OF the many sensational trials which stand out so conspicuously in the criminal history of the century that of the wretch whose name is at the head of this article is certainly one of the most extraordinary. And though a good deal was made public during the unfolding of the strange tale before Sir John Coleridge, the Lord Chief Justice, and a jury at the Maidstone Assizes, on the 5th of November, 1881, there was much that did not come out, and I now propose to deal with the suppressed part of the story in this sketch.
The man’s right name was Mapleton, but for some unexplained reason he had tacked “Lefroy” on to it; and it is as Lefroy that he will go down to posterity as a heartless and cold-blooded slayer of a fellow-man. He appears to have been a member of a respectable family, and had
