Seeking Nurse Peggy: Family uncover story of brutal murder committed a century ago

Nicole Reporter from Dunedin News

David Hullah was touring the South Island in a campervan when his mother suddenly told him to turn off the highway.

“She wanted to see the site where her aunt was murdered.”

She believed that site was Seacliff, about 25 kilometres north of Dunedin and home to an enchanted forest and a former lunatic asylum.

The 500-bed psychiatric hospital was once the largest building commissioned in New Zealand, but is also remembered as the site where 37 women died in a fire on the night of December 8, 1942.

But Hullah's relative was not one of those women.

His mother, Margaret Wells, who is in her mid-90s and lives in Australia, told her son of their relative's death as he drove towards Seacliff in March 2020, just before the first Covid-19 lockdown.

Wells was a young child when her favourite aunt, Peggy McInnes – who was actually her much older cousin – suddenly stopped visiting their Dunedin home.

Years later, she was told McInnes had been murdered.

Hullah said he knew McInnes used to work as a nurse at Seacliff, and was murdered by a spurned former boyfriend who later killed himself in the hospital’s grounds, now home to a reserve.

The story was eerily similar to another that unfolded in the tiny township in 2016, when Stephen Findlay killed neighbour Sharon Comerford before turning his gun on himself in the grounds of the reserve.

Findlay survived and in 2017 was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 11 years.

McInnes’ murder actually happened at Orokonui Hospital, a former psychiatric hospital about halfway between Dunedin and Seacliff, on August 24, 1928.

A newspaper report, headlined ‘Driven Insane By Jealousy’, said McInnes, a 25-year-old nurse, had recently been transferred from Seacliff to Orokonui.

But it was at Seacliff where McInnes had first met Thomas Ellis, a 35-year-old Dunedin bricklayer, who was working on a new kitchen building at the site.

The pair courted for several months before the tragedy happened in the grounds of the Orokonui Hospital.

Ellis visited McInnes at her new workplace after hearing their relationship was over. McInnes later left work at 8pm, wearing her uniform under a brown coat.

Later that evening, a staff member heard groans coming from the hospital grounds. They found Ellis wandering about with his throat cut.

Ellis died at the scene, and police were then tasked with finding a missing nurse: McInnes.

Several hours later they made a grim discovery.

McInnes was found lying on a blanket under a large pine tree. Her face had been bashed in, and her throat was cut.

The murder weapons – a pen knife and a stone wrapped in a handkerchief – were found nearby.

Tellingly, police found a note in Ellis’ pocket. The note, sent by McInnes, indicated she would meet him at a prearranged time and date.

A colleague of McInnes later told an inquest the young nurse was deciding between two men, including Ellis, whom she was lukewarm on.

The pair had earlier been spotted arguing at a dance at Seacliff after Ellis – later described in a report by the Otago Daily Times as a “tall, thin, dark man” – saw her dancing with other men.

“The facts of this sad tragedy are only too plain,” the coroner said.

“It is obvious that Nurse Mclnnes was murdered by Ellis who then cut his throat.”