Brooklyn Daily Eagle
New York, USA
23 May 1892
Execution of Deeming
Frederick Bayley Deeming has paid the penalties for his crimes and
the world breathes easier. He was a robber, swindler and a murderer
of women and helpless children. The record of his crimes for the
last ten years is startling. It begins with a petty theft, for
which he served a sentence of six weeks, and ends with the murder
of his young bride and the preparations for the killing of a girl
whom he was about to marry. Here are some of the things that he
did: After the theft he went in business in Sidney (sic),
Australia, and made a fraudulent assignment, swindling his
creditors out of a large sum; he swindled two brothers out of £60
and fled to Cape Town; obtained £4,000 on the strength of bogus
deeds for South African property and went to England; obtained
jewelry at Hull under false pretences; escaped to South America,
but was caught and sentenced to nine months' imprisonment; rented a
villa in the suburbs of Liverpool, and took to it the wife he
married in 1881, with her four children, and murdered them and
buried the bodies beneath the hearthstone; soon after he married
Miss Emily Mather, a Liverpool girl, and took her to Australia,
where he killed her also and buried her under the floor of his
house. On the eve of his marriage to Miss Kate Rouncesvell at
Perth, West Australia, he was arrested for his last crime. This was
in March. As soon as the prosecuting officers in Melbourne had
obtained the evidence necessary to convict him he was brought to
trial and found guilty. He declared himself innocent of any wrong
doing and made an appeal. There was no delay, for the English law,
which applies to the mother country as well as the colonies,
requires that a sentence of death must be executed within twenty
one days from the time that it is pronounced.
The Victorian Executive and the British privy council refused to
interfere and the man went to his death. Before the execution he
confessed that the had murdered Miss Mather, the last woman whom he
had married, but he said that he was not guilty of the other crimes
with which he was charged. He wrote the story of this life while in
the Melbourne jail and bequeathed to Miss Rouncesvell one tenth of
the profits from its publication.
All the atrocious and mysterious crimes committed in England,
Australia and Southern Africa during the last few years have been
ascribed to Deeming since his arrest. This was but natural, for the
police need some excuse for their inefficiency and the public makes
a hero of every great criminal. Yet it is not improbable that he
was guilty of many undetected murders. One theory is that he was
Jack the Ripper which filled the Whitechapel district of London with
terror. There is no doubt that he was capable of Jack the Ripper's
butchery, for a man who did not hesitate to slay his wife and his
own small children would not hesitate when the life of an outcast
was in question. He seems to have been possessed of a thirst for
the blood of women. None of his victims were men. Until the
Whitechapel outlaw is arrested there will be people who believe
that they have found in him ever brutal murderer. It is a fact to
be regretted, however, that savage passion is not confined to the
breast of one man who has frequented the slums of London
inetrmittently for the last four years. It is in every heart
awaiting favorable conditions for its development. What those
conditions were in the case of Deeming has not yet been disclosed.
