CHARGE OF MURDER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19009, 3 November 1923, Page 10

CHARGE OF MURDER

PROCEEDINGS AGAINST NURSE MITCHELL. THE CASE REMANDED. Prw«« Association—By Telegraph— Copyrt/at MELBOURNE, November 2. Hannah Mitchell, who was previously charged with performing an illegal operation on Mrs Hodgkinson, is now charged with murder. She was remanded till November 14. Bail was allowed at £ISOO. Nurse Mitchell’s name came into prominence early this year on a charge of murder arising out of the death of a young woman. A verdict of acquittal was recorded, hut Mitchell was soon afterwards charged with shooting with intent to murder Frank Bonfiglio, her former husband. In this case she was also acquitted. The murder trial, which became kno\Vn as the Yarra tragedy, was one of the most sensational mysteries and criminal trials in Australian annals. The recovery some months previously through a curious coincidence of the body of a young woman from the waters beneath a Yarra bridge horrified the public, and the investigations wore followed with public interest almost equalling the recent Gnu Alley crime. Leaves found in the sack containing the body formed the first of a series of clues which eventually associated it with the disappearance of a young girl from Nurse Mitchell’s maternity home and ended with extraordinary allegations by the nurse’s former husband, a man named Bonfiglio, that the girl died after a certain operation and that the body was mysteriously removed from place to place in a motor car and disposed of after its resting place had been changed several times, for fear of discovery. A remarkable feature of the closing scene of the trial was a passionate address from the dock by Nurse Mitchell. She declared that she did all she could to prevent the death of , the girl, who came to her in the ordinary way for maternity attention. Some abnormality developed while she was in the house and was responsible for her death at childbirth. Several attempts were made to secure the services of a doctor, hut they were unavailing. After the death, Nurse Mitchell said, she became ill and worried, and left herself very much in the hands of Bonfiglio, her former husband. He, she said, took the body in a motor car to the bush and there disposed of it. She did not worry much about the removal of the bodv, and did not think it a dreadful thing that it should be put away in the manner that it was. The address concluded with a scathing indictment of the treatment meted out to her by her former husband.