HANGED THROUGH A BUTTON

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 1985, 3 June 1919, Page 4

HANGED THROUGH A BUTTON

SMALL CLUES TO GREAT CRIMES.

A constable at Southampton recently noticed breath, marks on the interior of the window of a jeweller’s shop. He stopped —listened. Inside wore two burglars. A small clue! But even more trivial ones have led to similar arrests in the past.

A cigarette of a. peculiar brand, left behind by a burglar named Fitzpatrick, in a city warehouse, earned for him a long term of penal servitude. Another burglar, at Middlesbrough, was run to earth after a long chase with only a broken cigar hand as a clue.

Pierre Panne, the i’annnis French detective, who died in 19.15, once (raced a murderer within -IS hours with no clue save a trousers button. Suspicion was first aroused in the Oippen case by the spelling of the victim’s name, “Elmore,’’ with two “I’s” on a forged letter.

The mysterious murder of a little girl in Devonshire was solved owing to the accidental finding of some of her hair in a bird’s nest, a remarkable -case utilised by Mr Eden Pbillpolts in his “Sam of Sorrow Corner."

A single word, “Cndham,” overheard by chance at the Pctigc postoffice, was the starting point of the inquiry which brought to light tho shocking murder by starvation and ill-usage of Mrs Louis Staunton in a house rented by her unnatural husband near that remote village. The chance of a shutter falling upon a passer-by was the chief means of convicting a Liverpool youth, George Sumner, of the murder of Miss Bradtield there some few years back. Crock,' who murdered a const able at Dalston in 1884, was brought to the scaffold by a single initial hastily scratched upon tho blade of a chisel. Early last year a girl named Nellie Trow was brutally done to death on Eltham Common. In trying to defend herself she had torn a button from her assailant’s overcoat. A tiny clue! But it sufficed. In the case of a similar murder at Bodhim some time hack, perpetrated by a man named Ollison, the girl victim tore a handful of hair from her assailant’s heard. The day following a constable was waiting ids turn in a barber’s shop when a man came in to get his heard trimmed. It was Ollison. He was hanged.