STRANGE DEATHS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 12, 15 January 1932, Page 3

STRANGE DEATHS

METHODS IN SUICIDES. CASES IN AUSTRALIA. SYDNEY, Jan. 7. Many queer cases of suicide and attempted suicide are recalled by the incident in Melbourne last week, when an old man attached a bicycle to his wrists, using a stout piece of wire for the purpose, and then leaped into the Yarra. His body was not found until some days later. Last September a man rode on his motor-cycle from Sydney to a country town, and shot himself dead because a girl, who accompanied him, smashed his bottle of gin. In another country town a girl dramatically poisoned herself in a church, and loudly announced the fact to the startled audience. She was dead before the ambulance arrived. The year 3930 was curiously fruitful in strange suicides. A man placed his head on a rail at the Sydney railway station in front of an electric train, and the driver had no chance of saying his life. Another man took poison and leaped from the third floor of a building in Melbourne and fell on a crowded sidewalk. In a Victorian country town a gardener was found with his throat cut. He had previously cut away one foot piecemeal with a pair of secateurs, because the foot was affected with gout. At Janilla, in New South Wales, a man was found with his face blown away, the result of having exploded a detonator in his mouth. An Italian at North Ryde. Sydney, shot himself when ho realised that his love for a certain film star was in vain.

At Gilgandra, New South Wales, not long ago a woman drowned herself in a well, but before doing so tied a wire rope round her neck and made it fast to the windlass. Then there was the case of a woman manager of a country hotel who set the hotel on fire and then shot herself. Consideration for his friends was shown by a Melbourne man who gassed himself, first fixing an alarm clock to the gas jet in such a fashion that the tap was automatically turned off, thus obviating any danger to persons entering the room.

The latest case in Sydney was that of a member of the fire brigade, who stood on top of a chimney at his home, and defied all efforts to induce him to climb down. He dived to his death while a score or more people looked on. His greatest regret seemed to be that his wife refused to watch him commit his mad aoU