Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 September 1875 — Truth Will Out. 4 [ARTICLE]

Truth Will Out. 4

A story with several morals comes from Windsor, Conn. Forty years ago there was a bank at Windsor. One morning the cashier opened the locked vaults and found everything in perfect order, including an envelope that held, the evening before, $50,000. But the money was gone. Detectives were summoned. They struck what they thought to be a trail, and followed it straight to the<house of Thomas the President of the bank. The evidence against him was wholly circumstantial, but it seemed pretty clear. With in a few short weeks Emerson exchanged' his home at Windsor for a cell at Weathersfiela—one of those terrible four-by-nine cells in which Connecticut used to suffocate, as well as starve, her felons. The ex-President lived several years within those gloomy stone walls, and then came out to find himself an outcast, hated by the plundered community which had once honored him. He lived to be an old man, but his crime was- never forgotten * and lie went down to the grave with “ thief” stamped upon him. The verdict was on record. Everyone knew of it. His feeble protests were vain to shakq the settled conviction of his sin. Years after the grass grew over his body, a chance stroke of a workman’s hammer proved his innocence, and showed that he had been one of the many victims of circumstantial evidence. The cashier of the bank, the man who discovered the theft, died about the time the ex-convict did. The odor of sanctity hung about him. His memory was cherished at Windsor as that of a truly good man. In an evil moment for his memory the present occupant of his old house decided to have it repaired. While the carpenters were at work on Monday of last week a misdirected blow’ with a hammer sank the head of that tool into a secret cavity in a Wall. A moment’s investigation showed that the hiding-place held the money "stolen from the Windsor bank forty years ago. Unless circumstantial evidence is again playing tricks with the truth the cashier stole the money, hid it, allowed a perfect innocent man to drag out his life, with the terrible curse, of .a. conviction for felony resting dn him, and was afraid to ever use the money for the sake of which he bartered his soul. The Springfield Re s puhlican says that there is “ quite a sensation” in Windsor on account of this revelation. .The fact is not surprising.—Chicago Tribune. .