WOMAN FOUND STRANGLED

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27038, 13 May 1953, Page 6

WOMAN FOUND STRANGLED

HOTEL PORTER FACES MURDER CHARGE (N.Z, Press Association-Copyright) (Rec. 7 p.m.) LONDON, May 11. A hotel porter charged in a London Court today with strangling a woman with a nylon stocking was alleged to have told the police: “I do not remember much about it. I woke and found myself in bed with her.” John Phillip Haskayne. aged 39, a hotel porter, was remanded until May 19 on a charge of murdering Mrs Grace Darrington, aged about 50, in Mrs Darrington’s flat in Paddington, on the night of April 21. Mr lan Smith, prosecuting, said that Mrs Darrington’s husband, a commercial traveller, found his wife dead in bed when he returned from a business trip to Bristol. His wife was lying on the bed partly covered with her nightdress ana a pillow over her face. The stocking was wound round her neck. It had been established that Mrs Darrington was seen in a nearby hotel drinking with a man on the night of the alleged murder? The prosecutor said that Haskayne returned to his own hotel at 5.30 a.m. on April 22 and said to the night porter: “I am broke. I went mad this week.” Haskayne later stopped a police officer in the street and said: “I want you to take me in. I must have done that job in Paddington.”