In case you don’t know this story, Phillis was killed by her boyfriend and buried on Mt Victoria, Wellington in 1931.



She was 17 years old. And six months pregnant.

Phillis met George Coats when he was on a depression relief works gang near her family home in Brooklyn. George was 30, a widower with 6 children in orphanages. He courted Phillis. Took her to the movies. They dated in secret for months.

In March 1931 after an argument with her mother, Phillis stuffed her favourite dress into a small bag, walked to George’s bedsit in Mt Vic and begged him to take her in. She was unmistakably pregnant and had nowhere to go.

His friends described her as quiet, downcast, disengaged. She was isolated and miserable. And George was increasingly desperate. He got a job on the Hataitai recreation ground works in April, but the government cut hours and wages to rein in costs.

George’s sister helped him procure tools to perform an illicit abortion, but the kit failed. He began making comments to Phillis about killing her. Joking at first, but increasingly resolute. He made these remarks in front of his card-playing buddies.

By June, Phillis only left their boarding house room to cook his meals and wash her increasingly threadbare dress and underwear. On June 20th, George lost his job. He visited Hataitai the next day, and asked an old workmate to leave out a shovel. “To bury a dead dog”, he said.

On the night of the 25th he asked her to take a walk over Mt Vic, pregnant, exhausted, in her worn-down shoes. At the recreation ground works he had stashed the shovel and a sack stolen from their landlady’s greengrocer shop weeks earlier. He had planned this for weeks.

The medical examiner’s report from Phillis’ inquest is one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever read. He knocked her out and left her for dead where trucks of fill would be poured the next day. She died of suffocation trying to pull herself out of that shallow grave.

She was quickly buried under tonnes of earth from the tunnel. Maybe no-one would have even noticed she was gone, if George hadn’t done a moonlight flit on their room. The landlady found a letter from Phillis to her parents.

The landlady gave it to a friend of George, who took it to Phillis’ father, who took it to police. The letter was a farewell. A sort of suicide note. Phillis has been convinced she had to die. She sensed it was coming and couldn’t see another way out of her situation.

George’s friends were small time crooks and the police used that to put pressure on them. One of them eventually admitted all the jokes and not-so-jokes he’d made about “getting rid of Phil”, how the works were the perfect place to bury a body you didn’t want found.

George still dragged out his trial, made Phillis’ family hear his version where it had all been her idea, and all the grisly forensic evidence. Stirred up a media circus. Even appealed his conviction.

Messed up the threading last night and this is getting some RTs so here are the rest:





I need to give a shoutout and huge thanks to @verslibre who tracked down some really hard-to-find information on Phillis and her murderer. I wouldn’t have been able to tell Phillis’ story without Stef’s amazing work. Archivists are incredible, y’all!

You can follow @petrajane.

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