The evening world. Newspaper, June 26, 1922, Page 14

®y Sir Basil Thomson. (Chief of the Yara, 1913-1921.) “How Scotland Yard Unravels Crime.” “1 take off my hat to Sherlock Holmes with the silent prayer he may never appear in the flesh. The detection of crime actually con- @sts in good organization, hard work and luck—inabout equal pro portions.” Tecre was a poison pen case in which the only clue was seventeen @isspelicd words. The detective had the criminal arrested \less than two howrs after the crime was reported. “I have sometimes regretted that flappers cannot be put quietly "to sleep from fourteen to eighteen.” During the spy mania the fictions “of an imaginative housemaid terrorized an entire countryside. The $500,000 pearl necklace was recovered just in time to prevent the thieves from throwing it away. CHAPTER |, Unlike my predecessors, I had already F I were asked what were the best a wide acquaintance among criminals, qualifications for a detective I chiefly those of the professional clas: TEE EVENING WORED, MONDAE SURE 86, 2Uss. ecrets Scotland Yard SIR BASIL THOMSON his wife, She mounted the bus with riers waiting for the wirework door of should say to be a jack of all At Dartmoor Prison I had 1,200 of a gaping handbag, which was as ef- his cage to be opened must have trades and a master of none. That, them, nearly all professionals, with fective a bait for a pickpocket as descended upon the spirits of those Perhaps, is hecause I happen to be anything from one to thirty previous roast pork is for a shark. The pick- four thieves when thelr cage rose at “MW indifferent jack of all trades my- convictions. seif, and 1 cannot remember any tering that I acquired in distant rs of the carth that did not come 5 ful-at Scotland Yard. When you read of the crime in tho her countries try to make spe- ™#azines or the detective novels it Gialists of their detectives. They, * Dearly always murder. You have id have them know chemistry, a and mineralogy; they would to realize that the murderer is rarely MURDERERS NOT DEEP CRIM- INALS. pocket followed and just behind him went the husband to take him into custody in the very act. It must have been quite exciting sport for both. A GLEAM OF IMAGINATION. Every now and then the “thief to be in charge of a prison in order catcher” would show a rare gleam of the part of young persons. imagination. I remember the case of length to the surface. CHAPTER II. THE ADOLESCENT LIAR. URING the war there was outbreak of what might termed ‘‘adolescent lying’ on We all know the young girl who tells fils, and in normal times she would prob- an be them competent to appraise the ® criminal by nature at all, But for a man who was expected to pledge a ably be spanked and sent to bed with- ye of jewels, to Judge the time the srace of God he is just you and I, corpse has been dead or how long °"!Y more unlucky. footprint has been impressed upon minal you have to go to the crimes p earth. They forget that there *S*ipst property. a specialist round every onrner and Committed without any deep-laid plot, at a detective who knows his work whereas the professional thief or 3 also where to find a jeweler frser or fraud has carefully planned sft give him far better opinions than Commit them, own. All that they succeed in Pentant and ts planning only how he ‘and saddle themselves with a host Ut schemes for fresh adventures. }theorists who make a very poor show by the test of the statistics of tectives were naturally divided into p@iecovered crime, two classes, “thief catcher,’ FICTION VERY DIFFERENT to th FROM FACT. 1@ class of honest, painstaking po- Ucemen without suff Hee igsauite a sufficient education to fiction; in fact, in detective work flo- wo made w ip for this deficiency by in- jo 1s stranger than truth. Mr. Sher- timate knowledge of the rougher crim- Holmes, to whom I take off MY ing), his habits and his hat with a silent prayer that he may, personal tune ever appear in the flesh, worked by, pockets themselves, induction, but mot, so far as 1 8M have the same rega: ig age by, the a banaiaigg naughty little boy hi wi get ome, namely, organiza- j45¢ schoolmaster. The ‘thief ¢idh and hard work. He consumed catcher’ has no unimus against the ‘yest quantities of drugs and tobacco. people he has to watch, He keeps 1 do not know how much his ad- his eye upon them warily, as tlie keep- imirable achievements owed to these, er at the Zoo keeps his eye upon the i I Go Know that tf we at Scotland Polar, bears, aud when it t Ward had faithfully copied his proc- busingss he arrests them ly impartially esses wo should have ended by fasten- without rancor and without indul- {ng upon a distinguished statesman gence, ‘or bigh dignitary of the church the Pe eras erations q OVER SOUGATIBN. OF DETEC- ONE