A STRANGE STORY.
MHE case of the child William Llewellyn, who three weeks ago unaccountably disappeared in the street of a Welsh town, and whose body was discovered on the summit of a Glamorga.nshire hill on Saturday last, is a strange story. The boy disappeared while his mother was shopping. Every possible effort was made to find him, but it was not until more than a fortnight had passed that his dead body was found, owing to the accident of some foxhounds passing by the spot at which the child had lain down to die. The coroner, in summing up the evidence given at the inquest, is reported to have expressed the opinion that after finding him- self lost, the child made his way to this hill or mountain (ten miles away), became confused, lay down, thinking he was going to bed, and died in the night. "He did not think there was any ground for suspecting that deceased had been kid- napped, or that there had been foul play of any kind." The coroner had all the facts before him, and the verdict of the jury, "Death from exposure," will, of course, be accepted. But, regarded only as a case for the student of the annals of coroners' inquests and the strange stories which often lie behind them, the story thus suggested is sufficiently curious.
Let us state the known facts of the case—or perhaps we ought to say the facts as reported in the papers, which is all we have to go upon—and try to see (1) to what conclusion a plain man looking at and wishing to explain them would naturally come ; (2) whether there is any plausible theory which a plain man might not think of at first, but which he would be willing to accept; (3) whether or not it is possible that the whole difficulty presented may be solved by placing the story among the records of instances of superhuman endurance of body, combined with complete or partial failure in powers of reasoning. Here, then, are the facts. On Friday afternoon, April 11th, Mrs. Llewellyn, who lives at Penrheol- gerrig, which lies some five miles north-west of Aberaman, drove with her little boy Willie (aged five) in a cart to Abera- man, in the Aberdare Valley, to order provisions from some large Co-operative stores. In the course of transacting her business she left the boy in one part of the stores and went to another part. When she returned the boy had disappeared. While she was away, it was discovered afterwards, the boy had left the stores and crossed the road to a shop where he bought a halfpennyworth of sweets. He took his sweets and his half- penny change and went across the road again, but not to the Co-operative stores. He went into a boot-shop, and not finding his mother, wandered away, presumably trying to find the stores, for which he seems to have mistaken the boot-shop. Afterleaving the boot-shop all trace was lost of him. The whole countryside turned out in search ; all the neighbouring hills, roads, and fields were thoroughly examined; the police made inquiries at all common lodging-houses in the neighbouring towns, and in other likely and unlikely places, all with no result. At
last on Saturday the 26th the child's body was discovered. It was found by a party of gentlemen who were fox-hunting, and it was lying on a spot which is described as the highest point in Glamore-,aushire, ten miles distant from Aberaman, the place where the boy was lost. The boy's covert coat was lying a few yards away from the body, his jacket was near it, and his cap and handkerchief were by his side. Medical evidence was given to the effect that he had been dead for at least ten days (i.e., since the 16th) ; there were no fractures or dislocations, but the backs of the hands were abraded; further, it was made clear by the state of the body that it had been lying for a long time in the spot where it was found. The child's boots—an important fact, if it is a fact—are stated not to have been soiled.
We can, as we say, only judge of the case as it has been reported. If we have the facts right, to what conclusion would a plain man come ? His data would be, briefly, these. First, the child was five years old; second, the spot where he was found was the top of "the highest hill in Glamorgan- shire" (the highest bill- in Glamorganshire is some 1,850 ft.); third, from April 11th, when he was lost, to April 16th, the last day on which he could possibly have been alive, he was seen, so far as could be ascertained, by nobody ; fourth, and quite the most important of all, if it is the fact, his boots were clean. Now to take these points in order. First, a child of five years old could hardly be supposed to be strong enough to walk a long distance, yet his body was found ten miles away from the place where he was last seen. If he walked at all, he would not have walked straight to the place where his body was found; no person who has lost his way walks in a perfectly straight line. Probably, therefore, if he walked at all, he walked at least fifteen miles. Could a child of five do that ? If he did, he must have taken a long time to do it. A child of five would not walk more than two miles an hour, and from time to time he would certainly sit down to rest. Therefore he would have been walking for eight or ten hours. But he would not walk by night. And since he was lost on the afternoon of the 11th, he could not be supposed to have wandered more than, say, four or five miles on that day ; that he went so far even as that is an unlikely supposition. On the next day, if he woke at four, he might conceivably have wandered another ten miles. But it would probably have taken him all day long.; and the question is, if he did wander about the roads, how he managed to do it without food? Would he not have become hungry ? Yet it seems that be asked at no cottage for food; nor did the jury bring in the verdict (at least, it is not so reported) that he died of starvation.
