Swansea and Glamorgan Herald, and South Wales Free Press. — 1865-08-16 (Swansea, West Glamorgan, Wales)

THE QUINTUPLE MURDER.  CRIME, like other things, has its seasons, and often, after a comparatively quiet interval, one murder is quickly followed by another until a succession of tragedies has so dulled the nerves of the public that one more added to the list fails to excite the customary horror at snail an event. With the crimes of Constance Kent, Dr Pritchard, and the woman Winsor, as well as various others of a less remarkable character, still fresh in recollection, an ordinary murder would have aroused far less than common attention just now; but, as if to supply a sensational stimulant which cannot pall upon the most jaded appetite for horrors, we have now to chronicle one of those monstrous crimes which are happily rare among humanity. A five-fold murder under strange, if not mysterious circumstances, must demand the consideration of the journalist, as well as the pen of the reporter. However harrowing the details of the subject, the ends of public justice demand that they should be more than simply narrated. They must be examined to prepare the way for a judicial investigation into the guilt, or, as one would fain wish it to prove, the insanity of the prisoner and to evolve a moral for public instruction. Southey, or I Forward, the prisoner charged with this series of murders, appears to be a man of more than ordinary intelligence and cultivation, although his has been what may be well called a wasted life, independently of its last horrible acts. Leaving his profession as a law writer, he for years sought his living as a billiard-sharper. Possessing great skill in the game, he practised in the garb of a gentleman, upon unwary aristocratic dupes in fashionable watering-places, winning large slims with impunity, until at last the Hon. Dudley Ward became his debtor for £l,OOO, which he was personally unable to pay. Applications were made, first by Southey, and then by a woman representing herself as his wife, to Earl Dudley, as head of the honourable victim's family, for payment of this gambling debt. On the refusal of the nobleman to comply with these demands, and his forcible expulsion of the woman from his house, the public became acquainted with the facts, through the hearing of a summons against the Earl for assault. Many persons will still remember this remarkable case, and the more remarkable pseudosentimental but untruthful history of his misdirected career volunteered by the man Southey in connection with it. The manner in which he represented himself as driven by sheer humanity to the protection of an unfortunate lady to such a degree as to make her his mistress, attracted severe comments, as it deserved, from the press; and Southey was then dismissed to oblivion as al hypocritical knave unworthy of further consideration. Little was it then imagined that he would re-appear upon the public stage as the dark hero of a frightful tragedy. Yet this same whimpering but immoral sentimentalist now stands accused, and on his own admission, of the deliberate murder of no less that five persons. The woman he had rescued turns out to be a schoolmaster's wife, whom he had seduced from an early period of her marriage, and whose three children, born under her husband's roof, are yet said to be her paramour's. But this protector of women, who formerly represented himself as unable to leave a distressed woman unaided, had also a wife of his own, whom, with his innocent and then unborn child, he had for seven years deserted. Becoming too well known through his quarrel with Earl Dudley to canT on his billiard-sharping, Southey was fain to accept the comparatively humble and unremunerative employment of a billiard-marker in the metropolis. But here his passion for gambling pursued him; he took to betting on horse-racing; and having not only his paramour, but her three children thrown upon him to support, he presently fell into abject poverty, which he attempted, sometimes successfully, to relieve by various urgent appeals to private and official charity. How, during this phase of his life, he took the three children of his mistress (if they were not his own) to a strange coffee-house in Red Lion-street, and left them after administer to them fatal doses of poben, is fn ly detailed in our news columns; and for this deed a motive readily suggests itself, in the desire to rid himself of the burden of the children, which would appear to mark the murder as the act of deep but clumsy villany, rather than insanity. But when we find the murderer immediately starting for Ramsgate, and there deliberately shooting in the house of a mutual friend, and apparently without hope of escape, the wife and child whom he had deserted for seven years, and who during that period had never troubled him, the conduct of the man becomes inexplicable. Sane to all outward appearance, he must yet heap up useless crimes only to make his detection almost certain. We confess that there seems hero an absence of motive which puzzles us, and makes us at present withhold an opinion on the matter until the state of the man's mind is thoroughly investigated. But mad or not mad, Southey presents a terrible example of the result of misdirected faculties, the craving for wealth beyond what honest labour can procure, and the utter hopelessness induced by failure in a fraudulent career. Under such circumstances men have often committed suicide, and have thus rid the world of the mere excrescence upon its surface which they had become; but a quintuple murder forms a finoer-post which points out much more emphatically the road that leads to social, moral, and spiritual ruin.