VIII.—SOME UNAVENGED CRIMES.
There have, however, been occasions when detection has failed more or less completely. The police do not admit always that the perpetrators remain unknown; they have clues, suspicion, strong presumption, even more, but there is a gap in the evidence forthcoming, and to attempt prosecution would be to face inevitable defeat. To this day it is held at Scotland Yard that the real murderer in a mysterious murder in London in the seventies was discovered, but that the case failed before an artfully planned alibi. Sometimes an arrest is made on grounds that afford strong primâ-facie evidence, yet the case breaks down in court. The Burdell murder in 1857, in New York, was one of these. Dr. Burdell was a wealthy and eccentric dentist, owning a house in Bond Street, the greater part of which he let out in tenements. One of his tenants was a Mrs. Cunningham, to whom he became engaged, and whom, according to one account, he married. In any case, they quarrelled furiously, and Dr. Burdell warned her that she must leave the house, as he had let her rooms. Whereupon she told him significantly that he might not live to sign the agreement. Shortly afterwards he was found murdered, stabbed with fifteen wounds, and there were all the signs of a violent struggle. The wounds must
have been inflicted by a left-handed person, and Mrs. Cunningham was proved to be left-handed. The facts were strong against her, and she was arrested, but was acquitted on trial.
It came out long after the mysterious Road (Somerset) murder that the detectives were absolutely right about it, and that Inspector Whicher, of Scotland Yard, in fixing the crime on Constance Kent, had worked out the case with singular acumen. He elicited the motive—her jealousy of the little brother, one of a second family; he built up the clever theory of the abstracted nightdress, and obtained what he considered sufficient proof. It will be remembered that this accusation was denounced as frivolous and unjust. Mr. Whicher was so overwhelmed with ridicule that he soon afterwards retired from the force, and died, it was said, of a broken heart. His failure, as it was called, threw suspicion upon Mr. Kent, the father of the murdered child, and Gough, the boy’s nurse, and both were apprehended and charged, but the cases were dismissed. In the end, as all the world knows, Constance Kent, who had entered an Anglican sisterhood, made full confession to the Rev. Mr. Wagner, of Brighton, and she was duly convicted of murder. Although sentence of death was passed, it was commuted, and I had her in my charge at Millbank for years.
The outside public may think that the identity of that later miscreant, “Jack the Ripper,” was never revealed. So far as absolute knowledge goes, this is undoubtedly true. But the police, after the last murder, had brought their investigations to the point of strongly suspecting several persons, all of them known to be homicidal lunatics, and against three of these they held very plausible and reasonable grounds of suspicion. Concerning two of them the case was weak, although it was based on certain suggestive facts. One was a Polish Jew, a known lunatic, who was at large in the district of Whitechapel at the time of the murder, and who, having developed homicidal tendencies, was afterwards confined in an asylum. This man was said to resemble the murderer by the one person who got a glimpse of him—the police-constable in Mitre Court. The second possible criminal was a Russian doctor, also insane, who had been a convict in both England and Siberia. This man was in the habit of carrying about surgical knives and instruments in his pockets; his antecedents were of the very worst, and at the time of the Whitechapel murders he was in hiding, or, at least, his whereabouts was never exactly known. The third person was of the same type, but the suspicion in his case was stronger, and there was every reason to believe that his own friends entertained grave doubts about him. He also was a doctor in the prime of life, was believed to be insane or on the borderland of insanity, and he disappeared immediately after the last murder, that in Miller’s Court, on the 9th of November, 1888. On the last day of that year, seven weeks later, his body was found floating in the Thames, and was said to have been in the water a month. The theory in this case was that after his last exploit, which was the most fiendish of all, his brain entirely gave way, and he became furiously insane and committed suicide. It is at least a strong presumption that “Jack the Ripper” died or was put under restraint after the Miller’s Court affair, which ended this series of crimes. It would be interesting to know whether in this third case the man was left-handed or ambidextrous, both suggestions having been advanced by medical experts after viewing the victims. It is true that other doctors disagreed on this point, which may be said to add another to the many instances in which medical evidence has been conflicting, not to say confusing.
