Triple Murder Baffles Scotland Yard

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 816, 9 November 1929, Page 18

Triple Murder Baffles Scotland Yard

Edgar Wallace Discusses the Croydon Mystery, One of World’s Unsolved Poison Crimes

For months England has been stirred Tij the Croydon mystery murders, which •nor take their place at Scotland Yard as a. famous case. An analysis of the ha fling crimes has been written by / iyar Wallace, famous British writer of London. Scotland Yard never drops an inquiry. Seventeen year’s ago an atrocious murder was committed, the perpetrator of which was not discovered. Scotland Yard is still working on that case; its well-thumbed dossier is examined by every newcomer to the Records Department. Scotland Yard has not dropped, nor will it drop, Us inquiry into the Croydon murders —which all England still discusses. The tragedy centres round one living Individual —Mrs. Grace Duff, the aesthetic, clear-eyed woman of forty. She is the pivotal point in » circle of cold-blooded murders which removed her mother, her sister and her husband, in every case by arsenical poisoning, in every case in coincident circumstan as. What is known as ..he Croydon poisoning mystery is in reality no mystery at all, except as to the identity of the person who administered the poison. Three Victims in One Family According to the verdicts of coroners’ juries two people have been deliberately done to death, and the •third may have been done to death, by some persons unknown, all three victims having been destroyed by the sidministration of arsenic. The three were members of one family. There were living in Croydon eight months ago a widow, Mrs. Violet Amelia Sidney; ner unmarried daughter, Vera Sidney; her married daughter, Mrs. Edmund Duff, who lived with her husband and family in South Park Hill Road. Mrs. Sidney, whose age was Bit, was a woman of some means. In February of last year Mr. Duff, who was a retired commissioner from Nigeria and whose age was 59, returned from a fishing excursion in Hampshire and on the day of his arrival complained of feeling unwell. The doc.or was called to see him, but could find nothing that was seriously wrong. Later the! unfortunate man developed symptoms which were identified at the time as being consistent with an attack Of ptomaine poisoning. He died within a few hours of his first attack and at an inquest which followed no trace .of any malignant poisoning could be detected by the analyst to whom certain organs were sent. In the following February Miss Vera Sidney was taken suddenly ill and died. There seemed to be no suspicion that she had died from any other than natural causes, and she was buried. Her mother, who was devoted to her, felt her daughter's loss deeply and a month later she also complained of violent pains after drinking some medicine and died lu a very short space of time. The events preceding Vera’s death are important. Vera had a special kind of soup made. The cook of the household, a Mrs. Noakes, prepared more than was sufficient; she herself took half a cupful and a visitor also was served with the soup. It was made on Tuesday and added to on "Wednesday; that is to say, some of the soup that was left over on the night before was the basis of Wednesday's stewing Mrs. Noakes took halt a cupful on Tuesday and was very ill the same night. It was obviously poisoned not only on Tuesday but on Wednesday; when the poisoned broth was diluted by the addition of a newly made soup It was still so strongly poisonous that a visitor who partook of a portion was 111 for six days.' Therefore, the poison had not only been put In on the Tuesday, but the soup must have been re-doctored on the Wednesday. Who came to the house? First, there were the children of Thomas Sidney and of Mrs. Duff, who often t isited the place. Mr. Sidney’s children were babies. Mrs. Duff's children were very young and could uot have had the knowledge which the unknown poisoner possessed and which enabled the murderer to find one of those secret places which every kitchen possesses where food is stored. Both Mrs. Duff and Mr. Sidney had access to the house. In neither case is there any outstanding motive, as the coroner very properly pointed out, to suspect either of this awful crime.

The poison in Mrs. Sidney’s case was obviously conveyed through her medicine, which “had a nasty taste.” She suspected poisoning without naming any suspected culprit. Mrs. Duff saw her immediately after lunch and administered an emetic of salt and water and telephoned for the doctor. The unfortunate woman died that night.

To be exact, this was three weeks after Vera’s death. • There was no evidence whatever to show that there was ill-feeling between any members of the family. The poison from which Mr. Duff died was apparently Introduced in beer or in spirits. Under the will of the two women the son, Thomas Sidney, and the widowed daughter, Grace Duff, benefited to the extent of several thousand pounds. By the death of Edmund Duff nobody seems to have benefited financially. Subsequently, on a Home Office order, the bodies of the two women were exhumed and later the body of Mr. Duff was examined. Analyses followed and arsenic was discovered in each body. After an almost interminable series of adjourned inquiries certain facts were elicited, the most important of which was that in both houses—that of Mr. Duff and that of Mrs. Sidney —admission could be obtained to the house through a side door which was always open. This may have been mere coincidence. There are hundreds of thousands of households where one door into the house is never closed in the daytime and where there is accessibility. But the fact that the doors were open makes it possible that the victims —and what is more important—the victims’ food, were accessible to the unknown poisoner. AH Were Ailing There is another coincidence, namely, that in all three cases they were unwell before poison was administered; that is to say, they were under some sort of treatment or on a special diet. Vera was “poorly,” Mrs. Sidney was still prostrated by the tragic death of her daughter, Mr. Duff had returned from the country with what was probably diges-

