THE PARRICIDES.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 458, 29 March 1890, Page 5

THE PARRICIDES.

A SEVERE FATHER MURDERED BY HIS SONS.

CONFESSIONS OF THE BOYS.

(from our special correspondent.)

London, February 6. Since two lads of fifteen and sixteen calmly shot a fellow-workman at Maidstone, to avenge a fancied slight, and gloried in their crime, we have heard of no murder equal in atrocity and ferocity to the appalling case of parricide at Crewe. I confess I have but little pity for the victim. Ho must, as Ins sons allege, have been a bad father, and habitually and exceptionally cruel to his family, to make such a diabolical crime possible. Not that the murder was committed in hot blood. Quite the reverse, indeed. The brothers Richard and George Davies appear (judging by their confessions) to have concerted plans for effectually slaying their immediate progenitor with us much inditierence as though he vvei e fat pig or stalled ox. These youthful miscreants (aged 16 and 18 years respectL ely) have acknowledged, says the “ Telegraph,” that they coolly planned and ruthlessly executed the murder of their father. Each of them had voluntarily and separately signed a declaration to that effect. Each has done his utmost, with characteristic vileness, to incriminate the other, and to shift the awful responsibility for the actual deed from his own shoulders to those of his brother. Brought face to face, after having set down their mutual denunciations in writing at the Crewe Police-office, by Inspector Oldham, who read to them aloud their respective confessions, they fell to wrangling over the revolting details of the assassination. Richard qualified the latter part of his brother’s statement as “ nothing but lies.” “ You had the axe, and you know it,” he added; “ you struck father first.” “No,” rejoined George, “ I did not. It’s all true what I have written. You came up with the axe-head in one hand and the stave in the other. You took the pistol with you ; and you said if you did not finish him with the hatchet you would with the pistol. I never struck father with the axe at all.” Thus ignobly did these atrocious young parricides dispute the crowning infamy of the merciless blows that laid their sire low, a mangled corpse bleeding from half-a-dozen mortal wounds. They acknowledged an equal criminality, as far as the plan of the murder was concerned ; but each accused his brother of having done the dreadful deed, the blame of which, moreover, Richard Davies, with horrible cynicism, attributed to the slaughtered man. “ The cause we had for it,” he wrote in his declaration, “ was because he was such a bad father—nob to me, exactly, but to George and the rest—-and a bad husband to mother; for they have been very nearly starved sometimes, as he would neither buy them coal for the fire nor meat to eat when he was in a bad temper,” From the heartless confessions of these stripling assassins it is manifest that George and Richard had made up their minds to kill their father at least some days before they put their dire resolve into execution. The habits of Richard Davies the elder were such as to render his murder an easy enterprise to the lads who were associated with him in his daily oenupations. He was a man who simultaneously carried on two several businesses, that of a clothier in the town of Crewe, where he kept a shop and did a thriving trade, and that of a farmer near a village called Hough, about three miles from Crewe. Every Monday morning Davies drove from his small farmhouse to his shop in a yellow two-wheeled cart, drawn by a pony, remaining throughout the week in Crewe, and returning late on Saturday evening by the same conveyance to Hough, in order to spend his Sunday there with bis family. During these late dfives, part of the road being a somewhat narrow and lonely country lane, he was almost invariably accompanied by one or other of the sons who eventually took hia life. According to the statement signed by George Davies, the brothers had originally intended to shoot their father, and, should a bullet - wound nob prove immediately fatal, to finis!} him between them with a hatchet borrowed from the backyard of the shop in Crewe. To this epd they had bought a pistol—presumably an old-fashioned, single-barrelled weapon, for Richard, on the day of tfie murder, commissioned George to buy a box of percussiomcaps, which the latter did. In all probability they were deterred from using the explosive arm by the fear that its report might be heard, and in some indirect way lead to their detection and arrest. At any rate, only a few minutes before the younger Richard started for Hough in tho cart with his father, the two lads held a final consultation, and decided upon slaying their common progenitor with the hatchet above alluded to. The conversation held between them while they were settling how, when, and where the deed should be done is thus given by George Davies, a boy of sixteen : “ Dick said to me, ‘ I tell you what, I think I shall have a go at our old chap to-night.’ • I said, 1 Pleaso yourself.’ He said, ‘I meant to have a go at him on Monday night; bub he picked somebody up and gave them a ride.’ Dick said, ‘I shall get the little chopper out of the yard,’ and I said, ‘ I should not’get it, be; cause it would be missed.’ He said, ‘No, they woqld not miss it.’ Richard said, ‘ You will nob see me again ‘ before I have hit him, and I shall go home, and you must come running about ten minutes after me, and run into the house, and say some one has stopped my father up Crewe Lane,’” The incidents of the actual murder are recounted as follows by the same hand ; ‘ When we had gob about half-way down the lane Dick hit father with something, and father said, ‘Oh, dear, dear, what’s that?’ and then he said, ‘ Way, way,’ and Dick hit him again : and then father fell out of the back of the trap, and the seat as well.” Richard Davies, the younger, on the contrary, avers thabthe murder was committed by George, and that all he (Richard) did was to run behind, catch hold of his father, and pull him out of the trap. It had, by Richard’s account, been “made-up” between the brothers that the elder of the two was to wait in Crewe Lane “ for father to come.” “Then,” he goes on to say, “ I was to come out of the hedgp and seize the pony’s head, while* George, who was riding with him, and’ was bringing the axe with him, would jump up, and strike him two or three times.” Richard further declares that after he himself had dragged the dying man ogt of the cart backwards, and thrown him down in th'e road, he went' home, leaving George “ there to Wait until he was dead.’.’ Was ever a tale of horror written down with such cool, pitiless circumstantiality by hands imbrued in a father’s blood ? What sort of monsters are these beardless boys—described. as having received a fair ayerage education, and as having “always been well dressed”— who settle the programme of a parryfidf* in the course of a few minutes’ careless chqtj parry oqt their sanguinary scheme to the

letter, rob their victim’s body as it lies by the roadside, and then, their blood-stained clothes having betrayed them before they had time to betray one another, have recourse in their unspeakable baseness and poltroonery to mutual denunciation, each attempting to palliate his own deadly sin at his accomplice’s expense? The brothers Davies. be it remembered, who, after butchering their father together and of malice prepense, have “rounded” upon one another with fratricidal purpose, are by no means members of tho criminal, ignorant, or destitute class, bub sons of a respectable country tradesman, who have been decently brought up and properly cared for from childhood to adolescence, and one of whom at least has avowedly had no personal wrong bo complain of at the hands of his victim—his own father. All these conditions of the boymurderers, as well as the terrific incidents of their crime and the utter vileness of their subsequent mutual treachery, point to a depth of depravity which cannot but alarm those who are in any way responsible for the moral status of British youth. The disclosures that catne bo light some months ago in connection with the Regent’s Park murder were more than sufficiently startling, although the reckless brutality and savage lawlessness which they revealed were confined bo the “ lowest of the low ” —that is, to the inveterate young rowdies, roughs, and loafers svho infest certain districts of thi3 Metropolis, and constitute one of its most dangerous nuisances. In the cold, passionless, remorseless criminalby of respectably trained and educated lads like George and Richard Davies there is matter for painful reflection, and ground for profound anxiety as bo the possible future of the rising generation that has entered its teens, so to speak, under School Board auspices.