READING MURDER CASE

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 806, 29 October 1929, Page 9

READING MURDER CASE

SUSPECT ARRESTED AT GLASGOW STATEMENT TO POLICE

Reed. 10.3 a.m. LONDON, Monday. Joseph Barratt, aged 45, walked into the Glasgow Police Station and made a statement concerning the Reading murder. Detectives were hastily summoned from Reading, and Barratt was charged with the murder there of Alfred Oliver. Certain clues led to an unjustified suspicion of Philip Yale Drew, an actor. Barratt was remanded to permit of his removal to Reading. The people of England are mystified by a tragedy in which Alfred Oliver, aged 60, tobacconist, of Cross Street, Reading, was found bludgeoned to the point of death in his shop, on June 22. His wife left the house at 6.5 p.m., and returned at 6.15 p.m. She found her husband dying. For three months the inquiries made by the police failed to lead to an’ arrest, but at the inquest early this month a strange story was unfolded in the Coroner’s Court.

Philip Yale Drew, an actor, aged 50, who was playing the part of a disguised detective in a play called “The Monster,” which was being staged at Reading at the time of the murder, sat and listened to a long succession of witnesses. They pointed to him as a man whom they had seen behaving strangely outside Oliver’s shop on the evening of the crime. However, the jury returned a verdict of murder by some person unknown, and great crowds cheered this decision, for Drew became in a day (and only for a day) a popular idol.