Charles Peace, or The Adventures of a Notorious BurglarAnonymous
General
Charles Peace, or The Adventures of a Notorious Burglar
Anonymous
Burglars -- England -- London -- Biography; Murderers -- England -- London -- Biography; Peace, Charles Frederick, 1832-1879
We have endeavoured to give as faithful a picture as possible of the
treatment of prisoners while in gaol awaiting their trial.
Many an innocent man has to put up with all the indignities we have
described, and has been forced to suffer in silence, for no one seems
to have much sympathy for persons who have the misfortune to be
wrongfully accused.
They must get out of the scrape as best they can.
The public, however, every now and then awakens to the fact that a
great wrong has been done, and then an outcry is raised, and it goes
to sleep again.
We have an instance of this in the case of a clergyman who had the
misfortune to be suspected of having committed what is known as the
Coram-street murder.
This case is of a remarkable and exceptional character, and
incontestably points to what might be termed spasmodic sympathy or
charity, evinced on many occasions towards foreigners by a certain
section of the people of this country, who deem it expedient to close
their eyes to far more deserving cases of suffering endured by their
own countrymen, while they are lavish in their subscriptions to
recompense a foreigner.
Many of our readers will doubless remember the particulars connected
with the tragedy in Coram-street.
On Wednesday, Dec. 25th, 1873, a dreadful murder was discovered to
have been committed at 12, Great Coram-street, Brunswick-square, the
victim being a woman named Harriet Buswell.
She had been seen on the previous night at the “Count Cavour” hotel,
in Leicester-square, with a foreign gentleman.
The woman and her male companion left the hotel together.
It appeared that two persons, one of whom was the deceased, called at
a greengrocer’s shop near to Coram-street.
On the Christmas morning she was found by the landlady of the house in
which she resided dead on her bed, with her throat cut under the ear,
severing the jugular vein, and there was another deep gash lower down.
Life was quite extinct.
The door of the room in which she was found was locked on the outside,
and the key taken away; but, strange to say, there were no marks of
blood on the door, nor on the walls or bed, as if the blood had
spurted from the wounds.
The face of the victim was perfectly calm, but on the forehead there
was the distinct print of a thumb, and a little lower down the mark of
the palm of the hand in blood, as if, after the first wound had been
inflicted, the poor creature had been held down by the left hand while
the second wound was inflicted.
The appearance of the man who went home with the unfortunate woman was
described by the inmates of the house, but he left without any one
observing him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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