Yet the incontestable fact remains, unsatisfactory and disquieting, that many murder mysteries have baffled all inquiry, and that the long list of undiscovered crimes is continually receiving mysterious additions. An erroneous impression, however, prevails that such failures are more common in Great Britain than elsewhere. No doubt the British police are greatly handicapped by the law’s limitations, which in England always act in protecting the accused. But with all their advantages, the power to make arrests on suspicion, to interrogate the accused parties and force on self-incrimination, the Continental police meet with many rebuffs. Numbers of cases are “classed,” as it is officially called in Paris—that is, pigeon-holed for ever and a day, lacking sufficient proofs for trial, and in some instances, indeed, there is no clue whatever. In every country, and in all times, past and present, there have been crimes that defied detection.
Feuerbach, in his record of criminal trials in Bavaria, tells, for example, of the unsolved murder mystery of one Rupprecht, a notorious usurer of Munich, who was killed in 1817 in the doorway of a public tavern not fifty yards from his own residence. Yet his murderer was never discovered. The tavern was called the “hell”; it was a place of evil resort, for Rupprecht, a mean, parsimonious old curmudgeon, was fond of low company and spent most of his nights here, swallowing beer and cracking jokes with his friends. One night the landlord, returning from his cellar, heard a voice in the street asking for Rupprecht, and, going up to the drinking saloon, conveyed the message. Rupprecht went down to see his visitor and never returned. Within a minute deep groans were heard as of a person in a fit or in extreme pain. All rushed downstairs and found the old man lying in a pool of blood just inside the front door. There was a gaping wound in his head, but he was not unconscious, and kept repeating, “Wicked rogue! wicked villain! the axe! the axe!”
The wound had been inflicted by some sharp instrument, possibly a sword or sabre, wielded by a powerful hand. The victim must have been taken unawares, when his back was turned. The theory constructed by the police was that the murderer had waited within the porch out of sight, standing on a stone bench in a dark corner near the street door; that Rupprecht, finding no one to explain the summons, had looked out into the street and then had made to go back into the house. After he had turned the blow was struck. Thus not a scrap of a clue was left on the theatre of the crime. But Rupprecht was still alive and able to answer simple questions. A judge was summoned to interrogate him, and asked, “Who struck you?” “Schmidt,” replied Rupprecht. “Which Schmidt?” “Schmidt the woodcutter.” Further inquiries elicited statements that Schmidt had used a hatchet, that he lived in the Most, that they had quarrelled some time before. Rupprecht said he had recognised his assailant, and he went on muttering, “Schmidt, Schmidt, woodcutter, axe.” To find Schmidt was naturally the first business of the police. The name was as common as Smith is with us, and many Schmidts were woodcutters. Three Schmidts were suspected. One was a known confederate of thieves; another had been intimate, but afterwards was on bad terms, with Rupprecht: this was “Big Schmidt”; the third, his brother, “Little Schmidt,” also knew Rupprecht. All three, although none lived in the Most, were arrested and confronted with Rupprecht, but he recognised none of them; and he died next day, having become speechless and unconscious at the last. Only the first Schmidt seemed guilty; he was much agitated when interrogated, he contradicted himself, and could give no good account of the employment of his time when the offence was committed. Moreover, he had a hatchet; it was examined and spots were found upon it, undoubtedly of blood. He was brought into the presence of the dead Rupprecht, and was greatly overcome with terror and agitation.
Yet after the first accusation he offered good rebutting evidence. He explained the stain by saying he had a chapped hand which bled, and when it was pointed out that this was the right hand, which would be at the other end of the axe shaft, he was able in reply to prove that he was left-handed. Again, the wound in the head was considerably longer than the blade of the axe, and an axe cannot be drawn along after the blow. The murderer’s cries had been heard by the landlord, inquiring for Rupprecht, but it was not Schmidt’s voice. There was an alibi, moreover, or as good as one. Schmidt was at his mother-in-law’s, and was known to have gone home a little before the murder; soon after it, his wife found him in bed and asleep. If he had committed the crime he must have jumped out of bed again almost at once, run more than a mile, wounded Rupprecht, returned, gone back to bed and to sleep, all in less than an hour. Further, it was shown by trustworthy evidence that this Schmidt knew nothing of the murder after it had occurred.
