THE ECHO OF AN ANCIENT CRIME.

Otago Witness, Issue 2672, 31 May 1905, Page 70

THE ECHO OF AN ANCIENT CRIME.

(M.A.P.) — Early Recollections. —

I often wonder 'if, among the recollections of one's earliest years, an event of comparatively little importance does not dwell more firmly than events of great pith and moment I was reading the other day a series ol memories by Julian Hawthorne, the well-known American novelist, and I found that for a certain epoch in his schoolboy days the one dominating point of interest and recollection was the historic fight between Tom Sayers and John Heenan. I was a schoolboy about the same period, and I also recollect that the thoughts of this fight, surpassed .everything, else in interest foi the lad of the period. I did not see newspaipers in those days ; v but still one gets little echoes of what .appears in print from those who read, .and I have a strong memory still.,^oJE .the incidents which stood out from the'figiit, and whicb were repeated to me by elders. Especially do I remember how the arm of Tom Sayers was broken at an early stage in the fight, and yet how lie pluckily fought on to tihe end. Heenan used to be" called the Benicia boy. More than 20 years after the fight I visited the town of Benicia; it is a pretty little coast town in California, and th« place seemed familiar and even a little dear to me because through John Heenan it was associated with early recollections.

— The Fascination of Mystery. —

There is one other kind of event which I think seizes even a stronger hold on the boyish imagination than even a prize fight,, and that is a mysterious murder. Who does not recall among his boyish fancies the thoughts of some great crime, the perpetrator of which for a certain length of time remained unknown, and of all the theories that were started, and of the fascination which the thought' of the mystery exercised upon the imagination by night and by day? There are few of .us that would not' shrink back in horror.at the sight of a murdered human being, and that would not refuse to remain in the same spot — 6ven though it were ja, vast hall — with one who had conniiitted a murder;, and yet what a fascination both murder and a Tntirderer exercise over the human being. When I was the editor of an evening news.paper, I always found that of all the reading which was popular with the public, and which sent the circulation up by tens of thousands, there was nothing to be compared to a murder mystery ; it beat even a big race as a popular attraction. A few years ago I went to a fair in Boulogne ; I found that far and away th© most popular exhibit was a representation of a murder by a woman named Clairete Bompard and her confederate — I think his name was Eyraud — which had just been committed. Even to-day the books of Gaboriaui, the writer of detective stories, are read by tens of thousands of people ; and this favourite theme was a murder and a mystery attached. —Muller.— These somewhat gruesome reflections have been suggested to me by the following paragraph, whioh I found quite by cliance in a popular weekly paper last veck. "An echo" — so ran the- paragraph — "of an historic murder wasi heard at Finchley yesterday during an inquest on Ferdinand Muller, a German from Stuttgart. The man was found dead in an outhouse at the bottom of the garden by his landlady at Park Terrace, E. Finchley, on Tuesday morning. Mrs Florence Cook said deceased had been witli her for six months, but was very reticent, and seldom sj^>ke or allowed anyone to- come near him. She thought lie had no friends or relatives, other than a sister in Germany. In an old portmanteau, which was covered with ships' labels and labels of foreign railways, indicating that it had been all over the world, was found a. letter addressed to Mr William Lono, builder, of J'>ow lane, Child's Hill. This witness said dec eased was. a aian named Mulleir, and not I

Miller, by which name Be was locally! known. The jury found a verdict of death' from natural causes, and the doctor remarked that so utterly useless were the valves of the heart tiat it was a wonder the man had lived so long."

