The Wallaces, husband and wife, have never been arrested for the alleged murder of a lady at Brompton.
The murderer of Harriet Buswell, who was found dead in a bedroom in a house in Great Coram-street, is still at large.
Mrs. Samuels, an old lady whose head was battered in by a hat rail at a house in Burton-crescent, her body being found in the kitchen by a lodger, is another case which demonstrates but too clearly an escape from justice. A woman named Mary Donovan was arrested on suspicion, but after one or two magisterial examinations she was discharged.
Then again, more recently, we have the Euston-square mystery, as it was termed. An old lady, of eccentric habits, named Miss Hacker, took lodgings in Euston-square. She was missing for a year or more, when by the merest accident, her body was found in the cellar of the house in question. Suspicion fell upon a servant girl, named Hannah Dobbs, She was tried at the Central Criminal Court and acquitted.
It would be manifestly unjust to allege that the jury were not quite right in arriving at the conclusion they did. Nevertheless, it was clearly established that the ill-fated woman had met with foul play, and her murderer or murderers have escaped the doom they so justly merited.
When we add to this list the number of murders in which the bodies of the victims are never discovered at all, an appalling list of horrible atrocities is presented to the imagination; indeed, it is hardly possible to calculate the number of crimes of this nature which are annually committed in the metropolis and other parts of the United Kingdom.
It is quite time that some more stringent measures should be taken by the executive.
It may startle many when we declare, according to the Government statistics, that, during 1856 and 1865, one thousand eight hundred and seventy-five murders were unpunished and unaccounted for. But the Home Office publications disclose some serious discrepancies when the number of murders found by coroners’ juries are collated with the number of murders brought to punishment.
Speaking broadly, and assuming for the nonce that each murder has been committed by a different individual, it would appear that more than four-fifths of the murders pass unpunished.
This calculation, of course, only relates to crimes of this nature which are discovered. The undiscovered ones would swell the list to an extent altogeter incalculable.