The police drew blank also with “Big Schmidt” and “Little Schmidt,” neither of whom had left home on the night of the murder. They were no more successful with other Schmidts, although every one of the name was examined, and it was now realised that the last delirious words of the dying man had led them astray. But while hunting up the Schmidts it was not forgotten by the police that Rupprecht had also cried out, “My daughter! my daughter!” after he had been struck down. This might have been from the desire to see her in his last moments. On the other hand, he was estranged from this daughter, and he positively hated his son-in-law. They were no doubt a cold-blooded pair, these Bieringers, as they were called. The daughter showed little emotion when she heard her father had been mortally wounded; she looked at him as he lay without emotion, and had so little lost her appetite that she devoured a whole basin of soup in the house. It was suspicious, too, that she tried to fix the guilt on “Big Schmidt.” Bieringer was a man of superior station, well bred and well educated; and he lived on very bad terms with his wife, who was coarse, vulgar, and of violent temper like her father; and once at his instance she was imprisoned for forty-eight hours. Rupprecht sided with his daughter, and openly declared that in leaving her his money he would tie it up so tightly that Bieringer could not touch a penny. This he had said openly, and it was twisted into a motive why Bieringer should remove him before he could make such a will. But a sufficient alibi was proved by Bieringer; his time was accounted for satisfactorily on the night of the murder. The daughter was absolved from guilt, for even if she, a woman, could have struck so shrewd a blow, it was not to her interest to kill a father who sided with her against her husband and was on the point of making a will in her favour.
Other arrests were made, Rupprecht’s maid reported that three troopers belonging to the regiment in garrison had called on her master the very day of the murder; one of them owed him money which he could not pay, and the others, it was thought, had joined him in trying to intimidate the usurer. But the case of these troopers, men who could handle the very weapon that did the deed, broke down on clear proof that they were elsewhere at the time of the murder. The one flaw in the otherwise acute investigation was that the sabres of all the troopers had not been examined before so much noise had been made about the murder. But from the first attention had been concentrated on axes, wielded by woodcutters, and the probable use of a sabre had been overlooked. After the troopers, two other callers had come, and Rupprecht had given them a secret interview. One proved to be the regimental master-tailor, who was seeking a loan and had brought with him a witness to the transaction. Their innocence also was clearly proved; and although many other persons were arrested they were in all cases discharged.
The murder of this Rupprecht has remained a mystery. The only plausible suggestion was that he had been murdered by some aggrieved person, some would-be borrower whom he had rejected, or some debtor who could not pay and thought this the simplest way of clearing his obligation. The authorities could not fix this on anyone, for Rupprecht made no record of his transactions; he could neither read nor write, and kept all his accounts “in his head.” Only on rare occasions did he call in a confidential friend to look through his papers when there was question of arranging them or finding a note of hand. No one but Rupprecht himself could have afforded the proper clue; and, as it was, he had led the police in the wrong direction.
Numerous murder mysteries have been contributed by American criminal records. Special interest attaches to the case of Mary Rogers, “the pretty cigar seller” of New York, who was done to death by persons unknown in 1840, because it formed the basis of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous story, “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” The scene of that story is Paris, but the murder was actually committed near New York. Mary Rogers had many admirers, but her character was good, her conduct seemingly irreproachable. She was supposed to have spent her last Sunday with friends, but was seen with a single companion late that afternoon at a little restaurant near Hoboken. As she never returned home her disappearance caused much excitement, but at length her body, much maltreated, was found in the water near Sybil’s Cave, Hoboken. Many arrests were made, but the crime was never brought home to anyone.
Poe’s suggested solution, the jealous rage of an old lover returned from sea, was no more than ingenious fiction. Among others upon whom suspicion fell was John Anderson, the cigar merchant in whose employ Mary Rogers was, and it was encouraged by his flight after the discovery of the murder. But when arrested and brought back, he adduced what was deemed satisfactory proof of an alibi. Anderson lived to amass enormous wealth, and about the time of his death in Paris in 1881 the evil reports of his complicity in the murder were revived, but nothing new transpired. It was said that in his later years Anderson became an ardent spiritualist, and that the murdered Mary Rogers was one among the many spirits he communed with.
The murder of Mary Rogers was not the only unsolved mystery of its class beyond the Atlantic. It was long antedated by that known as the Manhattan Well Mystery. This murder occurred as far back as 1799, when New York was little more than a village compared to its present size. The Manhattan Company, now a bank, had then the privilege of supplying the city with water. The well stood in an open field, and all passers-by had free access to it. One day the pretty niece of a respectable Quaker disappeared; she had left her home, it was said, to be privately married, and nothing more was seen of her till she was fished out of the Manhattan well. Some thought she had committed suicide, but articles of her dress were found at a distance from the well, including her shoes, none of which she was likely to have removed and left there before drowning herself. Her muff, moreover, was found in the water; why should she have retained that to the last? Suspicion rested upon the man whom she was to have married, and who had called for her in his sleigh after she had already left the house. This man was tried for his life, but the case broke down, and the murder has always baffled detection.
