Louise Maseet, a daily governess in the North-East o' London,
was sentenced to death on Monday for the murder of her illegitimate child, a boy three and e half years old. The prisoner, who had made and kept an appointment to meet a young Frenchman at Brighton on the day after that on which the child's body wet discovered in the lavatory at Daleton Junction, had re- moved the child from the keeping of a woman at Tottenham on the morning of October 27th and was seen in company with the child as late as 3 p.m. at London Bridge Station, where she reappeared alone at 7. According to her own account she had in the interim disposed of the child, along with £12, to two women from Chelsea who were opening a baby farm. At 6.30 the dead body of the child, who had apparently been stunned by a brick and suffocated, was discovered at Daleton and a parcel containing its clothes was found at Brighton, where the mother arrived at 9.45. The two women have never been found, and the chain of circumstantial evidence against the prisoner was strengthened by her false story as to the time of her journey to Brighton. No motive for the murder can be assigned beyond the desire to rid herself of an en- cumbrance, but the callousness displayed by the prisoner in the interval between the commission of the crime and the identification of the body would seem to show that such a motive would be adequate in such a nature.
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