A BRUTAL MURDER.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2554, 28 May 1881, Page 2

A BRUTAL MURDER.

A horrible double murder was committed near Maryborough, Queensland, on April 30. The victims were a Mr and Mrs Jarvis. The husband was a milkman, who had a little homestead near the right bank of the Mary River, about four miles below the town. It is a lonely place. There is but little settlement on that side of the river below the town, because the land is not very fertile, and beyond the narrow strip of fairly good soil a wide reaching expanse of sterile and marshy country extends right away to the shore of Wide Bay. Jarvis had not been many years married, there were no children in the house, and the two lived alone. On the morning in question a Kanaka was at the house, who said he had run away from Magnolia plantation. So at least poor Mrs Jarvis told her sister in the course of the day, she having driven into town with her husband in the spring cart. In the evening they returned home. It was dark before they arrived at the slip-panel in the fence surrounding their little homestead, and Mrs Jarvis must have alighted first from the cart. Then the Kanaka, who probably lurking unseen by the fence, sprang unexpectedly on poor Jarvis, and with one blow of a tomahawk cleft the back of his skull, tie immediately turned on the woman, struck her down with his tomahawk, and then completed this horrible work by cutting her throat from ear to ear. Then he seems to have searched the spring cart, for there was missing from it a shawl, some yards of wincey, a loaf, onions, and a pound of coffee. His story that he had run away from Magnolia was quite true, and ho had taken a boat with him. To that boat he returned. That night a man on the river near the opposite bank heard a noise of splashing in the river, and apparently of a boat. He hailed, but received only a mumbling indistinct answer from the occupant of the craft. The nect morning, Saturday the lighthouse-keeper on Woody Island, a picturesque little timbered islet which travellers going to Maryborough see opposite the entrance of the river, noticed a Kanaka in a boat, with a sail made from a “ sort of sheet,” passing out towards the open sea. On enquiry, it turns out that the impromptu sail correspondent in color with either the shawl or the wincy taken from the murdered woman. The boat with its solitary passenger, has not been seen since. It is not likely to be seen, unless by chance picked up by a passing steamer. In the direction he was heading the Kanaka would soon be beyond the sheltered waters of Wide Bay and out in the open sea, rendered more dangerous by the surfbeaten sandspits that stretch out trom the northern pait of Frazer Island.— Brisbane correspondent of the “ Sydney Morning Herald.”