'Hard nut to crack...'

Invincible Strangers 44 Chapter 19

When planter Charles Mugele one night went to a Mormon bazaar, he left his daughter Louisa and her friend Fatamali’i, both 14, at their Lotopā home. Mugele and three friends returned, finding the front door locked. A faint voice called from the back door.

‘To their horror when they reached it, they found the native companion lying with her head nearly severed and blood was splattered all over the place,’ the Auckland Star reported. ‘Rushing into the house they found Louisa still alive but fearfully wounded with a gash on one arm and one leg, while her face and neck was slashed open as with a sharp knife.’

It was the night of 15 October 1927. Mugele sent two men for help while he ‘at once locked up all his Chinese labour, first disarming them of their usual knives’. Louisa told her father that they had been asleep with the lamp turned low. They were awakened by a noise. She sat up and was slashed with a knife across the arm and leg. She said that the assailant had been a Sāmoan. Fatamali’i rushed to the back door but the killer slashed at her. Wounded, she opened the door but was then slashed across her neck. The Auckland Star said she had a cut across her hand as if she had gripped at the knife; ‘The deed was one of cold-blooded murder or blood lust…. Seldom has Sāmoa been so aroused as now by this outrageous deed of brutal callous murder.’ At 4am Judge Woodward arrived. Louisa’s life was slipping away but she told him she could not see who attacked them. She soon died.