Second, is it not a remarkable fact that the body should have been found on the summit of the highest, and presumably the most inaccessible, hill in the district? Why should a little boy end a long wandering by climbing the highest hill in the neighbourhood ? The highest hill,—that is the important point. For if it could be supposed that the child was taken to the top of a hill, and intentionally left to die there, clearly the higher, and therefore the less often traversed, the hill, the better it would be suited to so villainous a purpose. Again, the instinct of the man lost in a hilly district is to go down, not up. He knows that houses lie in valleys, not on summits. An intelligent child would reason in the same way, and this was not an unintelligent child ; he is said, indeed, to have only just won a reciting-prize at school. Third, bow did it happen, if the boy was wandering for three or four days, that he was seen by nobody ? It is not as if he bad crept into a neigh- bouring farm outhouse, and had died there. He was found dead ten miles away, and probably he had walked (if he did walk) nearer twenty than fifteen miles, and that by daylight. Fourth, and last, bow could he have walked. fifteen or twenty miles without damaging his boots ?
The first conclusion to which it would be natural to come is that the child was kidnapped. But if so, for what object was he kidnapped, and what kind of a man or woman could have kidnapped him ? You are confronted with two pictures, or rather with the states of mind of two persons, who happen to come across each other at a particular hour on a particular day. First, you have the child who cannot find his mother. He reasons with himself. "I left my mother in a large shop. I cannot find the shop. I will therefore go home. I know I was driven a long way to get here, but if I go far enough on the road back I shall get home, where I shall find my mother, who is always there. This, I think, is the road home. In any case, if I ask any person the way home, that person will probably help me. Grown-up persons always help you." So the child wanders on. He meets a man, or a woman, who seer. a child wandering alone. Then—what happens ? Does the man or woman stop the child and ask what he wants ? Does he or she, perhaps, hide the child, and feed him, some- where, hoping for a reward ? And after a while, does the kidnapper become afraid of a mob's vengeance, and determine to get rid of the child at all costs ? The objection to that is that the kidnapper must have been abnormally stupid. He could gain nothing by the child's death. You are left to imagine a creature of a hideously twisted mind—something between a beast and a man, like Poe's murderer of the Rue Morgue, or Kipling's Bimbi—a sort of human gorilla who would readily contemplate the suffering of other persons if he could anyhow bring gain to himself, and who, despairing of getting that gain, decided that his own safety would be best assured by taking the child to a lonely spot where he would die without leaving any record against anybody. That theory entails the supposition that the kidnapper knew the neigh- bourhood, and the habits of the people living in it, thoroughly well; otherwise he would not have known which was the highest hill in the neighbourhood, and when he could take his victim there without fear of detection.
But the coroner, as we have said, before whom presumably every single fact bearing on the case was brought, is reported to have expressed the opinion that "there was no ground for supposing that deceased had been kidnapped, or that there had been foul play of any kind." The plain man, therefore, who adopts that view accepts a theory which, of course, is not impossible, but which involves, as we have suggested, the belief that the physical capabilities of a child can occa- sionally develop into something almost monstrous. The lost child wanders on, that is to say, for hour after hour, perhaps for day after day—for the medical evidence suggests that he may have lived for four days after becoming lost—thinking to himself that if he goes on he will get home. Perhaps his home lies on the side of a hill ; be comes, then, to a hill, and climbs up it until he can climb no higher, when he decides to go to sleep, and, following his custom, he takes off his coat before lying down to sleep. That may have been what happened in the case of the child Llewellyn ; and if so, the fact that the hill on which he was found dead was known to all in the neighbourhood to be the highest hill, and therefore probably the loneliest hill for miles round, is only a coincidence. But it is, at all events, a strange story,— one of the strangest that has come to light for some years. And unless the facts have been wrongly reported, one of the strangest parts of the whole business is the general acceptance of the theory that the physical powers of a child of five years old could have been equal to a task involving so extraordinary an amount of fatigue, perseverance, and hardihood, combined with an apparent reluctance, unnatural to a child, to seek the advice or assistance of his fellow-creatures. If it had not happened, it would be thought past belief ; but to be "past belief" is still no reason for supposing that it is not the truth.
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