BURIED BONES.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 231, 29 September 1928, Page 3 (Supplement)

BURIED BONES.

BODY OF MRS. HEAYDON NEVER FOUND. COOGEE MYSTERY. Whether a number of bones (lug up in a in Catherine Street, Glebe, at the «iul n| •Inly, 1!r23, were those of Mrs. Gertrude Mabel Heaydon, who had disappeared thi: previous October, will jjrobably never be definitely known.

Her death from the effects of an illegal operation was believed to have taken place at ( oogee. but apart from the bones, evidence of this was never found.

Nurse Mary Hughes, who was also Known as Mrs. Taylor, of New stead Flats,' Coogee, who had died some months before the bones were found, was held by the coroner to have been responsible for the death ot Airs. Heaydon, but on the evidence produced charges laid against Alfred Ernent Heaydon, husband of the dead woman; Frank Taylor, husband of Nurse Hughes; and Edward Riley, and Ellen Kreitfher, of having been accessories were dropped. Ellen Kreigher was said to have worked at the flat with Nurse Hughes. According to the story told by the husband, the wife had spoken of undergoing a certain operation, and he had tried to dissuade her. She persisted, however, and left him.

lie said tliat he was told afterwards that ■he was dead, but he did not tell the Police, as Nurse Hughes had scared him with her story of what would be the consequences.

In a letter to his wife's father in England, he stated that his wife had died of heart failure. A sister, however, received • letter from the deceased stating her intention of having an operation. The discrepancy between the two letters was referred to the Sydney police by Mrs. Henydon's relatives.

Word that a woman had died mysteriously at Coogee, and that her body had been taken away, reached the police during October, 11)22, but in the absence of any reports that any woman was missing, the police were not able to take action.

Information reached them in July, 1923,1 however, which confirmed this report, and it was also stated that the body of the woman had been buried under a garage at Surrey Hills. Bones Under Oarage. It was not until some weeks later that the police located the bones, not at Surrey Hills, but at Glebe. The flagstones in the g&rage were found to have been displaced. Digging in the earth beneath, the detectives came on a flagstone, and under this turned up eleven bones. When pieced together, they were found to be most of the bones of the right forearm of what appeared to have been a woman's arm.

To the medical experts they appeared also to have been buried for a year or inore.

At the inquest, Donald Charles Anderson, a carter, said he had been asked by Frank Taylor, husband of Nurse Hughes, to go to the flat with a cart, to take something away. He was late in reaching the place, and saw a cart going away in charge of Edward Riley. In the cart was a cabin trunk. Nurse Hughes, he said, told him that a woman had died, and that Riley was taking the body to a garage in Surrey Bills.

The information as to the exact locality •f the garage that was said to have been| Tented by Kiley was given to the police by I James Leslie Murphy, then serving a sentence of five years for housebreaking. He eaid he had been an associate of Riley and Taylor and Anderson, and that he had been shown where the garage was at Glebe. From a conversation which he overheard in the prison yard, when Taylor was on remand there, about a body having been buried, he concluded that it might have been in this garage.

The view that the woman's body had been dismembered, and that most of it had been taken up from the garage, and buried •liewhere, was advanced by counsel at the inquest, but no further traces of the remains were found.

The charges against Heaydon, Riley, Taylor, and Ellen Kreigher were not gone pn with.