WHEN HE HEARS THE VERDICT OIF WILFUL MURDER AGAINST HIM
A London Dressmaker Tells a Story Which Strengthens the Opinion that Deeming is Jack the Ripper.
Melbourne, April.
The coroner's jury today delivered a verdict of wilful murder against Deeming in the case of the wife formerly Miss Mather, whom he married at Rainhill, England, and whom he murdered and buried at Windsor, a suburb of Melbourne, on or about last Christmas Day. Deeming received the verdict with a defiant air. It yet remains for him to be examined before a magistrate and committed for trial. He will then be indicted for the crime, after which trial, conviction and execution are expected to follow speedily. The police of Sydney have been endeavoring to ascertain what became of the former wife of Deeming, whom he lived with in that city. It was supposed he murdered her as he had his other wives. The woman, however, proves to be alive. Deeming deserted her, and she, it appears, was not sorry to let him go.
London, April 7.
A dressmaker of London has identified a portrait of Deeming as that of the man who in the autumn of 1888 was laying attention to her with a view to matrimony. He showed great excitement over the Jack the Ripper murders of which several were perpetrated that year, and left her company a few hours before the murder of Mrs. Chapman, whose body was found on Hanbury St., Whitechapel, on the morning of Sept. 8th, 1888, she having been murdered the previous night. Several Ripper murders occurred about that time in rapid succession, the first of these mysterious crimes having been begun in Christmas week of the previous year, 1887, with the killing of an unknown woman near Osborne and Worth (sic) streets, Whitechapel. If the dressmaker is as correct as she is positive in her recollections, Deeming was in London during the autumn of 1888, when several of the murders occurred. The dressmaker says that the time Deeming left her company on the evening of Sept. 7th, was an hour before the time at which the medical testimony at the inquest indicated that the Chapman woman was probably murdered. A few days after the crime the man she believed was Deeming disappeared and she never saw him again. The opinion that Deeming committed several of the Ripper murders is strengthened in public opinion by the dressmaker's statement.
London, April 7.
Dinham villa, the building in which Deeming perpetrated the murder of his wife and four children is to be demolished. The owner says he could not expect people to again occupy the building; but he will build another house near or on the site.
