THE GREAT JEWEL ROBBERY.

Westport Times, Volume V, Issue 814, 18 May 1871, Page 2

THE GREAT JEWEL ROBBERY.

The great jewel robbery case has ended in a failure of justice. The obsolete fiction that a wife has no existence save through and by favour of her husband operated upon the mind of the jury, and the result is that Mrs Martha Torpey is as free as if she had never conspired with her bus. band to commit an audacious theft, and as if Messrs London and "Ryder were not the losers of some thousands of pounds. It is not too much to say that this verdict will take most people by surprise. It ran directly in the teeth of Mr Russell Gurney's Bumming up. It is opposed to the plain view of abstract justice, which supposes that if a man or woman violates the law, and is apprehended, and the crime proved, he or she will be punished ; and its tendency will be to confuse the public mind as to the limits of marital and wifely responsibility. Every professor of larceny who knows what is due to himself will be disposed to regard the state of holy matrimony with peculiar favour on learning the upshot of this trial, and the thief or burglar who henceforth pursues his calling as a bachelor will be strangely oblivious of the lesson given him. Let us recall the circumstances of the great robbery of which Mrs Torpey has been pronounced not guilty legally, the foreman prefacing the words by the statement that, in the opinion of the jury, she was acting throughout under the coercion of her husband. On the 12th of January in the present year, Mr Parkes, one of Messrs London and Ryder's shopmen, was sent to No. 4, Tipper Berkeley street, Portman Square, with diamond ornaments, amounting in value to several thousand pounds. A well-dressed man, calling himself " Mark Tyrrell," had called at Messrs London and Ryder's with a plausible story of his having inherited property, and wishing to make a selection of jewellery for presentation; and Mr Parkes and his precious parcels were despatched from Bond-street in consequence. It may be remarked, in passing, that to send one man on such an errand to a strange house marks the guilelessness of our London tradesmen ; and that the moral of the whole case seems to be that valuable goods should never be permitted out of the care of at least a couple of guardian?. One man to show fight and another to break tho windows and call for assistance, and " Mr Tyrrell " would have been frustrated, as he is said to have been by another firm of jewellers upon whom he tried a similar experiment, and who sent the jewels and two stout assistants to take care of them. Mr Parkes was alone, and on being admitted to the house in Berkeley-street he found " Mr Tyrrell" and a lady whom he recognised yesterday in the dock. There were the usual preliminary to a purchase of expensive articles of a'lornment. The gentleman was fastidious, the lady fanciful. This cluster was not quite the ornament the one had pictured to the other beforehand. That pendant would have hoen handsomer if the stones had been differently arranged. There were also little calculations about cost; combinations of figures,- such as men and women make when estimating tho ixtout to which they arc disposed to go in expenditure on a luxury. Then, after more of this kind of bye-play, tho woman passes into an

adjoining room " to consult her sister," and returns with a cloth steeped in chloroform; and in a few moments more the helpless shopman is lying bound hand and foot upon the sofa, ho stupefying drug at his inouth and 'nose, and threats of murder if he stirs whispered in his oar. The jewels on the table are sw-ept up, and the man and woman decamp; neglecting in their timorous haste a bag, which Mr Parkcs has brought with him, and which contains ornaments of a greater aggregate value than those they steal. Thus ends the first act of this criminal drama. The particulars of the robbery find their way into the newspapers; and a sort of mild wonder seizes upon the community that so very obvious a mode of making off with a neighbour's poods has not been attempted before. But there is apparently no clue to "Mr Tyrrell." The house in Upper Berkeley-street is a furnished one, which had been hired just before, evidently for the purpose of the robbery " and it seems as if Messrs London and Eyder had been victimised by an experienced thief, whose plans had been too well considered to make detection probable It happened, however, that a Mr. and Mrs. Torpey, a young married couple of respectable connections, who were living in lodgings at Leamington, contrived to excite the suspicions of the young woman who was in charge of the house in which they had a temporary home. On the 12th of January, the day of the robbery, Mrs. Torpey left for London by an early train, her husband having gone thither a few days previously, and many letters and telegrams having passed between them. Mrs. Torpey took her baby with her, aid said positively that she should return home that night. The young housekeeper sat up accordingly till midnight, but it was not until two in the morning that Mrs. Torpey arrived, accompanied by her husband. They had missed the train, they said, and had posted fourteen miles to get home without further delay. The personal appearance of both bad undergone great alteration. Mr. Torpey was partly shaven, and was made up to represent a foreigner; Mrs. Torpey had a black eye, and was without her chignon. From this moment their movements seemed to have been watched by the sbarpwitted young woman ?t the lodging-house. The accumulated injuries of having to sit up till midnight fruitlessly, and of being roused from a warm and comfortable bed in the small hours of a January morning, were in themselves sufficient to inspire any well-regulated mind with aversion to these untimely and inconsiderate guests. This distate perhaps gave point to the question—What did the presence of a black eye and the absence of a chignon mean 1 and when Mrs. Torpey, with the strange infatuation which criminals often exhibit, and which resembles nothing so much as a moth's flutterings about a candle, called attention to her husband's altered appearance, and subsequently gave her self-constituted detective a newspaper containing an account of the jewel robbery to read, the hitter's suspicions were confirmed. She peeped about and discovered drugs and a handkerchief; she watched Mr. Torpey, and found him consulting the Dutch routes in a foreign " Bradshaw ;" she found out that special and unusual pains were taken to preclude her from ascertaining the addresses or contents of two mysterious brown paper parcels which the Torpeys had brought with them from London. Jn the end, she communicated with the local police, said Mrs. Torpey was arrested \\ hi I e in the act of reading a letter from her husband, whom the police have, with all their boasted shrewdness, allowed to slip through their fingers, and who is still at large upon the Continent. The guilty complicity of the woman was not denied ; her astute counsel preferring to rely upon the plea that as a married woman she had been coerced into wrong-doing and could not be held Mr. Montagu AVilliams was wise in his generation. It was in vain that the recorder defined, in his lucid summing up the proper limits of the doctrine of wifely submission • and denounced as bad in morals, and bad in law, the doctrine that a woman should not be punished for crime, simply because her husband was her accomplice. It was in vaiu, too, that the evidence went to prove that Mrs. had taken an ; active part in carrying out the robbery. [ The jury nodded their heads as men and I nuabands while Mr. Williams explained to them with fervour that the teachings of religion, the tenets of jurisprudence, and the wisdom of our ancestors culminated in the axiom that a wife being hound to obey her husband, the interesting prisoner at the bar should be acquitted. After deliberation and consultation, which lasted exactly seven minutes, the jury and the counsel for the defence were found to be of one mind ; and to the astonishment of most people "J court, and probably to the indignation oi the public, the heroine of one of the n»st daring robberies of modern times I is permitted to escape scot free.