A MINISTER'S CRIME

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 53, 20 July 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

A MINISTER'S CRIME

PASTOR RICHESON DIES IN THE ELECTRIC CHAIR. I Clarence Richeson, the pastor who mur- J dered his sweetheart, Miss Avis Linnell, was electrocuted at Boston (Mass.) the other week. The unhappy man, who since the final dismissal of his appeal, had given way to unceasing fits of terror and remorse, conducted himself at the end with great fortitude, and as he walked towards the chair he intoned his favorite hymn, "Some time we'll understand." The day before his execution he spent in reading the Bible. Richeson sent back the portrait of his victim, which he always kept with him, to her mother, and returned to the family the various gifts which he had received from his fiancee. Router says that a negro murderer, Henry J. Butts, has been the constant companion of Richeson in prison. The negro took a certain pride in serving Richeson, who became so attached to the attentions of Butts that the negro was allowed to remain, although his crime called for imprisonment in another gaol. The crime for which Clarence Virgil Thompson Richeson, at the time of his arrest pastor of Immanuel Church of Cambridge, was sentenced to die in the electric chair, was the confessed murder of his former sweetheart, nineteen years old, Avis Linnell, of Hayannis, a pupil in the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, and a member of the church choir. The girl stood in the way of the minister's marriage to Miss Violet Edmands, a society girl and heiress, of Brooklyn, both through an engagement which still existed between the two, and because of the condition in which Miss Linnell found herself. The girl was deceived into taking a poison given her by Richeson, which she believed would remedy that condition, and died in her rooms at the Young Women's Christian Association on the evening of October 14, 1911. On that day invitations had been issued for the wedding ceremony which was to unite Mr. Richeson and' Miss Edmands. On the day following the .girl's death Mr. Richeson preached in the Cambridge Church, and in his prayer referred briefly to the death of a near'friend. Later suspicion fell on Richeson, and he was arrested, but he protested his innocence. Interest in the case was intensified on December 20. when it became known that Richeson had mutilated himself in his cell at the Charles street gaol. The public apparently lost all sympathy for the prissoner following his strange act, which was interpreted as a eonfession. Richeson confessed his guilt in a statement written -by himself on January 3.