MURDERS DISCLOSED.

Waikato Times, Volume 103, Issue 17326, 11 February 1928, Page 14 (Supplement)

MURDERS DISCLOSED.

BY DUMB CURL. FIANCEE AND FAMILY. FRANTIC GESTURES. % - (From a 'Correspondent). NICE, Dec. 27. Frantic gestures by a deaf and dumb girl in a side street at Grasse, 25 miles from Nice, on Christmas Eve led to the discovery of the dead bodies of six persons. Five of them had been murdered and the sixth was that of the murderer, an Armenian, who had committed suicide. The deaf and dumb girl had come to visit her friend, Eugenie Tabakian, an Armenian, who was engaged to marry a compatriot, Stepan Dedjian. She came running down stairs of a tenement house with tears streaming down her face and made desperate effort to call the attention of the policeman on duty near by. He, not knowing what was wrong, took her to the police station, and afterwards the police decided to follow her guidance. She took them upstains to the room occupied by Eugene Tabakian and, pointing to the door, invited the police to force an entry. They hesitated for a moment, but when they saw a long stream of blood coming from under the door, they decided to break it down. Within they discovered the multilated body of the young Armenian girl and, lying across it, Stepan Dedjian, who had shot himself through the head. It .was evident that Dedjian had strangled his victim and then severed her head and smashed it with the butt end of a revolver before turning it on himself. In Dedjian’s pockets there was a strange rambling loiter in which Hie Armenian said, "I niL\.:i to kill them all.” When the police visited Dedjian’s room, they found another letter in the same terms, and scrawled large in charcoal on the wall the sentence, “I mean to kill them all.” With the deaf and dumb girl as their guide, the police went to the house where the murdered girl s mother and married sister lived. There they knocked at the door, and getting no reply broke their way in. The mother was lying with her throat cut in the passage. In the kitchen there was l'our-years-old John Scherelian, her grandson, also dead, and by his side his baby sister, Jeanne Marie, just breathing. She died on her way to the hospital.

Fight For Life. Mme Scheretian was found dead in another room lying under a heap or bedclothes. Blood was bespattered everywhere, and it was evident that she had made a terrible fight for fife. On the walls the murderer had written in her blood once more the terrible phrase, “I mean to kill them all n it is thought that Dedjian, who was extremely nervous and irritable, imagined that his fiancees family were hostile to him.