Monday, Aug. 17, 1931

Ellen, David & Mr. Pierpont

David O'Shea, a farm boy from Knock Naloman, County Cork, walked to the scaffold in Mountjoy Jail in Dublin at dawn last week. Outside the gates a morbid crowd cursed the Irish police that hanged him. It was not that they thought David O'Shea innocent, but to the Irish mind he had been caught by unfair means. Irishmen expect sportsmanship in their policemen.

Last February the body of pretty young Ellen O'Sullivan was found in a bog. Ellen was a dairymaid employed by the Rathmore Creamery in County Kerry. The clothes were torn from her body, her head was bashed in by a boulder. All in all it looked pretty bad for Jeremiah Cronin, a neighboring farmer. He was Ellen's acknowledged sweetheart, and his bicycle was found not far from the scene of the crime.

Farmer Cronin roundly declared his innocence, swore that his bicycle had been stolen the night before. Irish detectives went to work. Suspicion veered toward young David O'Shea, another of Dairymaid Ellen's suitors. A Dublin sleuth slipped into David's little whitewashed hut and hid under a bed for many hours. There he overheard a whispered conversation between David O'Shea and his sister. Sister O'Shea went out of the cabin with a bucket containing one yellow woolen sock and a leather gaiter, which she burned. That was enough for the sleuth. He searched the grounds and found parts of Ellen O'Sullivan's smallclothes hidden in David O'Shea's hedge. Assistants pulled the other sock, the other gaiter, out of the bog not far from where the wayward dairymaid's body was found.

After the trial. O'Shea's lawyer appealed to the British Privy Council for David. First such appeal to London since the formation of the Irish Free State, it was refused.

All last week David O'Shea sat in his cell without speaking, without moving. He never confessed. On the scaffold the trap was sprung by an executioner from England, a Mr. Pierpont.

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