Denton and Haughton Examiner, etc. — 1879-05-17 (Denton, Greater Manchester, England)

REMARKABLE CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE CASE.  THE OULTON HALL MURDER.  At the York Assizes John D'Arcy has been condemned to death for the murder of an old man, Metcalf, who was lodge-keeper at Calton Hall. The peculiarity of the trial was that the evidence Was purely circumstantial. No one had seen him commit the murder. All that was certain was that the old man was barbarously murdered; that he was found with his skull fractured; and that some money and his watch were missing. The prisone-, who wandered about the country round Leeds mending clocks, was seen just outside the lodge gates by two or three boys, on the 4th of March, shortly before the time at which Metcalf must have been murdered. A witness who was passing the lodge heard Metcalf screamirig and crying, "Oh, don't murder me." Two or three men went with this witness to the house, and, looking through a back window, they saw a man with his back to them unlocking a chest of drawers. They 'did not recognite him, but they were clear that he wore clothes similar to those of the prisoner. It will strike every one as strange that three able-bodied Yorkshiremen did not enter the house and seize the man, but that they quietly suffered him to escape. The excuse of the valorous rustics of Oulton is that he had a poknr in hit hand, and that they thought it was a pistol, and feared they would get the worst of it. Some coins of the same value as those in a bag belonging to the old mat were found on the prisoner; and there was evidence that a person wearing boots like the prisonex was near the lodge about the time of the murder. "He at first denied having been at Outten (on- the 4th.of March, or in fact, having been at the lodge for five weeks; bit't he was seen there by several witnesies', and, indeed, he in the end admitted that he had been there on that day. Two young girls actually swore that'they had Seen D'Arcy inside the lodge about the tirosof the murder, and there was plenty of evid,ensm to show that the prisoner had been seen walking from Chilton to Methley Station. No doubt the jury were influenced by the cumulative weight of many other circumstances, and among them the not unimportant fact that when apprehended.be slipped,. unseen by the police, a half-sovereign—one of the coins in the old minis nioney-liag--into his landlady's hands, The defence set up for him was in substance q...t the chief witnesses were mistaken, and that. D'Arcy was else= whereat the thins when the crime was oonunitted at Oulton-lodge. His counsel undertook to rebut several pieces of testimony—for- example, the evidence for the Crown. that D'Arcy had returned by train to Leeds, and not, as he alleged, by tram-car. It could be shown that the police were a little too hasty. . When he was brought up at the Wakefield Court to be identified, the police insisted that he should wear a felt hat whieh, as they alleged, he had worn at Oulton on the 4th of March. The prisoner -objected to this; the hat, he , said, was. not his; and there was some force in his sarcasm, " You had better bring the poker that r did it with, and put it im my hand, and get them all to look at me." One of the strangest circumstances of the case, -which was not :unnaturally I pressed by the counsel for the defence, was the fact that when D'Arcy returned to Leeds he went at once to. a meisting of khe Young Men's Christian Association in the South Parade, and that he there made some remarks. . Tins was only an hour or two after the deed was done. Assuming, as we must do after the verdict of the jury, the guilt of DArcy, his conduct is mysterious. Hypocrisy may(be carried to sublimity; but it seems to surpass the audacity of a Tartuffe to hasten from the commission of a brutal murder to take part with calmness a,nd decency in the proceedings of a religions meeting.