LITTLE CLUE SUFFICIENT. he danger of over-educating your The detection of crime consists in detective is that little by little you food organization, hard work and will eliminate the "thief-catcher," for “Tk, in about equal proportions: whom there js a very definite place ‘when the third ingredient predomi- in the scheme. I remember one whose ates the detective is very successful zeal had communicated itself to his ndeed. Among many hundred ex- wife. At that time we were over- amples the Volsin murder at the end whelmed with complaints about pick- of 1917 may, be cited. The murderer pockets at the stopping places of the had cut off the head and hands of buses in the crowded hours. They his victim in the hope that identifica~ would take part in the rush to get tion would be impossible, and he chose in, crowding on with the other De she night of an air raid for his crime sengers and relieving them of the because the victim might be expected contents of their pockets, falling back to have left London in a panic; but as if they were disappointed of a he had forgotten @ little undbtrusive place and waiting for the next bus laundry, mark on ber clothing end by, to continue thelr business. If they this he was found, convicted and ¢x- saw any one eyeing them they would outed. That was both luck and or- mount the bus until they came to a ion, stopping place where they thought Gcotland Yard has the enormous #4- they would be more free from ob- wantage over Mr. Sherlock Holmes in servation, ‘that it has en organization which can My ‘‘thief catcher’ was a rather four every pawnshop, every laundry, conspicuous person and when he ap- ‘every public house and even every peared on the scene the pickpockete ‘edging house in the huge area of would melt away. He could not be ‘Lenoon within @ couple of hours. everywhere at once, but he used to 1 toox charge of the Criminal Inves- make « sort of “‘busman's holiday”’ tdastion Department in June, 194%. of bis days off duty and go out with id for him as @ as for a strict and stolen watch. It was impossible to he had not got the watch in his you." The suspect vapored about the railings of St. Mary Abbot's Church, watched from the curbstone ‘There was a pawnshop at the corner. the pawnshop, but the ‘‘thief catcher’’ his coat as he went, ho plunged into sleeves, resting on his knuckles in the conventional style, and asked him pass examinations for promotion, but what he could do for him. “What will things. you’ give me on this?" said the man, producing the watch. “Come along to the police station and I'll tell you, and acquaintance with the pick- 1 caution you that anything you say he gave at your trial.” WAYS OF EVADING OBSERVA- TION. ‘The London thief is preternaturally quick in detecting that he is being followed, Even if ho is not quite sure, he will adopt the expedient of turn- ing sharp on his heel and walking for fifty yards in the opposite direc- tion before resuming his journey and during that fifty yards his sharp eyes have taken a mental photograph of every person he has passed, In really big affairs he will pay a confederate to follow him at a distance, taking note of any other follower remotely resembling a policeman. The tubes are very, useful to him. He tooks for a long journey, sits near the door and alips out at the next station just before the gates of the car are slammed and there is no time for the policeman to alight, and having thus ehaken him off, he sets off for his real destination, Four well-known thieves tried this device once with a pair of detectives in attendance. Al) went well up to the point of slam- ming the gate and then things began to go wrong. The dotectives had the gate re-opened. The elevator was one of those that are operated by a man standing at the bottom and as {t went aloft the detective explained the posi- tion to the operator, Something went wrong with that clevaior; it stuck halfway for quite five minutes—time enough for the detectives to climb the stairs and summon uniformed police- men to man the gates on the level of the street. The feelings of the trapped rat who secs a group of ter out her supper, but in war-time any For the real search him until he did, because it Story, however wild, was accepted. One afternoon during the first year of the war I received an urgent re- Most murders are possession he would “have the‘law on quest from a Chief Constable in the Midlands for help in 2 case of great difficulty. The family of a doctor in good practice had been upset by re- ceiving a series of outrageous letters lg doctor or skilled mechanic who 4!8 depredations before he sets out to by John Barker's where people are and postcards signed by a lady's maid the murderer is re- always walting for the motor bus, Who had lately gone to another