BOGUS GUARDSMAN'S CAREER

Waikato Argus, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5156, 13 November 1912, Page 3

BOGUS GUARDSMAN'S CAREER

The remarkable career of John Peter Gerald Maurice Fitzgerald, agrd twenty-seven, was disclosed at the Old Bailey last month, when he was indicted for obtaining a cheque for £415 from a moneylender, by posing as Captain Fitzgerald, of the Horse Goarcla. His real name is John Henry Egenal Wepener. He was born at Kimberley, and was the son of a diamond digger in poor circumstances. He owed his education to the Church.

During the Boer war he served with an irregular force, and then he became attached to a religious body, which sent him to England. After a while he joined the Inniskilling Fusiliers but when the regiment was ordered to Crete, in 1905, he deserted. He first came to the notice of the police at Liverpool, where he was arrested for obtaining money from the friends of clergymen by means of forged telegrams. For this offence he received a sentence of live months’ imprisonment. After serving this sentence he went to the Continent, and attempted to obtain money by forged telegrams from persons in Vienna. On April 14th, 1909, in the name of John Fitzgerald, he was sentenced at Bologna to seven months’ imprisonment and fined 140 lire for defrauding an hotelkeeper to whom he posed as Duke Albert of Albany SaxeCoburg and Gotha. Subsequently he defrauded another hotelkeeper in the name of Keith Roberts, and he next appeared at Carlsbad where he became associated with a church, and met a woman who tendered him very material monetary assistance. She sent him to Moscow to learn the Russian language, but he abused her confidence, and she was compelled to close their acquaintance. In the early part of this year he was at Leipzig, and it was from this place that he engineered his latest fraud on moneylenders. From there he went to the Hotel Majestic, in Paris, where he incurred a bill which he forgot to pay. When a cheque was stopped in the case for which he was tried, he wrote to the moneylenders that the secret society, “lo Vado Vindicarmi,” would avenge him. “He lives by fraud,” said a detective inspector, “and is a typical adventurer. When he attempted to commit suicide after his arrest, he was prevented from taking a quantity of sublimate of mercury, which would have killed more than three men.’ ”

“You area very dangerous man” said Mr Justice Lusb, to Fitzgerald. “If this were the only crime you had committed it would have been bad enough, but I have heard an account of you that makes it clear that you are a determined and unscrupulous criminal. I cannot call you by any other name, and I cannot pass a less sentence on you than five years’ penal servitude.’ ”