SAVED ON EVE OF HANGING

Taranaki Daily News, 5 October 1929, Page 21 (Supplement)

SAVED ON EVE OF HANGING

ri'JSiLX ER GRANTED II ERIN EVE. STRANGE CASE IN ENGLAND. London, Aug. J 3. Four days before he would have been executed for the murder of a Manchester shopkeeper, George Fratsbn, who liad confessed to the crime, has been reprieved, ■because a fingerprint on a collar box found at the scene of (he murder proved not too be that of the condemned man. The case is likely to prove as big a sensation in Britain as that of Ohcar Slater, who was pardoned some time ago and given compensation for a crime he had never committed. Fratson, who was out of work and living under an assumed name in a common lodging house, was arrested after several shop murders had taken place in various parts of England. He gave 14 different statements to tho police regarding his whereabouts at the time of the murder, all of them conflicting, and thou he confessed that he had killed the shopkeeper with a hammer and a knife. <hi this confession he was tried and condemned to be hanged. The Court of Criminal Appeal refused to interfere with the sentence, but when the disclosure was made to the Home Office that a piece of cardboard collar box found in the murdered man's shop had a definite fingerprint on it that was not the fingerprint of Fratson,. the Home

Secretary ordered that the execution should not take place. Fratson said he knew the dead shopkeeper well and confessed io the crime merely because ho wanted lo have done with life and had no courage to commit suicide. He will probably be released. An extraordinary feature of the case is that Hie piece of cardboard which bore the fingerprint which saved Fratson’s life was produced at the trial, but the prosecution did not disclose that there was any finer-print on it at all. The Home Office is considering whether a special commission should be set up to consider the whole circumstances of the trial.