FAMOUS CRIME SECRETS

Taranaki Daily News, 23 June 1927, Page 13

FAMOUS CRIME SECRETS

MEN WHO ESCAPED GALLOWS. THREE REPRIEVES. Sensational new light on famous crimes is thrown by the publication of the life of Sir Richard Muir, the late Senior Counsel to the Treasury, which has been compiled from his intimate papers. Three times, it is revealed, he saw men accused of murder reprieved when he was convinced they should have gone to the scaffold. He had no doubt that Stinie Morrison, who was sentenced to death for the murder of Leon Beron and afterwards reprieved, ought to" have paid the extreme penalty of the law. He was convinced that Alexander Campbell Mason, who was sentenced to death for the murder of a taxicab driver named Jacob Dickey, and Ronald True, convicted of the murder of a woman of the unfortunate class named Gertrude Yates, ought to have been hanged. When informed that Ronald True had been reprieved on the grounds of insanity, Sir Richard expressed the view that a mistake had been made and that True was sane. “There appears to be no doubt” the book states, “that Mason owes his life to a mistake of a most peculiar nature. The plan which had been prepared showing how he made his escape was a tracing of an ordnance survey map, and had not been properly altered to show the true position of the walls and fences over which Mason climbed after the shooting of Dickey. “Considerable alteration in the land had taken place since the map was made, and when Muir inspected the scene of the murder, after Mason’s appeal had been dismissed, he remarked that if he had seen the place himself before the trial he could, have demonstrated to the jury beyond all possible doubt that it must have been Mason who fired the fatal shot. He said,‘Vivian could not have climbed over the wall as Mason said he did.’ ” Despite this opinion, however, the Home Secretary reprieved the condemned man.