IN GIRL'S PRESENCE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 21, 25 January 1936, Page 4 (Supplement)

IN GIRL'S PRESENCE.

LOVER IS SHOT DEAD. "NOT PROVEN," JURY FINDS. A jury returned a verdict or not proven at the conclusion of the six-day trial at Edinburgh of John McGuigan, alias John Miligan, a farm labourer, aged 24, on a charge of having shot at and killed 18-year-old Daniel Kerrigan in the presence of his sweetheart, aged 17, in a wood near Perth. On a charge of assault on the girl, Marjory Watson Fenwick, McGuigan was found guilty. He was also found guilty on a charge of burglary. Sentence of ten years' penal servitude was passed. The judge, summing-up, described the crime as a cruel and cowardly murder of a young man at the very threshold of his life and in the presence of the young woman with whom lie had been keeping company. Not content with that foul murder, he continued, the murderer, according to the Crown, proceeded to gratify his lust upon the person of the young woman. The greatest crimes were ofteb committed in darkness and secrecy, and it was only by considering the cumulative weight of circumstances that it became possible to say that the case had passed from the region of reasonable doubt into the region of reasonable certainty. "Don't forget," said the judge, "that the man who was capable of shooting Kerrigan dead in the presence of that young girl when they were sweethearting together was a man who was capable of any crime. "Whoever that man was, he was a man of low and degraded mentality. There is one unchallenged fact in the case. There is no doubt that the girl was assaulted, whether criminally or not. Does not that go some way to corroborate, the story which she told?"