DOING THE ROUND

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 71, Issue 219, 15 September 1928, Page 12

DOING THE ROUND

A PLAUSIBLE ROGUE GAOL FOR FALSE PRETENCES. “A particularly suave, plausible and versatile individual,” were the words with which Detective Walsh described William George Nelson Wildermoth, alias George Ikjrtram Marshall, at the Magistrate’s Court yesterday. Detective Walsh said that during the last four years Wildermoth had represented himself, among other things, as an engineer, a.s secretary of the Invercargill Labour Uni< ns, an insurance agent and a railway officer. He was charged with false pretences and fraud. Accused arrived at Marton Junction about the middle of August and became acquainted with a railway signalman, who introduced him to a booking clerk as Air Stead, a railway officer of Invercargill. He told the clerk that he and his wife were on tour, but he had unfortunately lost his free pass. His .story was so plausibly told that, the clerk communicated with the Wanganui office, whence instructions were sent to supply the. luckless “railway officer” with a pass to Taihapc (valued at 7s 2d.) On August 29 accused arrived in Wanganui, this time describing himself as manager uf the Invercargill branch of the Queensland Insurance Company. He visited the local offices of the company and informed the girl in the office that he was the Invercargill representative. His car, he said, had broken down and three shillings and six pence were needed for its repair. The manager was out and the office-girl would not take the responsibility of giving him the company’s cash, so she lent him, at his suggestion, some of her own money. He then proceeded to make himself popular about the city. Not content with being a railway officer and an insurance agent, he must become the secretary of a labour union, and managed to extract several small subs from his newly-made friends —who did not know he had been convicted 18 times in four years on charges of false pretences and breach of probation order. The crash came when he was arrested at New Plymouth on charges of false pretences. At the Taranaki centre he was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, and at the Wanganui Court yesterday, before Air J. S. Barton, S.M., he was sentenced to two further terms of throe months’ hard Jabour each, the terms to be concurrent.