NUMBER NINE.

Manawatu Herald, 21 January 1889, Page 2

NUMBER NINE.

+ (Pall Mall Budget) Eight undetected murders in one small district at the East- end and more to follow. One ghastly murder and mutilation in the West-end, to which there is no clue, and so far, while many innocent persons have bee arrestea, the murderers are still at large. There have been at least nine women murdered in London within ten months, under every chv cumstance of savage and fiendish atrocity, and the police are utterly at fault. Of the latest, but not the last, of the murders in the East-end we need say little. The murderer seems on ttis occasion to have selected a younger victim, and to have profited by the security of a locked room to indulge to a much greater extent than on any previous occasion in his mania for mutilation. / Short o 1 absolutely skinning his next victim from head to heel, it is difficult to see what fresh horror is left for him to commit. There is, of course ab solutely no means of preventing such a murder as this in the little room of an unfortunate. The woman invites the murderer into an apartment into which no one has a right to intrude. The certainty that no one will interfere, no matter what shouts and ihrieks may be heard, is one of the indispensable conditions for carvying on her ghastly business, and in all probability she herself locked the j door before reducing herself to the position of a living victim ready for this fiend's post-mortem.. A vary ingenious theory has been propounded by a correspondent in Manchester, who contends that the murderer is a Malay, who seeks to avenge the loss of his savings by the persistent murder of women of the class who robbed him. It may be so. But for our part the,cietails of the latest crime seem to point in another direction. The libertine is ruthless enough even when sane, but a debauchee gone mad with excess, possessed by a passion for blood superadded to the mere brutal insiinc from which that passion springs, is one of the most appalling, although by no means the most unfamiliar phenomena in the annals of crime.