One of the two men in custody on the charge
of having been concerned in the murder of Mr. Henry Smith at Muswell Hill on the night of February 13th, namely, Albert Milson, has made a confession of his share in the burglary, though he denies having had anything to do with the murder, and declares that he was not even in the house when Fowler, the other prisoner, committed it. He has given the police information as to where some of the tools used in the burglary, and perhaps in the murder, were buried by himself and Fowler after the murder, and the tools have been found in the places described in his confession. Fowler attempted to strangle himself on hearing of Milson's confession, but failed, and he fainted away in the dock during the sitting of the Court on Wednesday, when Milson's confession was read. The con- fession itself is a very graphic bit of criminal history, and doubtless renders the conviction of both prisoners certain, though we conclude that Milson,—especially if his story of taking no part in the murder, and having to bear the violence of his comrade for his absence, turns out to be true,—will not suffer the capital sentence. The account Milson gives of Fowler's violence to the woman with whom he lived,—he seems to have knocked her down repeatedly merely as a kind of amusement when he was in liquor,—shows Fowler, if Milson's evidence be trustworthy, to be a true Bill Sykes, exactly as Dickens has depicted him, though perhaps with even less than Bill Sykes's capacity for that terrible, but by no means uniform, Nemesis of all evil deeds, remorse.
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