TALE OF PIRATES

Hokitika Guardian, 7 October 1931, Page 3

TALE OF PIRATES

MURDER AND KIDNAPPING r ' NEAR NEW YORK strange'doings on yacht. NEW YORK, September 20. Aii amazing story of murder, kidnapping,. pirates and a driiting yacht has been told by a beautiful and wealthy wife. The subsequent finding of her husband’s body with a bullet wound in his forehead and with his throat gashed has created a sensation, and a mystery which will take s°me unravelling. Early one morning 10 day s ago some boatmen found the yacht Penguin drift ing in Long Island Sound, with five-year-o'd Barbara Collinge alone on board. The child, who was crying, said that her parents had been carried off during the night. An hour later the child’s mother turned' up on the beach . with such a fantastic story of murder . and kidnapping that the authorities -f refused to believe her tale, y i - ’ ’ The Collinge couple were reported to :•/ be wealthy,’ and the husband was 38 s years old, while bis widow is 32. Mrs , Collinge said that she was in her cabin late at night, when she heard a noise oil deck. She hurried out to find her husband, had been seized by tw’o pirates, one a boy of 18, the other a man' of 50, who bound him and disappeared in the darkness in a canoe,. Soon "they returned and said that they bad killed him. They took her aboard the canoe. The older punt? she said, then assaulted her in ’lie canoe and set her ashore. A handsome and intelligent woman and a college graduate. Mrs Collinge admitted .that her story sounded absurd, but she stuck to it, and on two succeeding days went aboard the yacht with officials and re-enacted the kidnapping scenes as she had described them. District-Attorney Blue told her that she wa s lying, and the police, after careful inquiry, did not believe that tile husband was killed. This morning however, his body, bound hand and foot, with knots of an experienced boat man, a bullet wound in the forehead, and a slash across the throat, was found in the surf at Oyster Bay, definitely settling that murder had been committed. The nolice are still uncertain whoth. er the widow is implicated.