MURDERERS WHO RETURN

Hokitika Guardian, 29 December 1920, Page 3

MURDERERS WHO RETURN

By tho Author of “Crime and the Criminal.” In Franco considerable importance is attached to the proved fact that many murderers have an overmastering impulse to returp to the Scene of the crime. For this reason a watch is kept day and night for many weeks, and instances are numerous where this vigil lias been rewarded.

It is not curiosity, but the working of the restless conscience that draws the unhappy sliedder of blood to the spot where the crime was committed. The annals of crime afford some striking illustrations of this. Dougnl, who shot and buried Miss Holland in the farmyard of the Essex “Moat Farm,” penned a graphic account of the crime. He described how he rushed up to London after the burial of his victim and plunged into debauchery. But suddenly on the evening of the fourth day, whilo drinking in an East End public-house, an overwhelming impulse soibed him to visit the lonely°farmhoiise and stand upon the spot where Miss Hollaftd was buried. “ T hated to. go,”, he wrote, “and yet I felt I must. After a time I went back to London, hut at interval? I had .to return.”

“Dr.” Crippen lived for two years in the house where his wife lay buried in the coal-cellar. Miss le Neve.in a published narrative of her life with him. makes this remark: “Often I have seen him stand in the evening, generally about nine o’clock, at the foot of the cellar steps, Holding a. candle amd gazing around with a strange expression upon his face.” So far as can he gathered nine in the evening must have been about the hour when ho commenced his ehastlv task of dismembering his wife. * * * 1% 9

A very striking fact was mentioned by the late Montague Williams, who'defended Lefroy, the murderer of Mr Gold in a Brighton railway carriage. He was attacked in Merstham tunnel and flung out in Bnlcombe tunnel. Lefroy made a full confession and asked that it may he sent to Mr Williams together with n letter of thanks. He wrote: “During the three weeks of freedom that I had before I was arrested I only left my place of concealment once. I felt one day that I must go down to Bnlcombe and have a look at the tunnel. I went hv train to Three Bridges and walked from there. I tried to imagine the exact spot ns I walked over the top of the’tunnel. Something seemed to draw me.”

James Cnnham Reed, who killed Florrie Dennis near Southend, was arrested at Mitcham on returning from a short excursion. He travelled to Croydon and was seen by a youth studying a time-table. He told the detective who arrested him: “I was going down to Southend to have a look at the place where they say a murder was com witter”— a senseless remark that can only bo/explained on the hypothesis that for once ho was sneaking the truth. But perhaps the most striking illustration of this disposition for the criminal to return to the scene of the crime is afforded by the case of Mrs Pearcey. This female fiend killed Mrs Hogg and her baby at Hampstead and wheeled the bodies in a perambulator to one of tho ponds on tho Heath. She was arrested next day. The night she spent in the vicnity of the Heath. She confessed to the'prison chaplain: “All that night T kept going to the pond. The bodies were under the water, hut T felt I must watch for them.”