Later, in 1830, there was the mystery of Sarah M. Cornell, in which suspicion fell upon a reverend gentleman of the Methodist persuasion, who was acquitted. Again, in 1836, there was the murder of Helen Jewitt, which was never cleared up; and more recently that of the Ryans, brother and sister; while the murder of Annie Downey, commonly called “Curly Tom,” a New York flower-girl, recalls many of the circumstances of the murders in Whitechapel.
A great crime that altogether baffled the New York police occurred in 1870, and is still remembered as an extraordinary mystery. It was the murder of a wealthy Jew named Nathan, in his own house in Twenty-third Street. He had come up from the country in July for a religious ceremony, and slept at home. His two sons, who were in business, also lived in the Twenty-third Street house. The only other occupant was a housekeeper. The sons, returning late, one after the other, looked in on their father and found him sleeping peacefully. No noise disturbed the house during the night, but early next morning Mr. Nathan was found a shapeless mass upon the floor; he had been killed with brutal violence, and the weapon used, a ship carpenter’s “dog,” was lying close by the body besmeared with blood and grey hairs. The dead man’s pockets had been rifled, and all his money and jewellery were gone; a safe that stood in the corner of the bedroom had been forced and its contents abstracted.
Various theories were started, but none led to the track of the criminal. One of Mr. Nathan’s sons was suspected, but his innocence was clearly proved. Another person thought to be guilty was the son of the resident housekeeper, but that supposition also fell to the ground. Some of the police were of opinion that it was the work of an ordinary burglar; others opposed this view, on the ground that the ship carpenter’s “dog” was not a housebreaking tool. One ingenious solution was offered, and it may be commended to the romantic novelist; it was to the effect that Mr. Nathan held certain documents gravely compromising the character of a person with whom he had had business dealings, and that this person had planned and executed the murder in order to become repossessed of them. This theory had no definite support from known fact; but Mr. Nathan was a close, secretive man, who kept all the threads of his financial affairs in his own hands; and it was said that no one in his family, not even his wife, was aware what his safe held or what he carried in his pockets. It is worth noticing that this last theory resembles very closely the explanation suggested as a solution of the undiscovered murder of Rupprecht in Bavaria, which has been already described.
There are one or two striking cases in the records of Indian crime of murders that have remained undiscovered. Mr. Arthur Crawfurd[3] describes that of an old Marwari money-lender, which repeats in some particulars the cases of Rupprecht and Nathan. This usurer was reputed to be very wealthy. His business was extensive, all his neighbours were more or less in his debt, and, as he was a hard, unrelenting creditor, he was generally detested throughout the district.
He lived in a mud-built house all on the ground floor. In front was the shop where he received his clients, and in this room, visible from the roadway, was a vast deed-box in which he kept papers, bills, notes of hand, but never money. When he had agreed to make a loan and all formalities were completed, he brought the cash from a secret receptacle in an inner chamber. In this, his strong room, so to speak, which occupied one corner at the back of the house, he slept. In the opposite angle lived his granddaughter, a young widow, who kept house for him. He was protected by a guard of two men in his pay, who slept in an outhouse close by.
One night the granddaughter, disturbed by a strange noise in the old man’s sleeping place, rose, lit a lamp, and was on the point of entering the bedroom when the usurer appeared at the door, bleeding profusely from his mouth and nostrils; his eyes protruded hideously; he was clearly in the last extremity, and fell almost at once to the ground. The granddaughter summoned the watchmen, who only arrived in time to hear a few last inarticulate sounds as their master expired. It was seen afterwards at the post-mortem that he had been partially smothered, and subjected to great violence. His assailant must have knelt on him heavily, for the ribs were nearly all fractured and had been forced into the lungs.
