Vicious act snuffs life of ex-lover
Broken-hearted and jealous, Bert Manly cut his ex-fiancee’s throat in her mother’s Whanganui home, before he calmly stepped out into the street and took off.
Gladys Cromarty, 21, stumbled downstairs from the bedroom where she had been mortally wounded and collapsed in the kitchen, gasped three times and soon died in a pool of blood on the floor.
As she collapsed, the front door clicked shut. Gladys’ mother Elizabeth rushed out the back door and a sister, Dora, out the front.
Dora heard the gate click shut and saw Manly straighten up and start walking briskly away from the house in Ridgway St.
When Elizabeth screamed, Manly’s pace quickened to a run.
He later stole a bike at the railway station and rode it to the police station, where he told two constables, “I’m the man you’re looking for.”
The murder weapon, one of Manly’s chef’s knives, was found in a cattle-stop.
Herbert Frederick Manly, 38, had been married and had children in England.
Gladys, her five siblings and their widowed mother were immigrants from Scotland. Dora, the oldest daughter, had come first, about six years before the May 1930 tragedy. Gladys had been in New Zealand less than a year.
Bert and Gladie, as he called her, met when they both worked at Koatanui, a farm about 15km northwest of Whanganui town in the Kai Iwi area. He was a chef and she a housemaid.
They became engaged. Manly left Kai Iwi, stayed at Gladys’ family home for a few days, and went to work in Wellington. Gladys soon followed him to the capital, where she got a job at the New Zealander Hotel. Manly later got a job there too.
On April 30, 1930, Gladys arrived back at her mother’s home with a bad cold, suffering a nervous breakdown, and without her engagement ring. A court later heard that Manly had pawned it.
Manly said to a woman friend of Gladys’ in Wellington who had seen them arguing, “If I do not have her, no one else will.”
Manly and a brother of Gladys’, Stanley — who had been working at the New Zealander too — arrived to stay at the Whanganui house on May 6.
Gladys and Manly seemed friendly towards each other and on Thursday, May 8 — the evening before the murder — they went to the pictures together.
“It will be for the last time, won’t it girl?” he said to her, a statement the Crown would later rely on to build the case against him.
Manly’s letters to Dora and her mother, his own father and the police, some of which were produced during his trial, paint a picture of him as a spurned lover — heart-broken and suicidal.
He told the police his mind was “absolutely unhinged. Life without her is not worth living”.
To Dora and Elizabeth he wrote, before Gladys’ death: “I’ve been to a doctor today and he says I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
“I know what is the cause, and Gladys knows, too. She said I’ve been too lenient to her,” he said, according to a Herald court report.
“My day off she actually cast me on one side to go out with [name omitted], a man who ruined [omitted]’s life and home, etc.
“All hotel girls in hotels such as these think of is separating men from their wives.”
The Crown alleged that one letter also showed a murderous intent, when Manly wrote that without Gladys, he could see nothing but “destruction . . . two valuable lives destroyed”.
His lawyer, however, argued for a finding of not guilty by reason of insanity, but the Whanganui Supreme Court jury disagreed, finding Manly guilty of murder.
The presiding judge, Chief Justice Sir Michael Myers, pronounced the death sentence and asked if the accused had anything to say.
In a quiet, husky voice, Manly replied: “It was never at any time premeditated.”
The Government changed his sentence to life imprisonment.