The interesting feature of such confessions from a legal point of view is that, no matter how circumstantial they may be, they are not usually of themselves sufficient under our law to warrant a conviction. The admission or confession of a defendant needs legal corroboration. This corroboration is often very difficult to find, and frequently cannot be secured at all. This provision of the statutes is doubtless a wise one to prevent hysterical, suicidal, egotistical, and semi-insane persons from meeting death in the electric chair or on the gallows, but it often results in the guilty going unpunished. Personally, I have never known a criminal to _confess_ a crime of which he was innocent. The nearest thing to it in my experience is when one criminal, jointly guilty with another and sure of conviction, has drawn lots with his pal, lost, confessed, and in the confession exculpated his companion. In the police organization of almost every large city there are a few men who are genuinely gifted for the work of detection. Such an one was Petrosino, a great detective, and an honest, unselfish, and heroic man, who united indefatigable patience and industry with reasoning powers of a high order. The most thrilling evening of my life was when my wife and I listened before a crackling fire in my library to Joe’s story of the Van Cortlandt Park murder, the night before I was going to prosecute the case. Sitting stiffly in an arm-chair, his great, ugly moon-face expressionless save for an occasional flash from his black eyes, Petrosino recounted slowly and accurately how, by means of a single slip of paper bearing the penciled name “Sabbatto Gizzi, P. O. Box 239, Lambertville, N. J.,” he had run down the unknown murderer of an unknown Italian stabbed to death in the park’s shrubbery. The paper contained neither the name of the criminal nor his victim, but by means of this slender clue he had gone to Lambertville and found an Italian who had identified the deceased as a man who had left Lambertville for New York in the company of another Italian named Strollo. Petrosino interviewed Strollo, who admitted the trip but denied any knowledge of his companion’s death. He had, he said, turned him over to his brother, for whom Strollo had been searching.