THE INVESTIGATOR. DID WE MURDER JIM BOLTON ?

Bryan Bruce investigates controversial criminal cases in NZ’s past.

“On February 18, 1957, the last man to be executed in New Zealand was hanged behind the walls of Mt Eden Prison. His name was Walter James Bolton - Jim to his mates, although there were precious few of them at the end.

Just two weeks after his Court Of Appeal hearing, Bolton was sent to the gallows having been found guilty of poisoning his wife of 43 years, Beatrice, with arsenic.
At his trial, the Crown argued that Jim Bolton had distilled the arsenic from some sheep dip on the farm into a highly potent clear liquid, which he put into his wife's tea. However, Bolton left school in standard four, and experts at the National Poison Centre now seriously doubt whether he would have had the knowledge of chemistry required to make the poison.

Did the 68-year-old and the father of six children really murder his wife because he was in love with his sister-in-law? Did his wife Beatrice accidentally kill herself? Or could the real killer have been Florence Doughty - Beatrice's sister and the woman with whom Bolton was having an affair?” www.throng.co.nz/the-investigator, 27/11/2007