s'
imprisonment in Dunedin, Butler found on his release that the young
woman had married a man of the name of Dewar. Butler went to Mrs. Dewar
and asked for the return of his jewellery; she refused to give it up. On
the night of the murder he called at the house in Cumberland Street and
made a last appeal to her, but in vain. He determined on revenge. During
his visit to Mrs. Dewar he had had an opportunity of seeing the axe and
observing the best way to break into the house. He watched the husband's
return, and decided to kill him as well as his wife on the chance of
obtaining his week's wages. With the help of the knife which he had
found in the backyard of a hotel he opened the window. The husband he
killed in his sleep, the woman waked with the first blow he struck her.
He found the jewellery in a drawer rolled up in a pair of stockings.
He afterwards hid it in a well-marked spot some half-hour before his
arrest.

A few years after its appearance in Society, this account of Butler was
reproduced in an Auckland newspaper. Bain, the detective, wrote a letter
questioning the truth of the writer's statements. He pointed out
that when Butler first came to Dunedin he had been at liberty only a
fortnight before serving his first term of imprisonment, very little
time in which to make the acquaintance of a woman and dispose of the
stolen jewellery. He asked why, if Butler had hidden the jewellery just
before his arrest, he had not also hidden the opera-glasses which he
had stolen from Mr. Stamper's house. Neither of these comments is very
convincing. A fortnight seems time enough in which a man of Butler's
character might get to know a woman and dispose of some jewellery;
while, if Butler were the murderer of Mr. Dewar as well as the burglar
who had broken into Stamper's house, it was part of his plan to
acknowledge himself guilty of the latter crime and use it to justify his
movements before and after the murder. Bain is more convincing when he
states at the conclusion of his letter that he had known Mrs. Dewar from
childhood as a "thoroughly good and true woman," who, as far as he knew,
had never in her life had any acquaintance with Butler.

At the same time, the account given by Butler's fellow-prisoner, in
which the conduct of the murdered woman is represented as constituting
the provocation for the subsequent crime, explains one peculiar
circumstance in connection with the tragedy, the selection of this
journeyman b