SLAYER’S LAST LETTER

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 962, 3 May 1930, Page 30

SLAYER’S LAST LETTER

“TIME IS GETTING SHORT, , SWEETHEART . . .” BEFORE THE SCAFFOLD A letter written by Kennedy, who, with Browne, was hanged for the murder of P.C. Gutteridge, is included in a book called “The Trial of Browne and Kennedy.” The letter removes any doubt as to the guilt of the men. A few hours before he walked to the scaffold, at Wandsworth Prison, Kennedy wrote to his wife: “Time is getting short, sweetheart, and still I feel that strange calm and confidence of our reunion. Perhaps the worst is to know the exact hour, and perhaps the best. My last word. I again assert that I had no previous knowledge of what was going to liappen that night.” Apart from tragic letters written by Kennedy and a verbatim report of the trial, there is an absorbing account of a scientific device which may be used in modern crime detection. Problem for C.I.D. “There is one matter brought forward in evidence which calls for consideration,” the author writes. “Bullets had been found in and near the body of the murdered man and an empty cartridge case in the stolen car. The problem set the C.I.D. was to find the revolver from which the cartridge was fired. “The firearm from which a particular bullet has been fired can be identified beyond question, and it is curious that this aid to the work of the detective was not perfected sooner. The fact at the back of these identifications is that no two natural or man-made objects are ever. precisely the same. To the unaided eye they may often appear to be so, but with the assistance of the microscope they are shown to be different. “To the naked eye the edges of ail razor blades look to be the same; actually, no two are or can be precisely the same, and the microscope shows them to be saw-edged, that is, serrated. In no two rifle barrels are the riflings ever precisely the same, because they have been cut by tools

the edges o£ which change slightly with every use made of them. "The markings of the breech shield of, say, a revolver, against which the cartridge rests and against which it is forced with tremendous power when fired, cannot be precisely the same in any two weapons, because they are made by hand with the use of a file. The human hand can never twice do exactly the same work. The Microscope’s Aid “So it comes to this: A bullet or shell invariably bears marks, which may be called equivalent to finger prints, distinctive of and peculiar to the barrel of the weapon from which it has been fired. Why not call it a •gun print?’ The scratches round the firing pinhole of the breech shield of a revolver are imprinted on the base of every cartridge fired from it; a cartridge hearing that imprint can have been fired from that ‘gun’ only. “Therefore, when it is suspected that a certain bullet was fired from a certain ‘gun.’ other bullets are fired from it, and the marks upon them made by the rifling and the marks upon the base of the cartridges made by the breech are microscopically examined and compared with those upon the bullet and the cartridge case to be identified.”