SENTENCE OF DEATH

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 18879, 3 December 1935, Page 7

SENTENCE OF DEATH

ATTEMPT. TO .MURDER LABORER CONVICTED SYDNEY, Dec. 2. At the Criminal Court, to-day, Frank Howard Jones, 20, laborer, was convicted of wounding Allen Clerk, with intent to murder him. Mr Justice Halse Rogers recorded the death sentence. An armed man wearing a mask held up the stationmaster, Mr Arthur Jay, at. North Strathfield, a suburban railway station, at midnight, on June 30 and demanded the hooking office takings. Mr Jay told the intruder that he had no money and no keys, whereupon a shot was fired in his direction. The report attracted two porters, one of whom, Allen Clerk, defied the bandit and was shot in the abdomen and wounded seriously. After the outrage the bandit escaped. A mysterious explosion occurred in a powder magazine on the bank of the municipal quarry at Concord suburb on July 28, and a man was 'badly injured. While he was being rescued the police found a loaded revolver and also an unloaded revolver not far from the victim, whose face and body were severely burned, even his clothes smouldering, although he was still conscious and not expected to live. The man told the police that he attempted to enter the shed containing the explosives, to sleep, when he was blown into the quarry, which is 30ft deep and full of rocks.

When the accused was before the lower court, a police sergeant said that hearing a call for help on July 28, he went down to the Concord municipal quarry, and found the accused about 90yds from a burning shed. During the same proceedings a detective tendered a statement allegedly made by the accused,in which it was described how Jones held up the stationmaster at North Strathfield. He was alleged to have stated that he had no intention of shooting Jay, as the revolver accidentally went off, while the shot which struck Clerk had been intended to go into the floor.