WAS BANDIT.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20363, 21 July 1934, Page 21 (Supplement)

WAS BANDIT.

Man Who Jumped Into Lion’s Den. (Special to the “ Star.") LONDON, June 12. Stanley Stenson, the young man who was killed by the lions at Whipsnade Zoological Gardens, when he jumped into their den to recover a man’s hat, was once a bandit, it has now been discovered. lie had served - two terms of imprisonment, and had been flogged for carrying firearms. Stenson tried to emulate the exploits of American gangsters. When he turned criminal he obtained a revolver and fifty rounds of ammunition, and went about with a black mask. He first fell into the hands of the police at the age of twenty-one, after a forty-eight-hour orgy of banditry. At midnight on August 12, 1930, he drove up to a garage in Camberley, held up the proprietor at the point of his revolver, and made off with the contents of the till. The next night he stopped a Hounslow builder, Mr A. J. Champion, who was motoring along the Great West Road, forced him to drive him for some distance, and then turned Mr Champion out of his car and drove away in it. Three hours later he stopped at a garage near Basingstoke and called on the proprietor Mr Stephen West, to put his hands up. Mr West grappled with Stenson and seized his revolver, but the youth drove off at full speed before he could be captured. He was arrested in Southampton. “ Dangerous Criminal.” Scotland Yard regarded him as such a dangerous criminal that the Attor-ney-General’s fiat was obtained to prefer a charge against him of carrying firearms with intent to endanger life — an offence which carries a maximum penalty of penal servitude for life. Stenson wisely pleaded guilty to the hold-up and theft charges, and got off with sixteen months’ imprisonment, which he served »at Wandsworth, and the flogging. One of the few people who recognised the victim of the Whipsnade tragedy as the dangerous motor bandit was the man he had held up on the Great ▼Vest Road.

Stenson s three brothers were emphatic that the dead man had renounced. his criminal life and was endeavouring to live down his past.