THE STEUNENBERG MURDER TRIAL

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8465, 15 June 1907, Page 5

THE STEUNENBERG MURDER TRIAL

SENSATIONAL EVIDENCE. Received June 14, 9.5 a.m. NEW YORK, June 14. Orchard, giving further evidence for the prosecution in the ehairges against officials of the Western Miners' Federation (Moyer, Haywood, and Pettibone) of abetting the murder of Governor Steunenbetg, testified that he planned to blow u,p a boardinghouse at Globeville, where 150 Unionists were living, but Haywood discountenanced it, and the plan was dropped. Received June 14, 10 p.m. NEW YORK, June 14. Continuing his evidence in the Steunenberg murder tral, Orchard identified Coates, an ex-Lieutenant-Governor of Colorado, as the man who suggested that they should jointly kidnap and hold for a ransom of 60,000 dollars, the three-year-old son of Mr Pawlson, a banker, of Wallace, Idaho. They co-operated with a man named Jack Simpkins, but the plot failed. . Orchard related how he secured a .room at the Idaho Hotel, where ;Steunenberg was stopping, and endeavoured to place a clockwork bomb mnder Steunenberg's bed. He admitted that he was willing to kill everybody in the hotel except himsself. The rest of the cross-examination referred to Orchard's further plots i lagaint Steunenberg and professed religious conversion in gaol. When .plied with questions about the conversion, Orchard, for the first time during the trial, broke down and wept, mentioning Bible stories that mowed him to confess. (In 1906 Charles H. Moyer, president (of the Western Federation of Miners, William D. Heywood, secretary, and George A. Pettibone, an ex-iaae'imiber of the Executive Board, were arrested at Denver as accessories to the dynamiting and murdering of Mr Frank Steunenberg, exGovernor of Idaho. It is alleged that revenge for former prosecutions prompted the murder. Shortly afterwards a man • named Harry Orchard was arrested in connection with the murder. He declared that he received from' 1 Moyer and another official of the Federation £760 for the murder of Steunenberg. ; After much delay the accused persons were put on trial. Harry Orchard confessed that he was promised three thousand dollars to kill Governor Steunenberg. He tied a bomb to Steunenberg's gate, and it exploded, with fatal results. He had planned twentysix murders for the inner circle of the Western Federation of Miners.)