| OCR Text |
Show No Glamor In Story of Crime Many earnest persons hold that the publication of crime news encourng-en youth in a criminal life. If they can see anything inviting to youth in the reports of the killing of the nix Missouri officers, the pursuit of the kiilers through three states and the final last stand and suicide sui-cide of two of the gang in Houston, they know the mind of the waywardly inclined better than newspaper men do. And most of the boys who embark on a criminal career find themselves finally behind prison bars or meeting violent death. It is the record inevitably written in the public press. There is no such thing as glorification of the criminal. The maudlin ncntimentality and heroics that once were a subject fur condemnation in some newspapers are not now found outside the metropolitan tabloids, and rarely there. Tin: cold, hard facts do not make the life of the criminal alluring. Association with men who boast of their criminal prowess and gloss it as war has been glossed by writers of fiction, may lure the vicious and the foolish. But the printed stories have no such gloss. The legends that have been woven about the lives of the bandits of frontier days may sound like high adventure to thrill-seeking boys, but the stories are not so told in newspaper columns. The Young brothers, hard, vicious killers at heart and in practice, are dead. The days that marked their flight to escape es-cape punishment as murderers were spent in skulking from point to point, ever aware that vengeance was on their trail. None of the comfort that marks the course of one who . travels honestly and openly was theirs. They must have cursed the papers that gathered here and there clews to their passage. And at the end, suicide is their choice. No glamor in that. And neither is there in the story of any other criminal crim-inal adventure. |
