Zurich Herald, 1928-07-19, Page 3Scotland Yard Methods
Prove Their Efficiency
Just When England Was Beginning to Suspect That its
Famous Anti -Crime, Organization Hal Fallen Down in
Its Battle to Suppress Modern Crime, the "Big -
Six" of the Yard "Got Their Men" and
Vindicated Their System
TRIED AND TRUE
C. Patrick Thompson in the New
York Herald Tribune gives our
American cousins something to think
.about when in a recent number of
thatpaper he told his readers of the
sucoess of Old London's Police Force.
'The press has been full of criticism
•of their 'third degree" treatment of
,suspects, so. it is refreshing to hear a
tale by au American praising the ef-
llciency of this famous force for good.
The tale runs in part as follows:
Scotland 'Yard, London's famous
:anti-crime organization, is feeling
pleased with itself again.
For months it had been under a
,cloud. A police constable, had been
murdered while attempting to make
•an arrest. His assailants had sent
bullets crashing through the pupils
,of his eyes—and then had sped to
;safety in a stolen automobile. All
England was stirred—and called for
'the swift punshment of the murderers.
Scotland Yard set to work on flap
case, but nothing happened. Month
after month went by without an arrest
'being made; without even a clue be-
ing found, so far as the English public
'knew.
Many were the criticisms that were
leveled at the slow, laborious
methods of crime detection, though
for years these methods had held
England's annual crop of murders to
a very small minimum and had re-
duced the number of unsolved mur-
ders virtually to the vanishing point.
Many were the entreaties for the
Yard to abandon its time -worn method
sof keeping ev rlastingly on a certain
track. "Introduce modern methods!"
"Get your man!"
And then, just when it looked like
Scotland Yard had been licked, that
it had been sticking stubbornly to a
wrong scent—two. arrests •were •made •
and two convictions •were obtained.
Scotland Yard had vindicated itself
and its methods.
It is a thrilling story—the story of
this vindication, but before we launch
into that, let's glance at the men who
have brought it about—"the Big Six"
of Scotland Yard.
Come with me behind the scenes of
the great red -turreted building on
Thames -side, by the Houses of Par-
liament, and meet these six super -de-
tectives, the men who are chiefly
responsible for the fact that out of
a year's total of 114 murders (this in
a population of 38,000,000) only two
remain unsolved.
Foremost among them stands the
vulture-heacled Chief Constable Wens-
ley, chief of the criminal investigation
department. Normally he is respon-
sible for the detection and suppres-
sion of crime among the 7,500,000 per-
son,. in the metropolis. Actually, he
is the lef detective of England,
always liable to be called in by the
police chiefs outside his area for the
solution of some major crime.
He directs operations on every
major crime and presides at the daily
conference of the Big Six. His men
make about 150,000 arrests a year, 16,-
000 of thecie being for indictable of-
fenses ranging from arson, rape, coun-
terfeiting and wounding to robbery
with violence and murder.
He is the master elucidator, probably
the most efficient and experienced de-
tective functioning to -day, and one of
the world's remarkable men. His face,
with its great beak of a nose, trap'
mouth and basilisk eyes, is stony in its
calm.
He used to be a• "footslogger," an or-
dinary patrolman, now he rides with
his powerfrl shoulders and big vulture
head slouched against the cushions of
a huge limosine.
In the_ forty years intervening be-
tween one state and the other he has
acquired a marvelous knowledge of the
underworld and its ways and has gone
about collecting murderers, coun-
terfeiters, forgers, robbers, gang chiefs
and other criminal fry as you or I
might collect stamps—tenaciously, ex-
pertly, interestedly yet detachedly.
He thinks crime is a disease. But
when he is after a man there is no
softness about hiin. He is tenacious
as a bulldog, cunning as a ferret, sharp
as a hawk, relentless and merciless.
He has his human side. He is with-
out vindictiveness. He is on hand-
shaking terms with hundreds of crim-
inals. He ;Las helped the destitute
family of many a• crook.
His life has never been attempted,
There was a time when the,chiefs of
the East Side gangs lie was engaged
in breaking up swore that his life was
not worth a moment's purchase. But
he went about the crime quarter ute
armed (as all Scotland Yard men do).
and unescorted—and lives,
He made his name in the service
psychological aspects of the case; and
then he examined the known bad char-
acters who might have done the thing.
He asked three main questions:
Who was the last person seen with
the victim? Who were the victim's
friends? Where was the instrument
used in the crime purchased?
He got his man, a Belgian butcher
named Voisin. Voisin was hanged.
The other case is known in crime
history as "the trunk murder." The
dismembered corpse of a woman was
Lound in a trunk deposited in the cloak
room at a London railway station. The
»nly clue was a dishcloth marked "St."
