In April 1922, 17-year-old Ernest Albert Walker, the footman to an English colonel, approached a policeman in Tonbridge and said, “I believe I have done a murder.” At the house, investigators discovered the body of messenger Raymond Charles Davis and a handwritten agenda on black-edged notepaper:

1. Ring up Sloane Street messenger office for boy.
2. Wait at front door.
3. Invite him in.
4. Bring him downstairs.
5. Ask him to sit down.
6. Hit him on the head.
7. Put him in the safe.
8. Keep him tied up.
9. At 10.30 torture.
10. Prepare for end.
11. Sit down, turn gas on.
12. Put gas light out.
13. Sit down, shut window.

Walker had also left a note for the butler:

I expect you will be surprised to see what I have done. Well since my mother died I have made up my mind to die also. You know you said a gun-case had been moved and I denied it. Well, it had, I got a gun out and loaded it and made a sling for my foot to pull the trigger, but my nerve went and I put it away. I rang up the Sloane Square office for a messenger boy and he came to the front door. I asked him to come in and wait, and I brought him to the pantry and hit him on the head with a coal-hammer. So simple! Then I tied him up and killed him. I killed him, not the gas. Then I sat down and turned the gas full on. I am as sane as ever I was, only I cannot live without my dear mother. I didn’t half give it to that damned boy. I made him squeak. Give my love to Dad and all my friends.

“I don’t know what made me do it,” he told police. “I came to Tonbridge as it would give me plenty of time to think and tell the police here.” He was judged “guilty but insane” and committed to the Broadmoor psychiatric hospital.

Twenty-nine-year-old James Landis was operating a currency-wrapping machine at the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing when an idea occurred to him. He went home and cut ordinary bond paper into pieces the size of U.S. currency, and wrapped them to resemble the bricks of $20 bills that he produced at work. On Dec. 30, 1953, he smuggled these packages into work with him and hid them in a locker room. Then he wrapped two bundles of real $20 bills in kraft paper and carried them to a storage area. There he unwrapped them, saving the labels, put the bills into two paper bags he had brought from home, and hid these.

He worked the rest of the morning at his station, then returned to the dummy bundles he had brought from home. In a toilet stall he affixed the labels to the ends of the dummy bricks, using glue he had brought from his station, and he rubber-stamped each “HA 12-31-53,” indicating that a bureau employee with the initials H.A. had wrapped the packages on Dec. 31, 1953. Then he carried the dummy bricks to a storage skid on the first floor, where he left them among packages of genuine $20 bills.

At 3:10 p.m. he finished work, changed clothes, and retrieved one of the paper bags from the dead storage area, using a pair of dirty trousers to conceal the $128,000 that the bag held. And he walked out of the building.

Landis and three friends set about buying inexpensive merchandise in order to shed the stolen money and get change, but it wasn’t to last long. When he returned to work on Jan. 4, a stockman picked up two bricks of currency and noted that one of them felt light. When the dummy bricks were discovered, the Secret Service began an investigation; Landis drove to Virginia and tried to hide the money with his father-in-law, who turned him in the following morning. Landis and his friends pleaded guilty on May 3, and all were sent to prison.

I hope this is true — Charles Whitehead’s Lives and Exploits of English Highwaymen, Pirates, and Robbers (1883) recounts a notable heist by one Arthur Chambers. Chambers rented a room from a wealthy landlord, and after winning his confidence, approached him one day with the sad news that he had just witnessed the death of his brother, who had enjoined him to convey his remains to Westminster Abbey. The landlord, moved by Chambers’ story, agreed to safeguard the coffin overnight in his own house, and Chambers arranged to have it delivered there.

That artful rogue was, however, confined in the coffin, in which air holes had been made, the screw-nails left unfixed, his clothes all on, with a winding-sheet wrapped over them, and his face blanched with flour. All the family were now gone to bed, except the maid-servant. Chambers arose from his confinement, went down stairs to the kitchen wrapped in his winding-sheet, sat down, and stared the maid in the face, who, overwhelmed with fear, cried out, ‘A ghost! a ghost!’ and ran up-stairs to her master’s room, who chid her unreasonable fears, and requested her to return to bed and compose herself. She, however, obstinately refused, and remained in the room.

In a short time, however, in stalked the stately ghost, took his seat, and conferred a complete sweat and a mortal fright upon all three who were present. Retiring from his station when he deemed it convenient, he continued, by the moving of the doors, and the noise raised through the house, to conceal his design: in the mean time, he went down stairs, opened the doors to his accomplices, who assisted him in carrying off the plate, and every thing which could be removed, not even sparing the kitchen utensils.

“The maid was the first to venture from her room in the morning, and to inform her master and mistress of what had happened, who, more than the night before, chid her credulity in believing that a ghost could rob a house, or carry away any article out of it,” Whitehead writes. “In a little time, however, the landlord was induced to rise from his bed, and to move down stairs, and found, to his astonishment and chagrin, that the whole of his plate, and almost the whole of his moveables, were gone, for which he had only received in return an empty coffin.”

