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
fac