SPANNER WEAPON USED BY MURDERER

Manawatu Times, Volume LII, Issue 3527, 17 June 1927, Page 6

SPANNER WEAPON USED BY MURDERER

Victim Identified as 20 Year-old Domestic MADDENED COWS LEAD TO DISCOVERY (Per Press Association), CHRISTCHURCH, Last Night. The victim o£ the Burwood murder has been identified as Gwendoline Scarff, a domestic, aged 20 years, and daughter of Walter Scarff, carrier, of Cashmere. The murdered woman had not recently lived with her parents. The only developments reported to-, day were the finding of a heavy bloodstained spanner, about ten inches long in a gorse bush 23 yards from the scene of the murder, and the discovery by school boys this morning of a fragment of a man’s shirt heavily blood-stained in a bottle on 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. Killed Just After Noon. The woman’s damaged wristlet watch had stopped at half-past twelve, just an hour before the boy, Eric Mugford (not Mumford) made his grim discovery. There is little doubt that the man he saw running away was the murderer. i , Man Seen in Sandliills. It is possible also that the same man was seen by Alfred Hawtin, who. while on his brother’s baker’s cart in North New Brighton yesterday afternoon, saw a strangely-garbed man rush out from the lupins which cover the sand hills In the vicinity, stop, and rush back Into the lupins again. The man wore pyjama trousers or underpants. He wore no hat and his shirt was open. Tie man’s behaviour was that of a person partly demented or much agitated; , Trousers Discarded. It would have been possible for a man to make his way across-country from the scene of the murder to the 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. Mugford’s discovery of the body was pure chance He was bringing in the cows and these, excited by the smell of blood, were difficult to manage and ran round wildly. • But for this he would not have been in the loc/lity where he saw the body. The police are now searching for the murderer in the city.