BURWOOD MURDER

Southland Times, Issue 20206, 17 June 1927, Page 8

BURWOOD MURDER

VICTIM IDENTIFIED BLOOD-STAINED SPANNER DISCOVERED OTHER IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENTS (Per United Press Association.) Christchurch, June 16. The victim of the Burwood murder has been identified as Gwendoline Scarff, a domestic, aged 20 years, a daughter of Walter Scarff, carrier of Cashmere. The murdered woman had not recently lived with her parents. The only developments reported to-day were the finding of a heavy blood-stained spanner, about ten inches long in a gorse bush 23 yards from the scene of the murder, and the discovery by schoolboys this morning of fragments of a man’s shirt heavily blood-stained in Bottle Lake road, 30 yards from where the body was found. The piece of shirt may not prove to be important but the spanner was undoubtedly the weapon with which the murder was done. The woman’s damaged wristlet watch had stopped at half-past twelve, just an hour before the boy, Eric Mugford (not Mumford), made his grim discovery. There is little doubt that the man he saw running away was the murderer. It is possible also that the same man was seen by Alfred Hawtin who was on his brother’s bakers’ cart in North New Brighton yesterday afternoon when he saw a strangely garbed man rush out from the lupins which cover the sand-hills in the vicinity, stop and rush back into the lupins again. The man wore pyjama trousers or underpants. He wore no hat and his shirt was open. The man’s behaviour was that of a person partly demented or much agitated. It would have been possible for 5 man to make his way across country from the scene of the murder to the spot where Hawtin saw his man. It is suggested that this fugitive was the murderer who, having found his trousers to be bloodstained, discarded them. \ Mugford’s discovery of the body was pure chance. He was bringing in the cows and these, excited by the smell of blood, were difficult to manage, running round wildly. But for this he would not have been in the locality where he saw the body.