When murders were committed in Victorian London, they were reported all over the world, often within a few hours of the crime having been perpetrated.
This haste to get the news out there meant that the initial reports were often somewhat confused about the crimes committed and the names of those involved.
An example of this appeared in The Wexford People on Saturday the 24th of February 1872
A MURDER IN LONDON
Another horrible and dramatic crime has been committed in London, that city of horrible and dramatic crime.
About three o’clock on Saturday morning an unfortunate stoker, named George Merrit, a decent, unoffending, and industrious man, with a wife and six children, was walking in the Belvedere Road, a well-known thoroughfare in the southern district of London.
The poor fellow was hurrying on to commence his early day’s work at a brewery, where he was employed, when a well-dressed man on the other side of the road drew a pistol and fired it at Merrit.
The first shot missed whereupon the wretched victim’s assailant fired a second and a third.
THE DEATH OF GEORGE MERRIT
The latter struck Merrit in the neck, bringing him to the ground, whereupon the man dropped the revolver, and rushing on Merrit stabbed him mortally with a dagger.
While Merrit lay on the ground bleeding from the deadly wounds which caused death to result in a few minutes, a policeman who had heard the shots ran up and arrested the slayer with the still smoking pistol in his hand.
THE MURDERER IDENITIFIED
On being brought to the police office it appeared that the man’s name was Minar that he was an American surgeon.
Further inquiries furnished a clue to the cause of the atrocious deed which he had committed.
A POSSIBLE MOTIVE
It is said that Minar had been a short time before inveigled into a house of ill-fame, and there robbed, and that he had threatened to kill a man who had assisted in the robbery should he ever come across him.
This theory is strengthened by the fact that when Minar was arrested he exclaimed, “Oh! that was not the man I meant to kill.”
WAS HE INSANE
Some evidence as to the prisoner’s insanity was tendered at the inquest, but it does not appear at all to be of a weighty character.
A man may have a peculiar idea about the arrangement of furniture and an objections to Irish servants, without being in that condition of insanity when we hold men irresponsible for crime.
THE EXCUSE OF INSANITY
A counsel who would today set up a defence of insanity would have a hard task before him.
The English public feel that the excuse of insanity has been stretched to the utmost in the case of Christinia Edmunds, and will watch jealously any future attempt to set up the uncomfortable doctrine that because a person is somewhat eccentric, and has had several relatives in the lunatic asylum, he or she may commit with impunity the most deliberate, atrocious, and well-planned murder.
Nobody, we are sure, was very anxious to see the extreme penalty of the law carried out on the wretched woman who went about Brighton scattering poisoned confections, like a new Borgia, but, on the other hand, the principle laid down in her case is a very dangerous one.
ECCENTRIC PERSONS
The number of persons who are slightly eccentric, and have relatives in a lunatic asylum, is inconveniently large, and it would indeed be a very serious thing to elevate these persons into a kind of privileged aristocracy of crime who could do murder with impunity.