A Diabolical Crime.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume III, Issue 437, 3 April 1890, Page 3

A Diabolical Crime.

TWO LADS GUILTY OF PARRICIDE.

[•‘stab” special.] Loudon, February 6. Since two lads of fifteen and sixteen calmly shot a fellow-woikmen at Maidstone, to avenge a fancied slight, and glorified in their crime, we have heaid of no murder equal in atrocity and ferocity to the appalling case of parricide at Crewe. I confess I have but little pity for the victim. He must, as his sons a lege, have been a bad father, and habitually and been exceptionally cruel to his family, to make such a diabolical crime possible. Not that the murder was committed in hot blood. Quite the reverse, indeed. The brothers Bichard and George Davies appear (judging by their confessions) to have concerted p an< for effedually slaying their immediate pr. genitor with as much indifference as though he were a fat pig or stalled ox. These youthful miscreants (aged 16 and 18 years respectively) have acknowledged, says the Telegraph, that they coolly planned ai d ruthlessly executed the murder of their father. Each of them bad voluntarily and separately signed a declaration to that effect. Each had done his utmost, with characteristic vileness, to incriminate the other, and to shift the awful responsibility for the actual deed from his own shoulders to those of his brother. B ought face to face, after having set down iheir mutual denunciations in writing at the Crewe Police office, by Inspector Oldham, who read to them aloud their respective confessions, they fell to wrangling over the revolting details of the assassination. Richard qualified the latter part of bis brother's statement as "nothing but lies.” “ You had the axe. and you know it,” he added: “you struck father first.” " No,” rejoined George, “ I did not. It’s all true what I have written. You came up with the axe bead in one hand and the stave in the other. You took the pistol with you ; and you said if you did not finish him with tbe hatchet you would with the pistol. I never struck father with the axe at all. ” Thus ignobly did these atrocious young parricides dispute the crowning infamy of the merciless blows that laid their sire low, a mangled corpse bleeding from half a dozen mortal wounds. They acknowledged an equal criminality, as far as the plan of tbe murder was concerned ; but each accused his brother of having done the dreadful deed, the blame of which, moreover, Richard Davies, with hor. rible oynici-m, attributed to tbe slaughtered men. “ The cause we bad for it,” he wrote in bis declaration, ■■ was because be was such a bad father—not to me, exactly, but to George and fas rest—and a bad husband to mother; tor they have been very nearly starved sometimes, as he would neither buy them coal for the fire nor meat to eat, when he was in a bad temper.”