But that clue led Wensley to the office
of a man named Robinson, and a
blood-stained match in that office com-
pleted the chain of evidence, Robin-
son was executed.
Hawkins, bald, stout, spectacled, is
the robbery and blackmail expert. He
Es the repository of innumerable se-
crets of the haunt monde. The late
Lord Rothschild, England's Pierpont
Morgan, once called him in to settle
a blackmailer.
Hawkins arranged a neat trap. Ten
thousand dollars was to be placed in a
hotel washroom. Hawkins fixed up an
electric contraption to ring a bell in
an adjoining room when the notes
were picked up. The bell rang.
Hawkins rushed in and seized a man
who was desperately 'trying to wash
black stains off his hands.
Hawkins had covered the notes with
powder scraped from indelible pencils,
so that the blackmailer should be
marked beyond all doubt.
Bill Brown, a black -haired giant, is
the burglar specialist. Then there is
Nicholls. With his little, waxed xnus-
tache and: dapper air he looks like a
floorwalker. But there is nothing of
the floorwalker in his mental make-up.
He is an adept at disguise, a master
in the gentle art of shadowing, talks
French an dGerman, is an expert on
the international "dope" traffic and
stopped the use of drugs among the
troops during the war. He prepares
cases for the Director of Public Prose-
cutions.
John Ashley, the fifth of the for-
midable bunch, looks like a Methodist
parson and does the detail thinking
for Wensley. He talks to criminals
in such a fatherly way that he usu-
ally
sually gets the truth out of them. He
has trained his memory to such a de-
gree that when he sits in at the con-
ferences of criminal and legal experts
when major crimes are under discus-
sion the alternative to a search of
the records is to "ask .Ashley."
He is the man who docketed at the
Yard over 1,000,000 records of British
and international crooks. Possibly
this accounts for this prematurely
gray hair.
Superintendent Savage, brown hair-
ed, good looking, is the youngest of
the six. He is an ornithologist. He
will tell you that there is only one
satisfactory way of getting rid of a
body. The details are not, however,
for publication.
So much for the Big Six themselves,
Their method, the famous Wensley
method, of working, does not make
such romantic reading as that of
Sherlock Holmes. In fact, it is noth-
ing more than one of those laborious
methods of crime detection which the
celebrated Mr. Holmes never ceased
to ridicule, a method, nevertheless, 1
which has proved its adequacy to the
hilt. Nowhere is it better- demon;
strated than in the Gutteridge case—I
now assured of a prominent place
among the class's crimes—the murder
of a police -officer in September, which
culminated in the arrest of the mur-
derers six months later.
Early on the morning of September
27 ICensley had a telephone call from
the police of Essex, the adjoining
county to London. One of their men,
Gutteridge, had been found dead in a
lonely lane. He had received a fatal
shot, had staggered back and fallen,
and as he lay he had been shot again
through eye. Wheel tracks showed
that an automobile had stopped at
that spot. The dead man had pencil
and notebook out. _
Detectives were dispatched. While
they were busy the discovery of an
abandoned, bloodstained car in a cul-
de-sac on the outskirts of the city
enabled Wensley and his colleagues
to reconstruct the crime in its prin-
ciple features.
Gutteridge, on patrol at night, had
recognized the doctor's car approach-
ing (the car had been stolen from a
doctor's garage), seen it occupied by
strangers, and had hailed it. No doubt
he had blown his whistle and tie
thugs had stopped. Gutteridge had
started to ask awkward questions, and
by gang smashing, and his name with the bandits, seeing long terms of penal
the public by solving two extraordin-
servitude
r vitudeand div for carrying loaded
ary Murder m, steries: g in a stolen car—
Orad was a case in which he had to British law comes down with a heavy
find the ma deter of a headless hand on the armed criminal with a
woman left 1Sring in a West End bad record—had shot him.
square. His only clew was a laundry Why had they then pursued him to
mark on a shoat shroudie.g,the corpse. the roadside and sent bullets crashing
He hunted his man along lines which; through each eye? Doubtless because
have since become the standard they had a superstitious dread of the
method at the Yard in the approach Impression of theinselves appearing
toallmurder mysteries. � on the retina of the dead moan's eyes. 1
First he atthed hiineeif what sort of Tho Yard had three iminediate
person would a lil;:oly to commit such clues: (1) the bullets extracted from
a crthi.el he OrAimated the mental and idle body, (2) the stolen car, and (a) the
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FAMOUS RUSSIAN BEAUTY
Mine Sakaeoff, dancer and entertainer, posing In the costume of the Netherlands.
a cartridge case left in the car.
They also had 'a description of the
doctor's instruments which had been
in the car, and which had disappeared.
They knew the type of gun from' which
some, at least, of the fatal bullets had
bee nflred.
