Former Rating Forged Naval Identity Card

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30442, 16 May 1964, Page 3

Former Rating Forged Naval Identity Card

(New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, May 15. A jury, after hearing eight witnesses, including naval intelligence officers, today found David Lincoln Ostler, a 28-year-old steward and former naval rating, guilty on a charge of forgery’, and recommended leniency.

Mr Justice Tompkins remanded Ostler for sentence and refused bail. Ostler was charged with making a material addition to a Royal New Zealand Navy identity card with the intention that the document should be used or acted on as genuine. Prosecuting, Mr J. H. C. Larsen said that on February 14, a Wellington taxi-driver found a satchel had been left in his car and the satchel was taken to the police. Among papers in it was a naval identification card which bore the name William Bernard Watson and had affixed to it a photograph of Ostler. “Official Air” Ostler, when interviewed, had said he was formerly a rating in the R.N.Z.N. and that after his discharge from the service, someone serving in the Navy gave him a blank identification card.

Ostler had said he thought the card would be “a handy thing to possess and that it

would impart an official air" if it were necessary for him to produce a means of identification, said Mr Larsen. Ostler had explained that an endorsement, “allied intelligence agent,” was made on the card by a friend during Some skylarking. In evidence, Ostler said that after his discharge from the Navy he was given a naval identification card by someone. He had put his photograph on the card and filled in the name William Bernard Watson. He had selected the name Watson because when the card was being filled in he was participating in a naval party game called “defaulters” and one of the names that had “cropped up” was Sherlock Holmes.

“We thought of Watson, and we had no idea of the Christian name, so 1 wrote William Bernard,” said Ostler. He testified that he had never shown the card to anyone either wanting or expecting that person to act on it.