The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser. — 1851-10-14 (Liverpool, Merseyside, England)

MURDER AND ►SUICIDE IN BERMONDSEY.—On Friday afternoon a horrible occurrence took place in Georgestreet, Bermondsey. A woman named Mary Newman, who, with her husband and child, a girl about six years old, lodged at No. 23, in that street, in a paroxysm of insanity inflicted fatal wounds upon herself and her child with a knife. The persons in the immediate neighbourhood were attracted to the spot by the screams of the little girl, whom they found in a dying state, the mother being quite dead. _ .  Two young ruffians have attempted to enter a cottage at Addlestone during the night, to rob Mrs. Willis, an old lady, of a quarter's annuity which she had just received. They were repulsed by the old :lady : when they endeavoured to cut through a shutter with a knife, she held an iron candlestick to keep back the knife, and threatened them with a sword-stick when they tried to enter by another way. On her recognising one of them as a neighbour they both fled ; but a policeman had watched them, and they have been sent to prison. At Lambeth, James Bell, living in great style, at No.l, Holland- place, Camberwell New-road, in a house elegantly furnished, with bottles in the window, to give it the appearance of an apothecary's, has been remanded on a charge of defrauding the public under pretence of telling fortunes, by casting of nativities and advertising himself as a professor of astrology. Sergeant Quinnear and another policeman visited the house in plain clothes, and, laying traps, caught,the man out in a series of lies, telling the former that be had a son who would not live long, the man being childless. Bell is said to carry on an immense traffic, to an incredible extent, in fortune-making. On Thursday last Mr. Frederick Bolton, an excise officer, connected with the inland revenue, died from tasting, by mistake, some tincture of aconite, known as woolfsbane. A witness in the office with Mr. Bolton asked him his opinion as to the nature of the liquid. Deceased said he believed it was a bitter, and took the bottle out of witness's hand, and afterwards returned it. Witness then conveyed the bottle to Mr. Brain, the principal officer of that department, who directly tore off the  paper covering, when witness saw it was labelled " Fleming's Tincture of Aconite—Poison," in large letters. Mr. Bolton said he had taken a tea spoonful, a dose large enough, it appears, to kill five persons. All remedies were unavailing, and he died in a few hours. The wife of a man named Baker, whilst sitting mending a flannel shirt of her husband's, who was reading to her at the time, on Friday night, in their lone cottage, in the parish of Gayton-le-Marsh, Lincolnshire, was shot dead by some miscreant, some of the shots also lodging in her husband's head, whom from the direction it was intended should have been murdered also. At first the man himself was accused of the murder, and his friends consider it a providential circumstance that he did not escape uninjured, as in that case he might have had some difficulty in proving his innocence of the toul and dastardly murder. Baker does not hesitate to express his suspicion of the " friends" of his wife, who, according to his account, want to get possession of the place—the cottage, and three or four acres of land neer it, being her property.