BOY'S STRANGE SECRET.

Auckland Star, Volume XLII, Issue 191, 12 August 1911, Page 17

BOY'S STRANGE SECRET.

ALONE FOR DAYS WITH HIS DEAD MOTHER. Remarkable evidence was given at an Inquest at Portlicawl on Wednesday, June •JB, by a lad named Leonard Richardson, aged ten. The inquest was on the body of his mother, whom he had allowed to lie dead in the house for two or three days without informing anyone. Ills father worked in the Rhondda Valley, and had not been to see his mother for a fortnight. When the neighbours asked the boy about his mother he said she was asleep. He told the coroner that his reason for Baying that was that he did not like to tell them she was dead. Continuing his evidence, the lad further said that the last time he saw his mother alive was the day befoie Coronation Day. She then gave him her purse and told him that when she was dead he whs to write to his father and his grannie, and hand the puree to whichever should arrive first at the house. Later the same day, when the milkman came, he went to his mother and tried to awaken her td ask if she would have some milk, but he failed to awaken her because she was dead.

The boy also said that after his mother died he had some other boys in the house, but took them into the fiont room, not into the kitchen, where his mother lay dead on the sofa. At bedtime he slept on another couch in the kitchen. A verdict was returned of death from cancer.