TRAGEDY AT RICHMOND. Auckland, September 17.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 404, 21 September 1889, Page 5

TRAGEDY AT RICHMOND. Auckland, September 17.

A horrible tragedy was discovered last Wednesday week at Vaucluse, Richmond, Victoria, at the residence x>f Mr Robert Ramsay, wholesale grocer, of Flinders Lane West, when his servant girl, named Alice Franklin, was discovered in the scullery with her throat cut from ear to ear. The girl had only been employed in the house since Friday, and was a comparatively recent arrival from England. She described herself as a widow, and said she had come out to her aunt, who lives in Adelaide, who, through a clergyman, obtained her a place with Mr Wilson, a widower and a school teacher, in that city. She entered Mi's Ramsay'g service on Monday evening, and did her work well and without any appearance of being depressed in mind she went to bed early on the night before the tragedy. A little later Mrs Ramsay went out to get some supper, and on finding the girl in bed, cut the haul herself, sharpening the knife for the purpose. Next morning Mr Ramsay's attention was called to the kitchen door by the loud knocking of the milkman, and on going there he saw Alice Franklin lying on her back in a pool of blood in the scullery behind the kitchen with her head nearly severed from her body. The place was splashed with blood like a shamble and the newly sharpened ham knife, with which the deed had been committed, was lying covered with clotted blood near one of the out- stretched hands of the diseased. The girl had evidently, with one determined B weep of the knife, cut right through to the vertebrae of the neck, and had fallen where she lay. The body was cold, but an examination of the girl'fi bed-room, which is over the scullery, showed that she had been in bed, and had destroyed herself as soon as she rose in the morning. Deceased during the few days on which she was employed by Mrs Ramsay went cheerfully about her work, did it well, and betrayed no depression of mind or gave any indication that she was tired of her life. She vvas of petite figure, somewhat comely and singularly neat, not only in her dress, but in the way in which she went about the household duties.