PLOT TO BREAK PRISON.

Wanganui Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 14218, 16 February 1914, Page 8

PLOT TO BREAK PRISON.

STINIE MORRISON’S FRIENDS AT WORK. GUARD INCREASED. Sensational stories were current in the week of an alleged plot to rescue Stinie Morrison from Parkhnrst Prison, where

he is sewing a life sentence for the mnrj tier of Leon Beron on Clapham Common. 1 A stranger with a foreign accent i.s said ■ to have intercepted one of the patrols outside the gaol, and to have inquired about I Morrison's health and the position of his ! cell. The conversation was overheard by I a superior officer on the other side of a | hedge, and a report has been sent to the j Home Office, while the night patrol outside the prison has been doubled. Another story was that two warders saw Morrison put something into his mouth. It was seized and was found to be a piece of chewed-up paper. Morrison was promptly removed to another cell, and when the cell he had previously occupied was searched, pieces of brown paper were found, on which, it is stated, details were written of an elaborate plot to blow up a wall of the prison oy means of an explosive to be fired by a fuse. it is stated Morrison has lately refused his meals, and has been threatened with forcible feeding, and that he has been feigning madness,at intervals, with the idea, presumably, that he might be transferred to a lunatic asylum. He has on at least one occasion been placed in a strait-waistcoat, and is very carefully watched. Mr Claude Lumley, the solicitor, who acted for Morrison at his trial, denies these stories, but says a fresh petition for Morrison’s release is bein<r prepared on alleged fresh facts only recently ascertained. Mr Abinger, the barrister who defended Morrison, says it is now believed from these fresh facts that the real murderer was not Morrison, but , alias . This new information, it appears, is to the following effect:—Some short time ago a young woman called on a firm of solicitors, saying that she was the wife of story. She said she was a respectable servant girl when she met —, alias her, and then (she says) compelled her to earn money for him. He. was a powerful man and she went in great fear of him. On the night of th murder, December 31st, 1910, she ashed her husband for some money. He said he had none. At about 11 o’clock that night a man, whom she believed by his voice to be Stinie Morrison (she did not see him), called to see her husband, and the two left the house together. Leon Beron was found murdered on Clapham Common at 3 o’clock the next morning., | This young woman’s husband did not return home until two days later. She says he arrived without a waistcoat; his shirt was smothered in blood, and he appeared to have been sleeping out. He produced gold, “plenty of it," and took off his shirt and burned it. She asked him where he had been, and he took a knife from his hip pocket and threatened to kill her if she told anyone he had been away for three days. She said Stinie Morrison was bound to tell upon which , alias , said: “ Vou can trust the Jew boy to keep his mouth shut.” When the woman was asked why she had not come forward before, she answered that she was terrified’, and had only come forward since she had seen her husband off on a boat from Liverpool on his wav to New York. She later made a sworn declaration, which was sent to the ’ Home Office, and subsequently handed to I Scotland Yard.