TWO MEN MURDERED

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23177, 25 October 1938, Page 12

TWO MEN MURDERED

A VICTORIAN CRIME HEADS SPLIT WITH AXE [from our own correspondent] MELBOURNE, Oct. 17 With their heads split open hv an axe the bodies of two murdered men were found yesterday lying side by side in an upstairs room at the delicensed Windsor Castle Hotel at Dunolly, an old-time alluvial mining field, 126 miles north-west of Melbourne. The victims were Charles Bunney, a returned soldier, aged 50 years, and Robert Gray, aged 73 years, a pensioner, formerly of Geelong. The door of the room in which the bodies were found was padlocked on the outside. A bloodstained axe was found in the room by First-Constable G. W. Torney, who had forced the door. The bed in the room had been thrown to one side and the bedclothes had been dumped in a corner. The bodies were just inside the door. After a doctor had examined the bodies the door was locked again, pending the arrival of a finger-print expert and detectives. Residents of the house mostly pensioners and other elderly men, who pay a rent of 2s a week, saw Bunney and Gray two days before the discovery of the tragedy, but hnd not heard anything to arouse their suspicions since then. Although Gray's room, where the bodies were found, was padlocked and the door of Bunney's room was open, the other residents concluded that the two men had gone away temporarily. Bobbery, it is believed, was the motive for the crime. Bunney recently returned to Dunollv from the Caulfield Military Hospital, Melbourne, where he received treatment for war disabilities. He was a member of the original sth Battalion, A.1.F., which left Australia in 1914. He fought on Gallipoli and in France.