Elizabeth Fraser, right, wife of Donald Fraser, murdered at the Racecourse Hotel in Riccarton in 1933. On the left is the Frasers' daughter Joyce and in the centre is Allan Walton, Elizabeth's brother. This photo first appeared in the New Zealand Herald in July 1934.
Infidelity, deceit and a failing marriage were at the heart of an unsolved murder mystery in Christchurch.
Elizabeth Fraser claimed she had been sleeping alongside her husband, publican Donald Fraser, when he was shot dead by a shotgun-armed intruder in November 1933.
But police quickly came to believe that Elizabeth was lying about that, as her side of the bed had not been slept in, causing detectives to look at the Frasers’ marriage more closely.
Their suspicions were compounded when a love letter addressed to Donald Fraser from another woman turned up at the Racecourse Hotel in Riccarton, which the Frasers ran, on the day Donald died.
The 90-year-old cold case murder is the subject of a New Zealand Herald and Open Justice podcast, Chasing Ghosts: Murder at the Racecourse Hotel, episodes of which are being released every Saturday in November.
The podcast reveals the Frasers’ marriage was falling apart in the months before Donald Fraser was killed, because he had met and apparently fallen in love with a younger woman he was introduced to while on a trip to Wellington.
She was Eileen Hardcastle, a fair-haired single woman who worked as a cashier for a company in Wellington. Police described her as “a woman of decent name holding a good position”.
Back in Christchurch, Fraser wrote to a friend, mentioning Eileen’s name. Word got back to her and she responded. It was the 1930s equivalent of swiping right.
In the weeks before Fraser was murdered, Donald and Eileen took a road trip holiday around the lower North Island, travelling in Elizabeth Fraser’s car.
Elizabeth came to Wellington looking for her husband, and encountered him with Eileen at the Trentham races.
What she might have said to her husband and his lover is not known.
But the matter came to a head with a violent argument three weeks before Fraser died, after he and his wife had both returned to the Racecourse Hotel.
The row was so loud and explosive that the Frasers’ teenage daughter Joyce ran out of the hotel to where the cook, a Mrs Dore, was talking to the porter in a building at the back.
Later, Sidney Higgs, a lodger, commented to Dore that there was a “bit of a donnybrook upstairs” - donnybrook being a slang word for an argument.
“You have only heard the tail end of it,” Dore replied.
During the row, Elizabeth Fraser took a pair of scissors to her husband’s clothes. Police later examined the ruined garments and considered she must have been in a violent rage when she did the damage.
Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined NZME’s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke’s Bay. His writing in the crime and justice sphere is informed by four years of front-line experience as a probation officer.
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