A REMARKDBLE CASE.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXV, Issue 4252, 26 June 1895, Page 5

A REM ARKDBLE CASE.

A sensation was caused in Melbourne by the development in a divorce case, Synnot v. Synnot, decided there on May 23. The husband was the petitioner, and the burden of his case was that his wife had been living an immoral life in a house of ill-fame at Garlton in 1884 and 1885. Commenting on the case the Melbourne ' Age ' says : — The collapse of the petitioner in the divorce case Synnot y. Synnot was complete. One cannot imagine a more triumphant vindication for an accused woman. The husband set himself to prove something that was in itself incredible — that his wife, a woman in possession of an income from a settlement of £10,000, had lived with her child in a common brothel. The astonishing part of the matter was that he was able to produce such a formidable array of witnesses in support of that statement. No fewer than twelve people went into the box and swore positively that they had seen Mrs Walter Synnot livinp with her little girl in a Carlton house of ill-fame. Some of them were extremely positive as to the identity. Confronted with Mrs Synnot in court, they declared that they had no doubt at all but that she was the woman whom they had seen at the bouse in question. Amongst these were ex-policemen and detectives who were specially told off to watch the house, and who claimed to have had exceptional means of seeing and knowing the accused. Certainly the testimony was cumulative and looked overwhelming ; and yet it was brushed away by a few plain facts as completely as a cloudlet is swept from the heavens. Mrs Synnot's plain unvarnished tale was sufficient to clear her credit so completely that Mr Purves abandoned his brief, and the judge declared the petitioning husband to be utterly out of court. This was accomplished by one of the clearest alibis on record. All the witnesses had fixed about the same dates of the supposed delinquency. It was at the latter end of 1884 and the early part of 1885 when Mrs Synnot was sworn to have lived in the Carlton brothel. The accused lady proved to the Court that she had taken a passage to England in the Indus in 1883, and that she had never returned to Australia till 1894, eleven years afterwards. She produced documentary evidence received by her in London and written from London about the dates specified in the allegation against her such as quite satisfied the Court that there was not a tittle of real evidence that could connect her with this atrocious calumny. The handsome manner in which Mr Purves made all the amends possible will go far to take the sting out of a bitter infliction, and the sympathetic words of His Honor Judge Williams will be no slight solatium for what must always remain an irreparable wrong. But when all is said that can be said, and every human salve and palliative administered, Mrs Synnot's case will be long remembered as one in which a virtuous and innocent wife was more brutally wronged by her husband than Divorce Court records commonly reveal. The atrocious charge against her was all the more unaccountable because, while a little honest inquiry would have exposed its utter falsehood, it was intended to brand for life, not alone the wife, but the daughter of the petitioner. Assuming the twelve witnesses who swore to Mrs Synnot's infamy to have been honest, as Mr Purves claims for them, they cannot but feel now that they were instruments intendant for the perpetration of a crime so rank that nature shudders at it. So far as they could they sought to send into lifelong degradation a woman whom the judge has pronounced irreproachable. Mr Purves says that cases of mistaken identity are not infrequent in the law courts. No doubt that is so. But this case, so far as we know, stands unique in the fact that twelve separate witnesses all agreed that they had seen and known Mrs Synnot in these disgraceful circumstances. The torture of the wronged lady in this case must have a double poignancy. Not alone was she wounded in a manner of all others most painful to a virtuous woman, but the future of her daughter was involved in her own. Fortunately both have escaped from the toils. But it is terrible to think what a fate would have been hers had she been realiy living in any part of the colony which would have rendered her alibi less complete than it was.