In 1968 British police constable David Morris was directing Vincent Fagan to a parking space when Fagan’s car ran onto his foot. Morris shouted at him to move the car, but Fagan refused and turned off the ignition. Eventually he started it again and moved off, but he was convicted of assault for the incident.

This raises a curious legal point. Normally Western law recognizes a crime only if a guilty action and a guilty intent occur at the same time. Here it seems that Fagan’s guilty action (rolling onto Morris’ foot) was a simple accident, and his guilty intent (his resolution not to move) occurred only later. Does that mean that he had committed no crime?

No, it doesn’t, ruled the English court of appeal. Fagan’s guilty action extended continuously while the constable’s foot was pinned under his tire, and he became guilty of assault a soon as he formed the resolution not to move the car. His appeal was dismissed.

(Fagan v Metropolitan Police Commissioner [1969] 1 QB 439)

Here’s a philosophical question. Some pinball machines reward high scores with free replays. And in states with anti-gambling statutes, some prosecutors crack down on this feature, saying that it constitutes gambling.

Is this a coherent argument? If pinball is legal, then can more pinball be illegal?

“The prosecutors … believe that ‘more of the same’ can be too much of a good thing, and rather than multiply legal acts, actually cross the line of legality,” writes Peter Suber in The Paradox of Self-Amendment.

“A quantitative change becomes at some point a qualitative change, just as lowering the temperature of water by degrees gives us nothing but cold water for a while, and then suddenly gives us ice.”

An 1873 arrest report by Arizona sheriff George Tyng, quoted in Case and Comment, 1934:

Received the within process Arizona City, Jan. 1873 and served same by arresting defendant at Ehrenberg, A.T., Jan. 31, 1873, but as defendant had no money and I was broke myself and the county dont pay cash in advance, and no steamboat around and no calaboose here and defendant wouldn’t walk down to Yuma all alone by himself and I wouldn’t walk down with him and as he wouldn’t stay arrested unless I boarded him which I had no money for to do, and as he gave up the coat (value .45 cents currency — estimated) and said he never stole it but Bryson gave it to him in presence of witnesses and that Bryson was a damned liar anyhow, and not knowing what to do with him, I did nothing more to him up to date beyond giving him excellent moral advice which he assured me was entirely unnecessary in his case, his life having been blameless and his reputation spotless as he could prove by the best men in Nevada and Idaho but have allowed him to run at large until a more favorable season when a steamboat happens to be here, and will take scrip for his passage to Yuma and present the bill to Supervisors themselves, which is nearly all I have done toward serving within process, though I would make return of the Balance were this process bigger on the back.

Fees — Balance of what coat sells for after paying Justice fees.

George Tyng,
Sheriff of Yuma County,
Arizona

In 1629, Joan Norkot of Hertfordshire died in a singularly impossible way:

1. “She lay in a composed manner in her bed, the bed cloaths nothing at all disturbed, and her child by her in the bed.”
2. “Her throat was cut from ear to ear and her neck broken, and if she first cut her throat she could not break her neck in the bed, nor e contra.”
3. “There was no blood in the bed saving that there was a tincture of blood upon the bolster whereupon her head lay, but no other substance of blood at all.”
4. “From the bed’s head there was a stream of blood on the floor, till it ponded on the bending of the floor to a very great quantity, and there was also another stream of blood on the floor at the bed’s feet, which ponded also on the floor to another great quantity, but no continuance or communication of blood of either of these two places, the one from the other, neither upon the bed, so that she bled in two places severally, and it was deposed that turning up the matte of the bed there were clotts of congealed blood in the straw of the matte underneath.”
5. “The bloody knife in the morning was found sticking in the floor a good distance from the bed, but the point of the knife as it stuck in the floor was towards the bed and the haft towards the door.”
6. “Lastly, there was the print of a thumb and four fingers of a left hand on the dead person’s left hand.”

No one had entered the house since she had gone to bed, and Joan’s sister Agnes and her husband, John Okeman, had lain in the outer room together with John’s mother, Mary. John was acquitted and his pregnant wife permitted to live, but Joan’s husband Arthur and her mother-in-law, each protesting their innocence, were hanged.

This account was found among the papers of Sir John Maynard, who died in 1690. When it was published in The Gentleman’s Magazine in July 1851, it made a sensation chiefly because it reported that Joan’s month-old corpse had been exhumed and itself accused the killers. “The appellers did touch the dead body, whereupon the brow of the dead, which was of a livid or carrion colour (that was the verbal expression in the terms of the witness) began to have a dew or gentle sweat [which] ran down in drops on the face, and the brow turned and changed to a lively and fresh colour, and the dead opened one of her eyes and shut it again, and this opening the eye was done three several times. She likewise thrust out the ring or marriage finger three times and pulled it in again, and the finger dropt blood from it on the grass.” But setting that aside, it’s hard to understand what happened to Joan. No motive was adduced in the murder, and no one has explained how it was accomplished. Who killed her, and how?