Gold Hill Daily News

Speculations on the Mary Smith Murder.

It can scarcely contribute to the comfort of our citizens to know that a red-handed murderer, smeared with the blood of two victims, and emboldened by the impunity with which he has perpetrated a duct of appalling crimes, stalks around among them, brushing with the hem of his accursed garments the skirts of their wives and daughters as they go homeward from church; mingling, unnoticed, with the gay crowd of amusement-goers; passing the compliments of the night with policemen as they tread their weary rounds—his busy brain red the while, perhaps, with the plot and plan of another murder. Such, however, seems to be the fact. So many points of similarity exist between the murder of Mary Smith on Tuesday night, and that of the French woman, Marie Louise Freschi some months since, that scarce a doubt can be entertained as to their having been done by the same hand. Even had this last murder occurred in a distant part of the country, its coincidence in all essential particulars with the former one, would have been so striking as to attract universal attention, and awake suspicion that one man was author of both. Both women were stunned by blows about the head and face, from bed and their throats cut with a fiendish determination to finish the bloody work begun. In both cases the murderer used some common weapon that was lying at hand—a chisel in the first instance, a case-knife in the last—washing his hands after the work was done, wiping them deliberately, and then, with all traces of the crime removed from his person, going forth into the streets leaving no clue behind him.

So far as human reason can determine in the little light that is let in upon the last mysterious murder, it seems plain that both murders were committed by the same hand, as though the murderer had written in characters of blood on the walls of the little room on Stout's Alley: "This is the work of him who killed the woman Freschi." The marks of the tiger's teeth are there—his sign-manual may be read in the mangled throat and face, and in every circumstance of the horrid crime. It is a curious coincidence—if it prove to be merely a coincidence—that both victims were women of the town, and that the murders were done with weapons furnished by the need of the moment. This murderer, with an idiosyncrasy for prostitute-killing, does not go with knife or pistol in hand, prompted by jealousy or revenge, to do his fatal errand. Under the guise of a visitor unarmed and seemingly guiltless of all murderous intention, he enters the house of his victims, awakens no suspicion on their part by any violent demonstration to induce them to alarm the neighborhood, but quietly and silently, while they are buried in that sleep which comes to the pillow of the guilty as well as the innocent, he arises and does the work of death swiftly and surely, as if he were the finger of fate.

A thousand theories might be built up regarding these two remarkable murders, and not one of them might even point at, much less touch the truth. If we could suppose a monomaniac imbued with a passion for killing, and guided by a crazy cunning to select victims with a view to a safe indulgence of his propensity, it is in the haunts of these unfortunate women that the tiger has his jungle. They are exiled by their habits of life from their neighbors: men go in and come out from their domiciles at all hours of the night without attracting attention, and even sobs and screams would only excite the suspicion that there were some drunken fracas with some paramour. If killed, their fate would create less emotion than that of persons of any other class; for of friends and relatives they have few or none, and preying upon society, and living beyond the pale of its laws and requirements, the public have come to regard a violent death as their natural ending.

The murderer in these two cases may be such a monomaniac: Or another hypothesis: He may be a man who has suffered, or imagined he has suffered some wrong at the hands of one of these women—a wrong for which he has sworn to work revenge on all that may fall within his power. Ruined in person or in property he may be thus seeking to make a class expiate the wrong done him by an individual. Or, a man of ungovernable passions and subject to white heats of rage, consorting with the fallen, in moments of frantic anger he kills his paramour. Or, again, dependent upon robbery for a living, he may have marked the women who have lived alone, and are apt to have money, coolly calculating that by killing one or two every quarter he can manage to live quite comfortably. Another hypothesis that could be advanced is that the woman Smith having in some way been privy to the murder of the woman Freschi, or knowing who committed it and intending to leave the city, the murderer feared that when she got beyond the fear of his vengeance she might betray the perpetrator, and so killed her to insure his own safety.

There is a possibility that the murders were committed by different hands, and that some one moved by a recital of the success and impunity which attended the Freschi murder, and emulous of a similar achievement, took pattern therefrom for the perpetration of this last work of blood.

The experiment of photographing the retina of the murdered woman's eye, despite the persiflage and incredulity with which it has been in most quarters received, has developed a strange coincidence, or produced a wonderful result. Stamped upon the centre of the retina, and conveyed by the photographic process to the plate upon which the picture was taken, there is plainly to be seen the outline of a human figure, so plainly as at once to arrest the attention of the most unimaginative eye. The figure is that of a tall dark man, the lower part of the face muffled in a heavy black moustache and beard, the left arm extended and the whole body thrown into the position of a man doing some violent deed. The face has enough of outline to suggest the possibility of filling it up so as to recognize the man were he met in a crowded street. The bushy hair surmounting a low forehead, heavy eyebrows arching over the cavernous depths where the eyes lie, the shadowy suggestions of the whole face, which cannot be described, but which impress the observer with a strange weird horror, causing one to start back as though with profane hand he had rent the veil and caught a glimpse of that world which lies beyond the confines of the grave. It is idle to laugh at such things. A fool can deny everything, but it is only a wise man who can seriously make up his mind to believe anything. The writer is not at all an imaginative man, and took no stock in the unauthenticated accounts of marvelous successes which had attended similar experiments in France. Physiology and philosophy both seemed to laugh at such a theory, and the writer was prepared to treat the thing lightly. But seeing is believing; plainly from the photographic plate the figure of a man looks out, the last object the murdered woman saw on earth.

"As when with the daring
Last look of despairing
Fixed on futurity.

she turned her piteous eyes to heaven for help and saw only the cruel face of the murderer bending over her, while his remorseless hand held the sharp knife quivering to her throat."

To suppose that the photographic figure to which we refer is the result of an accidental grouping of shadows, is simply to seek a miraculous explanation for a very simple natural fact. For it is much easier to suppose that the outline of the murderer was caught on the sensitive retina than to believe that in the only instance in which the experiment has been attempted in this country, a combination of light and shade should have occurred to produce a shade so correctly like a human figure as to deceive many sensible and unimpressionable men. In any event the experiment is worthy of further trial, and demonstration is easy. Oxen are killed daily. Experiments by photographing their eyes would soon determine whether there is anything in this theory or not.

Whether or not, granting that the experiment proves successful, it will ever prove of any actual use, is a matter of question. For once establish this fact, and murderers will punch out their victims' eyes before leaving them. And the dead retina might in some instances mislead the living judge. For supposing that a man were talking to and facing you, and that another, suddenly coming up behind, dealt a blow which finished him. Your image would be the one impressed upon his retina, and an innocent man might hang were the eye taken as conclusive evidence.—S. F. Bulletin, Feb. 27.