EVERYONE KNEW HE HAD BEEN IN A REFORMATORY.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17832, 28 April 1926, Page 13

EVERYONE KNEW HE HAD BEEN IN A REFORMATORY.

FARM LAD LOSES HOPE; COMMITS MURDER. INSANITY PLEA FAILS; SENTENCED TO DEATH. George Sharpes, the nineteen-year-old Warwickshire farm hand, was sentenced to death at the Warwickshire Assizes recently for the murder of Mrs Milly Illingworth Crabtree, of Manor Farm, Ladbrokc, near Southam. Mrs Crabtree, who was twenty-five, Was found dead at. the farm on Januarv 13. with a wound in her head. In another part of the house Sharpes was found with a wound in his throat A* the Police Court proceedings a long statement, said to have been made by Sharpes, was read, but parts were omitted. Mr J. G. Hurst. K.C.. who prosecuted, read the portions that had been withheld, as follows: “This is why I done it. When I was in Cheshire all the people in the village knew I had been in a reformatory for four years, and I thought that when coming with Mr Crabtree to Warwick I expected to make a fresh start. I had not been at Manor Farm two days before the other people at the farm knew I had been in a reformatory. I found Mrs Crabtree had told them. This shattered all my hopes, so J decided to go to Canada. I read in a book later they did not allow criminals to go, and common sense told me they would find out I had been in a reformatory. “In the first place I should never have been sent to a reformatory. I broke into a church at Crewe with my mate, and we were caught. If I had had the birch at the beginning all this might not have happened.’’ Dr M. Hamblin Smith, medical officer at Birmingham Prison, said he had had Sharpes under close and constant personal supervision, and had long interviews with him. He was poorly developed physically, and his cranium was somewhat large. He conversed readily and rationally, and with no trace of delusions. He exhibited a considerable degree of emotion when talking about the offence, and he seemed to brood over his possible fate. A few days ago, said the doctor, Sharpes drew’ a picture on his slate of a hearse with a coffin approaching a church, and he labelled it “George Sharpes’ Funeral.” He added that he found no signs of insanity. Mr T. F. Butler intimated that the defence would be that of insanity. He suggested that there was just that vestige of motive in the crime which would not affect a healthy mind. There was just that obsession of the mind that he had suffered some wrong from Mrs Crabtree. Mr Justice Shearman, summing up, said the question as to whether a man was insane was not for a doctor to decide. It was not for Harley Street to give verdicts of guilty or not guilty; it was for English juries. It was not the law that a man could bash out somebody’s brains and then say, “Oh, but I am not normal.’’