A fiend to be triedȔthe McNeil murder.
--The Confederate papers often publish tales of deeds committed by our invaders which are so horrible that the reader, and especially the foreign reader, deems them greatly exaggerated. The Yankee papers themselves, however, have in some cases the courage to tell the truth, and from one of them, the Quincy (Ill.) Herald, we get the following additional facts relative to the most brutal murder committed since the war. W. R. Strachan, the U. S. Provost-Marshal at Palmyra, Mo., has been arrested in Quincy for embezzling $30,000 of U. S. funds. The Herald gives the following history of this fiend in human shape:‘ He served in the capacity of Provost-Marshal at Palmyra for a year or more from and after the beginning of the war. In that capacity, we are assured by many witnesses, he was guilty of many other outrages and infamous offences besides that of stealing from the Government. He was in the daily habit, we are told, of arresting men without any sort of provocation, and then demanding from their friends large sums of money to procure their release from imprisonment.
It was this fellow Strachan who, while acting as Provost-Marshal at Palmyra, had an unaccountable influence over Col. McNeill. He got drunk with McNeill, and got McNeill drunk whenever he saw proper, or whenever he had an object to accomplish. It was this fellow Strachan that induced McNeill to issue the order by which ten men against whom no crime was charged were sentenced to be shot in cold blood. In this transaction Strachan got himself into a serious scrape, for which he was a few days since indicted by the grand jury of Marion county.
We give the facts as briefly and plainly as possible, just as they have been stated to us by some of the best citizens of Palmyra.--On the morning appointed for the shooting of those ten men, the wife of one of the men thus condemned to be shot came to Palmyra with six little children — called upon Strachan — told him that her husband was condemned to be shot that day and that these were her children — that if her husband should be ordered she would be unable to support the children, and begged the inhuman wretch, with big tears in her eyes, to release him from the sentence. Strachan at first refused, but the poor woman's importunities were so persistent that he finally told her if she would raise him $500 and permit him to use her, he would release her husband. The heart-broken woman canvassed the town of Palmyra, and found she could raise the sum of money required. Mr. Revely, of Lagrange, Mo., called at our office some days ago and told us that he furnished $300 of the amount, and had Strachan's receipt in his pocket for it. The money was raised — Strachan pocketed it, compelled the poor, heartbroken, afflicted woman to submit to his hellish lust, and released her husband.
For this crime against God, against law, against all the nobler impulses and instincts of human nature, he has been indicted by the grand jury of Marion county. As soon as his loathsome carcass can be had from the Court-Martial at St. Louis, he will be taken to Marion county and tried, convicted and punished for the infamous crime of rape — and a rape under the most heartrending, humiliating, and aggravated circumstances.--Such is the late Provost Marshal at Palmyra, if the testimony of the first citizens of that place, of all political parties, is to be relied upon. We would wish that none of these things were true of him, but these are not one half of the crimes he stands charged with.
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