DANCING GIRL’S COCAINE

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4432, 26 June 1922, Page 3

DANCING GIRL’S COCAINE

TALES OF LONDON NIGHT LIFE. Fifty or so people crowded the solemn, chapel-like coroner’s court at Parrington, London, to hear the life-story of Freda Eileen Kempton, a beautiful 21-years-old dancing instrustress. Her death, is associated with suspicions pf| drug poisoning. Of the murmured conversation that went on between Dr. Oswald, the suave and unemotional coroner, and a fragile little dancing girl in the witness box, who had been her companion, one caught, only snatches, but they lit up the story with revealing flashes. “. . . Three o’clock in the morning ... we called a taxi . . • man I knew as ‘Sammy’ . . . We went to the Chinese Restaurant. . . . Freda and Biipy were together. ■ . She was drinking port. . . . ‘Get on to Ghang,’ s|he said to me, indicating the telephone. . . < From Brett’s we went to the forty-three Club.” These were some of the glimpses of London’s tawdry night life, as revealed to the back of the court, where sporty-looking men and slim girls of delicate features, with furs lightly wrapped about their shoulders, sat listening hard. The girl in the witness-box was Rose Heinberg, a fellow dancing instructress of Miss Kempton’s—a petite, slender girl in a black coat of some shiny material trimmed with a heavy fur collar and fur cuffs. Her thin, pale face was almost concealed under a beehive-Jlke hat of black straw.

She spoke in a composed monotone. Only occasionally did she raise her voice. Once was when she told how her friend came out. of a room with her mouth twitching curiously an:l said. “I have been drugged.” Freda knew the symptoms. "Twelve months ago,” she told Miss Heinberg, “I used to take drugs and my mouth twitched so that I bad to chew gum in ordre to make people think I was eating sweets.” 13 Packets of Cocaine. The possession, of 13 packets o' cocaine (a drug obtained from the leaves of the coca pla.pt producing local insensibility to pain) by the dead girl was also revealed. “She opened her powder-puff case,” said Miss Heinberg, "and I thought she was going to powder her nose. Instead she brought out 13 little packets wrapped in white paper.” The reference to the calling up of Chang (or “Billy”) on the telephone turned all eyes in the court towards a yellow-ifaced Oriental who was watching the evidence with impassive countenance. His overcoat was provided with a hands,ome fur collar, a gold bracelet watch was on ’his wris 1 .., his jet black hair was brushed smoothly back from his brow. This was Chang. He is to make a statement later. The most dramatic moment in the proceedings came when Miss Heinberg told how Chang, the Chinese, had given Freda a small bottle, and how in a conversation that followed Freda asked : "Billy, can you die by taking cocaine The evidence of the medical experts who have been examining the organs of. the body was reserved for a future occasion. Proposal 2 Days Betyre Death Twc days before her death Freda Kempton had accepted a proposal of marriage made to her by a wealthy Manchester business man, and was to have been married secretly on the Monday following her death.