WATCHMAN KILLED.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20540, 15 February 1935, Page 5

WATCHMAN KILLED.

Recent Robbery and Murder at Perth. JEWELS WORTH £4500 TAKEN. Murder was associated with the robbery of about £4500 worth of jewellery from the shop of Caris Brothers, Ltd., in the centre of the business portion of Perth, Western Australia, shortly before 11 o’clock one night recently. Following a telephone message that the crash of glass had been hea-d in the shop, a police wireless patrol raced to the premises and found a watchman lying dead on the floor of the room in which he slept. A large mirror was in fragments on the floor. The dead man was Edgar Arthur Whitfield, aged 60, married, of South Perth. His left forearm was gashed jaggedly over a length of three or four inches. He was wounded apparently with the broken mirror on the right side near the small of his back, and there was a wound in the back of his head, perhaps caused by his fall. A wound near the mouth suggested that he had been shot through the mouth, but a post-mortem examination proved that this was caused by his artificial teeth, and that the man’s neck was broken, probably as the result of a wrestling throw. Evidence of Gallant Struggle. Mr Whitfield was a man of small stature, weighing about 9st, but it is evident from the state of the room that he made a gallant struggle to resist the thief before he was finally thrown and killed. The murderer must have escaped from the building by the narrowest of margins before the police patrol arrived on the scene. Caris Brothers’ large shop has its frontage to Hay Street, and from the rear a lane leads into Murray Street. It was from a telephone near Murray Street that the Central Police received a message that the breaking of glass had been heard from the direction of the jewellers. The man who sent the message has not yet reported to the police. Circumstances indicate that the mur-

derer climbed over a stone wall from a right-of-way at the back of the shop and entered the caretaker’s bedroom through an unbarred window about 10ft above the ground. Mr Whitfield was then alone in the building. He was apparently surprised in his bedroom and put up a strenuous fight. It is believed that he was trying to reach his bed to get a loaded revolver from under the pillow, when he was overpowered, probably by a much younger man. Shop Entrance Barred. When the wireless patrol received the alarm, they hurried to the front of Caris' shop, but found the entrance barred. Two of the police party then ran down a nearby arcade to reach the lane leading to the back of the jeweller’s shop, and it is possible that this delay enabled the murderer to get away. It is thought that, after killing Mr Whitfield, the murderer took the jewels from the windows and escaped. Members of the police patrol who first entered the shop did so by the same route as that followed by the murderer. Mr Whitfield was lying dead on his face There was blood on the front of his shirt and a pool of blood had saturated the floor. On the night of January 16 Mr Whitfield saw a man in the right-of-way and called out to .him, but the man ran away. The missing articles number 164. A few of them are valued at from £2OO to £250 each.