FIENDISH CRIME

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26285, 17 October 1946, Page 7

FIENDISH CRIME

MURDER AND ASSAULT ACCUSED ADMITS GUILT (Rec. 11.30 p.m.) SYDNEY, Oct. 16. “I done that job. Something went wrong with my head and I done it,” is what Mervyn Garvie, aged 39, a labourer, is alleged to have told Detective Sergeant J. V. Ramus touching the death of Cecil John Kelly, and the assault on Miss Mavis Crompton near Bulli on August 28. At the inquest to-day Detective Sergeant Ramus said Garvie confessed that he picked up an iron bolt when walking along the beach. He saw a small car and a man got out of it. He struck the man twice and thought he struck the girl. He admitted the girl’s allegations of what occurred later. He threw the bolt into the sea off the pier. Garvie could not write but could read a little. The statement was taken by detectives. Garvie was committed for trial. Bail was refused. A cable message received on August 30 stated: In one of the most savage crimes in Australian annals, a man named Cecil John Kelly, aged 35, was murdered and incinerated in a car and his fiancee, Mavis Crompton, aged 24, was struck down and raped by a sex maniac. The crime occurred on the low, undulating headland of Sandon’s Point, near Bulli, on the south coast of New South Wales. A man named Mervyn Garvie, aged 39, was subsequently arrested and charged with murdering Kelly and with criminally assaulting Miss Crompton.