Manhunt Ends In Suicide

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29260, 19 July 1960, Page 9

Manhunt Ends In Suicide

(N.Z. Press Association —Copvripht) LONDON, July 17.

A relentless manhunt through fields of ripening corn with dogs and a "spotter” aeroplane ended today when tousle-haired “Gypsy Jack” Smith, aged 24, shot himself in a ramshackle railway carriage where he had been at bay. The hue-and-cry began last Wednesday when Mrs Ethel Collinge, aged 45, was found dead in a field near Cambridge with gunshot wounds and a head injury. Nearby was a tumbledown Gypsy camp. One of its members —“Gypsy Jack” Smith—was missing.

Today 50 police led by Scotland Yard “murder squad" officers, and 250 villagers armed with staves, pitchforks and other weapons combed more orchards, dykes and spinneys. Quickly they closed in, unknowingly, on their dangerous quarry.

At a covered-over railway carriage, a police constable noticed that the outside and inside measurements were different. Moving a chest of drawers at one end, the police began kicking through some boarding. Suddenly a shot rang out. “Gypsy Jack” hiding behind the boards, had killed himself. Before the final tragedy, his mother said: "We Romanies (Gypsies) can see and understand many things that cannot be explained to ordinary people. I know my son never shot that woman. I also know I shall never see him alive again.”