A POLICE TRAGEDY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 1104, 3 June 1913, Page 4

A POLICE TRAGEDY.

CONSTABLE’S REVENGE.

Deprived of his merit stripe on the report of a police sergeant oi the Wiltshire police, a constable of the same force lay in wait in the darkness for his superior officer, shot him dead, and then committed suicide. These are the tragic facts arising out of the discovery of the bodies of Sergeant William Crouch and Police-Constable Ernest Pike, both of whom had died from gunshot wounds.

The story of the double tragedy, as elucidated at the subsequent inquest, is as follows: —After bis degradation, owing to a breach of discipline, at a police inquiry at Amesbury, Pike cycled home to Enford with a fellow constable. He was in an excited condition, and said : “I have done with the force. I will make this country ring.” He had supper at home. Later he took a double-barrelled sporting gun and went out to meet the sergeant at eleven o’clock, near Coombe Farm, where a pathway leaves the road. The sergeant, approaching the point, would walk along this footpath, and close to the junction, in the shadow of the trees, his body was found by a labourer named Cannings, at six o’clock in the morning, with the top of the skull blown away. Two empty cartridges lying on the ground close to the body pointed to the fact that the officer had been murdered by means of the sporting gun. The chief constable of Wiltshire (Captain Noel Llewellyn) on being informed of the tragedy, at once decided to use his trained bloodhounds, and obtained an article of clothing belonging to Pike, and put the hounds on the trail. The hounds immediately pointed towards the river, and at the footbridge came to a standstill at the entrance to the water, where a two-barrel gun was lying in the shallows. The river was searched, and the body of Pike was found about a quarter of a mile downstream,

Pike’s suicide, after shooting the police sergeant, must have been carried out in a most deliberate fashion. He must have walked to a bridge spanning the river Avon, some 200 yards from the scene of the crime, waded into the water, and then placed the muzzle of the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The verdict of the jury was that Crouch was wilfully murdered by Pike, who afterwards took his own life.

The tragedy was rendered all the more distressing by the fact that Crouch left a wife And two children, while Pike had six children.