The Montgomery advertiser., 1902-11-02

took off her nnistress's effects end left the room: forgetting the Incident for the time. ! That nightsthe mistress was murdered In her bed and all of her jewels were stolen. London was convulsed for nine days by the tragedy. but after long and thorough investigation the police were forced to admit their defeat. The murderer could not be discovered.
 Several years later the maid was walk ing along one of the streets of Paris when two men passed her. looking at her intently for moment and smiled. As they went by she heard one say to the other with laugh: There's leg for a stocking and a foot for a shoe!'
 The maid, who seems to have been a girl of some courage and wit. turned around began to joke with the men quite ingenuously and succeeded in bring ing them back to talk to her. Suddenly, pretending to be insulted by the remarks of one of them, she declared she would have them arrested. and leaving them laughing at her, she hurried to a nearby gendarme. To the policemen the girl said in broken French: "I want you to arrest those two men for murder Strange to say, the gendarme seized the fellows and took them to the police bu- reau, where the maid told her story. The men were detained, an investigation was made and they were finally forced to ad- init that years before they had been con- cealed in the Englshwoman's bedroom while the maid had tried on the stock lngs and shoes and that they had after ward committed the murder and robbery
 In the great list of undiscovered crimes there are very few indeed in which the police have even come near the solution of the mystery. The double Ryan mur- der of 1878, which was a peculiarly horri. ble and widely discussed crime, was never solved, although it was committed in q crowded tenement house. The murder in 1885 of the Chinese restaurant keeper Ching Ong in lower New York, was one of the most atrocious butcheries in the history of crime in this city, and was committed in broad daylight in the open shop at the foot of a flight of area steps on the street.. above which a constant stream of people was passing, almost literally in view of the corpse. Yet the murderer was never found. Benjamin Nathan. a wealthy business man of New York, was killed in his bedroom in 1SiC in this city. and his family reached him surely not more than a minute after the death blow was struck. Many recent murders remain a mystery, and to name half dozen cas@ of undiscovered crimes
 
 many sensations of the last year the authors of which are free men today.
 Even in cases where evidence seems to overpoweringly convict prisoner, it Is strangely hard, very often, for the detective force to obtain that connec- ting link which permits the changing of the evidence.
 In 1886 the murder of Helen Jewett, a notorious woman of great beauty and popularity among a certain class of ad- mirers aroused tremendous excitement in New York and seemed indubitably to in- volve a wild young man who was last seen with her and who visited her on the night that she met her death. One of the servants testified at his trial-for he was arrested, charged with the crime that she had heard a groan in Helen Jewetts rooms and had immediately afterward seen a figure wearing a Span ish cloak and a glazed cap. such as the prisoner affected, move quitely down the hall and out of the back door. A great mass of circumstantial evidence was secured against the young man but a connected link was not to be found and he was acquitted.
 The murder of Mary Rogers, the famous and beautiful attraction at Anderson s Broadway tobacco shop, in 1841, resulted in the arrest or d IIldH WllH WIOlh SilC was last seen alive, and an apparently overwhelming amount of evidence was procured agalnst him. There was no Lecoq or Holmes, however, to weld the chain and the man was released. No one else was found who might have com mitted the crime, and the case ended in the air.
 The deductions of the detectives of fic- tion receive little credence in real life. although they are amusing enough and the astonishing results obtained by them. unfortunately, have hardly parallel in the history of actual crimes. The police of all countries find great many crimes whose knots they are unable to unite. and there are great many persons who say that when thoroughly clever man commits a crime carefully there is little chance of his being discovered unless by some of those strange instances of chance that have been referred to.
 The police run in a rut more or less. it is true, but what comes within the region of their past experiences or teach ings they are well able to cope with. But all criminals are not good enough to scatter clews around before their de- parture from the scenes of their crimes, and very many occasions see the police, in spite of their assertions to the con- trary, baked at me very outset ol their investigations. It is possible that the novelists are right and that this may be avoided by the consideration Of the most prosaic and trivial details and the as- sumption that the impossible is what one should take for granted?" In London there is a. man in jail now simply be- cause he was foolish enough to put his thumb on a dusty window sill. In that case there is surely one worthy follower of the book detective in the English capi- tai today. The schemes of the detectives of fiction do not seem so far drawn when we regard this instance of keen-witted investigation. Perhaps no one would be any the worse for it, then, If we had A little more of such things in our police researches everywhere. That is' no one would be the worse for it except the criminals.