TALE OF PIRATES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 228, 26 September 1931, Page 9

TALE OF PIRATES.

Murder and , Kidnapping Near

New York.

STRANGE- DOINGS ON YACHT.

NEW YORK, September 20,

'An amazing story of murder, ping, pirates and a drifting yacht has b6en told by a beautiful and wealthy wife. The subsequent finding' of her husband's body with a bullet wound in his and with his throat gashed has created a sensation, and a mystery which will take some unravelling.

Early one morning 10 days ago some boatmen found the yacht Penguin drifting in Long Island Sound, with five-year-old Barbara Collinge alone on board. The child, who was crying, said 1 that her parents had been carried off during the night. An hour later the child's mother turned up on the beach with such a fantastic story of murder and kidnapping that the authorities refused to believe her tale.

The Collinge couple were reported to be wealthy, and the husband was 38 years old, while his widow is 32. Mrs. Collinge said that she was in her cabin late at night, when she heard a noise on deck. She hurried out to find her husband, Benjamin, had been seized by two pirates, one a boy of 18, the other a man of 50, who bound him and disappeared in the darkness in a canoe.

Soon they returned and said that they had killed him. They took her aboard the canoe. The older pirate, she said, then assaulted her in the canoe and set her ashore.

A handsome and intelligent woman and a college graduate, Mrs, Collinge admitted that her story sounded absurd, but she stuck to it, and on two succeeding days went aboard the yacht with officials and re-enacted the kidnapping scenes as she had described them.

District-Attorney Blue told her that she was lying, and the police, after careful inquiry, did not believe that the husband was killed. This morning, however, his body, bound hand and foot, with knote of an experienced boatman, a bullet wound in the forehead, and a slash across the throat, was found in the surf at Oyster' Bay, definitely settling that murder had been committed.

The police are still uncertain whether the widow is implicated.