Detected by Electricity

A Somnambulist Murderer Reveals His Guilt

I am now a telegraph operator of twelve years’ service; but my story requires that I revert to the time when, poor and penniless—my father dead—my poor mother was striving with all her earnest might to keep our little family together. Alas! The strength of woman is unequal to the determination of her mind, and my poor mother, overcome by her great exertions for the support of myself and sister, died five years after my father’s demise. Thus my sister and myself, aged respectively ten and twelve years, were thrown upon the mercy of a cold and pitiless world, without money, without friends, and, as I then thought, without relatives, but I have found many of the latter in my more prosperous and independent days.

I remember quite distinctly how I fared the first day that I attempted to get work. Everybody looked upon my tidy suit and ingenuous countenance as the worst symptoms of depravity and innate dishonesty, turning me away without a civil or sympathetic word. In vain I told my story, and pleaded a desire to do anything. It was the same thing for a week, when one night, worn out by… Read More