Darlington & Richmond Herald. — 1873-09-20 (Darlington, Durham, England)

THE SCENE OF THE MURDER— an apartment of about twelve by fourteen feet in extent. It is furnished quite as comfortably as the majority of similar cottages in the neighbourhood. The kitchen fireplace has a boiler on one side and an oven on the other. On the latter stands a kettle and teapot, where they probably stood to keep warm for Saturday's evening meal. The fender and fire-irons are clean. There is evidence everywhere, if not of strict cleanliness, of housewifely indnatry, and even of thrift. A. kitchen table had Lai on it the produce of Saturday's marketing--fish, potatoes, and groceries. The back of tne door by which you have entered is chalked with private memoranda of the accounts owing to the mistress for ginger beer; and the door of a small pantry opening out of the lower room below the staircase bears similar hieroglyphs, understood only by the person who made them before her awful end. The walls are hung with framed prints, coloured woodcuts from Germany of the battles of Metz and Sedan, a newer and gaudier picture intended to represent Our Saviour and the Holy Virgin Mother; some blotches of gaudy colour, purporting to pourtray junior members of the Royal Family of England; two photographs—one of the man Charles Dawson, apparently when about two and twenty years of age, and the other a girl of Afteen or sixteen, said to be his ill-fated paramour. Three small framed looking-glasses are also on the walls, and a large engraving of A Mother and Child; while on the mantel is a strange gathering of objects—drinking glasses, drinking" flasks labelled "Port" and "Irish Whisky," a pack of well-thumbed playing cards and suspended over these, two pistols, one loaded, and the other not. The quantity of weapons in the room is somewhat indicative of the violent nature of its recent tenant. Besides these pistols, the ollice have already removed from the apartment two fowling pieces which hung from crooks in the ceiling; a six-chamber revolver, which had been thrust in between the mattress and bed; boxes of gun-caps, lead bullets, and gun - cartridges; a large h-:zel bludgeon, a dark lantern, and a lead. loaded morgan rattler. More peaceful tastes were indicated by the presence of a bird cage ever the window, in which a canary sang on Sunday morning, while the hand which had tended it was cold in death; a bunch of plaintain-seed was carefully tied up ready for use not far off; and some bunches of dried rosemary, horehound, and other herbs, also hang around. The floor is of lime and gravel. A servant's clothes chest, two or three chairs, and a tent bedstead completed the furniture of the apartment. The only literary pabulum in the house was of the low London class--a copy of the current Weekly Budget, and a bunch of dirty ballads, among which the most frequently handled appeared to be one entitled " Can you wonder at Crime?" There is something painfully suggestive in the thought that the victim of this most foul murder may recently have been singing the lines thus set forth on the tattered slip :  "I am sure you will own, Mr. Ball, sir, Temptation is hard to resist; Look at our poor needle girls, sir, Trying their best to exist. Can you wonder at the!r prostitution, When blood.suebing firms barely give Enough to ward off destitution,— A girl, though she's poor, she must live: Th-1 poor needle girl, God defend her! With feelings as keen and as tender As yonr proud city ladies, reme nb(nl Mr. Bali, can you wonder at crime ?"  It was in 'this room, Dr: Easby, on Saturday night, when called in by the police, found Blartha Addison lying bruised and dead; and it was here that, on Monday afternoon, a