STARTLING DISCOVERY

Otago Witness, Issue 3595, 6 February 1923, Page 22

STARTLING DISCOVERY

THREE WOMEN ARRESTED. MELBOURNE, February 3. While dragging the Yarra River, the police discovered the decapitated body of a young girl in a bag. The head was found in a second bag. The state of decomposition of the bodv indicated that the girl had been dead for some months. The police had been searching for a coffin reported to have been thrown from the bridge by two men the previous night. February 4. A doctor who made the nost mortem examination on the body stated that it was too much decayed to be able to give the cause of death. The head had not been severed, but had apparently dropped off when removed from the original restingplace. Three women—Hannah Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell, and Margaret Milward—have been arrested. The first-named is charged with murdering in November a girl named Bertha Goughian, and the other two with being accessories after the fact. All were remanded. The police evidence showed that the girl Goughian came to Melbourne from Omeo to receive medical treatment. .She went to the house of Nurse Mitchell. The next day the nurse secured a car, and is alleged to have taken a body—supposed to be Miss Goughian's—and bid it in a gully 45 miles from Melbourne. The police, acting on certain information received, discovered where tbe body had been removed from the gully, but lost trace of it until Friday night/ when they received a telephone call from a man stating that he had seen two men dumping a big package from the Anderson street bridge into the \ arra. Dragging resulted in the discovery of the body. At the time of her arrest Hannah Mitchell was out on hail in connection with a sensational shooting affair in December last. Miss Coughlan was the daughter of well-known residents at Omeo. Her relatives were not aware that anything untoward had happened to her, and they supposed that after visiting Melbourne to receive attention to her eyes she had gone on a visit to friends. The police state that the body was twice, if not thrice, removed to new burial places before being dumped into the river.