he had written. At the bottom of the
pile was one signed “George.”
The car, or bus, that served
Woodbury at that time on Saturday
night was owned by the Philadelphia-
Woodbury Interstate Line, and it didn’t
take us long to discover that the driver
on duty that night was one George
Yarrow. For the past three months
he had been a regular driver on the
Woodbury route.
Yarrow was a single man. He lived in
Barnsboro with his sister and brother-
in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Harry Hassan.
Yarrow’s aged mother, Mrs. Mary
Yarrow, an invalid, also lived in the
house.
Trooper Smith and I went to
investigate the Yarrow home. As we
approached the house we got out of
my car and walked up the side of the
building.
Right outside the garage stood the
wreckage of an Essex coach car, its
interior absolutely burned away, its
metal work torn and blistered. Bits of
broken glass from its windows were
strewn on the ground around it and in
truth it was such a mess that only the
tyres had escaped the flames. The tyres- and the number plate. It was oddly
familiar – Z-4303.
We removed one of the rear tyres and
knocked on the door of the house. Mrs.
Hassan answered. She told us that her
brother George Yarrow was asleep in his
room. We asked her to call him.
Yarrow appeared, rubbing the sleep
from his eyes. We asked him what
he was doing on Saturday night and
he told us he had spent the night in
Woodbury after driving to Philadelphia
with friends. Yes, he had known Honey
Sarlo, but he hadn’t seen her for three
months. They had never been courting.
I asked him, “Did you know that
Rose Sarlo has been murdered?”
“No,” he replied, apparently little
affected by the news. He was not
nervous, only surprised. He seemed
only mildly interested in the details of
the murder.
I asked him, “Is that your car – the
wreck in the yard?”
“Yes, it burned up early this
morning,” Yarrow replied. “I was about
to take a girl to Atlantic City and as I
backed it out of the garage it back-fired,
starting a fire under the bonnet. The
fire spread to the inside of the bus. The
Barnsboro Fire Brigade had to come
and put out the blaze.”
This proved to be true, but by the
time the fire brigade reached the Hassan
home the inside of the car was burned
out.
We didn’t think Hassan’s story rang
true, so we arrested him on suspicion.
We took him to Woodbury and showed
him the body of Honey Sarlo in the
morgue, but he was unmoved. There
the police doctor had just finished the
post-mortem. Grimly he told us that
Honey Sarlo had been a virgin before
she was raped by her killer.
We kept Yarrow in a police cell,
but we still had another suspect to
question. This was Carmen Matteo, a
17-year-old. A witness whose identity
was withheld had told us that he had
seen Matteo crossing the Mantua Creek
Bridge, where Honey’s body was found,
shortly before 4.30 a.m. – a few hours
after the murder.
Matteo readily agreed that he had
been a friend
of Honey’s but
denied any
knowledge of
the killing. He
had crossed
the bridge at
that late hour
because he had
been to a party
in Philadelphia
and was late in
returning to the
Jersey side of the
Delaware River.
More evidence
was coming in
steadily. A friend
of the Sarlo
family noticed
badly trampled
weeds not far from East Red Bank
Avenue on the outskirts of Woodbury,
and found a black shoe, a bloody
handkerchief, and what appeared to be
blood spots on the grass and weeds. The
place was four miles from where Honey
Sarlo’s body was found – but the shoe
and the handkerchief were identified as
hers.
The owner of the only house nearby
had not heard any cries or shots on the
night of the murder, nor had he seen
a car parked there. But the irresistible
inference was that this was the place
where Honey Sarlo was first attacked
before she was driven, dead or alive, to
the bridge.
But on that Saturday night two
passengers had alighted from a bus
in East Red Bank Avenue at between
11 and 11.30. They were Mrs. Emily
Verfaillie and her 15-year-old daughter
Mary, who happened to be a friend of
Honey Sarlo.
“A few minutes after we got off the“I am going to close, sweetheart, and I
hope the letter you give me is a long one. I
could read them for ever. I never grow tired
of them. I will close with love.”
Who, we wondered, was this zealous
Lothario? He kept regular times, going
past not at 7.30 but at 7.31; he seemed
fairly insistent, and he had a sister.
He also had Honey’s confidence, and
we felt pretty certain that she must have
been killed by someone she implicitly
trusted, for she wasn’t the type to be
picked up by a stranger. So was this
busy letter writer her killer?
W
e set out to trace Honey’s
movements on that Saturday
night. She had gone to the bank in
Broad Street and made the deposit for
her father. She had then gone on to the
five-and-ten-cent store, which was also
in Broad Street, where she had bought
a box of tin soldiers for her brother
Bobbie’s seventh birthday in a few days’
time.
Next she went to the butcher shop of
Metzger, where her father and brother
Joseph worked. Her father remembered
her saying as she left, “Please bring
home two dill pickles for my lunch on
Monday. I’m going to the movies before
I go home.”
Honey was next seen by Blanche
Sweeten, aged 19, who lived across the
street from the Sarlo home.
Blanche knew Honey very well. She
said she saw Honey at around 10.30
that night near Woodbury post office,
which was near the cinema where Rose
had told her mother and father she was
going.
What caught Blanche’s attention was
that Honey was talking to two young
men. This was so unusual that Blanche
looked back several times at the group
as she walked down the street.
As she watched Honey, a car of a
type then called an Essex coach, which
was used as a bus to carry passengers,
passed them, its horn blowing. A few
minutes later Blanche saw the same
Essex coach parked in front of the post
office. She walked on down the street
and glanced back again to see a girl
who she thought was Honey walking
down a slope near the village cemetery.
Then she saw Honey talking to another
man and finally get into the car.
Blanche was so curious about Honey
at this point that she stopped to watch
the car move off. And then, with that
sort of premonition we have all had
at some time that something was not
quite right, she took a piece of paper
from her handbag and wrote down the
number of the bus. It was Z-4303.
Two neighbours of the Sarlo family
came forward to say that they too
had seen Honey talking to two youths
outside the post office at around 10.30.
There was a fairly good chance then
that the driver of that car, or at least a
bus driver, was the author of Honey’s
love letters – the man who passed at
“seven thirty-one.”
Carefully we sifted through the notes
A handcuffed Yarrow in the custody of Sheriff Tryon,
surrounded by Gloucester County detectives. He was taken
to the scene where it was believed Honey was murdered