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Police still searching for clues to elderly woman’s murder
Detectives on the East Coast of Demerara are still trying to come up with a motive and possible suspects in the murder of 89-year-old Millicent Cummings, whose battered body was found under a house at Cove and John early Friday morning.
So far police have questioned several persons, including a man who first discovered the body.
The man, Compton Hope, who lives in a property aback of the house, saw Cummings’s body but went away to work, and only returned hours later to give a statement to the police.
Millicent Cummings
Yesterday, this newspaper revisited the scene and discovered that Cummings was definitely killed at the same spot where her body was discovered.
There were blood stains spattered on the wall, which suggested that she was bludgeoned while lying on the ground.
No one heard the elderly woman’s screams, not even a man who lives upstairs in a section of the house under which her body was found.
He too was questioned and subsequently released.
Police sources have said that the man claimed that he only learnt that Cummings had been killed under his house when he came downstairs and saw other persons in the yard.
The other persons were neighbours who had responded to the alarm raised by Compton Hope.
Hope said, yesterday that he was trying not to be late for work on Friday morning when he saw the woman’s body lying on the ground under the house which he had to pass to access transportation.
He said that although he noticed that the woman was semi nude, he walked past the body thinking that it was just another destitute, who was probably drunk and had sought refuge in the yard.
Hope said that he was in such a hurry that he did not notice the pool of blood under the elderly woman’s body although the place was bright enough.
He called out to his neighbour and told him that a woman was lying under the house and advised him to “check it out”.
Hope subsequently caught a vehicle and went to work.
It was while at work around 07:30 hours that he received a telephone call from his sister who informed him that the police wanted to question him about a dead woman.
He said that he was shocked to learn that the woman was the same person whose body he had casually walked past earlier that morning.
“I never thought that what I saw was so serious. I thought that the woman would’a just get up and walk away. That’s why I left and went to work.”
On the advice of his sister he subsequently went to the police and gave them a statement.
“Looking back at it, I think I should have stayed back because it was a really serious matter. I don’t know her. I did see that her bottom was kinda exposed but I thought she was drunk.”
Relatives claimed that it was not unusual for the elderly woman who lived alone to be out of her house at some strange hours of the morning.
One relative, who lives in South Ruimveldt, in the city, told Kaieteur News that she would sometimes turn up at her house at 05:00 hours in the morning.
“I think she was very naïve, because she would tell us that no one will do her anything because everybody in the area knows her,” the relative stated.
Investigators will be hard pressed to solve this particular murder, given the insensitive nature of the crime.
They have not found any murder weapon which they believe is a blunt object, judging from the wounds observed on Cummings’s body.
A post mortem examination will be carried out on Cummings’s body tomorrow.
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