Vanity That Led to the Gallows

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 828, 23 November 1929, Page 18

Vanity That Led to the Gallows

Callousness of Vaquier and Norman Thorne . . . Fatal Craving for Notoriety . . . HBRK is something appropriate in the simiiltaneous appearance of The Trial of Jean Pierre Vaquier,” edited by R * H - Blundell and K. E. beaton (Hodge’s Notable British Trials), and “The Trial of Norman Tliorne, edited by Helena Normanton

(Bles’s Famous Trials), for these two crimes passionels have cei--tain features in common, although at first sight there would appear to be little similarity between the stolid, Industrious English lad who slew and carved up his dis-

carded lover in the soiuuae of his Sussex chicken farm in III 4 . a “ d u ’ e excitable, lazy, middloaged Frenchman who had poisoned the inebriate landlord of a Byfle-et inn eight months previously (writes Graham Brooks in “T.P.’s Weekly”) the^ame'traits ° WeVer ’ b ° th diSPla > ed , Were utterl y callous. Vaquier destitute lover who had followed Mis. Jones to England, sat calmlv in iU the bar parlour of the Blue Anchor, watching expectamlv her husband drink the poisoned salt’s w inch were to remove that obstacle to his ambitions. Thorne, having spent an hour in dismembering the body of

I Elsie Cameron and in burying the giff , relics in the ground, cheerfully marched off to take Elizabeth Colt; cutt for a stroll. Both displayed tne most aiuaziH coolness during the subsequent investigations. Neither attempted v> . run away. Thorne’s woebegone conversations with neighbours after newof Elsie’s disappearance spread abronattained a high degree of art H< ostentatiously assisted the police, *non one occasion remained sroiiinf-1 talking to the officers who were dt ging up his farm while he was stu-jf ing on the very spot beneath wh r- . his victim lay buried. . Such coolness amounted to vaaiT and so, if ever a man went to ’J* scaffold as the result of his own «* ( treme vanity, that man was Yaqnk who entered with zest into the invoke gations, made himself a popular . among local gossips, and contrived t get his photograph into the Had it not been for that photigrapwhich was seen by a London Cherny it is probable that the Crown * onl . never have succeeded in trinP 1 ' . home to Vaquier the possession poison. His craving for notorie. hanged him So at the trial. Vaquier comlied scented his hair and beard, and ecracked jokes in the dock. On ' ’ witness describing himself 65 builder and undertaker, the pri****" jovially remarked, “Ah. he . them above and below grountr Thorne, too, appeared cool and c r lected; even after the jury’s j. he so confidently expected 5U< ccsS J! the Court of Criminal Appeal Ik** fore that hearing he inquired who - i . he would do better to leave the Courts quietly by a side door** | put in front to “receive an ovsn oB *