This lad of fifteen attempted to murder a little boy of six. He met the boy in the streets, took him to a lonely place, and there savagely attacked him. The child succeeded in escaping from the homicidal maniac of fifteen, who later on was arrested and charged at the police-court.
There, when it became a question of the boy's sanity, a circumstance was narrated to the magistrate which threw a lurid light on the case.
A year previously the boy had taken his little sister of four for a walk. Two hours later he returned to his home saying that the child had fallen into the canal and was drowned.
Search was made, and the body of the child was found in the water. But to get there she had had to force her body through some broken palings, and portions of her clothing were found on this side of them.
The tragedy passed at the time as an accident. It was supposed the child in childish heedlessness had got through the palings and fallen in.
There is no doubt in the minds of those who knew the children that the little girl was deliberately thrust into the canal by her then fourteen-year-old brother. The boy was a homicidal maniac. His one idea was to take life. After he had been taken to an asylum many things came to light. Other children came forward and told how he had suddenly seized them in quiet places, and how, terrified by his strange look and his violent actions, they had struggled and escaped, and fled from him in terror.
The piano is being played in this big schoolroom, and some fifty little girls are taking part in the musical drill, which is part of their course of instruction. Many of them are pretty and neatly dressed, but there is a strange, uncanny look in some of the faces. Yet they are dangerous, requiring on the part of their teachers the utmost vigilance. Some of them become furiously angry in a moment, and if a schoolfellow is the cause of their anger will burst into fits of uncontrollable rage and threaten vengeance. Others are cunning and wait for their opportunity.
One of these girls, annoyed at having to mind a baby sister in what she considered her playtime, took it out with her, went some distance from home, and left the mite under a dark railway arch near a piece of waste ground. Then she came back and said that while she was out walking a big woman had snatched the baby and run away with it.
Fortunately, some one passing the arch soon afterwards heard a child cry, went in and found the baby, and was taking it to the police-station when she met the mother, who had gone in search of it.
The girl had stated that it was on the waste ground that the woman had attacked her, and this led the mother to search in that direction.