New Britain herald., 1926-11-24
SEES WILLIE STEVENS
 AS PATHETIC FIGURE
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 times have l thought of it. That night when my mother went away and never came back alive. While slept peacefully that night her body was lying beside the man she loved under the lonely crabapple tree. l must not think of it. But Willie Stevens recital of what he said went on that night in the Hall home brought it all back to me. Poor Will lie Stevens, 10 be mixed up in all this mess. Still. sometimes l wonder about him.
 To the newspapermen he is queer Willie Stevens with the funny stare and the simple looking face. They write reams and reams about his pe- culiar appearance-the great shock of coarse, curly hair; the heavy low crng eye brows; the walrus mus tache, bristly and heavy; the queer squint behind those thick-lensed glasses.
 It seems rather funny, under the circumstances, that l should feel sorry for any member of the Ste vens famly-but I do. l think he is d pathetic figure. And he is intelli- gent in spite of what most people think. It hardly seems possible that he would harm anyone, but it's hard to tell what anyone would do under some circumstances.
 Willie is awfully generous. Mrs. Hall used to give him about $500 a day for spending money. Of course 1t was his own money. He had quite q sum left 10 him by his mother and I know he was angered when Dr.. Hall was made eXecutor. Whenever he didn't think he had enough money from Mrs. Hall, he used to ask Mr. Hall for some, and as far as l know he was never refused any amount he sought.
 He'd spend almost every penny of it on the children, buying them toys and candy and almost anything they wanted. Naturally, they were very fond of him although they used to rag him unmercifully the way children will. He'd just grin in that empty way of his.
 Some of the parents didn't like him much. l remember one case where for several days he kept buy ing all manners of gifts for a little girl and when her mother asked her who gave them to her she said "Billy".
 The mother thought she meant a friend of her husbands but when she learned that it was Willie Stevens she was dreadfully alarmed and warned the child never to go near him again.
 But no child ever was harmed by Willie. as far as anyone ever knew.
 They say Willie had one great love affair-a young Hungarian girl. He would go to her house early in the morning, clean up, do the er- rands and even help cook the din- ner for the family. No one knows whether Willie ever told the girl he loved her. The chances are he never did. When she died, they say, Willie began 10 act queerer than ever.
 This fingerprint business is too complicated for me. When is flngerprint not a fingerprint. and why? That is one of the important points in the case, but it certainly is confusing, and I wouldn't be sur prsed that the jurors, too are con- fused by all this contradictory testi- mony of experts.
 Police authorities admit that there are no two fingerprints alike, so why should there be so much hullabaloo about determining whether or not it is Willie Stevens fingerprint on the card found near Dr. Halls body? To me 1t seems like a lot of unneces- sary quibbling.
 Of course, one of the points of the Hall Stevens lawyers is that this card is not necessarily the one found near the body, and there are several ways Willie's fingerprints might have got on this card. They make lot of the history of the card
 Personally I don't know what to think. But it certainly seems strange that recognized experts can't agree on things they ought to know about.
 I try to be fair in my judgment of the case, but it seemed to me that the prosecutions expert, MT. Faurot, certainly ought to know more about than anybody else In the country. He introduced the system in the United States 20 years ago, and that has been his speciality ever since. He was positive in his identi- hcation of Willie Stevens finger prints, and he was backed up by two other experts.
 I don't understand how the de- fense can charge that the visiting card fingerprint might be a deliber- ate fraud on the part of the prose- cution. I am sure that nobody con- sec innocent persons convicted. AS for myself, I would rather go on being haunted by the mystery of my m others terrible death than 10 see Mrs. Hall and her two brothers punished for a crime they didn't commit