The D.A. Breaks an Egg

Once again we are forced to call to the attention of the taxpayers the utter incompetency of the sheriff and district attorney of this county. Regardless of what some may think, it is not a pleasant duty; but it is for the best interest of the community that we comment on their handling of this last and latest crime.

It so happens that the murder was committed within the city limits, and the city police were on the job at approximately the same time the over-zealous, publicity-hungry county officials started working.

If the county officials had wanted the whole-hearted co-operation of the city police chief, it was theirs for the asking. But the county men, acting with characteristic high-handed disregard for conventional methods of procedure, ignored the city police, even to the extent of failing to communicate important clues.

The manner in which their efforts backfired is attested by the fact that a veteran attorney, who has probably forgotten more law than the district attorney ever knew, and who was getting courtroom experience when the man who now guides the legal destinies of Madison County was in his swaddling clothes, is even now studying the possibilities of litigation.

It is astonishing that Doug Selby, as district attorney, should have put himself in the position he now occupies. Not only did he announce to the press that a certain young woman had been murdered, but he then proceeded to invade the privacy of her bedroom, apparently inviting in a reporter of the servile Clarion to watch him pull a rabbit out of a hat — or, in this case, a clue out of a suitcase.

And just as soon as Sheriff Brandon could break away without letting the chief of police know where he was going, Brandon joined Selby at the hotel. There the two of them set about the systematic search of a room which had been rented by a young woman whose only similarity to the corpse was the fact that they both had been more or less recently in a Montana city.

But the point is that all of this unseemly haste, all of this invasion of privacy, all of this cheapening of the county, merely for the purpose of gaining individual credit, not only accomplished nothing, but did have a tendency to delay the solution of the case. It remained for Chief of Police Otto Larkin, working carefully and methodically, running down clues, putting two and two together, not only to make an arrest of a person who quite evidently is the guilty party, but to uncover evidence which is of the greatest importance, evidence which the county officials would never have seen had Larkin not been on the job.

And, as for a custom which has persisted for years in the office of the sheriff and district attorney, the habit of paying off political debts by catering exclusively to one newspaper and releasing news only through that most favored press organ, this is once when our esteemed contemporary has quite evidently outreached itself, and legal action is in the offing.