INFECTIOUS INSANITY.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 23, 28 January 1928, Page 3 (Supplement)

INFECTIOUS INSANITY.

HYPNOTISED TO MURDER.

AN ORIGINAL PLEA.

Saying he shot and killed his wife at her own urgent request, Evan M. Hart, a banker, made an original plea when charged with murder at Eureka, Kansas. Through his counsel he declared that his wife was insane and that when he killed her she was suffering from "communicative _ insanity." Dr. Karl Menninger, a specialist in mental diseases, the chief expert witness for the defence, declared that he knew of many cases of "communicative insanity" afflicting people who were very intimate, and who, because of intimacy adopted the same dislikes, likes, and abnormalities. The doctor testified that Mrs. Hart had paranoia (chronic insanity) and that she infected her husband with the same wipntftl hypnotising him into killing her. The mental expert, undeterred by the question of the public prosecutor as to whether there existed, such a disease as "convenient insanity," insisted that the banker was suffering from mental infection, and was therefore not responsible for killing, though he was now sane. Another sensational murder trial reached its culmination when Mrs. Margaret Lilliendahl and her alleged paramour, Willis Beach, were each sentenced to ten years' imprisonment for killing Dr. William Lilliendahl, the woman's husband. All parties in this "crime passionel" belonged to well-to-do classes. Dr. Lilliendahl was attacked and shot dead while out driving with his wife, who, with Beach, was accused of plotting and executing the murder.

Mrs. LiHiendahl, in the course of a sensational trial, went into the witness box and gave a detailed account of how, she said, two negroes waylaid the motor car on a lonely country road, knocked her senseless, and killed the doctor. When she recovered consciousness she hailed a passing motorist and summoned the police to the scene. The accused woman withstood a grilling cross-examination, and did not waver in her story, which, however, suffered from the defect that she' was unable to describe the negro murderers. The jury, after being locked up for a long time, brought in the curious verdict that the couple were guilty of "voluntary manslaughter.'' Thus the couple escaped the gallows. |