Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Son of Dr Frank Reginald LONGDEN and Josephine Mary LONGDEN nee ROBERTSON, Buninyong, Victoria

Husband of Amie Pyke LONGDEN nee TAYLOR, 1514 Sturt Street, Ballarat, Vic.

Death Pact
MELBOURNE. — Dr. Norman Anderson Longden, 45, of Ballarat, and Clarice Suttie, 30, sister, of Queensland, were found dead in a city, hotel room.  The woman's body, found unclad in a bath, had more than a dozen wounds. Each artery pressure point had been gashed. On a table beside the bath was a bottle of poison, a hypodermic needle and a blood stained razor blade. The doctor's body was found sprawled across the bed.  He had apparently died from the effects of poison, administered by a hypodermic needle.
Both formerly had been in the army.
Dr. Longden was a major, and was placed on the reserve on November 8, 1944. Sister Suttie had been a lieutenant in the Australian Army Nursing Service, and was placed  on reserve on June 6 1944.
Police believe that the deaths were the result of a suicide pact.

A Mystery of a Double Death

NORMAN ANDERSON LONGDEN
By THE MAN IN THE MASK
Unsolved crimes are of three kinds — those which may yet be solved, those which will never be solved, and those which need not be solved. In the last category comes the  Longden-Suttie case, but it is none the less tragic for that. Two lives were destroyed, apparently at the dictate of either convention or emotion, or possibly emotion deriving from  convention. Neither convention nor emotion should have been able to demand such a price in this case.

Each of the two victims, by professional training, should have understood the physiological basis of the love im pulse, so that, however intense might have been that impulse, it  should not have been able to over power reason to the extent that apparently if did.

Norman Anderson Longden at the time was forty - five; and was therefore still in his prime. He was a doctor, had served in the Field Ambulance during the 1914-18 war, had  established a practice in a Victorian country district, subsequently rejoining the AIF during 1941 and seeing further service in World War II. During the course of this service he  met a Queensland girl, Clarice Suttie, a nursing sister. A friendship developed which did not accord with convention. Dr. Longden was a married man. In June of 1944 Sister Suttie, aged 30 was discharged from the military forces, and Dr. Longden received his discharge shortly afterwards.

At the dictate of folly, or physiology, or both, they booked in at a Melbourne hotel on December 22, 1944, as Dr. and Mrs. Longden, of Bendigo. This was not the town in which the  doctor had previously been practising. Their apartment consisted of a double room with bathroom attached. Within three days some element of discord had developed. At twenty  to eleven on Christmas night, Detective Parker, at Russell Street Police Station, received a call, went to the hotel, and there saw Dr. Longden and Sister Clarice Suttie, whom the  doctor Introduced as his wife. The doctor explained the reason for the call. He was Intending shortly to resume private practice and had purchased some medical supplies which  had been delivered to his room. That evening he had missed a hypodermic syringe and a quantity of morphia, which had been included, in these supplies. Turning to the woman  who was, supposed to be his wife, the doctor then said: "I will have to tell him, dear!" To this she made the somewhat enigmatic reply: "You brought the detective here. It is your  story, darling!" Doctor Longden then, said : "My wife gave herself '" an overdose of morphia recently." In this there was implied the likelihood that the sister might be taking  morphia to still nerves that were war shattered, or love shattered, or even conscience shattered. It explained the alarm of the doctor at the disappearance of the morphia.
The detective sensed the possible state of affairs, began to ask questions, and finally the doctor admitted that the woman was not his wife, but stated that he wanted to marry  her. She, in turn, then stated that she had taken the overdose of morphia to frighten the doctor when he had broken the news to her that he could not get a divorce. Further, she  said she had hidden the syringe, for fun, and that it was on top of the shower. The detective found it there. The missing morphia, too, was found, in a sock in the doctor's suitcase. But a peculiar fact is that this was found only after a search of the room by all three, which seems to suggest that if it had been hidden there by either the doctor or the nurse, the one who had hidden it must have forgotten having done so, or wished in turn to hide the fact of having done so, and therefore took a pretended part In the search. It suggests a  further possibility that either the doctor or the nurse feared that the other was resorting to morphia as a drug and was attempting to prevent it. Since it was the sister who admittedly had hidden the syringe, it might be argued that it was the doctor who was resorting to the drug.  Against this Is the fact that it was the sister who had admitted taken morphia, and had taken an overdose of it. However, as both syringe and drug had been recovered, there was nothing further to be done.  The detective left the hotel. January 10,  1945, the couple had been at the hotel three weeks and were due to leave. At eleven that morning, the porter went up to their apartment to collect their luggage. He found tragedy in possession. Dr. O'Sullivan, of Fitzroy, was called and arrived at the hotel at eleven-forty. Doctor Longden, dressed only, in pyjama trousers, was lying on the bed, dead. In the bathroom was the body of Sister Suttie, nude, in some thing of a sitting posture at one end of the bath, which contained much blood.

A post-mortem examination was made by the Government Pathologist, Dr. C. H. Mollison. There was a puncture on the front of the left shoulder of Dr. Longden, and the conclusion was that death had been due to asphyxia consistent with morphia poisoning. This time it was the doctor, and not the sister, who had suffered an overdose of morphia. In the case  of Sister Suttie, death had been due to haemorrhage, particularly from a deep, eight-inch cut on the front of the right thigh. There were super ficial two-inch cuts in the bend of  each elbow, two cuts on the inside of the right arm, three small cuts about the wrist, and three on the right foot. Traces of morphia found in the body were not sufficient to have enabled these "cuts to have been inflicted without pain, but the pathologist stated that if novocaine had been, adminisered subcutaneously it would have prevented pain. In the  bathroom, within reach of Sister Suttie, were a razo rblade, a partly-smoked cigarette in an ashtray, and some novocaine.  Nowhere was there any sign of a truggle. One puzzling  feature was the nature of the large thigh wound. It did not appear to have been made by anyone with a knowledge of anatomy since it was made in a direction away from instead  of toward the large femoral artery. Yet both of the victims of the tragedy were of the medical profession. In the bedroom, in which the body of the doctor was found, an  investigation discovered morphine tablets and a hypodermic syringe. There were also the fragments of a letter which the doctor had written. It had been torn up and thrown into  the waste basket. Pieced together, it commenced:
"It is with a desire to assist the police, coroner, etc, and to avoid unnecessary trouble to other people that this is written. "Circumstances are such that it is no longer possible for  me to exist in this world. The blame, if any, is entirely my own, and I should like to take this opportunity of thanking my friends for what they have done for. me." The coroner  decided that the tragedy could have been a double suicide, or that one could have caused thie death of the other and then committed suicide. The evidence was not conclusive  enough for a definite finding, and thus the tragedy remains unsolved, one which need not now be solved, and one which on the face of it, need not have happened had not  emotion or convention conquered reason. So many tragedies are like that and, being like that, are doubly tragic. In this case it was a double tragedy which was so doubly tragic.