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A
“nasty man” will sometimes work alone, lying in wait in a door-way, or at a
street corner. More brutal and inexpert thieves press the fingers of both
hands into the victim’s throat; others use a short stick, which is passed
across the throat from behind, and hauled back at both ends—a plan seldom
adopted, though, and one that is of no avail to long-armed ruffians.
Another set of thieves, who go the shorter way to work of pouncing on the
wayfarer and stunning him with a blow, are not garroters at all, and are as
much despised by regular practitioners as both parties are execrated by
every body else.
Sometimes
garroters select largely frequented thoroughfares for their work, trusting
in that case to the very boldness of their guilt; but, as a rule, they
prefer late hours and lonely, ill-lighted places. They are very shrewd in
the selection of their subjects, and profess to be able to tell at a glance
whether a man is worth “planting.” Garroters are not without expedients to
avoid suspicion, should they be interrupted by a passer-by. Their victim is
then their friend; and their friend is intoxicated, they are sorry to say;
and the stranger will be good enough to pass on, perhaps, as otherwise the
police may observe their friend, which would be awkward. Or they pretend
that he has been taken suddenly ill, or is in a fit: and starting off, one
to fetch a cab and another a doctor, the rogues make good their escape.
Women
are seldom garroted; and their exemption is due, perhaps, to some last
spark of manly and generous feeling which even a garroter may cherish.
There are other motives, to be sure. The unhappy creatures who are or
should be the thieves’ wives resent the practice of this outrage on their
sex, and many of them have a bitter experience of it; for when they offend
their lords, those rascals sometimes “screw them up” by way of punishment.
Then, again, women are more difficult to deal with, and more adept at an
outcry, than men: such of them as carry money or jewels worth the risk of
penal servitude are rarely found alone in unfrequented places; and it was
Adam, and not Eve, who swallowed the core of the apple. The pomum Adami in
a woman’s throat is so small that it is difficult to choke her on the
safest principles of the garrote, and in fact it is safest altogether to
allow her to go unmolested. Garroters declare that more perjury is
committed in convicting them than any other class of malefactors. They
admit that a prosecutor may generally swear to the identity of the “stalls”
with a sure conscience, but seldom or never to the “nasty man,” because he
keeps out of sight as much as possible from the beginning, and at the
moment of attack is always invisible to the sufferer. Possibly there is
some truth in this, though not enough to add much to the uneasiness of
society. This uneasiness has been much increased by the observation that
garrote robberies, numerous as they have become of late, do not exhaust the
energies of our more desperate criminals.
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