(Jamaica Observer) Why was 33-year-old teacher Paula Gordon brutally murdered and her body dragged and dumped in a river more than 50 metres from her house in Zion Hill, St Catherine Saturday night?
Police investigating the murder that has shocked the quiet farming community believe it was a crime of passion. Gordon’s relatives, while not going that far, are convinced that the teacher was killed by someone close to her.
According to the victim’s brother, Karl Francis, his sister would not have walked from her door to the gate of her yard to speak with a stranger, especially at 10:00 pm, the time that the police estimated she was killed.
“This is just my view, but it looked as if she knew her attacker,” he said. A trail of blood from Gordon’s gate was what led residents to the river where they found her body at about 6:00 am Sunday. Family members said her head was bashed in and her body had stab wounds. “It looked as if she was running and it appeared her attacker(s) chased her, stabbed her and then dragged her body from her gate,” Gordon’s sister, Catherine Simpson, told the Jamaica Observer yesterday. “All now I still trying to come to grips with the news.”
The grieving siblings were among a group of relatives gathered at a family home in Zion Hill yesterday, trying to come to terms with the gruesome killing that has dampened the community’s Easter holiday. Her murder would have also depressed her Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) colleagues with whom she was scheduled to leave the island Sunday on a trip to Disney World in Florida.
In fact, her brother told the Observer that a few of the JTA members found out about the murder when they got to the community to pick up Gordon for the trip. Police said that a search of Gordon’s house revealed that documents and money were missing.
