PAINFUL SCANDAL.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 215, 9 March 1912, Page 8

PAINFUL SCANDAL.

London, January 18. A painful Old Bailey case. has beeft. tragfcally stopped. The prisoner, Mr. T. E. Stephens, a barrister,, aged 73, came of an old legal family, one of his ancestors having been called to the Bar in 1652, and become a bencher. Mr. Stephens was formerly a solicitor, and having married a wife with a small fortune went to the Bar. He was a Surrey J.P. and had stood as Liberal candidate for Plymouth and Mid-Worcestershire. He had also owned a drug business, which, in 1902, he made over to one of his sons, one of whom islnow dead. The other, Mr. T. H. Stephens, now prosecuted his father for libel. There were family quarrels over financial transactions. Prosecutor sold £2OO worth of railway stock to a Cardiff ship-owner, through the Capital and Counties Bank, and prisoner wrote to tfhe ship-owner that the stock. had been improperly transferred, as it was not his son's to dispose of. He made other allegations to the bank manager, calling prosecutor a thief who had robbed him of £2OOO, and whom he would have prosecuted at Bow street if ' he were not his son. There were two pitiful days in court. The son denied the charges set out in his father's plea of justification, a document yards Jong, which included a charge of feloniously breaking and entering the father's sa,fe, and taking thence money, documents and other valuables. The son said he and a brother had opened the safe with a » key they had made, and taken docu-

ments which they claimed. The prisoner had gone for sixteen years without speaking to his wife, and had left her short of money. Next day the father's turn for denial and recrimination came in. On the third morning he was found in his bedroom at the National Liberal Club with his throat cut. Another son, Mr. H. C. Stephens, who had walked .with him overnight, said that his father was then taken ill, and 1 complained that his brain was breaking. He left a letter charging the other son with driving him to his death; but an unsolicited letter from the foreman of. the Old Bailey jury was read, saying that the jury considered the prosecutor had been ("fully justified in the circumstances in staking the action you did to vindicate your character." The judge had also felt bound_to say in court that the prosecution was "not in any way unreasonable." . ,