AUSTRALIAN NEWS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22826, 10 March 1936, Page 9

AUSTRALIAN NEWS

THE WAGGA MURDER SYDNEY, March 9. (Received March 9. at 11.30 p.m.) In the Criminal Court to-day Roy Malcolm Soutar, aged 17, was convicted of murdering Christopher Bolger, aged 25, near Wagga, and was sentenced to death.

Soutar’s defence was that he killed Bolger during a fit of rage owing to an insulting statement the latter made about a girl he knew. Soutcr was recommended to mercy on the ground of his youth. The evidence disclosed that Souter, after shooting Bolger, tied weights to the feet and cast the body into an underground tank. Later that afternoon he brought friends to the house in a car and from under the lid of the same tank he obtained butter and other foodstuffs, which he served to his guests.

A previous message read as follows: — Mystery attends the death of a young grazier, Christopher Bolger, aged 22, whose body was found in a well on a station property at Wagga with the hands tied above the head, which was covered by a bag, and with what appears to be a bullet wound in the skull. The deceased’s parents, in Sydney, had endeavoured to communicate by telephone with him several times since last Saturday, but received no response. Local residents were unable to account for Bolger’s failure to keep appointments. The police were summoned and discovered bloodstains on the veranda of the homestead on Bolger’s property and they finally dragged the well and brought the body to the surface.