BURWOOD MURDER.

Grey River Argus, 17 June 1927, Page 4

BURWOOD MURDER.

IDENTITY OF VICTIM. Boys Find Clues. CHRISTCHURCH, June 15. The victim has been identified as Gwendoline Scarff, of 11 Thorrington Street, Cashmere. She was 20 years of age, single, and in service, not living at home. Her father is Mr Walter Scarff, a member of the Heathcote County Council. From the clues gathered, it is believed that the murder was premeditated and committed with some weapon, such as an axe. A tree in the vicinity has been found cut freshly and a piece of cloth was tied to a wire fence nearby.

This morning, boys found a bloody shirt on Bottle Lake Road, near the scene of the crime. The police are now searching for the murderer in the city. The Murderer’s Implement. A SPANNER POUND. BOYS SEe”tHE MAN. CHRISTCHURCH, June 16. The victim of the Burwood has been identified as Gwendoline Scarff, domestic, -aged 20 years, daughter of Walter Scarff, carrier, of Cashmere. The murdered woman had not recently lived with her parents. The only development reported today were the finding of a heavy, blood-stained spanner, about two inches long, in a gorse bush 23 yards from the scene of the murder, and the discovery by schoolboys this morning of a fragment of a man’s shirt, heavily blood-stained, in Bottle Lake Road, 300 yards from where the body was found.

The piece of shirt may not prove to be important, but the spanner was undoubtedly the weapon with which the murder was done.

The woman’s damaged wristlet watch had stopped at half-past twelve, just an hour before the boy, Erie Mugford (not Mumford), made his grim discovery. THE MURDERER SEEN.

There is little doubt that the man the boy saw running away was the murderer.

It is possible also that the same man was seen bv Alfred Hawtin, who was on his brother’s baker's cart in North New Brighton yesterday afternoon, when he saw a strangely-garbed man rush out from the lupins which cover the sand hills in the vicinity, stop, and rash back into the lupins again. The man wore pyjama trousers or underpants. He wore no hat, and his shirt was open. The man’s behaviour was that of a person partly demented, or much agitated. It would have been possible for a man to make his way across the country from the scene of the taurder to tlie spot where Hawtin saw his man. It is suggested that this fugitive was the murderer, who, having found his trousers to be blood-stained, discarded them.

MURDER WILL OUT! The boy Mugford’s discovery of the bodv was pure chance. He was bringing in cows, and these became excited by the smell of blood, and were difficult to manage, running round wildly But for this, the boy would not have been in the locality where he saw the body.