The Press. — London, England, 1857-01-10 00:00:00

JANUARY 10, 1857. THE RAILWAY MURDER AT DUBLIN. Tun period has now arrived when the public ate entitled to ask for some authentic in formation about the course which the Go vernment has pursued in reference to the murder of the late Mr. LITTLE. The Times of Thursday, under its Dublin ;correspondence, seems to be of opinion that the authorities are completely baffled ; annl we can well under stand the anxiety felt by many lonely cashiers in various great towns of the empire who arc often till an advanced lhour of the night making up their money-parcels, and who are us liable to secret and undetected assassina tion as poor Mr. LITTLE. That there has been mismanagement in the whole inquiry is lamentably certain ; and, on a retrospective view of the whole case, we are surprised at the utter incompetency shown by the officials. It is impossible that public examination into the conduct of the Government can be prevented; and we know that most general discontent prevails on the question in all circles of society at Dublin. The subject is English, as well as Irish. The crime could be as easily repeated in London as at Dublin; and as English detectives were employed upon the case, we have a right to discuss the whole question from first to last. The building in which Mr. LITTLE was assassinated stands at the termini of the Midland Railway and the Royal Canal. Built of granite, pierced with few windows, its architectural aspect is at once gloomy and handsome, and its sombre massiveness suggests the idea of an enormous sepulchre. The internal arrangements of the station are in the usual style of great railway buildings. A winding stone staircase conducts to the corridor which traverses the upper floor. On turning to the right, after ascending the staircase, the visitor passes three or four rooms at either side, and sees a padlock loosely driven into the doorway of the last room at his right hand. On opening the door an apartment, about fourteen feet by twelve, pre sents itself to his view. It is lighted by two windows. A great bass mat is cast on the floor, exactly on the spot where the corpse of the murdered man was found. Large black patches discolour and darkly stain the mat all over, and are by a practised eye at once recog nised as human blood. By the mat and around the floor are torn and trampled en velopes, addressed to various officials of the railway. The room is unswept and uncleaned. It is lighted by two windows. That to the north was nailed down at the time of the murder, and it was through that window the carpenter entered on the morning when the body of Mr. Limn was discovered, the door of the apartment having then been locked. The other window looks to the west, towards the Phoenix-park, and over the plains of Kil dare, and along the western chain of the beautiful line of hills which add such pic turesque beauty to the landscapes around Dublin. The room, divested of its horrible associations, is light and cheerful, and entirely free from aught that would make it an appro priate scene for a dark tragedy. But a prac tised eye at once detects something which certainly calls for explanation. We said that the room is unswept and un cleaned, but it is not undisturbed. Marks along the floor and on the wall show that there has been some recent dismantling of the apart ment, and that fixtures have been removed. The cashier had provided for his safety, as he vainly thought. A very limited space was THE PRESS. assigned by him to those who came to transact business with him. A counter and a tall railing had been erected, the latter being so high that a Grenadier would have difficulty in overlooking it while standing at ease. Inside the railing was a large cashier's desk, and right through the centre of it was a gas jet, which lighted the apartment at night. The spot where the gas-pipe penetrated can still be seen in the flooring, but the table has been taken away, the counter has been removed, and the railing carried off! Now, why was the room thus disturbed? What possible object had the officials in thus dismantling the chamber? The inquiries we now put will occur to any one of sense on visiting the room ; and we know that some officials have expressed surprise at the way in which the standing testimony to the appre• hensions of the unfortunate cashier wore removed. We should like to know whether an exact model of the apartment was made prior to the removal of these fixtures. But other and more serious inquiries re main. " Private investigation " was decided upon by the authorities, and, in our experi ence, never did we hear of such a " private " inquiry. What the Government were doing, and saying, and suspecting, and thinking, was known to scores of families in Dublin. It was not a " private " investigation at all ; although the newspapers were not officially acquainted with the facts, a number of families in Dublin were kept furnished with the last authentic intelligence on the case. The public mind was cruelly poisoned, "privately," against one gentleman; and the officials are certainly to blame for their precipitate suspicions in one case, and their fatally slow apprehension in another instance. They are also much to blame for not having kept their own counsels with more secrecy. The wives, daughters, and sisters of various officials were briefed with the evidence, and one had only to go, at Dublin, to Mrs. Factotum General That, or to Miss Deputy Gossip the Other, or to any of their non-official relatives, in order to know what the authorities were doing. An arduous responsibility devolved on journalists, and it was not by the public press that the character of one ill-treated gentleman was aspersed. It is said, however, by the friends of the officials that there were peculiar facts which influenced them. It was, certainly, an unfor tunate circumstance that a predecessor of Mr. TATTLE was unjustly accused by the