situ- ation. There was nothing to go upon ex- ing is to furnish a very allaring C4" earn an honest living after he {s Suddenly he formed a resolution and oop: the hundio of letters, which cer- ratory for the edification of view} ‘“lscharged; the others are thinking walked quickly across the street to tainly bore out the description which the Chief Constable had given them. I soon found that the London de- was too quick for him. Flinging off | Suppose that Mr. Sherlock Holmes would have taken another Injection of cocaine and smoked three or four the detective unG the the shop, dashed behind the counter pipes over them before he sat himself The latter belonged and received the suspect in his shirt down to analyze the ink and examine the paper under a powerful lens. The Detective Inspector to whom I in- trusted the case did none of these He asked for the bundle of letters and took the next train. I thought that the case might take him a week, but it took him exactly two hours. When he returned next day the following account of his causes them to may be used in evidence against you proceedings: VERY SIMPLE PROCEDURE. On the way down in the train ho read through the letters and made a note of every word that had been misspelt. There were seventeen. He then composed a piece of dictation which took in the seventeen words. it must an have been like composing acrostic. On his arrival at the house he summoned the entire house- hold—the doctor, his wife, the chil- dren and the five servants—into the dining-room and, adopting the busi- ness-like procedure of the village schoolmaster, he served out paper and pens. When all were seated com- fortably at the table he cleared his throat and gave them a piece of dictation, All entered into the spirit of the thing—all except one, and she made Ro sign. At the end of twenty minutes the pens ceased to scratch and the copies were handed in. After a brief inspection he detained he mistress and one servant and dis- missed the others. He then said that he would like the mistress to take him up to the girl's sleeping quarters with the girl herself. In her room was a locked box. The maid had lost the key, but when he talked of breaking it open the key was sud- denly discovered. In the box were writing materials identical with those of the incriminating letters, and then after a little pressing the girl burst into tears and made a clean breast of it. A CHILD'S AWFUL SECRET. In 1915, when the spy mania was at its height, a little general servant aged sixteen and fresh from the coun- try threw her master and mistress into an almost hysterical state by her revelations. One day the mistress found her in the kitchen writing cabalistic signs on a sheet of paper. ‘The girl explained that this was part of a dreadful secret, and when pressed a little confided to her that she had become a sort of bond-siave of a German master spy named “'E. who had employed her to make a plan of the Bristol Channel and had taught her to operate an extraordi- nary signalling engine called the “Maxtone.”” She said that she was in terror of her life, that the spy would come and tap at the kitchen window, that he had a powerful green motor-car wait- ing round the corner in which he would whisk her off to cperate the One Installment a Day —OF— SECRETS OF {SCOTLAND Y WILL APPEAR . THE EVENING WORLD Read the first instalment on this page and get The Evening World every day till the Series ends. You will want every chapter. $$ __| ” a Chief British Criminal Investigation Department 1913-1921 “Maxione" and the red lights, without which the submarines lying in wait in Bristol Channel would not be able to do their full work. Then this girl went on to say that in the course of a motor-ride she had taken documents out of jis pocket which she recognized as containing a plan for blowing up Tilbury Docks. She also produced letters trom the spy himrelf—impassioned love-letters MADE LOVE IN HIS LETTERS. The letters from the spy were in code, but those from the girl friend were en clair, Gradually the volume of correspondence grew until it Ye came a fornildable bundle. The mas- ter and mistress confided in a sen- sible friend, who passe’ the whole matter over to the authorities. Some of the master spy’s letters were ama- tory, but the love-making was ind solubly intertwined with strict bus: ness, only every now and then his admiration for her transcendent beauty would break loose, “But your beauty may enchant us.” The extraordinary part of this fraud was that the gir] was quite un- educated and had never been out of her native village, and yet she could fabricate different handwritings and make signs that distantly resembled shorthand. She had dotted all over her map sham chemical and mathe- matical symbols, and whenever she was cornered