A STRANGE STORY

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 138, 11 June 1926, Page 7

A STRANGE STORY

The tragedy occurred in La Mancha, a substantially built country house near Malatide, a seaside town ten miles from Dublin, on the night of 31st March. In the ruins of the house after a fire which totally destroyed it, were found ' the bodies of Joseph and Peter M' Donnell and their sisters Annie and Alice, and two servants, Mary M'Gowan and James Clarke. The M'Donnell family were all middle-aged, the men being about 55 years and the women some years younger. They had the reputation of being wealthy, having conducted a prosperous grocery business in Ballygar, Galway, from which they had come to La Mancha six years before. The mystery of the tragedy lay in the fact that the bodies of Clarke and the M'Donnell men were found during the course of the fire with indications that they had been murdered by blows from some instrument. ' The bodies of the three women were all terribly charred by fire, so that' it was impossible to tell how they had come by their death. In each room of the ground floor there was found a round hole charred aFout the edges, as if paraffin had been poured into it and then sat alight. Several theories were entertained as to the perpetrator of the crime, one being that one of the brothers had lost his reason and murdered the others, and another that poison had been administered. The gardener, a man named M'Cabe, was detained in custody after the inquest, which was adjourned from 9th April. He declared that he had been at a wake in Malatide that night of tho fire, and found the house in flames when he returned. Apparently the tragedy remains a mystery.