Mysteries of Police and Crime, Vol. 1 (of 3)Griffiths, Arthur
History
Mysteries of Police and Crime, Vol. 1 (of 3)
Griffiths, Arthur
Crime; Police
He lived in a mud-built house all on the ground floor. In front was the
shop where he received his clients, and in this room, visible from the
roadway, was a vast deed-box in which he kept papers, bills, notes of
hand, but never money. When he had agreed to make a loan and all
formalities were completed, he brought the cash from a secret receptacle
in an inner chamber. In this, his strong room, so to speak, which
occupied one corner at the back of the house, he slept. In the opposite
angle lived his granddaughter, a young widow, who kept house for him. He
was protected by a guard of two men in his pay, who slept in an outhouse
close by.
One night the granddaughter, disturbed by a strange noise in the old
man's sleeping place, rose, lit a lamp, and was on the point of entering
the bedroom when the usurer appeared at the door, bleeding profusely
from his mouth and nostrils; his eyes protruded hideously; he was
clearly in the last extremity, and fell almost at once to the ground.
The granddaughter summoned the watchmen, who only arrived in time to
hear a few last inarticulate sounds as their master expired. It was seen
afterwards at the _post-mortem_ that he had been partially smothered,
and subjected to great violence. His assailant must have knelt on him
heavily, for the ribs were nearly all fractured and had been forced into
the lungs.
The police arrived in all haste and made a thorough search of the
premises. It was soon seen that a hole had been made from outside
through the mud wall close by the old man's bed. The orifice was just
large enough to admit a man. There were no traces of any struggle save
the blood, which had flowed freely and inundated the mattress. Strange
to say, there had been no robbery. The money-lender's treasure chamber
was still secure, the lock intact, and all the money and valuables were
found untouched: many bags of rupees, a tin case crammed with currency
notes, and a package containing a considerable quantity of valuable
jewellery. Nor had the deed-box in the shop been interfered with.
The perpetrators of this murder were never discovered. The police,
hoping to entrap them in the not uncommon event of a return to the
theatre of the crime, established themselves secretly inside the house,
but not in the bedroom where the murder was accomplished. They were
right in their surmise, but the design failed utterly through their
culpable neglect. The bedroom, within a fortnight, was again entered,
and in precisely the same way, while the careless watchers slept
unconscious in the adjoining shop. The fair inference was that the
murderers had returned hoping to lay hands on some of the booty which
they had previously missed. But the old man's treasure had been removed,
and they went away disappointed and empty-handed, though unfortunately
they escaped capture.
The same authority, Mr. Arthur Crawfurd, gives another case that belongs
to the class of the New York murder of Mary Rogers
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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