FARMER FATALLY SHOT

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22922, 28 December 1937, Page 15

FARMER FATALLY SHOT

RIVERINA DISTRICT CRIME WIFE'S ORDEAL AT NIGHT [from our own correspondent] SYDNEY, Dec. 17 Police and armed farmer* throughout the huge Riverina district of New South Wales searched for a man who shot dead Mr. James Dickins, a«ed 54, at his Oaklands farm late on Sunday night. A man surrendered himself three days after the crime. •Oaklands is about 26 miles from the Victorian border, where a close watch was kept on all roads. The whole countryside was warned to watch for the fugitive. The farmer left his bed to investigate a noise near his garage. His wife heard him speak, and judged from the tone of her husband's words that he knew the man. After a short silence there was a shot. She waited for her husband to return and it was some time before she realised that the shot she heard must have been fired at him, and that she was alone in the house with the, children. . Becoming panic-stricken, Mrs. Dickins ran with her two children more than a mile across the paddocks in the darkness to the home of her brother, Mr. Patrick Gain. Mr. Gain and another man ran to the farm, where they found Mr. Dickins dead.