This week has been specially distinguished for inquiries into murders
; probably never in any one week before did the public journals present a chronicle so startling in the history of crime. At Aldershott two non-commissioned officers are shot ; at Wake- field an old lady is a Ileged to have been poisoned ; at Urpeth a man is stabbed to the heart ; and in the metropolis a long chain of circumstantial evidence has justified the committal of Mullins for the murder of Mrs. Emsley. The details of each case are shocking enough, but they all yield in interest to the inquiry into the murder at Road. Mr. Slack's roving commis- sion has come to an end,—a most lame and impotent conclusion. Every inquiry, so far, at Road seems to begin with sus. petting some one, and then a train of facts is collected in order to support the suspicion. First, a charge was trumped np against Miss Constance Kent, because one of her night-dresses was missing ; now a charge is gone into against the nurse because a chest-flannel is found. The entire mass of the evidence presented is worthless to support a charge of murder, and the points which seem to call for explanation from the, nurse might have been gone into in July last. It would have been a gross injustice to have put a prisoner on her trial on evi- dence so frail, and we rejoice that Mr. Slack's inquiries, pursued in secret, have ended in utter defeat. The Road murderer will never be discovered till, apart froni all previous suspicion, the inquiry begins by collecting the mere facts, and then seeking to attack the person to whom the facts point.
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