The police arrived in all haste and made a thorough search of the premises. It was soon seen that a hole had been made from outside through the mud wall close by the old man’s bed. The orifice was just large enough to admit a man. There were no traces of any struggle save the blood, which had flowed freely and inundated the mattress. Strange to say, there had been no robbery. The money-lender’s treasure chamber was still secure, the lock intact, and all the money and valuables were found untouched: many bags of rupees, a tin case crammed with currency notes, and a package containing a considerable quantity of valuable jewellery. Nor had the deed-box in the shop been interfered with.
The perpetrators of this murder were never discovered. The police, hoping to entrap them in the not uncommon event of a return to the theatre of the crime, established themselves secretly inside the house, but not in the bedroom where the murder was accomplished. They were right in their surmise, but the design failed utterly through their culpable neglect. The bedroom, within a fortnight, was again entered, and in precisely the same way, while the careless watchers slept unconscious in the adjoining shop. The fair inference was that the murderers had returned hoping to lay hands on some of the booty which they had previously missed. But the old man’s treasure had been removed, and they went away disappointed and empty-handed, though unfortunately they escaped capture.
The same authority, Mr. Arthur Crawfurd, gives another case that belongs to the class of the New York murder of Mary Rogers
and our own Whitechapel murders. The body of a female was washed ashore upon the rocks below the foot of Severndroog, in the South Konkan district. The fact was reported to Mr. Crawfurd, who found the body of a fine healthy young Mahomedan woman, who had not been dead for more than a couple of hours. The only injury to be seen was a severe extended wound upon one temple, which must have bled profusely, but was not, according to the medical evidence, sufficient to cause death. It seemed probable that she had been stunned by it and had fallen in the water, to be drowned, or that she had been thrown from the cliffs above on to the rocks, and, becoming unconscious, had slipped into the sea. She had, in fact, been seen crossing the cliffs on the morning of her death, and was easily recognised as the wife of a fisherman who lived in a village hard by, the port of which was filled with small craft that worked coastwise with goods and passengers, the only traffic of those days.
The only arrests made were those of two Europeans, soldiers, one an army schoolmaster on his way up coast to Bombay, the other a sergeant about to be pensioned; and both had been travelling by a coast boat which was windbound a little below the fort. They had been landed in order to take a little exercise, and had been forthwith stopped by a crowd of suspicious natives, who charged them with the crime. Yet on examination no blood stains were found upon their clothes, and nothing indicative of a struggle; moreover, it was soon clearly proved that they had not been put ashore till 10 a.m., whereas the dead body had been picked up before 8 a.m. Further inquiry showed that they were men of estimable character. But nothing else was elucidated beyond a vague report that the woman’s husband had reason, or believed himself to have reason, to accuse her of profligacy and had taken this revenge.
Another more recent Indian murder went near to being classed with the undiscovered. That it was brought home to its perpetrators was due to the keen intelligence of a native detective officer, the Sirdar Mir Abdul Ali, of the Bombay police. This clever detective, of whom a biography has appeared, belonged to the Bombay police, and his many successes show how much the Indian police has improved of late years. The murder was known as the Parel case. On the morning of the 24th of November, 1887, a deal box was picked up on a piece of open marsh close to the Elphinstone Station at Parel. Near it was an ordinary counterpane. It was at first supposed that the box had been stolen from the railway station, and the matter was reported to the police. An officer soon reached the spot, and ascertained that the box, from which an offensive smell issued, was locked and fastened. On breaking it open the remains of a woman were found within, coiled up and jammed in tightly, and in an advanced stage of decomposition. The face was so much battered that its features were unrecognisable, but the dress, that of a Mahomedan, might, it was hoped, lead to identification. According to custom, the police gathered in thousands of people by beat of battaki, or drum, but no one who viewed the corpse could recognise the clothes. Moreover, there was no woman reported missing at the time from any house in Bombay.
Abdul Ali shrewdly surmised either that the woman was a perfect stranger or that she had been murdered at a distance, and the box containing her remains had been brought into Bombay to be disposed of without attracting attention. This box furnished the clue. Abdul Ali, following out his idea of the stranger visitor, had caused search to be made through the “rest houses,” or musafarkhanas of Bombay, and in one of these the box was identified as the property of a Pathan, named Syed Gool, who had but recently married an unknown young woman and had apparently deserted her. At least, it came out that he had suddenly taken ship for Aden, and had been accompanied by his daughter and a friend, but not by his wife. Moreover, witnesses were now prepared to swear that the clothes found on the corpse at Parel much resembled those commonly worn by Syed Gool’s young wife. The evidence was little more than presumptive, but the head of the Bombay police persuaded the Governor to telegraph to the Resident of Aden to look out for the three passengers and arrest them on landing. They were accordingly taken into custody and sent back to Bombay.
