Daily News from New York, New York • 38

SUNDAY NEWS, JULY 3, 1960 39 -i -p i i v. Dorothy Barbara Rawlinson was mutilated, slain on beach. Mrs. Robinson, left, was beaten and murdered at her cottage. offer a reward, call in the FBI.

Sykes did ask the FBI to step in but Director J. Edgar Hoover refused, explaining that law forbids his investigators to perform such service outside U. S. territory. Now Lodge broadcast an appeal for anyone who knew about Miss Rawlinson's missing beach robe to come forward.

A man and his wife who heard this appeal reported that on 'Sunday, when they strolled to Southlands about 5:30, they saw the girl lying entirely nude on her robe, a book at her side. They went away quickly because they didn't want to embarrass her or interrupt her sunbathing. Two teen-aged boys reported they had been fishing off the rocks Sunday and, because they were late going home, they took a short cut through the private beach. The time was 6:30. There was no girl there then.

So that pinpointed the time of attack within an hour between 5:30 and 6:30 P. M. Although he was dismayed by the, previous failure of the Scotland Yard men to solve Bermuda's mysteries, Sykes called on the Yard again. Next day Detective Supt. Richard Lewis and Detective Sgt.

Frederick (Buck) Taylor arrived. Bike in Plain View "If a man can commit rape and der on a beach in broad daylight," Lodge told them, "no woman is safe anywhere in Bermuda." The newcomers got off to a false start by working on the theory that the murderer was a U. S. serviceman. Then they made several other errors.

Finally they pondered a question which had bothered the local police. Why had the murderer buried Miss Rawlinson's clothing but left her bike in plain view "Because he didn't know the bike was there," Lewis deduced. "But why didn't he?" "Because he came into Southlands from the shore." suggested Taylor. Together the pair walked along the beach toward Hamilton until they came to a path which led them off to a back road. They followed this road until they came to a tobacco-candy shop near a golf club.

They asked the clerk if he remembered any of the customers who came in after 6:30 "on that Sunday the girl was killed." The clerk remembered one light-skinned Segro who came in about 7 o'clock for cigarets. He remembered him because his trousers tvere wet "all the way -up to his pockets where he kept his money." Did he know this man No, but he'd seen him around the neighborhood but not since spring. Could he be a golf club caddie? The clerk didn't know. So Lewis and Taylor talked with the caddie master. had a caddie who answered the description of the man they were looking for.

But he let him go the previous May after a woman golfer complained she didn't want to be alone with him on the links. Oh, yes, he remembered the name. It was a month to the day after the Rawlinson murder when the Scotland Yard men turned to the local police to ask what they had on Wendell Willis (Donkey) Lightbourne, 19, the second son of a fatherless family of eight in Spring Hill, Warwick Parish. "Oh, yes, we know him," said Trott and Duerden. As a youngster, Donkey, unpopular with Negroes his owi age, was convicted of common assault.

He worked sporadically at odd jobs until 1958 when he was convicted of robbing a 14-year-old schoolgirl of five shillings after knocking her to the ground. "We questioned him after the Flood attack," said Trott, "because a taxi driver who heard Mrs. Flood screaming saw him run from the area. He told us he ran upon hearing the screams because ht was afraid police would blame him. "We had his fingerprints so we compared them with the one on the hoe used to beat Miss Kenny.

It wasn't his," said Trott. Confronted by the police, the shoi -husky teen-ager, called Donkey becaus he was considered stupid, said he got shell-fishing Sunday, Sept. 27, and tha" he hadn't seen the sunbathing girl. An. then the confession came in a rush: "I walked along the beach to wheiV the girl was sitting on a rock wt got to talking I grabbed her costum It tore off She went to slap me an.

said 'You, rascal you! I gave her backhanded slap and she went backwar. into the bushes. She must have hit he head blood came from her and sh made funny noises like ow, ow, ow. didn't like those noises And did he then tear off her her, rape her and toss her body to the sharks? "I didn't have no intercourse 1 just ran away she wasn't dead when I left Now how about Mrs. Flood.

Mrs. Robinson, Mrs. Pearce? No, sir, he couldn't remember anything about them. OCT. 31, Lightbourne was charged with the murder of Miss Rawlinson and the attack on Mrs.

Flood. There was nothing in particular to link him with the Robinson and Pearce murders except the nature of the attacks; brutal, presumably with the hands, and sexual mutilation with an unknown weapon, thought to be something similar to a broomstick. He went to trial last December in the Bermuda Supreme Court lefore the Chief Justice, Sir Newnham Worley, for the murder of Miss Rawlinson. For the spectators who packed the courtroom the first high point in the case was the reading of Lighthourne's statement by Detective Supt. Lewis.

'Get Rope Ready' After saying he left the young wcman alive, Lightbourne continued "But 1 want to- get it off my mind I done it the girl on the beach I bashed her I can't get to heaven now. I tried to hang myself. I also tried to shoot myself but I couldn't pull the trigger I would be better off dead. You fellows get the rope ready." However, when Lightbourne took the stand in his own defense, he said he did have intercourse with Miss Rawlinson at her invitation and then she slapped him. So he had to slap her "and the blood starts coming.

