DEAD MAJOR’S HONOUR.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 1992, 19 June 1919, Page 1

DEAD MAJOR’S HONOUR.

SETON SHOOTING CASE. “UNFOUNDED INNUENDOES.” In eoifhection with the murder in London recently of Major Miles Seton, by Colonel Rutherford, who has been found to be insane, and has been detained during His Majesty’s pleasm’e, Sir Malcolm Seton, cousin of the victim of the murder, writes as follows in defence of the dead major’s honour; — “Major Miles Seton was wellknown in his university days as one of the finest amateur athletes in Scotland, but had lived very little in this country during the last eighteen years, his medical practice having lain for the most part in South Africa and Australia. He served in the South African War

. . . . and in 1915, when the call for medical men with war experience became so urgent, he incurred heavy financial sacrifice by throwing up a practice in Melbourne.

.... He was on active service in Egypt in 1916, and it was a matter of great regret to him that his desire to serve in France could not be fulfilled, as he was employed on medical duties at the Australian bases in this country, for which he was considered specially qualified. “His (Major Seton’s) memory would have been exposed to grave suspicion were it not for the facts unexpectedly elicited on the final day of the trial as to the purely insane nature of Colonel Rutherford’s grievance against him. “For the fact is that (unless the murderer pleads justification) the reputation of a murdered man is irrelevant" to the issue that is to be tried, and is left without a defend-

er. . . . The rules of evidence admit such testimony as to the record of the accused as is- inadmissable with regard to the dead man. All this is inevitable, and must be accepted without complaint. But if we of the murdered man’s house can appreciate the pitiful eclipse in homicidal mania of Colonel Rutherford’s career, we are surely justified in our poignant feeling of the double tragedy that Major Seton’s active and useful life was cut short by the act of a lunatic, while the manner of his death exposed his memory to innuendoes which we positively knew yet could not formerly testify to bo absolutely without foundation.”