The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-08-02
THE NATHAN MURDER.

From the n. Y. Tribune
If the police have not succeeded in cap
turing the Twenty-third street murderer, it is
not for lack of volunteered advice. Most of
the newspapers have invented theories which
if not exactly ingenious are certainly striking.
One journal proves to its own satisfaction in
one column that there must have been at least
two persons implicated in the deed, and in
another that there could not possibly have
been more than one. A reporter of a physio-
logical turn of mind has a theory that the
murderer struck his victim twice with his fists,
and then made use of at least two instruments
to infict the fatal wounds. Another, after
long reflection upon the problem how the
assassin could have got into the house, arrives
at the sagacious conclusion that he must have
climbed up the columns of the street door,
and crawled through the second-story window.
Another still drops some mysterious ute
RANGES about a blood-bespattered saw, to
which he hopes the police will give a very
particular scrutiny. OF those theories which
designate any particular person as the pro-
bable criminal-and more than one unfortu-
nate man has been publicly pointed at by
suspicious reporters-there is, of course,
nothing for us to say. Conjectures of this
kind are grossly cruel and unjust. They rest
upon no sufficient ground, and they may do
irreparable and awful injury to the innocent.
The difficulty of the present case is, as we
said on Saturday, that the mode in which the
murder was committed is SO evident, and yet
the traces of the culprit are so slight. II
there were any obscurity about the motive for
the deed, any question about the instrument,
any reasonable perplexity in understanding
how the assassin entered or left the house, we
might hope that in the course of the solution
of these problems we should light upon some
clue that would lead to the detection of the
murderer. But it is easy to see how the
deed was done, and why it was done:
We can almost trace the guilty man
step by step, and yet we find no traces
but q few finger marks that canno be iden-
titled, and a shipwrights tool which nobody
about the house had ever seen before. There
is really no valid objection to the currently
accepted theory that the murderer concealed
himself in the house during the day, aud it is
not necessary to suppose that he was very
well acquainted with the construction of the
house or the habits of the inmates. On the
contrary, it is clear that on one important
point he was not acquainted with Mr.. Ma
than's habits, for it was not that gentleman's
custom to keep money in the safe which
aroused the murderers c~upidity. 1t is noto-
riously a common practice of thieves to
sneak into q house by day or in the early
evening, and hide themselves until all is
quiet; q very large proportion of the bur-
glaries annually reported are committed in
this way; and the condition in which Mr..
Natnan 3 mousse WAS lett last thursday
afforded a thief every opportunity he could
desire for an operation of this kind. The
ladies of the family were all absent; the gem
tlemen came in late; the door was left unfast-
sned even by q night-latch; and workmen
were continually going in and out. There is
some difficulty about the supposition of the
murderer's getting out again by the front
door; but it is more apparent than real. Mr..
Washington Nathan ~testifies that he came
home at 1870, and locked, bolted, and
chained the front door. The murder, ae-
cording to the medical examination, was pro-
badly committed between / and 8 O'Clock.
The officer patrolling Twenty-third street
d tried the front and basement doors of Mr..
Eathan's house several times in the course of
the early morning-at 1870, at 4.3O, and
again about 6, only a few moments before
the murder was discovered, and each time he
found the doors fast. Yet when Mr.. Wash
ingtoA Nathan ran down to call the police, he
is reported to have declared that he found
the. front door ''partly open" If this was
the case, the murderer must have waited in
the house at least three hours after commit
ting the crime, and then gone out into the
busy street by broad daylight. OF course
no murderer would run such a risk, and
- $3.50. . fL"#NA fH . "A"