Jekyll and Hyde in Real Life

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1064, 30 August 1930, Page 18

Jekyll and Hyde in Real Life

■ AS Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde masterpiece consciously founded upon fact? That is the first thought which strikes

the reader of “Lawbreakers,” in which Mr. Charles Kingston devotes eight chapters to criminals with dual personalities, says a reviewer in “John o’ London’s Weekly."

Wainewright, the ex-Guardsman, artist, art critic, and friend of Lamb and Hazlitt, was also the forger and poisoner who died serving sentence of transportation in Tasmania. Joshua Ashley, the popular clubman and prototype of Hornung’s “Raffles,” astounded society when his trial at the Old Bailey revealed that for years he had been living by stealing and pawning the silver from the clubs to which he belonged.

In the ’fifties, a Scotland Yard detective, Charles King, was the trainer, director and protector of a gang of pickpockets upon whose pilferings he subsisted; a century earlier Dr. Levy Weil had practised as a doctor byday and a burglar by night, as a burglar making good use of the knowledge which he had gained in the course of professional visits to his patients' houses. Dishonest Charity Undoubtedly the most romantic Jekyll-Hyde was Leopold Redpath, a clerk earning £3OO a year in the service of the Great Northern Railway. One can imagine the astonishment of the chairman of the railway when an earl to whom he was chatting in the street left him abruptly to hurry after the clerk, whom he greeted effusively; Who is that?’’ said the chairman, when the nob.eman returned. "One of the most munificent supporters of the charity schools with which I am connected,” was the surprising: an-

Doctor Who Robbed His Patients’ Houses ... Philanthropy on £3OO a Year . . . Murderers and Their Motives.

swer. "He’s been so very kind that I simply could not let the opportunity slip to give him a handshake and thank him once more/’

Indeed,” said his companion, drvly; and, passing on, ruminated on the oddity of the £6 a week railway clerk who was a philanthropist and the friend of an earl.

The chairman would have been still more puzzled had he known that his clerk with the modest salary possessed a house in Chester Terrace and a country mansion near Weybridge, where he kept a retinue of servants and entertained peers and magnates on a lavish scale. The munificent donations to charity of Redpath the “philanthropist" had gained him many distinguished friends, who were unaware of his humble occupation by day. The mystery was solved at the Old Bailey when Redpath was convicted of forging Great Northern Railway stock to the extent of over one hundred thousand pounds. Murder Motives Mr. Kingston has not confined himself, however, to the subject of dual personalities. His book is a miscellany of crime, in which humour and grim tragedy are skilfully blended. Murder is usually attributed to revenge, greed, or lust. There has occasionally, however, been a more curious motive for the crime:—• One wild-looking prisoner charged with murder replied in a voice of ecstasy that he was guilty. “Why are you so emphatic about it?” the judge inquired. "Because I committed murder to save myself from committing suicide," was the astounding reply. "I could not bear to take my own life, and as l wish to leave this wicked world 1 killed the first man I met in the street.”

Needless to say f the lunatic’s wishes were frustrated, for instead of being hanged he was sent to Broadmoor—a fate also reserved for a woman, equally mad, whose motive for her crime was even more strange. Christiana Edmunds had reached middle-age without ever having had a lover—hardly to be wondered at, for she was plain to the point of ugliness and had a disagreeable nature.

It was unfortunate for Dr. Beard that on being called in to prescribe for a headache, he did not discard his customary sympathetic bedside manner, for Christiana immediately mistook it for personal affection. Believing that the doctor was in love with her, shfi began to think out how she could remove the only obstacle to

Having purchased a box of chocolates and impregnated some of the chocolates with strychnine, Christiana called on Mrs. Beard. Fortunately, Mrs. Beard noticed a bitter taste on biting the first chocolate, and spat it out. The doctor and his wife agreed that this had been a deliberate attempt at poisoning, and Christiana was informed that they would have nothing more to do with her. A normal person might have been thankful to escape so lightly. Christiana, however, was by no means normal. Her one thought was how to win hack the doctor’s esteem:

With the cleverness of madness she collected a. scheme whereby he would be convinced that she had been the victim of a confectioner's blunder, and the scheme involved the murder of someone unknown to her! She had protested to Dr. Beard that she had not put the poison in the chocolate, but she had not been able, of course, to produce proof of her statement. It was to provide this proof that she decided to smuggle poison into the stock of a Brighton confectioner, wait until one of his unfortunate customers bought the poisoned sweets and died, and then go to Dr. Beard and point out the injustice he had done her. A Prison Queen When, after the death of a child of four. It was announced that the confectioner's stock had been analysed and found to contain strychnine, Christiana felt that her plan had succeeded. But she reckoned without the police, for she was duly arrested and convicted of murder:

At Broadmoor she lived to a querulous old age. Affecting the airs of the grand lady, she elected herself leader of its society, and with tyrarmical haughtiness ruled her court of mad women; no suburban lady could be more particular than this poisoner was as to whom she mixed w.lth and thereby admitted to the ranks of gentility.

No doubt she was liappier there than in her pre-criminal days—which may, or may not, bo an argument against capital punishment.