CURIOUS CLUES TO CRIME.

Otago Witness, Issue 3395, 9 April 1919, Page 54

CURIOUS CLUES TO CRIME.

CRIMINALS BROUGHT TO BOOK BY INSIGNIFICANT TRIFLES.

The suspected burglar who shot at and fatally wounded Constable Campbell in a back court at 637 Great Eastern road, Glasgow, overlooked one thing as he flew from the scene of his dastardly outragehe left his cap behind him! A trifle and of no significance, you may say. Well, trifles have before now played an extraordinary part in bringing criminals to the bar of justice. It was a trifle that led to the capture of the notorious Dr Crippen. When this astute villain got on board ship and was racing across the Atlantic as last as a moden liner could cany him he not unnaturally thought he was safe. But he had overlooked one little item—he forgot all about wireless telegraphy; it -brought about his capture. In clues to crime trifles are never discarded ; they are pounced upon eagerly. The average individual might "turn them down" as being too insignificant; the Eolice authorities pick them up. A roken coat button, long preserved in the Black Museum at Scotland Yard, was the apparently insignificant clue that led to the conviction of one of the most dangerous of armed bur dare. In another case a famous French detective once traced a murderer within 48 hours with nothing to go upon except a solitary trouser button. Mrs Dyer, who murdered more than a score of infants, was.careful to destroy the clothes of the poor little innocents sne condemned to death. She could not, however, resist the temptation to keep some pretty oxidised silver buttons belonging to a little girl's pelisse. These were found in her den at Reading when it was raided by the police, and, being afterwards identified by the mother of the dead child, formed one of the strongest links in the chain of circumstantial evidence which led to the conviction of the . most callous murderess of modern times. —Muller's Mistake.—. Some of the greatest criminal mysteries in the whole annals of crime would have remained unsolved till the crack cf doom but for apparently insignificant trifles. The notorious Franz Muller' would, in all probability have remained a free man till the end of his days had it not been for the minutest scrap of tissue paper. After foully murdering a Mr Briggs' in a railway carriage on the North London line Muller made off with his victim's hat. When caught, several months later, a top hat, declared to be Mr Briggs's, was found in his possession. Its shape, however, had been considerably altered, and Muller insisted that the , hat had been bought by himself. Was it Mr Briggs's hat?' "If it is Mr Briggs's hat," said the hatter who supplied him, "you may find a piece of tissue paper in the lining. Mr Briggs's hat was too large for him, so I put the paper in to make it fit." When the lining was turned down a scrap of paper, which had adhered to the leather, was discovered. - Muller had a bigger head than Mr Briggs, and had therefore resolved to take the paper out. He left that little bit, however, sufficient to establish the identity of the hat beyond all question as that Mr Briggs was wearing when he was murdered. —Fatal "Scrap of Paper."— A scrap of paper was also sufficient to place the hangman's noose around the neck of another murderer. John Tom's was little more than a mere youth when he stood his. trial at the Lancaster Assizes, charged with the murder of a man named Culshaw. Culshaw had been killed by a pistol shot, and the weapon had evidently been fired -at close quarters. The evidence against Toms was meagre and unsatisfactory, until there was produced in court a terrible, blood-stained piece of paper. It was handed to the jury and examined by them, and on it were still plainly discernible the words of a North Country comic song. The piece of paper had been recovered from the fatal wound in the dead man's head, and had been the wad of the assassin's pistol. A song book was found in Toms's pocket, and part of one page of it was missing. The piece found in the dead man's wound corresponded with it exactly. Toms was, of course, found guilty and hanged. —A Scientist's Overlook.— What a tiny thing it was, too, that brought the great Professor Webster to his just doom. Webster was one of the foremost scientists of his time, a man of remarkable ability and of high—one might indeed say of unimpeachable—character, but extremely nervous and hasty. One day he had a sudden sharp quarrel over money matters with his life-long friend Dr Parkman. They came to blows, and in the struggle Dr Parkman was accidentally killed. Webster would probably have had a light sentence for manslaughter had he confessed; but he chose to keep silence, and employed all the sinister resources of his science in disposing of the remains of his friend. He cut the body up in his laboratory, and burnt and destroyed all the parts, even the bones. lie felt safe in the secure belief that he had not left so much as a hair of his victim, to betray him. But he forgot one thing, made one little mistake. Among the ashes and clinkers of the furnace was found part of a set of false teeth, which a dentist recognised as having belonged to the missing man. The teeth were made of a composition which resisted fire. It was a very small thing for a scientist to for§et; but those teeth hanged Webster, and efore he was executed he confessed.

