WAVE OF GRIME.

Taranaki Daily News, 13 March 1922, Page 5

WAVE OF GRIME.

TRAGEDIES IN ENGLAND. LOVERS DIE TOGETHER. I DRAMAS OF MYSTERY. By Telegraph.—Press Assn. —Copyright Received March 12, 5.5 p.m. > London, March 11. An extraordinary crime wave is ■ sweeping over England, including many ■ mysterious murders, which are baffling r the police. Prominent are illicit love affairs,some ending in double suicide and others in murder. Within the past fortnight several such cases have been reported. The wife of a prominent Manchester 1 business man ran off with a skating rink instructor and the pair occupied a ’ cottage in a Hampshire village as a honeymoon couple. They were not 1 seen’for several days, after which the ' police discovered their bodies in a bedroom.

Another couple, a married man and a single woman, made a double suicide pact. They took poison and entered the sea at* Southend; the man was drowned, but the woman cheated death. A married curate and his lover drank poieon in champagne at a Nottingham hotel and 'both died.

Another inexplicable affair was a case in which lover® were eloping in a train. Suddenly the man shot the girl and then turned the weapon on himself. He expired., but the girl is not seriously hurt.

There have been numerous gas tragedies in which couples died together. An unmarried mother at Chelsea and two sons died from gas poisoning and the verdict against the woman was suicide and double murdei. A verdict of murder was returned against a young man accused of strangling a girl at Brixton with a silk stockA laborer was sentenced to death for murdering a woman of seventy-nine, an old age pensioner of Holborn. A youth was similarly sentenced for murdering his fiancee at Clapton, and a boy is awaiting trial for giving his father a fatal blow after the latter struck his mother. , . A widow of fifty-five, living alone at Henley-on-Thames, who was in constant dread of a man residing abroad, was found murdered. The police suggest the deceased met the murderer while travelling either to Canada or Australia. The day preceding the tragedy she left instructions regarding money. The sensation of the moment . concerns the death of a beautiful girl, a West End dancer, who is believed to he a victim of the drug habit, and the death of another girl in connection with which a married airman has been apprehended. Received March 12, 5.0 p.m. Paris, March 11.

Paris is experiencing a startling number of what the French describe as crimes of passion. Poland is terrorised by a modern “Jack-the-Ripper.” Within three weeks the bodies of nine girls were found mutilated.—Aus.-N.Z. Cable Assn.