PLACID ON SCAFFOLD

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 954, 23 April 1930, Page 11

PLACID ON SCAFFOLD

PODMORE DRINKS BUT HAS NO BREAKFAST PENALTY FOR MURDER LONDON, Tuesday. Wiliam Podmore, found guilty of the murder of Mr. Vivian Messiter at Southampton, was executed this morning. An eye-witness says the condemned man displayed no emotion. lie i placidly wrote letters until a few minutes before his death. Podmore refused to eat breakfast, but at the last he gratefully accepted stimulants. At the conference of the Independent Labour Party yesterday a resolution, moved by Mr. J. Maxton, for Bridgeton, Glasgow, was adopted expressing regret that the Home Secretary. Mr. J. It. Clynes, had refused to exercise his constitutional power and reprieve Podmore. The resolution stated that a large volume of public opinion had urged a reprieve. It added that the party repeatedly had declared in favour of the abolition of capital punishment and that this was an opportunity of avoiding “useless barbarity.” A copy of the resolution was telegraphed to Mr. Clynes.

The execution of William Podmore closes a sensational and at times a puzzling crime case. On the afternoon of October 30. 1928, Mr. Vivian Messiter ,aged 57, a Southampton oil agent, disappeared. Ten weeks later liis dead body was discovered, with the skull fractured, in his garage in Grove Street, Southampton. A coroner’s jury, after a long inquiry, returned an open verdict, but at the subsequent magisterial inquiry William Henry Podmore, aged 29, a motor engineer, was committed for trial on a ohargo of having murdered Mr. Messiter. He was arrested as he came out of Wandsworth prison on December 17 last. The trial was opened before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Hewart, in the Assize Court of the old castle at Winchester, on March 4 last. Four days later he was found guilty and condemned to death. Recently there have been efforts to secure a reprieve or a fresh trial for Podmore. together with talk of the discovery of new evidence. However, on Saturday last it was announced that the Home Secretary, Mr. J. R. Clynes, had decided not to interfere with the sentence.