—A Youthful Murderer. — Equally curious -was the trifle -which led to the detection of a strange precocious monster, whose name is unknown to the

present generation, but whose baleful preeminence in youthful crime must ever arouse a shudder when the story is recalled. Jesse Pomeroy was only a schoolboy, who played and larked about as other boys do; but the games of boyhood were not to his taste—he found pleasure only in maliciously tormenting all those weaker than himself. Boys avoided him as much as possible, and it was long before it was known lie was an ingenious little demon, whose only pleasure was to torture. He revelled in the sight of physical suffering, and never missed an opportunity to inflict it. At last, when he was 14, his cruel propensities found their final and terrible expression in the murder of a playmate, a pretty little girl. He killed her, as it afterwards came out, for the sole and only reason that he found a horrible pleasure in watching her death agpnies. Young as he was, he showed a diabolical cleverness in disposing of the body of his victim. He buried it in quicklime; but he committed one trifling oversight. He forgot what an older man would probably have also neglected—that rats might get at the body before the quicklime had entirely consumed it. They did, and they died from the effects o£= poison. Attention was thus directed to the lime, an observant man thinking the incident curious. Thus was Jesse Pomeroy discovered to be a murderer. 'On account of his youth he escaped the death penalty.

—Fatal Ring and Coin. —

Exactly 18 years ago a Mrs Luetgent disappeared suddenly from Chicago, but her friends thought nothing of this, as her husband stated that she had gone to visit relatives some miles distant. It was the wedding ring which the man had placed on his bride's finger years before, when he had promised to cherish her in sickness and in health, that betrayed him. This silent witness to his _ crime was discovered in an acidvat on his premises, and inquiries were set on foot. Before long it was proven quite clearly that he had destroyed his wife's remains in the acids after killing her. He had forgotten the tiny circlet of gold—the mute but immutable witness; a small thing to forget amid the horrors of a crime—but it was the trifle which brought conviction home to him.

Perhaps the smallest circumstance that ever unrolled the curtain from before an unsuspected murder was that which convicted the murderer of Mr and Mrs Newtown in 1898. A stationmaster sold a ticket at a small station, and received a silver coin dated 1836, rather oddly marked. He put the coin in his pocket and placed another in the till, and that afternoon showed it to some of his friends. A man recognised it immediately as one that Newtown had kept for -some time as a pocket-piece and lucky coin, and this was the first hint gained by the detectives as to where they should look for the murderer, who was subsequently apprehended and convicted. It was a minute trifle this handing over a coin, but it brought the murderer to the just punishment which his crime deserved. Had he glanced on any other piece of money in his pocket—and it was afterwards known that he had a pocketful of money—he would in all probability have remained undiscovered. ■ — Convicted by a Hair ! A single hair once brought a man to the death-chair. It occurred in America some years ago, and the case is cited as an illustration of how some skilled scientists, knowing the natural history of man and being endowed with the highest gift of analysis and deduction, have accomplished some things to rival the Sherlock Holmes of fiction. The body of a murdered woman who had been decapitated was discovered in a cheap lodging-house. The case seemed destitute, of clues until Dr Carleton Simon, a New York crime specialist, was called in, and he discovered that the hair of the body of the victim, when examined by the polaroscope, showed excessive sulphur, a condition not unusual in Swedish and Norwegian nativity. Under the finger nails of the corpse was found a single black hair, evidently from the head of the woman's assailant. This showed a large increase in carbon, such as is manifest in the Latin races. The doctor therefore judged that the woman was of the Norse races, and the man probably an Italian. This, indeed, proved to be true, and led to the arrest and conviction of the murderer. The Devereux Case. — The medical man is indeed frequently able to solve the most baffling mysteries. "After having been out for a few hours I returned home from a walk with' my little boy Stanley, to find my wife and the twins lying dead in their bed, evidently from poison taken or administered," said Devereux, the man accused of the notorious Kensal Rise trunk tragedy. His defence was that his wife had murdered the children and committed suicide. She had, he declared, taken morphia and chloroform. There had been no witness of the terrible crime, and who could disprove his words? Was Devereux himself the victim of a terrible tragedy — 6£ awftil false accusing circumstances ? Might he not have arrived home as he stated, found himself faced with the bodies, and, horrified by the suspicion that might fall upon him, have resolved to hide them, in desperation, in the trunk in which they were found ? The evidence of Sir Thomas Stevenson, the medical expert.at the trial, however, proved beyond doubt that the prisoner's story of what took place in that room, into which no eye could penetrate, was a lie. There had been no suicide. The chloroform had been inhaled—not swallowed. Devereux's face grew ghastly pale as he listened. That medical evidence ■placed the noose round his neck.—Glasgow Herald.