115

THE SHEEDY TRAGEDY

Startling Developments Spring Upon the Public

Lat Saturday the police arrested a negro barber known as Monday McFarland, charging him with having struck the blow that killed John Sheedy. He was put into the sweat box and made a confession which, for picturesque imagery and fertile imagination has not been equaled since Mark Twain narrated the remarkable adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He claimed that he had been inspired by Mrs.Sheedy to do the work; that he had been criminally intimate with her and was thereby, with the aid of whiskey and fear of her, induced to make the assault. The police also arrested a young man named Walstrom ad an accomplice, chiefly because Mrs.Sheedy met him while at Buffalo N. Y., for medical treatment, and the acquaintance had been renewed since he came here.

The horrible story told by McFarland seemed to be in a measure confirmed when the body was exhumed because it was shown by subsequent autopsy that the blow was not sufficient to cause death and it was inferred that the work had been completed bu poison administered by the wife. The stomach is being analyzed for the presence of poison. The autopsy also revealed disease of the heart that may have been the actual cause of death.

The character of Mrs. Sheedy before her marriage is really the ground on which the theory of the detectives is built. She had been twice married before she met Sheedy, who supplanted her second husband and Hved with her some years before they were married.

There are a number of incoherencies in the case of the prosecution so far as presented to the public and sentiment is not unit in believing the guilt of the accused. Able counsel have been engaged bu all the defendants and the trial will be hotly contested. McFarland and Walstrom were committed to jail without bail.

The coroner's jury held several sessions with closed doors, but such of the testimony as would seem to clinch the theory of the detectives or shed luster on them was allowed to leak-out