SEALED IN A BOX

Opotiki News, Volume III, Issue 317, 30 September 1940, Page 3

SEALED IN A BOX

.. man' LEFT TO DIE PROVIDENTIAL DISCOVERY Sydney, May 15.—Bound and gagged by three bandites who stole his taxi-cab, a Sydney taxi-driver, Jack Edward Rawlinson, was thrown into a disused toolbox, which was then scaled, in a shed at Lidcombe, a suburb. Rawlinson was found by the merest chance seven hours later and was released. His captors had told him that they would return for him in an hour, but the police havo littio doubt that Rawlinson was left there to face a lingering death from thirst and starvation. For nearly 12 hours his wife sat at home, won- 1 dering what had happened to her husband, who was to have decorated the house for her 21st. birthday. Three men hired Rawlinson at 11 p.m. to drive them to an address a mile away. There he was threatened with a revolver,® and the men dragged him to the back seat, robbed him of £3 and his license, and removed his coat. The cab was driven to a lonely spot near Rook wood Cemetery, and Rawlinson was ordered out. The men forced him through, a hole in a fence on to a railway l siding, opened the door of a tool shed, bound and gagged him, and threw him into a tool box which they sealed with strong wiro and weighed with a railway sleeper.

“Tho air as not too bad,” said Rawlinson, “and after resting 1 started to struggle with tho rope round my wrists. I felt happy when I got it undone, but I thought I was finished when I could not lift the lid. I rattled the lid and shouted for a long time, but no one heard me. .1- think I dozed. It was very cold when I woke up. I started to make a row again when 1 heard steps. I thought that tho men were coming back to do for me.”

The steps were those of Richard Ibbott, a railway fottler, who was walking to work when he felt ill and decided to go to the shed and rest. “When I got to tho shed doorway, I heard a moan,” said Ibbott, “and thought someone had locked a dog in the tool-box. There was a railway sleeper too heavy for mo to lift, so 1 pulled it off. I raised the lid, und got the shock of my life when a man bobbed his head up. Fettlers havo not used the shed for months. He may have been there for days before being found.”

Rawlinson’s taxi-cab was found abandoned later in another suburb.