Big hunt for girl’s killer

Press, 2 July 1979, Page 1

Big hunt for girl’s killer

PA Auckland A team of 34 policemen is hunting the killer of a cabaret worker who died in Auckland’s main street about 3.30 a.m. yesterday. The dead girl was Margaret Bell, aged 17. Late last evening the police said the slaying was still apparently motiveless. One bullet fired from a high-powered rifle killed Miss Bell as she left the Mainstreet Cabaret, formerly the Peter Pan, in Upper Queen Street, where she worked part-time while attending a secretarial course.

She had been working at the cabaret for only three weeks and would usually have left half an hour earlier. Yesterday she stayed back with other staff to bid farewell to a workmate. Outside the gunman was waiting. As Miss Bell stood with friends at the door she was shot through the head. She died instantly. The police said last

evening they had found no motive and did not know if the slain girl had been “unlucky or deliberately shot.” The police officer in charge of the inquiry, Detective Inspector B. J. Rowe, said a witness had seen a pale-blue Valiant car outside the cabaret with two occupants and a firearm, believed to have been a high-powered rifle. The car was thought to have been double-parked outside the cabaret at the time of the shooting and it had been seen travelling down Queen Street at high speed soon after. When the single shot was fired Miss Bell had been with two other persons and others had been nearby. Miss Bell, who came from Whenuapai and lived in a flat in Mount Eden, seemed to have been a nice, respectable girl. “All we can say is we are aware of no reason for someone wanting to kill her," said Inspector Rowe.