for an explanation she invented a new romance. MISTRESS TERRIBLY FRIGHTENED. She had reduced her mistress to such distress that she did not dare to leave the house, and therefore the Police Superintendent who was de- tailed to see her had to make a visit to the suburbs. There he found a simple, pleasant-faced country girl, the daughter of a laborer, who would have been supposed to have no knowledge of the world outside her native village. Her employers were in such a state of mind that it was decided to send her home to ‘her mother. One of the curious points about the sirl’s imagination was her power of inventing names upon the spet, which is a very rare quality even among practined Hara. When pressed the name of the master spy, without @ moment's thought she gave it as Eric Herfranzg Mullgrd. When she was pressed to explain why the Ger- mang were not able to operate their own machine, the “Maxione,” which she described as being a sort of col- lapsible framework of tron rods, quite portable, but 5 or 6 feet in height when extended, she said that the keys of the base, which flashed rays from the little lamps attached to the arms at the top, had to be worked with great speed with the fingers and the elbows as well, and she gave a dem- onstration on the dining-room table, which was so energetic that it must have leff bruises on her elbows, The flashes were green and red and could be seen for a distance of 160 miles. That was why one had to strike the keys so hard and, naturally, a Ge man's fingers were not likely to be so nimble as those of an English girl, THE DANGEROUS AGE, The ages of from fourteen to eighteen have been 80 productive of trouble to the police that I have sometimes regretted that all girls be~ tween those ages are not safely put to sleep by the State and allowed to grow quietly and harmlessly into womanhood unseen by the world, Perhaps the legend of the “Sleeping Beauty” may have been suggested by the pranks of adolescent liars in the dawn of the Christian Era, How many hay-stacks have been set on fire by little farm-servants? How many ghosts have been conjured up? How much paraffin has been thrown on ceilings to attract photographers for the daily Press, merely from an momentous eight-year period in fore the World War broke. Yard force. detective as the world ever saw.” any rank from Dover to Calais, of detective facts that could be of dealing with criminals. He Holmes type of detective nor the Doyle theory of deduction. He favors the method of the man who uses common sense and keeps busy looking for facts. Readers of The Evening World are going to learn of Sir. Basil’s methods through his briefs of the cases he handled as chief of the Yard. They will gather from the results of those investigations just how carefully they were planned and conducted. They will get a close-up of some of the mysterious spy cases of the World War—the cases of some Americans, too, or men who claimed to be. They will learn how British statesmen and aristocracy were imposed upon, and how the impostors were rounded up. They will get an idea of the magnitude of the job of handling the German spies who flocked to England. They will get all this story first-hand, told in plain language, so clearly presented as to make it as delightful as the best of fiction. One instalment of the Scotland Yard Series will appear in The Evening World every day. infantile desire to see the grown-ups buzzing about ike a nest of di turbed wasps? THE PEARL NECKLACE ROBBERY. But to return to pre-war memories. At the moment when I took charge of the Criminal Investigation Depart- ment the Central Offlee was busy over the robbery of the pearl neck- lace. A necklace valued at about $550,000 had been despatched from Paris to a London jeweller by regi tered post. ‘The box was safely de- livered with all the seals apparently intact, but the pearls were missing and lumps of coal had been substi- tuted for them. At first suspicion fell upon the French postal authorities, Eiaborate inquiries were made on both sides of the Channel, and it was established beyond a doubt that the wrapper and the seals were exactly in the condition in which the parcel was delivered for registration. There was no doubt whatever that they had been properly packed, and therefore somowhere there existed a counterfeit seal of the firm, which consisted of the initial “M. M."" within an oval border. My first contribution to the case was to establish by experiment tha’ @ counterfeit seal could be made and used on melted sealing wax within four minutes, and that, therefore, at some point in the parcel’s journey it would have been possible to break the seals, undo the wrappings, remove the pearls and seal the parcel up again without the loss of a post. Gradu- ally the police began