planned and executed a diabolical homicide and who has retired to obscurity and safety will very likely in course of time make a clean breast of it to some one whom he believes to be his friend.  He wants to “get it off his chest,” to talk it over, to discuss its fine points, to boast of how clever he was, to ask for unnecessary advice about his conduct in the future, to have at least one other person in the world who has seen his soul’s nakedness.

The interesting feature of such confessions from a legal point of view is that, no matter how circumstantial they may be, they are not usually of themselves sufficient under our law to warrant a conviction.  The admission or confession of a defendant needs legal corroboration.  This corroboration is often very difficult to find, and frequently cannot be secured at all.  This provision of the statutes is doubtless a wise one to prevent hysterical, suicidal, egotistical, and semi-insane persons from meeting death in the electric chair or on the gallows, but it often results in the guilty going unpunished.  Personally, I have never known a criminal to confess a crime of which he was innocent.  The nearest thing to it in my experience is when one criminal, jointly guilty with another and sure of conviction, has drawn lots with his pal, lost, confessed, and in the confession exculpated his companion.

In the police organization of almost every large city there are a few men who are genuinely gifted for the work of detection.  Such an one was Guiseppe Petrosino, a great detective, and an honest, unselfish, and heroic man, who united indefatigable patience and industry with reasoning powers of a high order.  The most thrilling evening of my life was when I listened before a crackling fire in my library to Joe’s story of the Van Cortlandt Park murder, the night before I was going to prosecute the case.  Sitting stiffly in an arm-chair, his ugly moon-face expressionless save for an occasional flash from his black eyes, Petrosino recounted slowly and accurately how, by means of a single slip of paper bearing the penciled name “Sabbatto Gizzi, P.O.  Box 239, Lambertville, N.J.,” he had run down the unknown murderer of an unknown Italian stabbed to death in the park’s shrubbery.

Petrosino’s physical characteristics were so pronounced that he was probably as widely, if not more widely, known than any other Italian in New York.  He was short and heavy, with enormous shoulders and a bull neck, on which was placed a great round head like a summer squash.  His face was pock-marked, and he talked with a deliberation that was due to his desire for accuracy, but which at times might have been suspected to arise from some other cause.  He rarely smiled and went methodically about his business, which was to drive the Italian criminals out of the city and country.  Of course, being a marked man in more senses than one, it was practically impossible to disguise himself, and, accordingly,