The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle. — 1872-10-26 (Stourbridge, West Midlands, England)

MYSTERIOUS TRAGEDY IN LONDON.  A melancholy and fatal occurrence has just been brought to light. It appears that on Thursday in last week, a respectably-dressed lady and gentleman took apartments in a house in Golden-square, stating they had arrived from the Continent, and required the room for a week only. They slept there on Ihuraday night, had their breakfast in the house on Friday morning, dined at a restaurant in Regent street, and returned home at ten o'clock, p.m. Nothing MN afterwards heard or seen of them until eleven o'clock on Saturday morning, when Mrs. Cunningham, the landlady, went upstairs to clean the rooms, and on coming to the door of the apartments of her new lodgers she was much startled to find it locked, and the key tied to the handle outside. On entering the room she saw the lady seated in an arm chair, with a railway rug partly over her face, and the gentleman stretched on the floor tightly clenching what afterwards proved to be a Bible in his hands. She instantly gave an alarm, when medical all was called n, and he discovered that the bodies had been dead some time, and a phial labelled strychnine was found on the table. There was also by its side, apparently n a man's handwriting, a note in English, to the following effect :  " You will find £.3 on the table, which I have left to bury us with; let it he done as quietly as possible: one pound is to be given to Mrs. Cunningham for her kindness to wi, and also what remains in the trunks besides." On searching the bodies no papers of anylitescription which will lead to their identity have been found, but from the appearance of the grate in the room there is no doubt a number of papers were destroyed before the terrible act was committed. The man appears to have been about 45 years of age, and the woman 50.  The Daily Telegraph, in remarking upon the tragic ;flair, say.:—  The double suicide must have been planned and carried out with a deliberaton altogether marvellous. A heap of blackened ashes in the grate showed how every vestige of writing, every clue to identity, had been carefully destroyed ; an unsigned note on the table stated that the five or six pounds lying beside it were to be expended in burying the bodies, and in compensating the landlady ; and the man had bound around his jaws and over his head a leathern strap, the woman a pocket-handkerchief. As yet there is no clue to the identification of the suicides, and probably none will ever be found. It seems unlikely that any wild romance or passion overpowering all restraints of reason and all love for life, could have entered into the prosaic existence of two people in mature middle age, although the improbability would diminish appreciably if it turned out, as seems to be suspected, that they were French by nationality. What is most striking about the incident is the care taken to remove all trace by which the former life or the friends of the miserable pair could be indicated. Even the most determined suicides have generally some wish to justify their mad act—some lingering notion that they may by final words of explanation or apology stand a little better with the world they urn leaving—some instinctive desire that their clay shall not he without the kindly offices of friendship or of family. But these hapless people in Golden-square literally "made a solitude "for themselves before they died; and the manner of their death may suggest darker thoughts about the life that led up to such an ending that might he justified if we knew the truth, which is in all likelihood destined to be buried for ever n a nameless and shameful grave.