Foe of Drug Fiends

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 862, 4 January 1930, Page 16

Foe of Drug Fiends

Death of Brilliant Detective

SHE death of ex-Chief-De-tective Inspector Francis Hall removes one of the most spectacular and outstanding figures in London police circles.

He retired comparatively recently. “I do not like quitting,” he said. “I am afraid I shall not long survive.” And he had a precedent for this. Many retired police officers who have appeared to be the picture of health have faded away and died. There are few who had. a closer acquaintance with crime and criminals of all sorts than ex-Chief-Inspector Hall.

Murderers, dope fiends, thugs—ail came into his hands.

One of the ghastliest of the tragedies he investigated concerned two little girls who vanished. Their father —a Russian named Vlodski—was a baker, and had the reputation of being a mean, hard, despicable creature. Hall suspected the -worst, and went to the house the man occupied. Eventually he was led by a trail of blood to a cellar and there found the children. One of the little ones had managed to crawl up the cellar stairs and had worn her nails away in scratching the bolted door. The father was arrested and executed. “He was the wickedest and most cruel man I have known,” said Hall afterward. It was Mr. Hall who cleared the “dopists” out of the East End of London. Met Billie Carlton He met Billie Carlton when he was in the West End, and was destined afterward to meet her in a Limehouse den that was kept by Ping Yu. He

raided the den and found men and women lyiifg about in evening dress. Ping Yu’s wife was a Scotswoman whose maiden name was Robertson. There was a conviction against Ping Yu. who decided to return to China, and his wife insisted on going there, too.

Hall was able to snatch several white women from the clutches of Orientals —and once when raiding a Limehouse den he found a dead white woman, who, like Billie Carlton and Freda Kempton, had died from an overdose of drugs. It was after this raid that a Thames Police Court magistrate declared that “Hall could smell out an opium den a mile away.” It was Inspector Hall who captured Brilliant Chang. Chang had gone to a small house in Limehouse, and was living there with two white dope victims. These women denied that the prince of traffickers was in the house. Hall and his colleagues insisted in exploring and at last came across the Chinaman huddled under some sheets. Chang was eventually deported. It was Inspector Hall who searched the vessel in which Bywaters, the murderer of Percy Thompson, arrived after his last voyage. He found the impassioned letters which formed such a prominent feature of the Old Bailey trial. It was his painful duty to arrest Mrs. Thompson, and he was wont to say that in his opinion the woman hould never have been hanged. “A gulp came into my throat when I had to identify the body after execution,” he declared. “The horror of the affair haunts me to this day.” His humanity is indicated by the fact that he was the life governor of an East End orphanage and the friend of many down-and-out ex-convicts.