MURDER IN A TAXI-CAB.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIV, Issue 9337, 5 January 1909, Page 6

MURDER IN A TAXI-CAB.

The first taxi-cab tragedy in London’s gloomy history of crime is a very serious one. It is the old story" of a fool and his money, with murder and snicide as the sequel. William Barnard Davy, the 23-year old son of a Sheffield publican, had inherited a fortune of £12,000 on attaining his majority, and ran through it in about a year in the usual round of dissipation and folly. He had been through the South African war and had also visited Australia, but his travels had not served to steady* him. He was hopelessly extravagant and shiftless, and flung his money away right and left. On one of his trips to London about a year ago, be made the acquaintance of a young lady'known in the West End as “Queenie. ” She was not, as she admitted to a friend, “much struck” with Davy,at the time, but he treated her with lavish hospitalcity, spending money freely on her. Moreover, he told her that he had a fortune in - his own right. The truth was that he was just reaching the end of his fortune, but this she did not discover till some time later. “Queenie” and the young spendthrift stayed together for two or three months at the Hotel Metropole, and from there they were married on May 12th.- They went to Sheffield, and also to Worksop, where the young man’s mother was living, but Davy’s mother declined to receive his wife; so the couple returned to London. But by this'time the money Shad run short, and ’“Queenie” had made the disagreeable discovery that instead of marrying money she had linked herself to-a man as poor as herself. Disagreements arose, and the couple separated, Davy returning to Sheffield and his wife living in London, ostensibly on the look-out for a theatrical engagement. Since then Davy appears to have paid several yisits to London to? see his wife and get money .from her. He Was always short of money. and always bead-iVer-ears in flebt, although his mother appears to have drained her own resources in assisting him. Last week he was in London again without a penny,, and slept on the Embankment. Then his wife gave him five pounds. He spent some of this on a revolver, and threatened to shoot his wife unless she gave him more money. A peace was patched up, but Davy insisted that his wife should return with him to Sheffield, but this she absolutely refused to do. On the night of the tragedy they appeared to have met at the Empire Music Hall, and renewed the controversy. Much against her will the wife consented to drive to King’s Gross with her husband to see him' off. They started from Piccadilly in a taxi-cab, but before they reached Bnssell Sqnare the driver heard *tbe woman scream. Before he could pull up, dismount and open the door, Davy had fired three shots at the woman, and just as the door was wrenched open the wretched man tamed the revolver on himself. When the oab reached the nearest hospital, man and wife lay huddled on the floor, quite dead.