“DROWNED” WOMAN’S RETURN

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 10, 7 October 1936, Page 11

“DROWNED” WOMAN’S RETURN

An Identification Tangle The Liverpool police were recently investigating reports that a woman said to have been seen in the city by several persons was Mrs. Isabella Connolly, Bittern Street, Liverpool, who, it had been supposed, was taken dead from the Mersey last July.

The woman taken from the river was identified and buried as Mrs. Isabella Connolly. The body, which was decomposed and had lost the right hand, was identified by Francis Connolly as that of his wife Isabella. The statement later made by the niece of Mrs. Connolly, Elizabeth McCulloch. is that she saw her aunt in a Liverpool street with another woman. Mrs. McCulloch estated that nothing would shake her daughter’s belief that she-saw her aunt. When she came home she said she bumped right into her. She ran up to the woman and said: “Excuse me, are you Bella Connolly?” At first the woman said “No.” but when her daughter said. “Oh, yes. vou’re mv Aunt Bella all right,” the woman laughed and said: “Yes." The woman afterward said that she had been to Horley, and then she hurried off with her companion. Mrs. McCulloch added that Mr. and Mrs. Connolly had been married 19 years. That night Mrs. Connolly knocked at the door of the home of her sister. Mrs. McCulloch, in Richmond Row, and was admitted bv her niece, who had never wavered in her belief that the woman taken from the River Mersey and buried as Mrs. Connolly was not her aunt. Mrs. Connolly derived a good deal of amusement in reading newspaper accounts of the mystery. She said she had been pea-picking in the Ghorley district of Lancashire for some time after her departure from Liverpool. Mrs. Connolly was missed from home early in June. Mr. Connolly was later told that a woman’s body had been recovered from the Mersey and was in the mortuary. The police officer suggested it might be that of his wife. Mr. Connolly went to the mortuary. but at first was unable to identify rhe body The second time he went was to look for a scar of an operation, which he found. It was mainly through that that he was able to identify the body.