A fiend of the Jack the Ripper type has invaded the "Gas House" district of New York city and for the second time within three weeks has claimed a victim. The body of Charles Murray, a five year old cripple, was found by a playmate in the hallway of his home, with a knife slash across the abdomen. The murderer escaped as mysteriously as did the slayer of little Leonora Anna Cohn, of the same district, a few weeks ago.

Many points of similarity between the two crimes tend to the belief that the same man was responsible for both. Like the Cohn girl, the Murray boy was hideously slain. He was stabbed in the abdomen with a knife of exceeding keenness. The knife was then turned around in almost a complete circle.

The body of the little cripple was found at dusk behind a door under a stairway on the first floor of his home. The door led to the cellar. Ten minutes previously the child had been playing in the street. He had entered the building with an older sister, who left him at the foot of the stairs when she went up to the Murray flat on the second floor.

The sister, returning a moment later to buy a newspaper for her father, missed the child and saw a man in the hallway, who, she told the police, seemed greatly excited. As she neared the bottom of the steps he walked hurriedly from the building. The girl was able to give a good description of the stranger.

After the crime was discovered it took the reserves of two police stations to preserve order in the neighborhood. Women with their children huddled close to them, ran about the streets weeping, and anxious mothers in a state of hysteria hurried from place to place seeking their children, who at the time of the crime were playing in the streets. The body of the boy, followed by a crowd numbering hundreds, was taken to the morgue. An examination showed that the murderer first had torn, apparently with his hands, the lad's trousers from his waist. The waist had been raised and the incision made in the abdomen. Although it is not known positively it is thought that the boy first was strangled, the police arguing that he undoubtedly would have made an outcry if he could have done so.