The very gruesome murder discovered last week in Cropton Lane,
aear Pickering, Yorkshire, has been pretty well cleared up. Ever since May last, Joseph Wood, and a little boy Joseph Thompson, eight years old, the son of his late housekeeper, have been miss- ing. On the 17th May they were seen. On the 18th they were inissing, and the man who helped Joseph Wood on the farm, Robert Charter, said they had gone away before daylight. The ,missing man was so eccentric that this was for a time believed, but when Charter produced a letter with the Liverpool postmark, not in Joseph Wood's handwriting, saying that Joseph Wood and the boy were going "foreign," suspicion was -excited, though it was very slow in coming to an actual investiga- tion, which only began this month. Then at last a great part of Wood's body was found in a field of Charter's,—who had left the house where the murder was committed in the meantime,—the bands cut off, and some of his clothes were found in a pond. Charter has now confessed that he killed (though he denies the intention to murder) Joseph Wood, and says that he does not know how the boy died, but he thought the pigs had eaten him, as he found some of his limbs among their food. The only distinc- tive character of the murder seems to be the singular and complete -absence of anything like the feeling of reverence or even horror towards the dead bodies of the man and boy on the part of Charter. Parts of the child's body have been found, and it seems certain that it was really given to the pigs to eat. Charter, against whom the coroner's jury at once gave a verdict of wilful murder, seems to have had accomplices after the fact who helped him to remove the bodies. But his extraordinary brutality to the bodies, and his clumsiness in trumping up a story to cover what had happened, seem to show that, after all, adequate indifference is a far better protection against suspicion than any amount of ingenuity. For the five months during which his guilt was undiscovered Charter never seems to have entertained the thought of escape.
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