REFUSAL TO APPEAL.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18538, 8 April 1930, Page 9

REFUSAL TO APPEAL.

FOX INVOLVED IN DIVORCE SUIT.

(United Press Association—By Electrlo Telegraph—Copyright.) (Received April 7, 8.20 p.m.) LONDON, April 7. The undefended divorce suit Morse versus Morse and Fox comes before Mr Justice Hill to-day, the day before Fox is to be hanged. It is noteworthy that Fox refused to appeal against the sentence, and he is also emphatic that there is no plea of insanity. “I do not want to prolong the agony,” wrote Fox to his solicitor.

[The Home Secretary, Mr J. R. Clynes, will not interfere with the death sentence passed on Fox, who was found guilty of the murder of his mother. The execution has been fixed for to-day. The Crown’s case was that Fox insured his mother’s life for £3OOO the day before she was found dead in the Margate Hotel, and that he strangled her and set fire to the room. Fox’s career of crime, culminating in the death sentence at the age of thirty-one, began, says the “Daily Mail,” when as a schoolboy, of thirteen, and a bright scholar, he collected subscriptions for a non-existent charity. Self-possession and a plausible tongue obtained him many victims, and when the fraud was discovered he was sentenced to be whipped. He afterwards left Norfolk, his birthplace, and become a smart-looking page boy In a West End houuse, from which he disappeared with the family plate. He next blossomed out as a bank clerk, developed a gift for forgery, and became known as a man about town, while still in his teens. He escaped prosecution for forgery on promising t oenlist, and became a cadet in the Air Force. There he stole an officer’s cheque-book, and posed as an officer until arrested for forgery in a West End club, where he was cutting a dash. He was sentenced to three months’ gaol. After the war, he entered a bank, where he forged clients’ signatures, and in 1920 was sent to gaol for nine months. He got twelve months for similar offences in 1822. J