Dipley was indicted and found guilty of first degree murder. He drew a sentence of life imprisonment in the Missouri State Penitentiary — for a knockout blow inspired by jealousy that ended the career of a world’s champion.
The Clue of the Onyx Ring
The pretty, fair-haired little girl showed an unusual black onyx to the Inspector. It had been treasured by her mother, and the frightened. Kathleen was sure that her mother was dead. In this true story, a child’s intuition bypasses clouding evidence to strike at the core of a vicious crime.
The perceptions and powers of deduction in a child can be tricky factors in a criminal investigation.
Frequently, as almost any criminal lawyer or experienced enforcement official has ample reason to know, the element of imagination can run riot in a youngster’s mind. It can create a set of fancied circumstances that may easily lead a case into a perfectly plausible tangle that requires an expert to detect and unsnarl.
On the other hand, it is foolhardy for anyone in the field of crime detection to underestimate the keenness of mind in an observant child.
Take the “Case of the Onyx Clue,” which occurred some ten years ago in Providence, Rhode Island. It came to my attention last spring, after I had participated in a conference on legal matters there of state attorneys general from the northeastern sector of the United States.
Chief Inspector Thomas F. Rattigan of Providence had attained, over the years, a reputation for being not only a police officer worthy of note in his profession but a shrewd expert, as well, in the art of weighing human nature. No piece of information that might have bearing on a crime — or to clarification of circumstances that might indicate one had occurred — is too seemingly trivial ever to be brushed aside by the quiet, unassuming Chief Inspector.
So, when a 13-year-old girl — shy, embarrassed and frightened — appeared at his office on September 12, 1945, Inspector Rattigan put her at ease and listened with fatherly understanding while she fumbled for words.
The child was pretty, fair haired Kathleen Newcomb, older of two daughters in a family of modest means in the New England community. She had come, she said, to talk with Rattigan about her mother.
Kathleen sat with her hands in her lap, nervously fidgeting with a ring of unusual design. It was a ring, Rattigan noted, slightly too large for the finger on which she wore it.
“My mother,” she said slowly, “is dead. I am sure of it.”
Rattigan gave no sign, either of his mild astonishment at the girl’s announcement or his natural incredulity. Carefully, he questioned Kathleen and drew forth some strange fragments of childish apprehensions. Kathleen’s mother, Mary Ann, had disappeared some five weeks earlier. No report of her disappearance had been made to police. She had vanished without a word even to her eldest daughter with whom the mother always had been extremely close. It had been presumed by the family that Mary Ann, motivated by some minor domestic quarrel, had gone to visit relatives in Massachusetts. Hence no alarm had been spread. But weeks had passed and there had been no word.
“What makes you believe that she is dead?” Rattigan asked.
“This,” Kathleen said, pulling off the ring and handing it to the startled officer.
It was a ring set with a black onyx stone of unusual design and cut. As she handed it over, the child burst into uncontrollable tears. Rattigan found himself unable to comfort the girl or to elicit any further information. He promised he would try to help her and sent her home. After she had gone, Rattigan sat for some minutes eyeing in fascination the dull glow of the onyx ring lying on his desk blotter. That ring could make him appear either fatuous or fame-worthy.
True to his promise to the child, but reluctant to make a full-dress investigation of so trivial an incident, Rattigan undertook some quiet inquiries. They bore strange fruit.
He dropped in casually on Gordon Newcomb, father of Kathleen, and determined that his wife, Mary Ann, truly had disappeared, as the child had said. From other sources he learned that the onyx ring had been a betrothal gift from Gordon to Mary Ann back in 1931, when she had seen it in a store window and ecstatically told her fiancé she would much prefer it to a diamond.
The ring, Rattigan was to learn, had become a symbol of happiness to golden-haired Mary Ann.
The Inspector then devised ways to talk casually again with Kathleen. From the child’s responses to his questions he put together still more pieces. Kathleen, even as a little girl, had developed a fascination for the ring almost as great as that of her mother. To her, too it was a symbol. She had asked on several occasions to be allowed to wear it. Each time the mother had refused.
“It will be yours to keep, dear, when I die,” she said.
“That is how I know she is dead,” the child told Rattigan.
But when he tried to press her as to how she had come by the gem, Kathleen again burst into tears and was unable to proceed further in the interview.
Meantime, Rattigan’s inquiries were turning up curious developments. Mary Ann Newcomb, he learned, had become in later years a most unhappy woman, despite the onyx talisman from happier times. There had been domestic strife and bitterness. Rattigan called in the husband, to determine whether he could shed any further light on the mystery of the missing Mary Ann.
Newcomb was distraught, but could offer nothing beyond the fact that Mary Ann had departed abruptly on an August night after a quarrel. Then Rattigan reached into his pocket and pulled out the ring. He laid it on the desk between them.
“Where did you get that?” Newcomb said.
“From your daughter,” the Inspector said quietly. “You gave it to her, didn’t you — after you killed your wife.”
Newcomb paled. Vigorously he denied the accusation. Then he finally admitted he had given Kathleen the ring a week after Mary Ann disappeared. He said he and his wife had a violent quarrel. He accused the child of building” fantasy because her mother had deserted her.
But Rattigan, remembering the look in the eyes of the little girl when she first had visited him, left the ring lying, its dull black glow winking at Gordon Newcomb, on the desk between them as he pressed question upon question on the nervous father.
At midnight that night, Gordon Newcomb broke. He admitted he had choked Mary Ann to death at the climax to a violent quarrel. He led Rattigan to a grave under the floor of a garage in Cranston, Rhode Island, where they found her body.
Newcomb was tried and convicted of murder. A trained and experienced policeman had decided the incredible deductions of a little girl who loved her mother never should be brushed aside as fantasy without full investigation. He tested that decision with an onyx ring.