The victim was found in this modern, cliffside rental home on the East End of St. John.
PRIVATEER BAY — An insurance company owner from Nashville, Tennessee, Edward H. Netherland, was found dead with a head wound Tuesday morning, November 18, in his isolated rental home at the farthest reach of the undeveloped luxury subdivision at Privateer Bay on the East End of St. John.
“I saw him Monday afternoon,” the owner of property in the same undeveloped subdivision as the lone rental house told St. John Tradewinds newspaper. “The next morning the girl came to clean up and he was slumped over dead between the bed and the outside wall.”
“It looked like a tussle and they hit him or he hit his head,” the neighboring property owner told Tradewinds. “It wasn’t like (the house) was ransacked – his wallet was gone; his watch was gone.”
“I don’t think they knew he was there,” the long-time St. John resident surmised. “This guy didn’t go out.”
“This is an isolated spot,” the neighboring property owner said of the modern house which hangs off a cliff on the north shore of Privateer Point on the East End of St. John with a porch cantilevered far above the shoreline overlooking Tortola.”
“He was renting,” the property owner said. “He never locked his doors. He was on the phone 10 hours a day,”
“He sat out there in the peace and quiet… ,” the man said of the Cliffside home which is reached only by a circuitous unmarked concrete subdivision road overgrown with the brush of the semi-arid area.
Of course forensics came out,” the source told St. John Tradewinds. “They did the whole cop thing; but nothing ever comes of that.”
“He was a big guy,” the owner told Tradewinds. “There had to have been a fight.”
“There had to be a fight,” the Tradewinds source said. “He had a big wound on his head.”
The Office of the Medical Examiner transported the body to St. Thomas on a late afternoon barge Tuesday.
