The Potteries Examiner : — 1878-01-19 (Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England)

LOCAL TRAGICAL EVENTS.  Quite a chapter of accidents have occurred of late. This week we have some of the inquests. Then there have been suicides and a terrible murder. The Hanford murder is still a profound secret. Will the 1300 reward, which the Government offers, lead to the discovery and apprehension of the assassin or assassins think you? If the police have a clue to the detection of the malefactor the handsome guerdon may prove an incentive to a. dibgent search for and the fortunate finding of the perpetrator of the foul and sanguinary slaughter. Poor old lady! little did she guess that quiet Sabbath morn when she looked towards Trentham weds and across the vernal shores of the swift flowing Trent that she was ere next morning to be brutally massacred on her own hearth stone by possibly one of her neighbours who during the course of that day peradventure passed her by, and saluted her with all the air of gentle neigh. bourliness and human interest in her  life and being's welfare. Could some' genius have then whispered in her ear whilst she was so saluted, as we presume she was by her murderer of that fatal night, what would be her emotions—her horror—her dread amaze ? she would have recoiled and cried, "No, not that one surely, who now looks so quit and sedate —he surely harbours no such direful plot against my life." We write of course under the surmise that the homicidal blow cauiefrom a neighbour's treacherous and atrocious Land. We gaze upon the ruffian's midnight. and very possibly long and carefully premeditated act. The lust for sordid coin, silvern and goldern. possessed by the infirm and aged dame. inthienced his cupidity. and proinpted him to brutally butter imhr Ann and strike her down mangled, lifeless, and bleeding at his feet. He catches a glimpse of thc haggard features of the corpse, by him newly constituted such, a cold shiver, and an eerie shudder comes over him. Panic seizes him and: his teeth ehatter like a wretch in an ague fit. What noes he see?' Bestarts ! lie thought if Wite-a. shePt:wr  spectre approaching him with eyeballs of fire. With, a shriek which awoke sosie of the lilleepers in the cottages around. who anon fell off to sleep again, supposing it was the scream of sonic night bird from the contiguous woods —he rushes front the horrid scene of his damnable guilt, and re-enters his own feat-haunted dwelling. Stealthily he creeps to his bed, and after uneasily tossing to and fro for a long, weary, woeful -time, he at last falls asleep, and dreams that he is indicted for the murder at the Assizes, tried, convicted, hung, and buried within the precincts cf the prison, in a grave tilled with quick lime and flaming sulphur; he starts from his bed in terrified alarm and discovers as be stands shivering on the fluor of his bed chamber that as yet it is but the foreshadowing of the doom which awaits him and which he so richly deserves. He falls a,leep once more, and when he wakes and gets up he dreads that every step that approaches his door is the officers of justice come to apprehend him, to convey him to prison. Day by day and night after night he walks about with the gloomy spectre of the hangman's mpe dangling before his eyes and wooing his shrinking neck to its deadly embrace. This we ti-ow that we have effusively writtcn is not all mere fancy. It in all probability is a reality in the case of the caitiff who did to death the luckless lady on whose ceuel murder we have meditated at random. May the murderer ere long be assuredly discovered and, the blood of his hapless victim be avenged.