Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 07.pdf/35

 16

shot through the temple, and no less than eighteen severe wounds had been inflicted on his head. It only remained to track the criminals. Mrs. Manning was the first to be arrested. A few days after the murder, a lady who gave the name of Smith called on a stock-broker in Edinburgh and asked 'him to sell for her some shares in the Amiens and Boulogne Railway — of course she left her address. Shortly after her visit, this gentleman received a printed circular cautioning stock-brokers against dealing in certain foreign railway shares, alleged to have been stolen in London. The numbers of the missing shares corresponded with those that "Mrs. Smith" had left behind her. The stock-broker gave her address to the police, she was promptly arrested, tacitly admitted that she was Maria Man ning and accounted for her presence in Edinburgh by saying that she had fled from the brutality of her husband. Frederick Manning was at length tracked to Jersey. He had taken refuge in the house of an old peasant at Beaumont, in the parish of St. Peter's, in that island, and had ordered large supplies of brandy from a neighboring public house with a view to create and maintain a fictitious courage. The publican however, unaccustomed to such large orders, and attracted by the news that the Bermondsey murderer was lurking in the island, betrayed his patron to the police, and

Manning was duly arrested. He at once confessed the crime, which he said that he had committed at the instigation of his wife. The prosecution of the Mannings was conducted by Sir John Jervis, the AttorneyGeneral of the day. Serjeant Wilkins de fended Frederick Manning, and Serjeant Ballantine, author of the famous " Expe riences," appeared for Maria. In a manner befitting the descendants of Adam and Eve, the guilty pair endeavored to shift the responsibility for the outrage on to each other's shoulders; and a vigorous attempt to save the life of Maria Manning on the ground that, being an alien, she was entitled to trial de medietate linguae, i.e. by a jury half composed of aliens. But it was all in vain, and the Mannings were sentenced to die. Mrs. Manning spent the last days of her wasted life in alternations of despair, denunciations of "base, base England," and scrupulous attention to her toilet. The convicts made several "statements" before their execution, but the only reliable facts to be deduced from them were that O'Con nor's grave had been dug some days before the murder, that the wretched man had walked over it and into it, and had asked why the flagstones had been taken up and that Mrs. Manning had told him the drains were under repairs! Lex.