1 don't like blood. Every time I kill a chicken I don't like the blood. So I left her there alive and walked down the beach." Lightbourne's counsel was Lois J'j Browne, a Negro and Bermuda's first woman barrister. She called three witnesses. The first was hi mother, Mrs.

Ethel Matilda Jane I.ip-hthourne. She said his father died when he was 10 years old. The second Mrs. Cora Gale, headmistress of the school Donkey attended. She said he had an IQ of 40 and was "unteachable." The last witness was Dr.

Mildred Mavnard, a New York psychiatrist. She testified Lightbourne was suffering from a mental disease "hut I will not say he is insane in the usual sense of the word." A jury of five Negroes and seven whites found him guilty as charged, but recommended leniency. Sir Newnham sentenced him to be handed, leaving Ihe matter of mercy to the island governo, Sir Julian Gascoigne. The governor was presented promptly with two petitions. The first, demanding no mercy be shown the condemned man, was signed by 631.

The second, praying for mercy, was signed by 2000. One copy of this petition was addressed to Queen Elizabeth. Three psychiatrists came from Ion-don to examine Donkey. They found him sane but "a mental defective whose emotional balance and judgment are both grossly impaired." Lightbourne was reprieved and he is now serving life imprisonment at Parkhurst Prison, Isle of Wight, By and large peace has returned to Bermuda. The citizens feel that even if the evidence didn't show it, Lightbourne did kill Mrs.

Robinson and Mrs. Pearce. As for the common prowler who assaulted Miss Kenny he's probably too afraul. of the law to do anything like that agam tors Trott and Duerden accompanied them to Southlands. At the entrance to the beach lay Miss Rawlinson's motor bike, half covered with drifting sand.

The Sayers' frightened eyes swept the empty sands, smoothed by the wind and barren of footprints. The two inspectors strode across it to hunt among the icoral rocks that hemmed in the beach. "Here!" exclaimed Trott when he found traces of blood on a jutting rock. Now he put in a call to Central Police Station from the home of the beach owner, Brigadier Dunbar Maconochie. Police came from town, and with shovels and screening equipment, they began to dig.

A foot down they came on a white shirt and a pair of green shorts far too deep to have been accidentally covered by shifting sands. About a dozen feet farther along they dug up a blue bathing suit. Then the book Miss Rawlinson had been reading, Vicki Baum's "Mortgage on Life." When darkness fell, floodlights were turned on. All through the night the police worked but they found nothing more no beach robe, no body. With the dawn, Lodge ordered skin divers to search the waters.

About 9 o'clock a craft came toward Southlands about as fast as the aged rower could bring it from a coral reef half a mile away. "There's a body out there," the boatman yelled as soon as he was in earshot. He waved his hand toward the reef and added, "Out there where I was hunting rockfish." All that was left of fearless Barbara Rawlinson lay face down in shallow water. She had been disfigured by a sadistic, pummeling slayer and mutilated by sharks. EXCITEMENT in Bermuda reached a new high.

Newspapers demanded that the government fingerprint everybody, one whit afraid and one of these was Dorothy Barbara Rawlinson, 29. This London brunette arrived in Bermuda in May, 1959, for a vacation and liked it so well she stayed on, employed as a secre-tary by a Hamilton importer. All through the terror she cycled back and forth to work. All through the panic she sunned herself on Southlands Beach, a private property less than a mile from Bali Hai. She wasn't even afraid of the hurricane threats in September.

There was one on Sunday, Sept. 27, the day she told her landlady, Mrs. Thomas Sayers, she planned to go to Southlands. "The waters are too rough," Mrs. Sayers commented.

"Oh, I'm not going in just get the sun and air." Off to the Beach Miss Rawlinson telephoned several friends. Each refused to accompany her because of the threatening storm. "Then I'll go alone," she said. "You really shouldn't," Mrs. Sayers found herself saying.

"That killer hasn't been caught." "Oh, pooh! It's not Friday, it's not moon-time and it's not night time so whatfs there to be afraid of?" Mrs. Sayers fell silent and Miss Rawlinson went to get ready. When she reappeared, she was wearing a white shirt and green linen shorts over her blue bathing suit. She carried a multicolored beach robe and a library book. "I'll be back in an hour," she said, and rode away on her bicycle.

But she wasn't back in an hour or all that Sunday, or all night. Mrs. Say- ers was uneasy about her. "Oh, don't worry about her," Sayers advised. "She's probably spending the night with" friends.

She doesn't have to confide in us." But when Miss Rawlinson didn't call the Sayers Monday morning, and when they learned she had not gone to her office, they telephoned the police. Inspec T5f Scotland Yard men confer on beach about Rawlinson mystery. Skin divers search for body of missing secretary..