THE MYSTERY OF MAIDA VALE.
" I DO so enjoy my murders," says the nice old lady in Miss
Eden's charming novelette, "The Semi-Detached House ;" and we suppose that sentence, which was uttered in simplicity and not irony, explains the sudden decay of interest in the story called by the reporters, with their fine instinct for alliteration, "The Mystery of liaida Vale." While the case was supposed to involve a murder, and a peculiarly wicked one, the newspapers could not make too much of the details ; but as soon as the medical evidence proved that the death of the poor child was natural, the affair dropped at once out of public recollection. It was a very curious case, nevertheless,—one suggesting several strange possibilities ; and Edgar Poe or Gaboriau would have studied the evidence with the closest attention, to make it the foundation of a story. We are not certain that, supposing such incidents ever to be worth inquiry, they would have misspent their time. We do not feel at all sure that the object with which the death was concealed was not a criminal one, although the offence to be hidden was almost beyond question less than murder. As our readers will remember—for we gave the bare facts last week—a brown-paper parcel was found on the 26th inst. by a servant- girl in the garden fronting No. 32 Clarendon Gardens, Maida Vale. When opened by the police, who were at once summoned, the parcel proved to contain the body of a fair-haired girl, between eight and ten years old, which had apparently been dead three or four days. The body was naked, and the rough wrappers of bed-ticking in which it was swathed were without marks or anything tending in the remotest degree to identification. The worst theory being in all cases of crime the popular one, it was at first assumed that the child had been the victim of one of those outrages which are so frequent in our criminal records, and are so constantly followed by murder; and then, owing probably to some rumours as to the result of the post- mortem inquiry, that the wretched child had been starved to death. The first conjecture was natural enough, as criminal records prove, unhappily, the frequency of the double crime ; but the second was a little rash. The killing of anybody who is able to speak by deliberate starvation is very difficult, nature teaching the victim to resist continuously, and the neighbours receiving an appeal for food with instant and hearty sympathy. Experience shows that while a child in London may sometimes be most brutally treated, and even slowly murdered, without public interference, it cannot be starved without the neigh- bouring women discovering its condition, and raising loud, some- times very courageous and self-denying protests. Children are neglected, or maltreated hideously, but seldom deliberately starved. At the inquest, however, both these theories were disproved. The child had not been violated, no violence had been used to promre death, and the medical evidence was distinctly hostile to the supposition that she had been starved. She had had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours before death ; but the body was well nourished, and the absence of food in it could be explained by the reluctance to eat often observed in the last stages of congestion of the lungs. The child had been suffering from that disease, aggravated by a heart complaint ; and that undoubtedly, in the surgeon's opinion, was the immediate cause of death. The Coroner, Dr. W. W. Westcott, to the end seemed very doubtful, and cross-examined the medical wit- ness with some severity ; but the Jury took the broad, common-sense view that violence would have left some mark and that starvation continued up to the point of murder produces emaciation, and found a verdict of death from natural causes. All public interest, therefore, died away.
The Jury were, we think, right. The child, if murdered at all, must have been murdered by poisoning, as there was no wound and no emaciation, and poisoners do not conceal the bodies of their victims. They always think their agency will be hidden, they rely on their skill, and they see no motive for the immense additional risk involved in concealing a body and accounting for the disappearance of the deceased. There was, in all human probability, no murder in the affair, the child dying, after a rapid illness, of congestion of the lungs ; but still there remains a mystery, and we should say a criminal one. The child's body was undoubtedly hidden away deliberately with the intention that it should not be found till recognition had become impossible, and the reason for hiding it away must have been a serious one. The instinctive objection to any rough or derogatory treatment of the dead is, even among the criminal classes, very strong—much too strong to permit concealment for any trivial reason ; while the risk of being suspected of murder must have appeared to the person who hid the body very great. A grown person may disappear in London very easily, his or her movements being supposed to be voluntary, and popular curiosity growing slight from the multiplicity of the objects at which it is directed ; but a child is "noticed," like a pretty dog. There is amusement in its movements. Fifty people would have noticed its existence, and commented on its illness, and inquired, however casually, as to its disappearance—a risk which a guardian intent on disposing of a body would mentally exaggerate. Besides, why dispose of it? The child was not a baby, whose very existence its mother desired to deny, but a girl of at least eight, who might be in the way to any extent, but whose death would in ordinary cases have ended all incon- venience. Suppose, for instance, she had been an idiot— a point upon which there was no evidence, the brain being decomposed,—it might be desirable to be rid of an idiot, but death would have made the riddance. Of course there were the funeral expenses to be encountered, and it is just conceivable that a callous mother or guardian in bitter poverty avoided them—or, it may be, the additional trouble of an inquest, no doctor having been called in—by throwing the body away into a clump of bushes. That, however, is im- probable, the risk being too great for the motive. There is always help forthcoming on such occasions, if only from the parish, and the very poorest are not found making such attempts to dispose of their dead, which, again, the neighbours would not silently permit. There must have been some stronger motive; and a theory was started at the inquest, and supported by a modicum of evidence, that the child had been stolen, died naturally, and was then put away to avoid identification. That story, however, though mentioned by the police, came to nothing, and is not in itself at all probable. Why should a kidnapper run the grave additional risk of being sus- pected of a murder when none had been committed ? The child, stolen according to the story in Liverpool, would not have been recognised in London ; while the possession of the child could have been accounted for at the inquest readily enough—much more readily than the disappearance of the child. There are thousands of women in London who have charge of children left with them by relatives or friends. Is it not more probable that the object of dispensing with a funeral in the brutal method adopted was to deny the fact of death altogether, the life of the child, not its death, being advantageous to its keepers ? There is no need to suppose an inheritance at stake. Personation with perjury for the sake of small annuities or pensions is one of the commonest of crimes, as all annuity and pension offices know well—so common as to be a distinct difficulty to those who manage such estab- lishments, and to impede quite seriously the purchase of Government Life Annuities. They would be twice as popular if the money could be drawn like dividends on Consols, on the bare application and signature of the receiver. If the intention were to replace the dead child by another, and so continue to draw money, a funeral, with its formalities, its certificates, and its publicity, would be the very thing to be avoided, even at the risk of a suspicion which, in the worst event, could be removed by a confession of the facts. Greater risks are run every day for the smallest gains, and gains, too, which can only be acquired once.
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