AN EXPERT BAG THIEF

Dominion, Volume 15, Issue 54, 26 November 1921, Page 9

AN EXPERT BAG THIEF

YOUNG GIRL IN COURT TWENTY-SEVEN THEFTS ADMITTED Mary Carlton.. Murray, seventeen years of age, pleaded guilty in the Magistrate’s Court yesterday to five charges ,of stealing handbags and contents, the theft extending over a period of two months. Chief-Detective Kemp said that the girl was an expert bag thief. She was caught in the act of stealing bags at Paddy’s Market, in "M” Shed, last week. She admitted twenty-seven cases of such thefts, and the police wero able to verify eighteen of them. There was nothing to be said in her favour, and he asked that she bo given tho maximum punishment. Mr. J. O’Donovan, who appeared for the girl, said that there was not much he could say, but pointed out that- tho girl was only 17 years of age. For tho past two years she had been employed as a waitress in a tearoom. He suggested that she should be convicted and ordered to come up for sentence when called upon, on condition that she stayed at tho Magdala. Home. The Magistrate, Mr. F. K. Hunt, said that he preferred to give her a term of reformative treatment, more .especially as she had been before the Court in 1918. The girl was ordered to bo detained for reformative treatment for a period not exceeding two years.