A DETECTIVE PUZZLE.
ANTE rarely read police reports, and never "enjoy murders," as the benevolent old lady in Miss Eden's bright story, "The Semi-detached House," admitted that she did ; but occasionally an inquest presents features which render the evidence worth studying as a subject of intellectual curiosity. One occurred, for instance, at Chorlton, near Manchester, in the last week which, besides some circumstances of unusual pathos, seemed at first sight to present an absolutely in- soluble detective puzzle. An old widow woman named Lavinia Fairer, seventy-two years of age and totally blind, lived alone in a small house there. She was not without means, her husband, a solicitor's clerk, having left her two houses and other property; but she had a tereper which servants found intolerable, they always resigned in a pet, and for three weeks she had remained without one. The neigh- bours seem to have paid her little regard, but on Thursday, March 14th, a charwoman knocked at her door at intervals for hours, and becoming alarmed at the silence, told a relative of Mrs. Ferrer, who authorised the breaking of the door. On their entrance they found the old lady lying dead on the floor of the kitchen, with her nose broken and a knife used for cutting corns lying all bloody by her side. Everything was perfectly neat, there was no appearance of a struggle, and as the door had been locked or bolted from the inside it was supposed at first that she had died in a fit, or from that universally quoted cause of sudden death, heart failure. On undressing the body, however, a small wound was found in the breast, which had scarcely bled at all, but which was attributed to the knife found on the floor. It was, therefore, assumed that Mrs. Ferrer had committed suicide, but at the inquest which necessarily followed a new aspect was given to the case. Dr. Heslop, the surgeon entrusted with the post- mortem examination, evidently believed suicide to have been physically impossible. He told the coroner's jury "the wound referred to by Dr. Yeats was the one that had caused death. It was a quarter of an inch long, and had penetrated to the 'mit. The ' corn-knife ' produced corresponded to it exactly. As the woman was dressed however, it seemed impossible that the wound could have been self-inflicted. Her various garments above the waist were stitched up at the neck, and there were three of them, the apertures being in different directions, so that apparently she could not have got her hand and a knife in together. The wound, in fact, was a regular stab, from left to right. She could not have inflicted the wound from below, because her skirts were fastened tightly round her waist. Her clothes were in no place penetrated ; and on the other hand, the wound could not have been self- inflicted whilst she was naked, because death would be so rapid that she would not have time to wipe her hand or dress herself. Apparently she had not had a fit, because the brain was normal. The blood from the wound had only smeared one of her inner garments, and he could not find where the eight drops of blood on the floor could have come from."
Any one who reads this account with attention will see that he is in an intellectual impasse which it might puzzle Monsieur Lecoq, or Sherlock Holmes, or any other of the detectives of fiction, who seem so marvellously clear-sighted because the authors invent the situation as well as the ex- planation, to pass through. Even Edgar Poe, who explained an actual and most mysterious murder so perfectly that the murderer, as he read the account, declared that it must have been written by divine assistance, would, we fancy, if he admitted the medical evidence, as, of course, jurors very properly do, have been perplexed. Certainly the jury were, for though the coroner gave them a caution by pointing out the absence of any trace of direct murder, they separated after an open verdict, which left the affair to the police. They were by no means stupid in doing so, for suicide is written out of the probabilities by the doctor's evidence, and there is apparently no motive for murder. No money appears to have been removed, nor could any person have intended to profit
by the death, for the deceased had made a will, which would, of course, have remained unknown till her departure. Her executors appeared in Court. The old lady had no enemies, for servants who leave of their own accord do not in England take to the knife, especially as a weapon against the blind, who are protected, even among criminals, by an almost superstitious fear of consequences. The only possible theory, therefore, that would fit the facts would be that some person unknown had for some undiscoverable motive entered the house in some untraceable way, had stunned and stripped the old lady, stabbed her with the very curious weapon employed, and then, having once more dressed the body, had avoided departing by the door, which, remember, was locked from the inside, and had effected his escape in the darkness by the mysterious way he entered. Such a crime, so committed, would have furnished a sufficient motive for a romance by Gaboriau, who would, we fancy, have made the murderer's object the discovery of a paper, kept by the victim in her clothes, which threatened the honour of some ducal family or other, probably named Sannoneuse.
The facts, we imagine, were far simpler than, after the doctor had spoken, they appeared to be. Mr. Heslop had made one little mistake, probably from want of experience in murder cases. As we read the undoubted facts in evidence, Mrs. Farrer, who had been beard to express her weariness of life—a weariness most natural in a blind old widow who could not keep a servant—and her wish that she had a gun to shoot herself with, on Wednesday evening while in the kitchen pre- paring her supper stumbled against something, perhaps the mantelpiece, and broke her nose. The accident, so specially terrible to a blind person, exasperated her depression and her temper into frenzy, and she resolved to kill herself. Dropping her gown and petticoats from her waist, she snatched up the "corn-knife," and, lifting her underclothing, drove it as nearly as she could guess into her heart. She succeeded, but she did not die instantaneously. People very rarely do. She was able, by a natural instinct, to snatch up her dress and petti- coats and fasten them tightly about her, and then, say after one minute of gasping, she died. The very slight fall of blood to the floor, which so struck the doctor, occurred before she had replaced her dress, and was possibly from the nose. Curiously enough, all the symptoms which excited the doctor's surprise stand recorded in the account of that most unprovoked of crimes, the assassination of the innocent Empress of Austria by Luccheni. They are mentioned by the authoress of "The Martyrdom of an Empress," who must have been present when that great crime occurred. She says that the Empress, after being stabbed by a sharp triangular stiletto, walked across the gang-plank of the steamer, and then "she was immediately carried to the upper deck of the 'Geneva,' although all those who surrounded her continued stupidly to imagine that she had been merely startled and was not seriously hurt, and there she was laid upon some red velvet cushions hastily brought from the captain's room. In spite of the immediate use of smelling-salts, cold water, and vinegar, the Empress did not recover consciousness, and so terribly white and drawn did her beautiful features become that Countess Sztaray, who stood by wringing her hands help- lessly, finally made up her mind to unfasten the imperial lady's corsage. Upon doing so she gave a terrible scream, for she found that it had been pierced by some sharp instrument above the left breast, and that a few drops of blood were slowly oozing from a very small triangular wound which showed like a deep purple mark upon the tender white flesh." There was in Mrs. Fames case no romance and no murder, only an ordinary suicide, produced by a sense of intolerable loneliness, which had been exasperated by a sudden and severe physical misfortune into frenzy. "Suicide while momentarily of unsound mind," would have been the just verdict. Utter loneliness, even among the well-to-do, is a much more frequent cause of that offence than is imagined, the isolation being produced either by unpopularity, or as in the curious case recorded on Tuesday, when a man of really large means apparently dreaded intrusion lest he should be robbed, or through the death of some one upon whom the victim of melancholy had become dependent for the sympathy neces- sary to life. We should not, indeed, ourselves doubt, though, of course, no proof is possible, that a mental sense of loneli- ness frequently produces an intolerable weariness of waiting
any longer, a weariness which yields only to religious resigna- tion. However that may be, we think it was unquestionably the cause of Mrs. Lavinia Farrer's suieide.
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