—The Railway Murder. —

Muller! What a flood of memories that one name brought to me. I remember the time for weeks, if not for months, the one name you beard mentioned in the conversations of everybody was Muller. For iveeks, if not for months, he was more the centre oi national interest, curiosity, theories, obstinate questionings than, tie Prime Minister, or even the And the reason was this : on a 'fine day in July 43 years ago, the body of a clerk named Briggs was found on, the track of the North London Railway. Briggs had been murdered, and the body had then been thrown out on the rails. The murderer had got clean away, and but for the fact that he had left behind his hat there was not the smallest trace of him, not a single clue. He had disappeared, as it were, into night; and at first it seemed almost certain that the murder of this poor clerk would have to be added to the already long list <ol undetected crimes. The boldness with whi^h" the murder Lad been; committed, the^skill; and adroitness of the murderer, the absolute completeness witht ■ which he hud destroyed, apparently, all chance of detections-all these things worked on the- popular mind. It seemed to demonstrate ..that even on a short journey on a suburban , railway, and) in the broad daylight, a man was not safe from being murdered, and murdered without any cliance of the criminal being detected. — Motive of the Crime. — Here, then, were all the elements of a murder mystery, and the public caught- on to the sensation with characteristic avidity. There were not as many newspapers in those days as there are in ours; but such, newspapers as did exist filled their columns with long reports about the case. I lived) in a ?mall provincial town in Ireland at the time, but I can still recall the avid interest with which every new item in the case was debated. One of the reasons which were assigned for the nmrder was that Mr Briggs caa*ried a valuable watch, and that the desire to get hold of the watch must have b*en, therefore, ona of the chief motives of the crime. I remember one of my acquaintances repeating to me almost the very terms of a somewhat sensational article in a London evening paper, in which the reflections of the murderer as he sat opposite the victim and gozed upon the watch he desired so greedily were very picturesquely described 1 . - —On the Trail.— The nvy-stejET was solved' in the end. The criminal, "wijjj' that stupidity which seems to, characterise the race, had left behind - liimrr-liis own liat; and in. some way or o.thep- this feat \t as traced to -a, young German of tfoe name of Muller. Then other' corroboratives evidence was brought for-, ward. The murderer, leaving his own hat, had taken away the hat of Mr Briggs ; and then it was found! that a man had! gone to a hatter and asked him to cut down, this hat so as to make it smaller in size. It is impossible to convey to arybody of this generation the sensation tiat was created by this discovery. Tail hats were much taller in those days of th© sixties tban they are now. I remember th© sensation that was created the first time- c. hat was worn which was at a smaller altitude than the typical top hat of the period. One of the first to make this astounding and audacious change in the fashions of the times was the present King — then, of course, Prinoe of Wales ; and there were people who, when he set the example of wearing a hat of th© fashion of to-day, even asked him to go a step further and to abolish the top-iat altogether. i At the moment when the discovery with regard to - Muller' s cutting down the hat : of Mr Briggs was made, it was all over for 1 the present with low-crowned hats. They ; became identified .in the public imaginaj tion *vith -Muller and the murder that Mulrler had committed. Cockneys are a jovial and a light-hearted, race, with a certain tendency , which they share in common < with the Parisians, to see the comic side of even ghastly things. The low-crowned) hat came to be known ior a time as "Mul-ler-cut-downs" ; and" now and them there was plenty of chaff between the 'bus men as th-ey rode by each other, for 'busmen then, as now, rather affected this form of head-gear. —The Hat Clue. — The clue with regard to the Eat was followed up, iml it was then discovered that a young German named Muller had sailed to New York. Detectives were sent after him, h^ was arrested there, and brought back to England. This brought the sensation to a climax. Every word! of the li*ial was devoured 1 with interest by every reader of newspapers in the kingdom ; and again the criminal became at '•entre of greater interest and curiosity thanany other individual in the kingdom. He was more debated than politics, or racing, or prize-fighting ; be was the central point of national attention. When he was finally condemned and sentenced, the inttrest was not yet at an end. Nobody had seen him*" commit tbe murder; the evidence against him was from first ta last entiiely of a circumstantial character. In addition, he was young — he was, if I remember lightly, soft and gentle in appearance ; just one of those rotund-faced, fair-haired young Germans, whose expression is always one of mild surprise and! gentle benignity. There is always a certain number of well-meaning and kindly people who take an interest in the fate of criminals. Indeed, a curious chapter in human psychology might be written on the point why it is that criminals do exercise such a fascination over certain types of men and women. In the United' States, ■where a larger amount of latitude is given to communication between the condemned nuio-derer and the public than we would under any circumstances admit, criminals constantly become the subject of morbid interest, and sometimes of morbid affection.

— Public Sympathy. — A further cause of the interest which was ' taken in young Muiler was that hie was a , German, and a number of his countrymen, mcved by the natural sympathy which men of the same race have for each other, j started an agitation against the carrying out of the- capital sentence. In short, there was a large section of opinion in the country which disbelieved in the- completeness of the circumstantial evidence, and •who thought that as there was some Qoubj^ there ought not to be an execution. It ■ •was even whispered that an august person- ' age — no less a one, in fact, than the King of Prussia — the German Empire bad not ' yet been brought into being by Bismarck and Sedan — had intervened on beihalf of his former subject, and was credited, in fact, ■with being one of the many thousands ■who, doubting the guilt of the young German, pleaded that he should be spared.

