The Piha Body-Snatchers

Northern Advocate, 2 June 1939, Page 4

The Piha Body-Snatchers

THE Piha case, which concluded yesterday with the sentencing- of McKay and Talbot, will go down in the annals of New Zealand crime as one of the most bizarre and sensational dramas ever unfolded in our courts. For a comparatively small country with a brief history, New Zealand has had a remarkable number of cases which bore unusual features, eithei in the commission of the crime or in the manner in which the guilty person was traced. The mystery of the severed hand, which has been recalled by the Piha case, since the underlying motive was similar, had those elements of unscrupulous cunning which fascinate the lawabiding public. Even now no one knows to whom the seveied hand belonged. The Kaiwarra murder case, of over 40 years ago, in which an accused was convicted because a tiny wad of newspaper, found in a shotgun wound on the murdered man’s body, corresponded with a torn piece of newspaper in his house, illustrated the fantastic manner in which an unanswerable case may be erected from seemingly unimportant trifles. More recently the Ruawaro case and the “suitcase murder’ at Wellington, excited that slightly morbid, but nevertheless very human, interest which all of us feel in unusual or spectacular crimes, and in all these, and many another recent case, a most impressive feature have been the ingenuity and resource with which the New Zealand detective force has summoned science to its aid. . To mysteries which have been solved in this fashion must now be added the Piha case. G. R. McKay, when planning his great coup, can hardly have envisaged the danger of betrayal by diatoms in a lump of clay. Those tiny organisms, however, played an important part in his conviction, but it would be idle to pretend that this extraordinary piece of roguery was performed with any great finesse or subtlety. In conception, the crime had a certain flavour of brazen originality; in execution it was just a series of clumsy errors.