HORRIBLE MURDERS IN IRELAND.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1019, 19 October 1882, Page 3

HORRIBLE MURDERS IN IRELAND.

The special correspondent of the Irish Times sends the fohbwing graphic account of the murder of the Jeyce family. The locality in which it was committed lies in the wildest and loneliest district of the most remote regions of Connemara, and is almost inaccessible owing- to the mountain fastnesses, ?nd the miles of lakes around it. The land here forms a portion ot the estate of Colonel Clements, whose tenantry numbering some three or four hundred have, with one of t>vo trifling exceptions', not paid a single far. thing of rent during the last three years. John Joyce was one of these.tenants. He

was 45 y.'ars of age, and some time ago hold a farm from fclio murdered Earl of Loitrim at Derby Park, but had been evicted in 1877. Then being a widower withfotir children, he uianird a poor woman who shared lis fate, She was a widow, and at the time of iier wedding was iti possession of x farm at Maamlrassna. Since then he had lived peacefully on the farm, his mother, Margaret Joyce, aged 85 years ; his daughter, Margaret Joj'ce, 18 ; and his sons Michael Joyce-, IG, and Patrick Joyce, 11, residing in the same house with him and his wife Bridget. His elder son, Martin, a young man aged 20, lived at Clonbur, being a servant in the employment of George Hare, a farmer, and to this circumstance he owes his escape from being one of the victims of the bloody tragedy. It appears the i Joyce family retired to bed at their usual hour, John Joyce and his wife sleeping on a miserable littie bed composed of rags and straw, and placed in a slight recess in fche wall a few feet from the door on the left hand side as the cabin is entered. The rest of the family sbpt on a wretched couch in an inner apartment, the old woman and one ®f her grandsons lying with their heads towards a little window, and Margaret and her brother lying in a, contrnry direction. By this means it was sought to enable the four occupants of one bed to find room ou the couch, which was so small that it had even to be lengthened by the placing of a barrel, end uppermost, at the foot of the bed. All was quiet for the first few hours, and nothing occurred to disturb the repose of the sleepers till about 1 o'clock in the morning, when, as Michael stated with his dying bre.ith, he heard shots. The door was then taken off its hinges, and a number of armed assassins poured into the cabin. The father was shot on the floor, having sprang out of. bed, The wife was bludgeoned to death, and then the inner room was entered. Tie feeble old grandmother was attacked, and her skull was crushed by a rain of blows which left bone, blood and brain one red mass of pulp. Michael was shot in the head and stomach. His sister was struck on the head by a biow, which left her a corpse, and Patrick, the younger child, was badly beaten over the head and face with a stick. To do their hellish work with greater certainty and more despatch the murderers lighted the room with a blazing pieco of bog peat. Having completed their bloodv and cruel murder they departed, disappearing in the darkness from the scene where they had wrought such inhuman slaughter. Michael, wounded fatally, and his bowels protruding through a bullet wound in the stomach, crawled out of the bed in which lay the corpses of his grandmother and his sister, and went to the kitchtn for a drink of water to quench the burning thirst that parched his lips, and added so greatly to the agony he endured. He found his father lying dead on the floor, and his stepmother dying in her bed. Terrified and faint, he was afraid to re - turn to that horrible bed, reeking with gore and ghastly with its de»d, which he had left in the inner room. Trembling with dread to remain by the naked corpse of his father, and feeling the pangs of death himself, he crept in by the side of his father's wife. She lay moaning, but though her head and face had been beaten into a horrid mass she did not die until some time subsequently. At length the son of a neighboring farmer named Collins, accompanied by tffo women named O'Brien who were going to the cabin to borrow a pair of cards for woollen spinning, arrived at the door, and Collins entered. Pie saw the dead body of his neighbor lying stark and naked on the clay floor, with two bullet holes in his side. Alarmed at what he had seen, he did not advance further, but raised an alarm in the village, which lies ia a scattered straggling form along the valley and mountain side. The villagers soon collected, and a body of them entered the cabin, There they beheld a spectacle which beggars description. They spoke to the boys, who told their mournful tal« as wed as they could, and they counted the corpses that lay around them. At halfpast 9 o'clock twelve men went to the police hut at Firming, two miles across the mountains, and stated what they had seen and heard. Two constabulary men returned with them, and visited the cabin, where they beheld a sight most terrible in character. Two dogs were in the bed where tho bodies of the grandmother and granddaughter were lying, and they had eaten all the flesh off the left arm of the old woman, which was hanging over the bedside. The police tried to drive away the animals, which were a sort of sheep dog, but they had the greatest difficulty in doing so. The dogs ran under the bed, evidently reluc taht to leave their horrible feast of human flesh, and when at length they were driven awaj T they are said to have become mad, and to have been destroyed by the inhabitants of the place.