tire trouble. In no case were they completely healthy people struck down by the poisoner’s hand. In every case, therefore, there was need for the special attention which an invalid, or a semi-invalid, or an ailing person receives at the hands of friends and servants. That is very important, because a well man or woman does not receive food at any other than the hands of their servants. A friend or a member of the family does not prepare food for the healthy members of the household. It is important, too, because this increase of accessibility and extraordinary attention practically makes- it impossible that any evidence can be secured of administration.

If I hand a glass of poisoned wine to a friend of mine and he dies, it is easy to trace the administration to me; but if my friend is sick and all sorts of potions are being prepared for him both by his servants and his misguided friends, not only is the possibility of detection reduced to a minimum, but the suspicion that he owed his death to foul means is minimised by the fact that he was already ill when the poison was taken. The coroner’s jury has definitely dismissed the possibility of acidental administration. Here again the very coincidence of the circumstances makes it almost impossible that the deaths could have been due to an accident. Weed-killer is to be found in thousands of homes, so is carbolic acid, so are a dozen other poisons, it. is common knowledge that weed-killer is poisonous, and people who possess this commodity handle and store it with such care that the possibilities of an accident are reduced to a negligible quantity. On the balance of probability it is a million to one against similar accidents occurring within a year in two families living in separate houses. An Accomplice Likely

What strikes me as being extremely probable in this particular case is that the murderer had an accomplice.

Whether that accomplice was innocent or guilty will perhaps one day. be known. lam satisfied in my mind that there is a third person who, if he did not actively assist in the murders and was not actually privy to their committal, must, in the case of Mr. Duff, be well aware of the unknown motive—unknown, if suspected by the police, but for the moment entirely unknown to the public. That mysterious third person is in as dreadful a position as the murderer, for any moment he. may find his secret surprised and, because of his very silence, go tfo the scaffold for the person who actually administered the poison. He may have been entirely innocent, he may have been horrified to discover the tragic turn that events had taken and the terrible solution which the murderer had found for somtf immediate problem.

Experience teac'jes us that men and women who occupy what is known as respectable positions in society will often risk the most ignominious of deaths to avoid any scandal being attached to their names, and I nave an idea that something of the sort is happening here. It is a big price to pay for the illusion of respectability. Were the threp people killed by weed-killer at all? Were they destroyed by a purer form of arsenic? And if so, how was that arsenic procured? This may be the point on which the case will eventually turn. Was the third and unknown acces : sory, innocent or guilty, the agen from whom the poison w r as obtained on some pretext, or another? My own view is that the murderer will ifever be discovered if weedkiller was the poison employed, unless the mania persists and the coroner’s court exposures have not terrified the murderer to sanity. Otherwise there will be other deaths from poison, for a poison maniac’s appetite is as insatiable as the drug field’s. I am not in the confidence of the police, but I imagine that they are concentrating at the moment upon only one of these deaths—that of Edmund Duff—for here may be discovered, and will be discovered, sooner or later, a significant motive. In this case two people are directly and indirectly concerned, and when the crime is brought home to its perpetrator, it will be on the evidence concerning the Duff murder. Mr. Duff died from poison which ■was administered to him after his return from the fishing excursion. The action of arsenic administered in quantities, which evidently was employed, is very swift and violent. It was therefore impossible that the arsenic could have been taken while he was in the country and the effect felt when he returned to town. Here his wife was practically never out of his sight, and she appears to have done everything that was humanly possible for him during the course of his fatal illness. There Is no suggestion that any servant owed him a grudge, even supposing that servants who owe their masters a grudge are likely to take so awful a revenge. Suspect’s Name Unprinted

m What was the motive here? To put out of the way a troublesome man? He troubled nobody apparently; Mrs. Duff testified to his being the best of husbands and the kindest of fathers and indignantly denied that he was a man of bad temper or that he was jealous. No suggestion was made in court as to a cause of his jealousy. Not since the Borden case —which, in certain respects, except the method employed by the destroyer, it resembles—has a great body of public opinion been unanimous in proclaiming the murderer’s name. In England, where the law of libel operates with disastrous results to the indiscreet, no one has yet printed it.