DIARY WHICH LED TO THE SCAFFOLD
SIGNATURE OF THE REAL SIR ROGER.
SIGNATURE OF THE CLAIMANT.
It appears that sixteen or seventeen years ago an elderly gentleman named James Whalley was living at Leominster. He passed his days at the home of a man named Thomas, a petty municipal functionary, leading a decidedly frugal, not to say miserly, life. Whalley had two children, Emma and Henry Whalley Priestman, whom he educated and lived with until about the year 1877, when he quarrelled with his daughter and left her and her brother at Hereford, he himself going to live at Thomas's cottage at Leominster. On the seventh of May 1881, he died, leaving between fifty and sixty thousand pounds. A will was produced, bearing the old man's indubitable signature, as well as the signature of witnesses, in which the bulk of the fortune was left to Thomas, the son being cut off with £5,000. Everything seemed plain and above-board, but certain circumstances were suspicious, and the document was contested. This famous will, of which a photograph has been specially taken for the present article, was brought into court and submitted to the scrutiny of experts, accustomed to detect the most minute flaws in the work of the cleverest forger. They were obliged to give it as their opinion that the signatures were all genuine—the document itself being in the hand of one of the attesting witnesses. But when it came to examining the will carefully as a whole, it was found by one expert that there was cause for suspicion. The attesting clauses were rather curiously cramped at the side, giving from their position the idea to the expert's mind that they had been added subsequently, with a view to accommodating the signature. The signature itself, too, had a date under it, a peculiarity of the testator's in writing a letter, but never found elsewhere. The lines varied, too, as though the writer had begun in the belief that there had been ample room. Everything now seemed to point to the fact of a will written over and around a signature, and not to a signature naturally written at the bottom of a will. Meanwhile, there had appeared in different parts of the paper certain odd marks and formations. Early in the inquiry the will had been glazed and framed; and now left to itself the paper, as it were, began to speak and declare itself other than what it seemed. Soon these marks and formations took the shape of words and fragments of words, and by a powerful magnifying glass could even be read. It was now sufficiently clear for the expert to declare that these were hollows and shades caused by pencil marks made by one of the attesting witnesses and principal legatee, and afterwards rubbed out.
MURDERER'S OFFER TO ACT AS DETECTIVE.