First clipping: Gruesome Murder in Buffalo

I’ve begun to transcribe the clippings and here is the first one (on the left in the photo). The first clipping has three short notices under the heading “General News”.

Mrs. Ralph Watson, of Stacksteads, was on Friday delivered of triplets. Mother and children doing well.

Mr. George Norwood, former chairman of the London and India Dock Joint Committee, died on Thursday night, after an illness of some duration.

Miss Elizabeth Trembath, a worthy specimen of the old fashioned Lumb stock, has died at the age of 85. She had been 45 years in the postal service.

And then  a longer story under the headline “Gruesome Murder in Buffalo”.

The severely deteriorated body of a prominent lawyer of this city was recently found submerged in the Erie Canal. Charles Weigand, Esq., had gone missing in the Spring of this year. Weigand was an avid yachtsman and when his vessel was found disabled and abandoned, it had been presumed by police that he had drowned in a Lake Erie squall. Private investigators, however, had uncovered Weigand’s links to a ring of opium smugglers. As a base of operations, the smugglers used one of the towering grain elevators for which Buffalo is noted. The ringleader was the notorious David Lantry, a cunning criminal well known in New York. 

Weigand had been brutally murdered in the Spring, after arousing the displeasure of Lantry and his other confederates. His corpse was then sub-merged for safekeeping in the canal, at the rear of a concert saloon. Their plan was to allow the body to be disfigured by its long bath, enough so that the cause of Weigand’s death could no longer be determined. Then the body would be placed along the lake shore, giving the impression Weigand had died in the wreck of his yacht and that the body had spent the intervening months adrift.

The facts were uncovered when Lantry and his band attempted to collect on an insurance policy taken on Weigand’s life not long before the murder.

I find that story hard to believe. It is possibly true, but I can't find any other reference to it.

Beside the clipping is a notation written in pen. It seems to say "from The Bacup Times". There is a web site called the Bacup Times in Britain. It's a local history site. Under the heading "New Articles" there are stories and pictures from an old newspaper called the Bacup Times.

I'm not sure why this story about a man being killed in Buffalo would appear in a British newspaper. But I did check and the towns mentioned in the "General News" column, Stackstead and Lumb are also in Britain near Bacup.