LONELY COTTAGE DRAMA.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21241, 23 January 1931, Page 8

LONELY COTTAGE DRAMA.

ESCAPED LUNATIC MURDERER. A lonely cottage near Sulby Glen, Isle of Man, was the scene of a terrible tragedy, the victim being Percy William Brookes (CO), a retired garage proprietor. Brookes, who used this cottage as a shooting box, had gone to visit it, and he found the door had been tampered with. He hailed a man called Kinrade, who was in a field a short distance away, and asked him to join in an investigation. They searched the lower rooms, and Mr Brookes noticed that a gun whicli had been hanging above the fireplace was missing. He shouted 'upstairs, and, receiving no reply, mounted. He had reached the first landing when Kinrade heard a shot, and Mr Brookes fell to the bottom of the staircase, dead. Kinrade ran off to fetch help. The police found that a bullet had entered the back of Mr Brookes’s neck and lodged in the shoulder blade. He had evidently just turned the corner of the staircase when he was shot. * Two days before a lunatic escaped from an asylum in Douglas, and he was taken into custody two days after the shooting in connection with the murder. He was Thomas Edward Kissack (43), and he was arrested at the pomtof the revolver at Druidale by Sergeant Watterson, of the Douglas police. “ I entered a disused farmhouse at Druidale quietly,” Sergeant Watterson told a reporter, “ and Kissack, who was standing,by the fireplace with a doublebarrelled gun in his hands, did not see 111 “I rushed into the room and shouted, ‘Hands up, Kissack! , Drop that gun: He looked round in amazement and dropped the gun. , . . ■ “The man was exhausted, and just on the point of collapse.” ' i ■ln Kissaek’s hiding-place were found some bread, and a dead rabbit was lying on . the floor.