UNSOLVED MYSTERY

Taranaki Daily News, 17 October 1934, Page 12

UNSOLVED MYSTERY

“POISON PEN” RIDDLE

POSTMISTRESS ACQUITTED.

ORDEAL OF SEVEN DAYS’ TRIAL.

After a trial lasting seven days, m which an extraordinary story had been unfolded of the activities of a poison pen” writer, a middle-aged village postmistress was recently found not guilty at the Winchester Assizes. As a result, the police have to start again their attempts to find the writer of the scores of anonymous letters which for .W years made the village a place of suspicion and fear. The letters were penned by someone who had, in the words of counsel, gone to the cesspools of a vocabulary. The postmistress strenuously denied that she was the author of the letters. She M Mrs. Edith Jane Creeth, of Bnghstone, Isle of Wight. She was charged with sending obscene and offensive literature through the post. For four years the village of Brignstone had been disturbed by anonymous letters. They were sent indiscriminately to the 500 inhabitants of the district, and no one knew who would be the next to be chosen as a victim. Police su^ fell on Mrs. Creeth and she was charged with the offence. , Pale but smiling, Mrs. Creeth stood for a few minutes behind the dock after she heard the jury’s verdict. I thought I should be acquitted because I am absolutely innocent,” she said afterward. “But it was a hard fight, and I do not want to go through such a terrible ordeal again. At first I thought the jury said guilty instead of not guilty and it gave me a terrible shock for the moment. The first person chosen for persecution by the anonymous letters was Miss Willoughby, the village schoolmistress. She was driven to resignation, and, to escape the offensive letters, she left the island with her mother, telling no one where she was goingj* Settled in the village of North Boarhunt, in Hampshire, she at first found freedom from persecution. Then in the ordinary way she sent, an official form to Brighstone Post Office asking that any letters might be forwarded to her new address. That was the end of her peace, for the postmaster of North Boarhunt received an anonymous letter containing the sentence: “Give three cheers for, the Brighstone people now that the Willoughby woman and her wicked old mother have gone, Danger-—beware of the husband-snatcher.” The prosecution alleged that the only person who knew Miss Willoughby’s address was Mrs. Creeth as postmistress at Brighstone, Mrs. Creeth herself received anonymous letters, some of them threatening and the windows of her cottage were mysteriously broken, to say nothing of three outbreaks of fire in her home which could not be accounted for. In all, there were r.bout 130 of these vile communications, and a writing expert who examined them declared that although the majority were the work of one person, there were doubts about some of them, and it was possible that there were x wo people hiding their identity. ELABORATE TRAPS FAIL.

Elaborate schemes for running the culprit to earth failed. In one case it was announced that Mrs. Creeth was ill in bed; the doctor attended at her home regularly; flowers were even sent to brighten her sick room. Actually, she was away from Brighstone, it being hoped that a clue might be obtained by this subterfuge, but it resulted in nothing. Mr. T. J. O’Connor, K.C., defending counsel, in his final address to the jury emphasised that the anonymous letters had been going on for four years, he said, the documents had been under the scrutiny, of a handwriting expert, and since the beginning of 1933 Superintendent Morrison had bejjn reporting on the mattar, and deciding there was a case for the prosecution. “Yet nothing was done,” remarked Mr. O'Connor. “Why? Because, you may infer, there was uncertainty. Is it not a little odd that on the same facts 18 months later the prosecution should come and ask you to say for certain that Mrs. Creeth, and no one else, wrote the letters?"

They were not dealing with London or New York, but with a little village in the Isle of Wight. “That village for the past three or four years must have been a raging inferno of suspicions,” went on Mr. O’Connor, “everybody being suspects and everybody’s nerves on edge.” The first difficulty which confronted the jury, Mr. O’Sonnor continued, was whether any woman could possibly have written the letters. They appeared to be the work of a raving lunatic who had gone to the cesspools for a vocabulary, and it was almost incredible that any woman should have had such a vocabulary. Dealing rzith the question of handwriting, counsel added that the wild style of the anonymous writer was very different from the neat, almost scholarly style, of Mrs. Creeth’s known writing. Mr. W. E. P. Done, prosecuting counsel, pointed out that he did not suggest that the writer of the anonymous letters had a grudge against all the recipients of them. “Having yielded to the temptation of writing one,” he added, “I suggest she went on to gratify a desire to write them. I suggest it became a kind of obsession, almost a frenzy.” Mr. Justice Branson, in summing up, remarked that it was agreed that the anonymous letters must all have come from the same source, and that the same writer was responsible for them all. It would be unsafe to convict on the handwriting alone. The judge pointed out that February 13, 1931, was ah'* important date. A police sergeant had said he was watching the pillar-box that day from 3 p.m. until the post office closed, and he was satisfied that an anonymous letter could only have been put through by Mrs. Creeth herself. The defence met this in two ways—first by saying that she was not there that day, and secondly that the sergeant did not keep watch until the evening. Which did the jury believe? The jury would also have to consider in the case" of letters posted while she .was away whether she might have induced her husband to post them in order to show that the suspicion that was falling upon her was misplaced. After an absence of an hour and threequarters the jury returned a verdict of “not guilty.”