Even now the case would have been incomplete but for the confession of one of the parties—Syed Gool’s friend, who was known as Noor Mahomed. This man, a confederate, on arrival at Bombay, made a clean breast of the crime and was admitted as an approver; but for that the offence might never have been brought home. Syed Gool, it appeared, had come from Karachi only a little before, had put up at the musafarkhana of one Ismail Habib in Pakmodia Street, where he had presently married one Sherif Khatum, whom he met in this same “rest house,” and the whole party had taken up their residence in another house in the same street. Noor Mahomed went on to say that husband and wife soon quarrelled as to the possession of the latter’s jewels, and their differences so increased in bitterness that Syed Gool resolved to murder the woman. He effected his purpose, assisted by his friend, using a pair of long iron pincers, with which he compressed her windpipe till she died of suffocation. The rest of the crime followed a not unusual course: the packing of the corpse in a wooden box which had been made to Syed Gool’s order by a carpenter, and its removal in a bullock cart to the neighbourhood of the Elphinstone Station, where the murderers hired a man to watch it for a few pence during their temporary absence. But they had no intention of returning; indeed, they embarked at once on board the Aden steamer, and the man left in charge of the box took it home with him, where it remained till he was alarmed by the offensive smell already mentioned. Then he prudently resolved to get rid of it by removing it to the spot on which it was found.[4]
The tale of undiscovered murders can never be ended, and additions are made to it continually. In this country fresh cases crop up year after year, and it would take volumes to catalogue them all. I will mention but one or two more, merely to point the moral that the police are often at fault still, even in these latter days of enlightened research, where so much makes in favour of the law. Thus the Burton Crescent murder, in December, 1878, must always be remembered against the police. An aged widow, named Samuel, lived at a house in Burton Crescent, but she kept no servant on the premises, and took in a lodger, although she was of independent means. The lodger was a musician in a theatrical orchestra, away most of the day, returning late to supper. One evening there was no supper and no Mrs. Samuel, but on making search he found her dead body in the kitchen, lying in a pool of blood. The police summoned a doctor to view the corpse, and it was found that Mrs. Samuel had been battered to death with the fragment of a hat-rail in which many pegs still remained. The pocket of her dress had been cut off, and a pair of boots was missing, but no other property. Nothing could have happened till late in the afternoon, as three workmen, against whom there was apparently no suspicion, were in the house till then, and the maid who assisted in the household duties had left Mrs. Samuel alive and well at 4 p.m. Only one arrest was made, that of a woman, one Mary Donovan, who was frequently remanded on the application of the police, but against whom no sufficient evidence was forthcoming to warrant her committal for trial. The Burton Crescent murder has remained a mystery to this day.
So has that of Lieutenant Roper, R.E., who was murdered at Chatham on the 11th of February, 1881. This young officer, who was going through the course of military engineering, was found lying dead at the bottom of the staircase leading to his quarters in Brompton Barracks. He had been shot with a revolver, and the weapon, six-chambered, was picked up at a short distance from the body, one shot discharged, the remaining five barrels still loaded with ball cartridges. The only presumption was that the murderer’s object was plunder, personal robbery. Mr. Roper had left the mess at an earlier hour than usual, between 8 and 9 p.m., on the plea that he had letters to write home announcing his approaching arrival on short leave of absence. A brother officer accompanied him part of the way to Brompton Barracks, but left him to attend some entertainment, Roper declining to go at once, for the reason given, but promising to join him later.
The unfortunate officer was quite unconscious when found, and although he survived some forty minutes, he never recovered the power of speech, so that he could give no indication as to his assailant. A poker belonging to Mr. Roper was found by his side, and it was inferred that he had entered his room before the attack, and had seized the poker as the only instrument of self-defence within reach. Not the slightest clue was ever obtained which would help to solve this mystery; rewards were offered, but in vain, and the police had at last to confess themselves entirely baffled. Mr. Roper was an exceedingly promising young officer; he had but just completed his course of instruction with considerable credit, and he was said to have been in perfect health and spirits on the fatal evening, so that there was nothing whatever to support, and indeed everything to discredit, any theory of suicide.