She was recognised from the portraits in half a dozen parts of the country at the same time, but it was not until a fortnight later that she was positively identified at Oban.
The anti-climax of the farce was reached, when, a few days later, she paid a visit to the London office of her solicitor, and was attended from the station by a string of motor-cars each containing the special representative of a London paper.
PORTRAIT SENT BY WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY
By kind permission of Mr. Thorne-Baker and “The Daily Mirror”
Two years later she was found guilty of having defrauded a poor landlady of a large sum of money at the time when everyone had accepted her great “expectations” at her own valuation.
There have been frequent failures in the use of bloodhounds to detect a criminal, but this must be attributed, in part at all events, to the circumstance that the dogs have often not been employed until every other means has failed.
In the Luard case, for instance, in 1908, bloodhounds were set upon the track of the supposed assailant of the murdered woman, but the trial was not made immediately after the discovery of the crime. The scent had become faint, and it was therefore not surprising that the dogs, after starting hotly upon the trail, soon lost it again.
The writer is indebted to Major Richardson for the accompanying photograph of his trained bloodhound, “Pathan,” and for his kind permission to quote the graphic description of actual man hunts from his fascinating book upon the subject.[1]
“On one occasion, when searching for the body of a woman, I used two collies and a bloodhound. It was summer, and the police, after patrolling the entire countryside, had narrowed the search down to a mountain covered with a dense wood and undergrowth of rhododendron bushes. It happened in mid-summer, and the day was very hot. The collies worked industriously for almost two hours, keeping well ahead, but after that time they began to flag, and soon refused to leave my heel. The bloodhound, on the contrary, continued persistently to search ahead of me all through the hottest part of the day, until the woman’s body was found on the top of the mountain.