Devonshire has been startled by an unusually savage murder. An
unmarried lady named Keyse, nearly seventy years of age, possessed of considerable means, and formerly employed about the Court, lived at Babbacombe,, near Torquay, in a pretty place called The Glen. Her household consisted of a parlourmaM who had been with her forty-eight years, a housemaid who had been nearly as long, a cook, and a young footman named John Lee. This man had been convicted of theft and sentenced to im- prisonment; but Miss Keyse, who knew him as a lad, pitied him and took him as a footman, promising to get him a place. Last Saturday morning an alarm of fire was raised; and on the servants descending they found the house on fire in three places, John Lee in his shirt-sleeves, and in great agitation, and Miss Keyse in the drawing-room in her night-dress, dead, with her skull driven in, and her throat cut through to the spine. The house had not been forced ; and the police arrested John Lee, who, it was deposed at the inquest, had grumbled over the delay in getting him a place, had told the postman that it would be worse for his mistress if she did not get him one, and that he would kill someone in the house; who had blood on his hands, caused, he said, by breaking a pane of glass, and who had control of the oil with which the rooms had been fired. A spare sock of his was found steeped in paraffine. A diamond ring is said to have disappeared, but this is not proved. The police theory, of course, is that Lee endeavoured to rob the house ; that Miss Keyse, roused by the noise, came down to inquire ; that he murdered her, and then set fire to the rooms.
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