Arrest of a Steerage Passenger for Wife Murder.
[New York, Nov.23]--A mysterious individual was arrested as he alighted from the steamer Wyoming yesterday. He was a steerage passenger, and registered the name "James Shaw." He was arrested on a cable message from England to the British Consul-General, Mr. Hoare. The dispatch asked that steerate passenger James Shaw be detained, as he was really James Pennock, of Pickering, North Riding, Yorkshire, England, and that he had murdered his wife on November 7. He was described as 47 years of age, 5 feet 7 inches in height, with "ginger" whiskers and hair, and having a proturbance on his head the size of a walnut.
Deputy Marshal Fed. Bernhardt took charge of James Shaw, who protested his innocence and declared that he had kissed his wife good-bye on November 9 at Leeds, near which town he lived. He was going west, and had $5. He was locked up in Ludlow Street Jail, pending further instructions from England.
Shaw somewhat answered the description of "Jack the Ripper," and there was in his pocket an illustrated account of the Whitechapel horror, but Marshal Bernhardt pumped his prisoner in his own peculiar way and satisfied himself that Shaw was not the "Ripper."
Shaw admits that that is an assumed name, his real name being Heddington, but he declines to say why he is travelling incognito.
There is no "walnut" on his head, and no scar where it might have been, and he is two inches shorter than the Yorkshire man. He cannot read nor write, and is rather confused in his accounting for the presence in his pocket of the newspaper containing the Whitechapel story.