Midland Company of not having been faithful in his dealings. The person so accused brought an action for defamation against the company, and gained large damages. Such a circum stance, along with some other personal con siderations, helped to exaggerate the caution which the authorities pursued. Yet facts came out from time to time which should have made the authorities more prompt. Amongst these facts nothing was more remarkable than the finding of the bag of forty-six pounds in silver in the locomotive department. It was concealed in a hamper, and was dripping with wet. An order had been issued in the morning that certain tanks should be cleaned out, and the bag of money was taken by its hider and placed elsewhere for further removal at a convenient hour. Is it not strange that under such circumstances, along with several other suggestive facts (which we shall not now mention), Government made no arrest of a certain person ? We attach great importance to the anxiety of the murderer that the bag of silver should be secured. It proves that booty was his object. He had succeeded in taking away 3501. from Mr. LerTLE's room, as much. probably, as he was able to carry ; but the fact that he had left behind him (without removal) a large quantity of gold, made some persons adopt an ingenious, but unsound, theory that the murder was committed for the purpose of silencing Mr. LITTLE for ever about (alleged) irregular transactions. We believe, on the contrary, that it was a mercenary murder, and that the 27 no►fi swot f<n► u 's was the motive of the ferocious deed. Examined with scrutinising eye, there are several conclusions which are of great importance in this case. 1. The horrid act was obviously committed by a person familiar with Mr. Lirrix's hours and habits, and minutely acquainted with the internal arrangements of the railway. 2 There was a dreadful skill displayed in its commis sion, which proves it to have been the bloody work of sonic mind of sinister ingenuity. The murderer was obviously a man . of calculating brain, sagacious in anticipating consequences, and the means which he adopted were " diabo lically suited to his ends." 3. He must have been a person who had a right from his position to ask Mr. LITTLE to open his door, after it had been locked by the cautious cashier. 4. The careful hiding away of the bag of silver in the " locomotive department," which is about one Hundred and eighty yards from the building in which the murder took place, proves fami liarity with, and easy access to, the spot where the money was found. We believe that, in point of class, the mur derer was neither a gentleman nor a working man. We think that he belonged to the class commonly addressed as " Mr ," and that he was in such a condition of life as that 350/. would have been a capital to him. We believe that his daily course of life at the railway made him an ha'oitual frequenter of the "locomotive department" and the buildings in its imme diate vicinity. We think that, with proper skill and promptitude, there would be no difficulty in fixing with precision on a certain person, and saying with the awful voice of justice, " Thou art the man !" While COURVOISIER'S case was in the balance, guilt was positively brought home to him by the wife of a hotel-keeper at Leicester-square hearing of some of the evidence against him, and recollecting at once about a certain parcel intrusted to her keeping. Not long since, when a pseudo-baronet set up his claims to a title and estates in the west of England, the fact of his fraud and forgery was brought home by an engraver in Oxford street tele graphing to Sir FREDERIC THESIOER, after reading the account of the first day's trial in the Times. The publicity obtained by remands in this railway-murder case, had there been any public exa►uinatiou, would probably have sup plied the necessary evidence, and we fear (from what has reached us) that there has been ex treme maladroitness on the part of the officials. We must remind the Attorney-General for Ire land that this is the third dreadful murder, within a brief space of time, whose perpetra tors have not been brought to justice ! No one has yet been punished for the murders of Mrs. KELLY and Mr. CALLAHAN, and the man who savagely killed Mr. LITTLE still coolly walks about his business at the Midland Rail way station. PERSONS WRONGFULLY CONVICTED.—The Rev. John Davis, the Ordinary of Newgate, has just fur nished us with the sad history of a certain John Markham, who, when walking in Oxford-street, was mistaken for James Anderson, the man who is now under examination at the Mansion-house upon the charge of having defrauded the City banks. Mark ham and Atwell's brother were tried together for forgery. Markham was convicted, and sentenced to four years of penal servitude, while his companion was acquitted. It was a case of mistaken identity—the lawyers and police had got bold of the wrong man. The poor creature was obliged to sell every little article of furniture he possessed in the world to provide for his unsuccess ful defence. His wife was reduced to the deepest distress, and the man himself suffered actual im prisonment for six months. When the matter came to be looked into the detectives found that they really had made a mistake, and that John Markham was not James Anderson. The result we give in Mr. Davis's own words By the exertions of the late Under• Sheriff Rose, whom I gladly assisted, such evidence was placed before the Secretary of State that, after its careful examination by the detective police, the unhappy John Markham was, with Mr. Mullen's consent, on the part of the bankers of London, parduatil by Sir George Grey, and liberated. Mr. Davis concludes by recommending tba case to the favourable consideration of the Association of Bankers, and no doubt, in the present unsatisfactory state of the law upon this point, it is to them only that John Markham can look for redress.—Times. 1 -