And here Sir Wyndham Childs, the
chief of the secret political police and
counter -espionage, an ex -army officer,
butted in and made a significant dis-
covery. Childs is lean, polite, a nar-
row -eyed lynx of a man." He was a
musketry expert in the army. He ex-
amined cartridge case, bullets and
photographs of the shot -riddled face
and found that (a) the case was that
of an obsolete Mark IV cartridge with-
drawn from the army soon after the
war started, (h) one of the bullets
fired through the eyes had been pro-
elled by black powder, a detonation
or cartridges not used since 1894, and
c) the other had been propelled, by
ordite.
It was thus established that two
men, one of whom had a mixed'assort-
ment of ,ammunition, were concerned
n the crime; and Childs could further
ay that when a revolver was found
the breach shield of which duplicated
the peculiarities in the fatal cartridge
ase—marks not known to be as infal-
ible as finger prints—that would be
he weapon with which the constable
was murdered.
In the process of testing these
theories the Yard chiefs examine over
,000 revolvers, and spent days firing
unets into wood and examining the
ffect under the microscope. That
ould have taken friend Holmes quite
time, even with ' the assistance of
Meanwhile months went by. No
r. Watson..
rrest. What were Wensley and his
men up to? They were looking for
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tematic comb -out of suspects and
others.
Every revolver that came into police
hands went to Scotland Yard. The
War Office co-operated. A weird and
wonderful collection of guns accumu-
lated. Uneasy folk in illicit posses-
sion of revolvers furtively dropped
them. They were fished out of rivers
and off waste land, and sent to the
Yard. The owners were hunted. out
and questioned.
The record office provided the names
of all criminals of violent tendencies
who had been liberated from prison in
the last two or three years. They
were looked up. Thousands of men
were traced' and interrogated. Detec-
tives shadowed suspects and kept
watch for wanted crooks who had
eluded the round -up. There were sud-
den raids and surprise searches.
The vulture -headed Wensley sat in
his office by the old river and, in the
course of months, saw his search nar-
row down to six suspects. One was.
an habitual criminal named Browne.
Even Dartmoor, where they tame
tigers, had not been able to tame him,
and he had served every day of his
last sentence of four years. Browne
had eluded all search.
Suddenly, eater Chance, the incalcu-
lable faceor. In Sheffield, the steel
city of the Midlands, a recklessly
driven car collides with a local car
and goes on. The aggrieved local man
manages to note its number as it
shoots away. It is a London registra-
tion number.
The Sheffield police ask the London
police to look it up. The latter report
back that the name is not known at
the address. It looks like a fake num-
ber. Will Sheffield inquire further
and report?
Sheffield gets busy and finds a local
man was in the mystery car as pas-
senger. This man is an ex -convict.
He is questioned and discloses that
the driver was Browne. Browne has
a garage at Brixton.
• This "leak" in Sheffield reaches the
hawks at the Yard. Instantly they
pounce. But the Flying Squad men
find that Browne is away. He has
motored to his old prison at Dartmoor
to bring a friend, a convict due for
release, back to London.
Here the tale touches fantasy.
Browne drives the released convict to
Scotland Yard, where he has to report
on entering the metropolis, and then
goes to Battersea. The waiting de-
tectives jump on him before he can
reach one of his several guns.
In the Yard they are on tenterhooks.
They have got one of the killers. But,
the evidence
In Browne's garage an expert ex-
amines the collection of guns. He
breaks one. Mark IV cartridges in
the cylinder and the breach shield du-
plicates the peculiarities in the fatal
cartridge. He breaks another gun.
It contains an assortment of aninuu-
nition, two rounds of which hold black
powder propellant.
And there are the doctor's stolen
instruments I
Strange vanity! The killer, strong,
intelligent, cunning, ferocious, is so
sure of not being tracked that he has
held on to the very evidence needed
to hang him—the guns, the ammuni-
tion, the instruments.
The Yard's half -year's patient hunt
is at an end. All the detectives'
theories have proved correct. They
incidentaly have confirmed their fav-
orite contention; that detective work
is only about a 55 per cent. factor in
unravelling a crime, the other 45 per
cent. being accounted for by the items
of information received—uniformity
of style, carelessness and vanity. In
that order.
For months they had known as much
as Sherlock Holmes could have dis-
covered by his celebrated deductive
method; but without that "informa-
tion received" they would still be look-
ing for Browne, and, lacking this inter-
locking system,,this deadly close -
woven net for gthering information
from every corner of the island and
getting action on it from a central
headquarters, not all the Holmeses
in the world could have found Browne,
let alone effected an arrest and se-
cured the essential evidence.
