Winter's End

In London's Wandsworth Prison last week gentle-mannered, somber Harold Dorian Trevor, 62, was hanged by his neck until dead. Thus ended a life which the London police hated to take. They had known Harold Dorian Trevor long and well.

In 1895 London-born, 15-year-old Harold Dorian Trevor stole a gentleman's morning rig, cane and single eyeglass, to begin a career which brought him fame as "The Man with the Monocle." For 40 years he did business at the same stand. From renting agents he got lists of rented quarters. Then he played the perfect gentleman to landladies, often with romantic embellishments. Then he lifted whatever was liftable. Then, usually, he landed in jail. He spent two-thirds of his life there, always ambitious to pull off a job that would get him "enough money to retire and live quietly in the country."

Last fall, with old age coming on, Harold Dorian Trevor tried to change his pitch. Just ten days out of jail, he approached an Army officer's widow, Mrs. Theodora Greenhill, 65, who had a Kensington flat to rent. Instead of murmuring blandishments, he throttled her. A tyro at murder, he left many fingerprints, as well as an order to view the flat, issued under his real name. He talked nervously to the cabby who drove him from the scene.

When Harold Dorian Trevor was sentenced to death, he said: "My life has been all winter." It was the final irony of his wintry life that the night after he murdered Mrs. Greenhill he slept, unsuspectingly, on a bed that could have given him his country quiet: The proprietress of his Birmingham hotel, fearing bombing, had hidden several thousand pounds in crisp, new banknotes in his mattress.

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