PARIS POISON CASE.

CONFLICTING STORIES.

FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT. PARIS, Sunday.

There are remarkable developments in the affair of the poisoning of Mrs. Audrey Creighton-ryan, known as “Miss Audrey Creighton,” who swallowed three tablets of corrosive sublimate and is lying gravely ill at the American Hospital at Neuilly, and her husband, Mr. Thomas Stewart Ryan, a member of the staff of the Chicago Tribune in Paris, who is alleged to have forced her to take the poison and is now in the Santé Prison. The police are investigating this strange affair under great difficulty, and the statements they have obtained from the young wife and her husband form a singular story of contradictions. At present the charge against Mr. Ryan is one of poisoning, but if his wife dies – and the doctors take a gloomy view of her case – he will be charged with murder. It is a triangular drama, for there is another man in the case, Mr. Peter Mccoy, a young American artist, of the Latin Quarter, whom Mrs. Ryan acknowledged as her lover and who has also been questioned by the police.

Mr. Ryan’s first statement was that when he took his wife to his hotel and insisted that he would not abandon his right as a husband she declared that there was nothing left for her but to die. He did not take this seriously, and replied that if she had made up her mind to commit suicide she had only to take some tablets of corrosive sublimate which he had brought in his bag from India. He began to write letters, and when his back was turned his wife, unknown to him, opened his bag, took from it the poison, which she swallowed, and declared, “Since you love me so much, it is your turn to commit suicide.” Then, suffering from the poison, she cried out, and he himself, becoming frantic, slashed at his throat with his penknife. Attracted by his wife’s shouts, servants and clients of the hotel arrived on the scene, and he took her to hospital.

Questioned yesterday on this statement, Mrs. Ryan repeated her first declaration that her husband not only forced her to take the poison, but also compelled her to write letters, one to the man she intended to marry if she secured a divorce, and another to her mother, and threatened to kill her unless she complied with his request. The first letter ran: “Dear Peter, I am going to die because I love you too much. I cannot live without you. Farewell.” On the back of the envelope of this letter were the words, “I want you to inherit my violin.” The other letter reads: “Dear Mother, when yon receive this letter I will be dead. I ask your forgiveness for writing thus, but I find myself in the midst of circumstances which, if you knew, you would not blame me for wanting to die.” When shown these letters at the hospital Mrs. Ryan admitted that she wrote them under the influence of terror.