A terrible murder has greatly excited East London. A respectable
girl, fifteen years old next March, daughter of a machinist named Jeffs, employed by the Tilbury and Southend Railway Company, was missed on January 31st last from West Ham. She was not found till February 14th, when the police, who were searching some empty houses in the Portway, found her body in a cupboard of one of them on the top floor. The poor girl had been outraged and strangled, and the body placed in- the cupboard. No one has yet been arrested, and there is no direct evidence, but it would appear to be certain, from the marks in the dust on the floor, that the girl, who was a good one, had entered the house voluntarily, had stood on the floor, pro- bably talking, but at all events stood quietly, and had made violent resistance to her assailant. The presumption, therefore, is very strong that she recognised and trusted the murderer, that he knew the empty houses well, and that he must in some way have opened the door. The police have, therefore, a limit fixed to their inquiries, and people in the neighbour- hood are collecting money for a reward of £200 for evidence, in addition to £100 offered by the Mayor of West Ham. No one is known to have been courting the girl, about whose excellent character there is no dispute ; and the theory, there- fore, is that she was decoyed into the house in the expectation of seeing some one. The evidence, in short, points to murder by an acquaintance, and rather discredits an idea prevalent in the neighbourhood, where disappearances of late years have not been infrequent, that some one man is making a practice of murder,—a ghastly suggestion, which has created a kind of panic, and aroused an interest strongly manifested at the unhappy victim's funeral.
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