SISTERS MURDERED.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 14906, 3 February 1912, Page 2 (Supplement)

SISTERS MURDERED.

TRIPLE TRAGEDY AFTER A DANCE.

As they were returning home in high spirits from a dance at 11.30 on Thursday night, December 14, Isabella Stephenson, aged 20, and her sister Jane, aged 18, the daughters of Mr. John Stephenson, fanner, of Butterwick, near Stockton-on-Tees, were met by a farmer's son named Jonas Marshall, aged 22, and shot down. The younger girl died almost immediately, and her sister died the following night. After shooting the girls Marshall reloaded his double-barrelled gun, tied one end of a piece of string to the trigger of the gun and the other end to the bar of a gate, and after drinking some carbolic acid from a bottle pointed tho gun at his own body,- jerked the string, and shot himself dead. The elder girl, abot in two places, after kissing her sister as she lay on the road endeavoured to make her way to her home, 500 yds distant, but collapsed and lay unconscious in a ditch for three hours. Her brother, who set out in search of his sisters discovered her and the bodies of the dead girl and the murderer. In her depositions Isabella Stephenson said that Marshall jumped from behind a hedge and without speaking fired three shots at them. My sister," she said, " never spoke. She "just moaned. Marshall wanted to pay his addresses to me some time ago but I objected." The girls were accompanied part of the way home by a young man who had left them only a few minutes before Marshall made his appearance. At tho inquest on the younger girl and Marshall the jury found that Jane Stephenson was wilfully murdered by Marshall and that the latter met his death by a gunshot wound selfinliicted.