Following Idea
of Jack Miner
Bering Sea, Fleet to Tag
Whales For Scientists'
Study of Habits
Anaoortes, Wash.—How many wives
has a whale? What is Mrs. Whale's
average family and how long do its
members live? The answers to these
and many other questions are to be
sought by scientists who will accom-
pany the whaling fleet to Bering Sea
this season. To aid in investigations
small identification tags will be shot
into the backs of whales as a sign to
gunners to pass them up as subjects
for study.
After a hiatus of more than forty
years, whaling operations are being
resumed on an extensive scale on the
Pacific Coast. Whaling fleets are be-
ing increased and more expert person-
nel, added to crews.
Whale oil, fertilizer and chicken
feed are the most important of the by-
products from the great mammals, but
there is also profit in whale tails for
Japan, the whalebone of the baleens,
the ivory of the large teeth of hump -
hacks, and the liver oil for medicine.
The expression "a whale of a prize,"
although used generally to denote size,
is expressive in another way, for the
whale is more valuable to its captors
than any other creature.
A single north Pacific whale will
have in its mouth nearly a ton of
whalebone worth many hundreds of
dollars. From its blubber, twenty-five
to forty tons of all may be obtained,
worth about ON a bon. The by-pro-
ducts are valuable enough to pay the
operating expenses.
•
FRENCH AT
A party of. 2,500 French citizens, headed by the inayar of Calais, tressed the channel
war memorial at Folkestone the tora familiar to thousands of Canadian soldiers.
POLKESTCINE
and laid
a wreath
Ott
Trees Are Like Men
Interesting Data
Tree life, like human life, is largely
governed by environment and antes•
tral traits. Nature has made no ex-
ceptions in the case of trees to the
principles that control living things,
Trees partake of food and have means
of converting their food into growth
and reproduction. They drink and
breathe and are subject to favorable
and unfavorable influences according
to the kind of nourishment they ob-
tain, the localities and climates In
which they live an dthe association
of their neighbors. Trees hand down
from generation to generation the
characteristics of their ancestors just
asc human beings do. This extends
even to the peculiarities of individual
trees of the same species.
It has been found that like produces
like, even to shapes and sizes. Rapid -
growing trees produce fast growers.
Tall, straight, healthy mother trees
will produce similarly formed trees
from their seed if started in congenial
soil and climate. Short, shaggy trees
will produce the same type. The
seeds of trees that have grown in
warm climates will not do well plant'
ed in cold climates. Seeds of trees
that thrive in wet soils will not de
well when planted in dry soils. Ti
has been found that trees with
crooked trunks will have a tendency
to produce offspring with crooked
trunks.
Forest tree growers should inquire
into the history of the mother trees
when they are buying seed. Many
failures have been recorded in grow-
ing trees by planting seed from an
inferior type. Antecedents are im-
portant with trees as with men and
women. Forest trees inherit the char
acteristics of their ancestors to a
marked degree.
Monkey Sobbed
Like a Child
A monkey incident that might make
him suspect that perhaps Darwin was
right after all is told by Martin John-
son,
ohnson, the famous camera explorer.
"Once," he writes, "while we were
watching them on a clear afternoon
near sunset, we suddenly startled one
of the old females who had been
prinking herself off to one side. With
a scream of fear she dashed off, fol-
lowed by all the rest loudly complain-
ing at the disturbance. One little fel-
low, too young to run fast, was left
behind in the stampede. Hoping to
catch him for a pet, I ran after him.
He glanced over his shoulder, squeat.
ing with terror, as he saw'me overtale
ing him. Suddenly he decided it was
no use, ho didn't have a chance to
escape. He stopped, lay down on the
rock and covered his eyes with his
tiny hands. Trembling all over he
lay there sobbing like a child and
waited for the end. The little fellow
acted exactly` as if he knew I were
going to kill him, and couldn't bear to
see my hand uplifted to strike.
"I picked the poor little thing up.
His heart was going like a trip -haus
mer. I suppose ho was surprised to
find that he was not yet hurt. He
moved his hand a bit from one eye
and peered at me. The sight of my
face so close was too much. He
pressed his hand quickly back and
cried out in desperation. When 1
found I couldn't soothe him I carefully
set. him gown and backed off. Again
he peeked at me from behind one
hand. He gave a sort of gasp as 11
he didn't believe his eyes. He jerked
both hands down. Yes, both eyes told
him I was too far away to grab him.
He moved first one foot, then another.
Both worked all right. With a yell
he turned and ran. At this moment
a fuzzy face peeked around one of
the rocks about fifty feet ahead. When
the baby reached this point a body
followed the head, apparently the
mother, for the little one I had re-
leased hopped aboard her back and
rode happily away to tell hfel,iplay-.
mates of his frightful adventtir%!with
a giant."
Babe Ruth has hit 31. ;lt
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rums
!ready this season -1' that
quoting Shakespeaice&
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