MANY HAVE RETURNED FROM THE ‘DEAD’

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30937, 18 December 1965, Page 18

MANY HAVE RETURNED FROM THE ‘DEAD’

Last weekend a man reappeared after his sens, daughters and relatives had presumed him dead. The man. Frederick Ernest George Wroe, a «2-year-old farmhand, had lived on pigs, opossums and eels he caught by hand for two years, near the Wanganui River. People frequently reappear from the “dead” bringing with them joy, shame, or terror.

Some listed as dead for as long as 30 years have come back to life. SHIPWRECKED Of all those associated with marital mix-ups, none was more tragic than Enoch Arden, of Tennyson's poem. Arden came back from the sea after 11 years of being shipwrecked to find his wife had remarried.

Tennyson told of what Enoch Arden saw in these words: His wife, his wife no more, and «au> the babe. Her.,, vet not hie. upon the father’s knee. And all the warmth, the peace, the happiness. And his own children, tall and beautiful, <n his place. Lord of his rights and of his children's love . . He. therefore, turning softly like a thief. Lest the harsh shingle should grate underfoot. And feeling all along the garden wall. Lest he tumble and be found, crept to the gate and opened it, and closed. Enoch Arden died without speaking to or seeing his wife and children again. In 1957, Norman Harold Hopkins reappeared in Australia after having been presumed dead for five years. Hopkins disappeared from the ship Taroona in Bass Strait, found on his return that his wife had married a Sydney constable. STRANGEST CASE Perhaps the strangest “back to life” case in recent times was that of a socially prominent American businessman, Thomas Buntin, who disappeared for 22 years. Buntin, a masquerader, was declared legally dead both before and after he “came back to life.”

His masquerade began when he and his then 22-year-old secretary Betty McCuddy, also a member of a wealthy family, disappeared in 1931. Eleven years later Tennessee courts declared them legally dead, and for another 11 years nothing was heard of them. Then they were discovered in the little Texas town of Orange under the assumed name of Palmer. When they were found in November, 1953, Thomas, a 50-year-old television salesman, and Betty, his 44-year-old, attractive “wife,” had to tell their six children that they were not Mr and Mrs Thomas Palmer but two other people who had abandoned their families and a huge fortune for love. An insurance company which had paid Buntin's “widow” and their three sons more than £12,000 on his life policy seven years after he

had disappeared tried to recover the money when he reappeared. HAD TO PAY But the judge who heard the case ruled that once an insurance company was forced to pay a claim on the life of a man missing for seven years the decision was final, even if the man turned up alive. The judge also ruled that Buntin was still “legally dead.”

After Buntin had vanished and was declared dead his real wife remarried. She did not even want to know him when he reappeared. An Australian case was that of Leslie Cochrane Dunbar, who in 1932 was declared by the New South Wales Supreme Court to be dead after a boat he had hired was found capsized in Botany Bay. Eight years later he was discovered—a successful manufacturer in a Melbourne suburb. He was married and making a fortune. Dunbar ran away because he was unemployed. He wished to forget everything in a search for adventure and fortune in another State where nobody knew him. His mother and father in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield mourned him as dead for years.

Dunbar was traced as a result of the efforts of Detect-ive-Sergeant H. V. Jones, of the Sydney C. 1.8. “From the day I left home I sliced off my earlier life like a crust from a loaf,” Dunbar said.

Dunbar, who changed his name to Harrison, said after his identity was discovered that he could never link up again with his forgotten life in Sydney. A man who was missing for 42 years and was listed as dead in 1922 was found to be living in Toowoomba, Queensland, in December, 1952.

The man was Willy Brandes, a watchmaker, who disappeared from Holzminden, Lower Saxony, in 1910. Saxony police closed his file 12 years after he left and marked it “missing, believed dead.” In 1952, he let the citizens of Holzminden know he was alive by sending an advertisement to the local newspaper wihch read: “A very merry Christmas to all my old friends, in hope of an early reunion.” Asked why he had never written to relatives and friends in Germany, Brandes said: “I just never got around to it." Sometimes "dead” men who have vanished for years have reappeared to collect fortunes. CLAIMED PRIZE One was a Victorian chimney sweep, George Henry. Victorian police believed Henry dead, possibly murdered, in 1948. Police searched for his body in far-western Victorian scrub. But Henry turned up in

Penrith, Now South Wales, in 1950, fit and well, to claim a half-share in a major prize in a consultation on the 1947 Melbourne Cup. Another "Arden case" was that of a U.S. flier, Daniel Schmidt, who, when freed from a P.O.W. camp in China in 1955, flew home tn find his 20-year-oid wife had remarried. Mrs Schmidt did not And out that her husband was alive and a P.O.W. until two months after she had married another man. RECONCILED Schmidt and his wife were reconciled one month after his return. As soon as he got home from China, Schmidt started divorce proceedings and claimed custody of his son, but later repented and forgave his wife for remarrying. They started life together again. Wanganui's man back from the dead, Mr Frederick Wroe, is now a patient in the Wanganui Hospital. His memory is reported to be gone, but there were times when he was quite lucid. The full story of his two years "dead" would make interesting reading.