Second Murder
On 11 June 1935, Holmes withdrew £500 from his account and late in the evening left home, telling his wife he had to meet someone. He was also very cautious as he left his home, accompanied by his wife to the door of his Nash sedan. Early the next morning, he was found dead in his car at Hickson Road, Dawes Point. He had been shot three times at close range. The crime scene was made to appear that Holmes had committed suicide, but forensic police had no doubt that he was murdered. Holmes was due to give evidence at Smith's inquest later that morning.
Reginald Holmes was cremated at Northern Suburbs Crematorium on 13 June 1935. He left an estate valued at over ₤34,000 in 1935, which would be worth millions of dollars today.
In his 1995 book The Shark Arm Murders, Professor Alex Castles claims that Reginald Holmes took out a contract on his own life to spare his family the public disgrace of conviction.
Read more about this topic: Shark Arm Case
Famous quotes containing the word murder:
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)
“Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting
here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,
The pink paint on the innocence of fear;
Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)