BODY EXHUMED

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume VLI, Issue 3421, 18 December 1935, Page 8

BODY EXHUMED

GRIM GRAVEYARD SCENE. While the village of Caunton, Nottinghamshire, slept, the "body of Mrs Louisa Baguley, aged 87, a property owner who had lived in Burton Joyce, and who died in May this year, was exhumed shortly before midnight from a grave in the churchyard there. Mrs Baguley died in a Nottingham nursing home, and the request for her exhumation followed the discovery of traces of morphia in the body of her daughter, Miss Ada Louisa Baguley, aged 50, who died at the same place on September 11, and whose cremation had been stopped. It was a scene reminiscent of the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The figures of the gravediggers were sharply silhouetted in the darkness by flashlights which shone into the opened grave. Round about stood members of the Nottingham and Newark police. In the torchlight four men took up the coffin as it came to the surface and bore it to a hearse drawn up by the side of the church. The body was then driven to Nottingham and a pathological examination made before the inquest on Miss Baguley was resumed.

Earlier in the day Miss Waddington, the middle-aged proprietress of the nursing home in Devon Drive, Sherwood, Nottingham, where Mrs and Miss Baguley died, told of events which preceded their deaths. “I know nothing of the proposed exhumation,” she said, “but I think everything should be cleared up as quickly as possible. Mrs Baguley and her daughter were brought to my house by visitor's, who said that they needed expert care. The mother was suffering from nothing specifically, except old age. The daughter, however, had creeping paralysis. “If there is any mystery at all it has been caused, I suppose, by the fact that under the will which the daughter made, I have been given a certain sum of money and property. I suppose there must be a lot of awful suspicion about now that it has been found that there* was morphia in the body. I have no morphia in my house. “So far as the will is concerned it amounts to this: Mrs Baguley, before she died in May, had suggested making her money over to me, so as to cover expenses. As patients they paid 30/- a week, but after her mother’s death Miss Baguley thought that it would be better if she— to whom the money and property had been left—could leave it to me in her will. The legacy is just the rent from a half a dozen or so cottages in Burton Joyce and War Stock, amounting to £500.”