In the matter of crime, the period of Mr. Vincent’s Commissionership was remarkable for several murders, fifteen of which occurred in the year 1893. One of the most sensational crimes was the “double murder” at Walkeshwar in April 1897, when a Bhattia merchant and his sister were killed in a house near the temple by a gang of six men, all of whom were traced and arrested by the police after a protracted and difficult investigation. Five of the culprits were eventually hanged. The police were also successful in 1893 in breaking up two gangs of _dhatura_-poisoners, who had robbed a large number of people. In 1895 Superintendent Brewin, with the help of the Sirdar Abdul Ali and his detectives, successfully unravelled a case of poisoning, perpetrated with the object of defrauding the Sun Life Assurance Company. A Goanese named Fonseca insured the life of a friend, Duarte, with the company and shortly afterwards administered to him a dose of arsenic, which he had obtained from a European employed in Stephens’ stables, who used the poison for killing rats. Prior to insuring Duarte’s life, Fonseca had him medically examined by two Indian Christian doctors of Portuguese descent, well-known in Bombay, who made a very perfunctory examination. Subsequently, when Fonseca asked them to certify the cause of Duarte’s death, they acted even more negligently and gave a certificate of death from natural causes without any inquiry. Certain facts, however, aroused the suspicions of the manager of the Assurance Company; the police were called in; and in due course Fonseca was tried and convicted of murder. The records of 1893 mention the arrest and conviction of a leading member of the famous _Sonari Toli_ or Golden Gang of swindlers, which for some time made a lucrative livelihood by fleecing the more credulous section of the public. But in the case of ordinary theft and robbery the police were less successful in recovering stolen property than in previous years, the percentage of recovery for the five years ending in 1894 being only 48 and declining to 35 in 1898. Much of this crime was committed by professional bad characters and members of criminal tribes belonging to the Deccan and other parts of the Bombay Presidency. The prevalence of robbery and theft was viewed with such dissatisfaction by the Bombay Government that in 1894 they urged the Commissioner to make use of the provisions of chapter VIII of the Criminal Procedure Code, which had been applied with much success in up-country districts. Unfortunately the Bombay magistracy required as a rule far more direct evidence of bad livelihood than was procurable by the urban police, and any regular use of that chapter of the Code was therefore declared by the Commissioner to be impracticable.