Note by Colonel John Meadows, D.S.O., Chief Commissioner . . . .of the Adelaide Police . . . .

THE foregoing MS. came into my hands under circumstances that were quite accidental and that are unnecessary in the public interest to disclose.

Peter Wacks is dead. He died heroically on the occasion of the landing at Suvla Bay and the manner of his death is known to all the world.

Mrs. Wacks left the Commonwealth with her two sons over four years ago, and we are given to understand she has married again. A prominent resident of this city, when in the United States the year before last, recognised her when on holiday in the Rocky Mountains. He does not remember her new name, but he brought back the news that she was very happily married to a wealthy South American rancher, and that there was another child now of this second marriage. She was always a very charming woman.

I have very carefully gone into this so-called confession of the dead man, and I admit at once that I find it very difficult to know exactly what to say.

To begin with — anything at all written by Wacks must be received with a certain amount of suspicion and reserve.

In his confession Wacks does not tell us — indeed, perhaps he himself was not aware of the fact — that for six months he was an inmate of a Mental Asylum. His was an extreme case of religious mania, and his detention followed immediately upon his two years’ crusade, as, so he called himself, a travelling evangelist.

His mind completely broke down, and at first it was believed his condition of mania would be permanent.

It is true, as he says, that he was a great preacher. His oratory was at all times of a very high order, and the command that he had of his audiences was marvellous. Wherever he went he was received by great crowds of admirers — and, towards the end, there were no buildings large enough to accommodate all who desired to hear him. His preaching, however, was of a most frenzied and emotional nature, and in the course of his two years’ ministry, he was undoubtedly responsible for dispatching a good many down the path he ultimately went himself. He played on the fears and terrors of his listeners in a most unhealthy way.

In regard to the crimes that he lays so unsparingly at his own door — the authorities have for a long time been aware of all that he credited himself with.

During his detention at the Mental Asylum he repeatedly declared himself the author of the crimes enumerated in his MS. and of many other crimes as well.

It is most difficult to separate the false from the true. To some extent one is inclined at first to dismiss at once any idea of Wacks’ complicity in the perpetration of those dreadful murders that shook this city just over eleven years ago.

But, on the other hand, his confession discloses at times so intimate and accurate a knowledge of all the details of the bloody happenings of those days, that I am reluctantly compelled to believe there must be at least some truth in what he writes.

For myself, I had always a suspicion at the time that the second half of the murders were of quite a different order to those of the first, and that they were, moreover, carried out by quite a different kind of assassin.

Also, I was always quite certain that the caretaker of Mr. Silas Magrath could not have been the man who made off with the policeman’s bicycle at Government House, and subsequently disposed of it in the gravel pit off the Torrens Road. His legs were quite three inches too short.

Then, too, much which Wacks tells us of other happenings that can be checked and verified are perfectly true.

For example, there is no doubt he broke in............