prosecution. , . ~ "Yet nothing was done, remarked Mr O’Connor. “Why? Because, you may

infer, there was uncertainty. Is it not a little odd that on the same facts 18 months later the prosecution should come and ask you to say for certain that Mrs Creeth, and no one else, wrote the letters? ” ’ ■ T j They were not dealing with .London or New York, but with a little village in the Isle of Wight. “ That village for the past three or four years must have been a raging inferno of suspicion,” went on Mr O’Connor, ■“ everybody being suspects and everybody’s nerves on edge. “WORK OF RAYING LUNATIC.” The first difficulty which confronted the jury, Mr O’Connor continued, was whether any woman could possibly have written th e letters. They appeared to to be the work of a raving lunatic who had gone to the cesspools for a vocabulary, and it was almost incredible that any woman should have had such a vocabulary. Dealing with the question of handwriting, counsel added that the wild style of the anonymous writer was very different from the neat, almost scholarly, style of Mrs Creeth’s known writing. Mr W. E. P. Done, prosecuting counsel, ' pointed out that he did not suggest that the writer of the anonymous letters had a grudge against all the recipients of them. “ Having yielded to the temptation of writing one,” he added, “I suggest she went on to gratify a desire to write them. I suggest it became a kind of obsession, almost a frenzy.” Mr Justice Branson, in summing up, remarked that it was agreed that the anonymous letters must all have come from the same source, and that the same writer was responsible for them all. It would be unsafe to convict on the handwriting alone. POLICEMAN WATCHES PILLAR- ' BOX. The judge pointed out that February 13, 1931, was an important date. A police sergeant had said he was watching the pillar-box that day from 3 p.m. until the post office closed, and he was satisfied that an. anonymous letter could only have been put through by Mrs Creeth herself. The defence met this in two ways — first by saying that she was not there that day, and secondly that_ the sergeant did not keep watch until the evening. Which did the jury believe? The jury would also have to consider in the case of letters posted while she was away whether she might have induced her husband to post them in order to show that the suspicion that was falling upon her was misplaced. ■ After an absence of an hour and three-quarters the jury returned a verdict of “not guilty.”