DOUBLE MURDER.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 97, 27 April 1938, Page 9

DOUBLE MURDER.

" TORTURE KILLERS."

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER.

[TEXAS RANGERS ON TRAIL.

NEW YORK, April 5. Texas Rangers, with guns cocked and field-glasses swinging at their necks, rode over the sunbaked Van Horn brush country in search of the "torture killers" of society woman, Mrs. Weston Frome, and her pretty, dark-haired daughter Nancy, aged 23. Their half-stripped bodies were found face down in a ditch in the Mesquite Wilderness, six miles east of Van Horn. They had been shot, bludgeoned and tortured with a lighted cigar. Fo_ir hundred pounds in travellers' chequos*. £20 in cash, and their jewellery had been stolen from them. A man's torn handkerchief clenched in Miss Frome's hand and a b'x of matches were the only clues that G-men and rangers found. Missing Five Days. It is believed that Mrs. Frome and her daughter had been dead at le?_ -t four days. They disappeared when their limousine was found abandoned "-i a ditch in the desert 50 miles awav. Wealthy Weston Frome, of Berkeley. California, immediately hired a omnia n-# and cars to scour the desert, but it wis five days later when the bodies of his wife and daugther were discovered. The police believe that there were two killers—both half-crazed. Each knuckle of the girl's right hand w-js! burned with a lighted cigar. Medical examination revealed th-it | Xancv Frome was not dead when tic j murderers made their getaway. ■ le . was left to suffocate, face down, m the | ditch. Defectives are anxious to que-■ tion the owners of a blue coupe eui ■ seen in the district. i

Truck Driver James Milam, one <->t the searchers, who found the bodies, told the police that he had seen a s*range couple—a man and a woman—:n a blue car patrolling up and down the roadway near the place where Mis. Frome and her daughter were found. Driver Questioned. He made a note of its registration number and has given it to the police. Weston Frome took part in the search for the killers. He had waved his wife and daughter good-bye as they drove oft" from their California home at Berkeley to visit relatives at Parrts Island, South California. Frome family is one of the wealthiest In California. A man driving a bloodstained car is reported to have been detained at Alamo Gordo, New Mexico, and is being hild for questioning.