FEAR CAUSES TRAGEDY.

Auckland Star, Volume 246, Issue 246, 16 October 1926, Page 38

FEAR CAUSES TRAGEDY.

rXFIDELITY AXD MURDER.

A tragic story, reading like a page from Hardy's "Jude the Obscure," was told at the inquest on Mrs. Halse, aged 50, and her three children, who were found hanged at the Hertfordshire hamlet of Patmore Heath. Mr. Francis William Halse, the husbano! a wine and spirit merchant, of Xewton Abbot, said he was separated from his wife in 1919 under a deed of mutual arrangement, uuder which he allowed her £3 5/ a week—increased in 1921 to £3 a wee.. There was a clause to the effect that when his two children reached the age of nine he was to have the right to bare them sent Ito him for a month in each year.

He had not exercised the right until this year, when he wrote to his wife asking that the children should be sent to him. He had no knowledge of the third child, or which he was not the father.

The coroner said the cause of the tragedy was very plain—the woman's fear that the husband would discover the existence of the third child.

It was manifest that when the children reached their father tbey would talk about their little sister at home.

The Jury returned a verdict that the mother murdered the three children, and then committed suicide, and that she was of unsound mind at the time.