ARRESTED FOR MURDER

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 657, 8 May 1929, Page 9

ARRESTED FOR MURDER

TWO FRENCHMEN UNDER THIRD DEGREE GRUELLING INTERROGATION (Australian and N.Z. Press Association) Reed. 0.23 a.m. LONDON, Tuesday. For the murder of Miss Olive Branson in the south of France, the police arrested. Joseph Girard, formerly her gardener, and Girard’s brother-in-law, Fancois Pinet, manager of an hotel at Monte Carlo. There was a gruelling third-degree interrogation of Girard and Pinet for 17 hours, under which they were physically exhausted. The clue leading to the arrests was the fact that Girard’s wife did not serve Miss Branson’s lunch at the usual time, though there should have been no reason to believe that she was missing. The body of Miss Branson, a cousin of an English High Court Judge, Sir George Branson, was found in a water tank near a villa where she had lived at Les Baux, a village in the South of France. The police at first concluded that it was a case of suicide. The relatives of Miss Branson refused to believe that, however. A post-mortem examination revealed a bullet in the dead girls’ head and bloodstains were found in her bedroom. It is argued that Miss Branson could not have shot herself and then walked to the tank 20 yards away in her stockinged feet and in night attire and, therefore, that it is a case of murder.