“I ACCEPT A HARD FATE.”

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18539, 9 April 1930, Page 9

“I ACCEPT A HARD FATE.”

Execution of Henry Fox. INVOLVED IN DIVORCE SUIT. (United Press Association—By Electrio Telegraph—Copyright.) LONDON, April 7. Henry Fox was executed to-day on a charge of murdering his mother. He maintained his innocence to the last. “I shall die an innocent man,” he told the last visitor to-day. It w r as Fox’s own instructon that there should be no appeal. In a letter to his solicitor, he wrote: “I had a fair trial; if it is justice that I die then, there is nothing more to be done. I accept a hard fate.” A last minute petition for a reprieve from the Mission of Intercession was handed to the Home Office on the grounds of mental instability. Divorce Suit. An undefended divorce case, Morse v. Morse and Fox, came before Mr Justice Hill to-day, when George Morse, captain of a Shire liner, was granted a decree nisi on the grounds of his wife’s misconduct with Henry Fox the murderer. Fox was unaware of the action. : Mrs Morse, respondent in the case, and her 21-year-old son are now living in Cremorne, Sydney. Mrs Morse’s father is 82 years of age, and is associated with a big business in Sydney, and is also a bank director.

The “Sunday Graphic” asserts that suspicion first attached to Henry Fox, thirty-one. regarding the death of his mother, Mrs Rosaline Fox, owing to an alleged attempt on the life of Mrs Morse, a “wealthy Australian," with whom, it was stated in Court, he had been associated.

Fox was sentenced to death by Mr Justice Rowlatt on Friday for the murder of his mother at the Hotel Metropole, Margate, last October. The “Sunday Graphic” states that Fox introduced Mrs Morse to his acquaintances as his aunt. Mrs Morse, in 1928, rented a flat at Southsea, where Fox and his mother stayed. Fox took out an insurance policy for £3OOO on Mrs Morse’s life. Later, Mrs Morse’s son arrived, and shared a double bedroom with Fox, while Mrs Morse took Fox’s room, where Fox had been warned by the owner of the flat that a gas tap behind the chest of drawers might be turned on unless the chest was moved carefully.

Impressed Women.

Mrs Morse awoke, partially gassed, to find the tap turned on. It was during this period that Mrs Morse made a will which benefited Fox. He said that Mrs Morse was bequeathing the money to him because she owed him £SOOO.

Ultimately, when Fox was arrested on a larceny charge, the gas tap incident was reported to the Southsea police, who passed on their suspicions to the Margate police when Mrs Fox was found dead.

The “Sunday Dispatch,” giving details of Fox’s career of crime, says that he possessed a personality that greatly impressed women. He frequently boasted of how he used his women friends to maintain his affluent appearance.

Scotland Yard’s investigation of his association with Mrs Morse convinced the detectives, they said, that at one time he intended to use his notorious skill to forge her will and later make an attempt on her life.

The “Daily Mail” says that there have been only five matricides in Britain in the last three centuries.

“Ghastly Lies.”

Embittered by lies—“those ghastly lies”—and appalled by the starkness of the tragedy, yet silent in the face of everything, lives Mrs Morse, the Sydney woman whose name recurred so frequently in the sensational trial of Henry Fox, vicious murderer of his own mother (says the Sydney “Daily Guardian” of March 25).

Thirteen thousand miles away, in the cell of the condemned, lies Henry Fox. He may live only until he is called to the gallows to expiate with his own life his heinous crime. In Sydney Mrs Morse lives in comparative luxury. There is a physical comfort for her; but what of her mental ease? “Nothing that can now be said can undo the harm already done,” she reasons, and thus refuses to be interviewed or to discuss the case. If the world has misunderstood her through the cabled reports from London, then the tragedy is all the greater. But she and her sister were emphatic on this point, last evening, Mrs Morse will not be interviewed. That the linking of Mrs Morse’s name with that of the murderer Fox had been a tremendous shock to the whole family, was amply proved by the attitude of Mrs Morse’s sister. “Those lies” have dealt a blow 13,000 miles across the ocean.

What exactly “those lies” may be, Mrs Morse herself was not present to explain, nor would her sister go into details.