NEWCASTLE MYSTERY

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 January 1929, Page 11

NEWCASTLE MYSTERY

SUPPOSED POISONING.

NEWCASTLE, January 2.

Careful investigation of the events preceding the death of Hilda Johnson, a 15-year-old Maryville girl, in Newcastle Hospital at 5 o’clock yesterday morning, has convinced the local police that they are faced with one of the deepest mysteries in the history of the district.

Strychnine poisoning is believed to have caused the girl’s death. Sitting in a local picture show on Friday evening, only a few minutes after she Jiad eaten portion of a chocolate, she became violently ill, showing symptoms similar to those expected in strychnine cases. Later, while she was returning home, her illness returned. She was past hope of recovery when she was admitted to the hospital shortly after 2 o’clock yesterday morning. Early accounts of the case received by the police indicated that the chocolate was at fault, and that the source from which the girl received it might be difficult to trace. Since then a young man who gave it to the girl has given detectives a straightforward account of the occurrences on Friday evening, and it is not now anticipated that the more obvious lines of investigation will lead to a solution of the case.

The girl’s stomach, the half-eaten chocolate about which she complained, and chocolates remaining in the box from which it came, have all been sent to the Sydney offices of the Department of Health, with a request for immediate analysis.

It is thought almost certain that strychnine will be found in the stomach, and main interest will centre on whether poison is detected in the remaining half of the chocolate. If so, three theories will need to be investigated. One is that poison was taken by the girl intentionally. This is difficulty to believe. Accounts of the girl given by her family—a very large one —her friends, and her employers—she worked as a maid at a house near her parents’ home and lived out —unite with medical examination in indicating that she was of normal character for her age, bright, cheerful, and entirely innocent. A second suggestion is that poison may have accidentally been present in the chocolate. If this were so, it must have entered it in process of manufacture., The chocolate, made in England, was elaborately wrapped in tinfoil when it reached the girl. The third theory is that the case was one of deliberate murder, and that the chocolate was tampered with before Miss Johnson bit it. This idea established, it would nevertheless probably prove difficult to sheet home the crime to any definite person. Inquiries have made it plain that hundreds of people could have had access to the box from which the chocolate came.

CHOCOLATES FROM ENGLAND. The chocolates, the police have ascertained, were taken from a large box sent to a Newcastle family as a Christmas present from friends in England. The box had proved so large as to outlive even the healthiest appetites, and was left lying in a bedroom. Many different people had been alone in the room in which it was. On Friday, a 17-year-old son of the family thought that he would like to let a boy friend of his own age taste the chocolates. He took a handful from the box and looked for something into which he could put them. The only bag he could find was a narrow one, of transparent paper —the envelope containing a soft collar he had just bought. He slipped the chocolates into it and a few minutes later handed it over to his friend.

The friend, according to a statement he has since made to the police, had, as it happened, met Miss Johnson some five weeks previously, and had been with her often in the meantime. Shortly after the chocolates had been given to him, he met her by arrangement, and with one or two companions of their own age they went off to the pictures. At the interval his hand slipped into his pocket and touched the bag. “Try one of these,” he said.

The girl ate one with enjoyment. Shortly after the lights went out he was alarmed to find that the girl was evidently ill. Her limbs were unnaturally rigid, and she was almost unable to speak. The young man decided that she should be taken home as soon as possible. Enlisting the services of the picture show manager, he carried her out of the building, called a taxi, and in it escorted the girl to the front gate of her home in Estell Street, Maryville, one of Newcastle’s inner suburbs. There he left her. Her symptoms had subsided during the journey, and he thought it best that she should be put to bed as soon as possible. On his way to his own home, he told detectives to-day, he threw away the remainder of the chocolates. He felt that they had made the girl ill, and he did not want them to do any further harm. Taken to-day by a car to the place where he said he disposed of the chocolates, he was able to point to a certain spot on the pavement. The chocolates were not there, but a stain seemed to indicate that sweets of some sort had been trampled on. It appears that almost as soon as the taxi in which she had been brought home drove away, Miss Johnson complained again. She was found lying by her mother at the back door of the house. She had dropped her handbag outside, .but still clutched firmly a handkerchief in which half a choco- 1 late was later found. “I had one, and it was allright,” she said, “but this one was so bitter that I had to take it out of my mouth and put it into the handkerchief.” Terror-stricken, the mother called a doctor. He, it is alleged, said that what the girl was suffering from was hysteria. She must have been overexcited by what she had seen at the pictures. She needed to be put to bed and allowed to rest in the quiet. That was at 10.30 p.m. The girl’s condition did not improve. She began to complain bitterly of pains in her stomach. Shortly before 2 a.m. the doctor was again called in, and he then ordered her removal to hospital. Inquiries as to the possibility of the girl having willingly, or unwillingly, taken the poison before she went to the picture show were answered in the negative this afternoon. A postmortem examination, it was stated, had showed that her stomach was almost empty, and in such a case strychnine would have acted almost immediately after it was taken. The dead girl was one of twin sisters. The eldest of the family, she had, neighbours stated, been brought up under a very careful home discip-

line, and had rarely been away from home after dark.

Police investigations into the mystery are under the direction of Inspector Stein. Chief inquiries are being conducted by Detective-Sergeant T. G. Ryan, who was prominent last year in the investigation that cleared up the Williamstown mystery. The “Herald’s” representative understands that there is little chance of an early solution of the present mystery, and that the police believe that important elements in the case are still to be discovered.