to see daylight. Rumors fy in Hatton Garden, and it was not long before the names of Grizzard, Silvermann and one or two others were whispered in connection with the robbery. A GROUP OF SHREWD DODGERS. Then began one of the most dif. cult cases of observation that I re- member, No fox was ever more cun- ning in covering his tracks. The men had no reason to suspect that they were being followed, and yet they, never relaxed their precautions for @ moment. If they took a taxi to any rendezvous they gave a false destina- tion, paid off the taxi and took an- other, sometimes repeating this proe cess of mystification two or three times, If they met in Oxford Street to lunch together at an A. B. C, shop they would suddenly change their minds on the doorstep and go off to another, and al] the while they had an aged discharged conyict in thelr pay The Evening World Prints the Former Chief’s Story of the Workings of the British Criminal Investigation Department the inner workings of Scotland Yard, known in the news and in the detective story books as the seat of one of the |g greatest crime detecting organizations in the world. { The doors are opened by the man who headed the British Criminal Investigation Department (the high-sounding official title of Scotland Yard) from 1913 to 1921—the busiest and most F’ the first time in history the public is to have a view of » The first of a series of articles appears on this page. Others will be printed daily in The Evening World. Sir Basil Thomson, the author of the series of articles being printed in The Evening World, went to Scotland Yard a year be- His acquaintance with the British criminal had been gained through an experience of several years . as head of one of the great British prisons, and through his active career as a criminal investigator and as a member of the Scotland In commenting on his work during the war an American writer described him as being “‘as capable an executive During the war Scotland Yard had complete control of all traffic between England and the Continent and no passenger of trip, failed to pass the scrutiny of Sir Basil’s men. This work alone furnishes material for the meatiest volume confine himself to the story of spies and espionage. The first instalment of his story, as printed on this page, shows that the detective-baronet is more than a chief of investigators. He has a mind of his own—consequently he has his own methods -@ ’ its history. or to Holland, or on the return written, but Sir Basil doe§ not doesn’t believe in the Sherlock to shadow them and call thelr atten, tion to any suspictous follower, shall not tell here what devices the police adopted, but I will say that at the last, when every other kind of observation failed, wo did adopt a new device which was successful. ‘ WIFE AS AN ACCOMPLICE. The object throughout hed been to find a moment when one or other of the parties had the stolen pearls about his person, and when the day came for making the arrest, just as the four thieves were entering a tube station, the police failed, because on that par- ticular day they had left the neck lace at home. They were detained, nevertheless, in order that a ther- ough search might be made of all their hiding places. As it then turned out, the necklace was in the possession of the wife of one of them, and when the search be- came too hot and she feared a visit from the police she put the necklace into a matchbox and dropped it the street. /There it was found, wit out, however, its diamond clasp, which had been disposed of sepa- rately. It did not take the police long to unravel the details of the crime. They found the engraver who had inno. cently cut the false seal, and the of- fice where the parcel had been opened. The thieves had arranged with the postman to bring the pa) to the office for three or four utes before taking tt on to deliver tt, Whether the postman knew before. hand what they intended to do fs un- certain, They expected to find dia- monds, which were far more easily disposed of; when they found Dearls, so large that in the trade each pearl had almost @ history, they knew that they could not dispose of them and were at first for throwing the Thames, is eee te It may be judged that 1 an expert in precious stones i, say that I had the matchbox and its contents Jaid out on my table for quite half an hour before I was sure that the pearls were genuine. They looked, to my untutored eye, so yel: low. We telephoned to the owner and the insurance agent. The owner fel! upon the pearls as a man might fall Upon some beloved and long-lost child whom he had never expected to seo again in this world. I then told him jocularly of my doubts, ‘Yellow? he sald, with genuine amazement, “Yellow? 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