— His Last Words. —

I dare say no such, representation was \ made by tie King of Prussia, but, still, j the fact that such, a rumour could be believed will give the reader of to-day some idea of the amount of excitement and attention "which the murder and the murderer excited. AH the appeals were in. vain., and. at last the day came for the execution. . The poor wretch, had be>en given t>toe privilege -of being attended to the scaffold by 'clergymen .of his own race. If I remember .rightly, this was the more necessary, as he had but a very imperfect know- ' ledge of* English. One of these clergymen ■was evidently- very deeply moved, and he was carried away by that intense desire •vrbich. ascertain "number of people always iiave that the criminal should confess to the justice of his sentence before it is executed. Again and again the German clergyman made this appeal. Up to the last hour jSluller had apparently remained obdurately silent. Not by a sign or a look or a "whisper did he> give any indication to that eager -world outside that was appealing to lum for a word "whether lie was guilty or iimocent ; and so the German clergyman ■was only making himself the echo of a ■universal sentiment and craving when he pressed the young criminal to confess. At last, just as the rope was being put around his neck, the hardened, or the hopeful, murderer wave way, a,nd he said just four words. They are engraven on my memory, for they were German words, and at the time I was just- starting the study of German, and was in the intricacies of the iiresmlar verb that Muller used. "Thun." In German is to -do. and the past participle of that is the somewhat unexpected "word "gethan." This -was tie wood — "gethaai" — which Muller used. "leh hab' es gethan," he said to the clergyman as he T^a-s about to fall through the -drop.- rt I did it." It was not much, but it was enough.

— Beyond the Grave. —

And yet — this will show the morbid state of excitement in * the pub.'ic mmd — even, this profession was questioned. I remember a very sharps letter of criticism on the account given by the German clergyman. This letter — the minuteness of the criticism is significant — pointed out that the German clergyman gave two different versions of what Muller had said. In the first version — the version he gave verbally just after the execution — the clergyman, said that the criminal had' said simply "Ich Lab' es gethan," while in his written version to the newspapers, he added the word **Ja," meaning "Yes." "Ich hab' es gethan." And for some time afterwards there were people found ready to question the justice cf the trial and of the execution. —A Brother's Weary Pilgrimage —

This is the crime which, is brought back to my memory by the inquest "On that other Muller who has just died in Finchley. His tistory is in some respects overshadowed) by the crime for which his brother suffered. The Mr Long who gave evidence at the inquest was interviewed afterwards ; and he gave this truly remarkable history cf the life and career of the poor creature whose dead body had just been found. The ihistory is worth reproducing here ; it is life in microcosm with all its possibilities and wonders, which make it so often Stranger than any fiction. "Forty years »go," said Mr Long, "I was twenty years 0i age, and Muller, my friend, was twentythree." And then, having given an account of the murder by his friend Muller's brother, the narrative goes on: The execution took place- on November J4, and Ferdinand Muller, the brother, immediately wade ready to leave the ,

country with his friend, Mr Long, who has now identified his body after ten years' separation. Muller went to the post office at Child's Hill, banked £40, and then set sail for Vancouver. The two men visited the goldfields and generally prospected, passed over the Rockies, and then went to Australia. Their ex-

periences among the early colonists were remarkable. They carried their bank around their waists in belts, and when

the "deposit 1 ' was heavy they awoke in the morning with the marks of the money impressed on their sides, which were often sore from having lain on the metal. Usually they slept with a loaded six-shooter beside them. They came

back to England- fairly wealthy, but Muller seems to have had bad luck, with the

result that his money went, and he took

service with a Bond street perfumer, a German. Later on this man drowned himself, and Muller became bailiff on an estate for a time. He next went to France to become a gardener, but returned to England and took service with a West-End optician, another German, who directly afterwards went out of his mind, and was ordered a- voyage to Australia. . On the way home he jumped -^'overboard and was drowned. Muller ■was subsequently engaged on the farm of a family, with whom he- had, remained till recently. From the date of the murder^ 40 years ago this man's career bad never for long together been disassociated with tragedies, and eventually he himself met death alone a.nd unknown in the very place where lived the man who was paid the reward for the arrest of his brother, being identified by the friend of his youth, who had not seen him for 10 years. . The allusion to Muller dying in the same place as the man who obtained, the reward foi the arrest of his brother is to the fact that the man who helped to the discr.verv of the murderer was a cowkeeper, named Biyce ; and Bryoe lived at Finchlev. It is, indeed, a strange story. — T. P.