TWO SYDNEY MURDERS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24372, 9 August 1940, Page 9

TWO SYDNEY MURDERS

BATTERED VICTIMS BY ROADSIDE WEALTHY GREEK AND TAXIDRIVER r (From Our Own Correspondent) SYDNEY, July 31. Two murders on roads near Sydney within a week are engaging the attention of detectives, each of the victims having been brutally battered. A week's inquiries into the death of Victor Moulos, aged 39, a wealthy Greek business man, have left the detectives baffled. Moulos was found lying by the side of a road in the Brookvale district, near Manly. The left side of his head had been crushed in and he died without regaining consciousness.' Detectives have travelled thousands of miles and interviewed more than 200 persons, including many Greeks, in the hope of securing a lead which might decide whether Moulds was the victim of a " hit-run" car driver, or was murdered. Medical opinion on the wounds

in " Moulos's head is that he was battered, and there is only a faint possibility that he was struck by a car. A complete investigation into Moulos's ..financial affairs has been made, and any theory of robbery has been discarded. In probing Moulos's history since he arrived in Australia in 1922, detectives have learned that he was a capable business man. hard, bu! strictly honest. A skilled bootmaker. Moulos arrived in Sydney from Greece at the age of 21 with £47, and unable to speak a word of English. He joined his father in a restaurant business, where he stayed for two years. Then the business was sold, and Moulos took a correspondence course in electrical engineering from America, and became skilled in this business. He amassed a large sum of money, much of which he put into shops and real estate, which brought him in a regular, substantial income.

The second crime was murder without doubt. A callous fiend bashed a young taxi driver, Norman Rutter Hood, so brutally with a jemmy in his cab near Mascot Aerodrome that Hood died in hospital. Hood was found early last Friday morning near a road. His cab was found abandoned a few miles away. Hood had been

attacked seven or eight hours before he was discovered. Near the place where Hood was lying detectives found two pieces of his skull and part of his brain, ghastly evidence of the viciousness of the assault. Even detectives hardened by many years of experience admitted that this assault was the most brutal of its kind they had known. It was apparent that after several blows were struck by a passenger in the cab as Hood sat at the wheel, he fell forward, and while his head was resting against the dashboard he was struck again. Then pushed from the cab, unconscious. Hood was robbed of his takings—a paltry 18s—and left on the roadside.