REVISED BLACK MUSEUM.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXVI, Issue 18075, 13 January 1921, Page 3

REVISED BLACK MUSEUM.

A GRIM COLLECTION. ASSOCIATION WITH DEATH. The work of recataloguing the exhibits in the “Black Museum” of New Scotland Yard has just been completed, says the “Daily Mail.” No one of these grim relics but has an association with death. At a murder trial various articles are produced that have a direct bearing upon the trial. Afterwards the most important are taken into the “Museum’ and added to the remarkable collection that has been accumulating for 40 years. Some of them are innocent enough until you see t-heir association. Others are quite the reverse. But they all have a history and have assisted to complete a chain of evidence that has usually brought about a conviction. But not all. On one side is a miscellany of “exhibits” that have figured in trials tha<t have resulted in a verdict of “Not Guilty.” A few are connected with unsolved mysteries.

Perhaps the grimmest of all is a postcard addressed to the “Commissioner of the Police,” and it reads. “Look out for the double event to-night.—Yours truly, Jack the Ripper.” It was written in red ink, and that is how the Whitechapel mystery of iniquity received his name. Moreover, the warning came true, for within a few hours of its receipt two women were done to death within 200 yards of one another. In one coiner is noticed a large bath. In that George Smith, the “Brides in the Bath” murderer, drowned his last victim. The formidable butcher’s cleaver was used by Mrs Pearcy to slaj Alls Hogg at Hampstead. The small pistol shot Florrie Dennis at Southend and was traced to the possession of James Con ham Read.

Beside it Lies another weapon—an old Army pistol. With it Dougall killed Miss Camille Holland at the Moat Farm. This formidable knife was once the property of Defroy and lies close to another revolver, the one with which he shot Air Gold in the Brighton railway carriage. The hatchet near by was purchased by Koczula, who murdered his employer with it in a Shaftesbury Avenue restaurant.

But there are many Liny “exhibits” of a more subtle interest than these lethal weapons. A small pill-box—Neil Cream, the poisoner of live young women, was convicted by it. A tiny phial contains the arsenic retrieved from the body of Aliss Barrow, which sent Seddon to the gallows. A few hairs and a scrap of Hesh mounted upon porcelain and covered with glass— a phastly relic of poor Belle Elimore. the murdered wife of

“Dr. Crippen. A child’s top—taken from the hand of little Willie Starchfield.

A few grains of tobacco—Devereux, the chemist, accidentally dropped them into the trunk : n which he placed his murdered wife and child. A row of poison bottles taken from Chapman, the Borough publican, who poisoned Aliss Alarsli with antimony, mid with them a cheap copy of “Standard Work on (Poisons,” with the page turned down dealing with the action of antimony, as left by Chapman. Two exercise books contain Aliss Dyer’s transactio is in the little mites she drowned by Caversham weir. And there is a pestle, a relic of the murder of Aliss Camp in a railway carriage, for which no arrest, even was made.

These “ exhibits” are not kept to graitify idle curiosity, for except by special permission admittance is not given to the “Black Museum.” They are used in lectures upon crime and crime detection that are given to young detectives, and illustrate afresh the story of some murder mysterv in the work of carrying on the training of the “C.1.D.”