Volume V
|
Sessions, 1811, at the Old Bailey, and sentenced to Death, for stealing a Letter containing Ten Pounds secreted a letter entrusted to him as one of the letter- carriers of the General Post Office, and appropriated to his own purposes a ten-pound Bank of England note contained therein. It appeared in evidence that the letter which the prisoner was charged with having secreted had been with the usual regularity put into the post office, upon the 29th of May, 1811, at Liverpool, by a person named William Scolfield, directed to his father at the house of Mr Raynes, 25 King Street, Covent Garden. A letter of advice had been previously sent, and received by Mr Scolfield, senior, stating the number and particulars of the note which it was his son's intention to transmit to him. The letter, however, with the promised enclosure, not having arrived upon the 31st of May, Mr Scolfield, junior, went to the bank and stopped payment of the note. Until the 31st of July no information was received by which the circumstance could be elucidated ; but upon that day it was paid away in the Bank of England by Messrs Robarts & Co. Mr Parken, solicitor for the Post Office, to whom previous intimation of the robbery had been given, then ascertained that Robarts & Co. had received it from Meux & Co., to whom it had been given by a publican named William Rose, who kept the Crown and Two Chairmen, Dean Street, Soho. In the evidence of Mr Rose it appeared that he had received the note from the prisoner, whose name he put on it, and who was letter-carrier to the district in which he resided. The usual proofs of the routine business at the Post Office having been adduced, as well as the proof of the mode by which the prisoner had obtained possession of the letter, Mr Justice Heath summed up the evidence, and the jury found the prisoner guilty. He was sentenced to death. |