SECOND MYSTERY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 150, 27 June 1934, Page 5

SECOND MYSTERY.

'DEAD HAND' MURDER.

ACCUSED WOMAN'S STORY,

ANOTHER TRIAL PROBABLE.

(From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, June 20. On Monday Lillian Anderson was charged at the Central Criminal Court with shooting her husband on May 10 at Wagga. This case, it should be remembered, is an offshoot of the now famous "dead hand" case, in which the body of Percy Smith, found sunk in the Murrumbidgec, was identified by finger-prints under very difficult and unusual conditions. So far as the Smith murder was concerned, that phase of the case seemed to be closed with the sentence of Edward Morcy to death at Wagga on May 11. But on the previous evening MoncriefT Anderson, oue of the Crown witnesses who had identified Morcy as having been seen with Smith, was shot, while getting water at a trough near the Wagga reserve, where he lived in an unemployed camp, and his wife was then arrested for shooting him. As Mr. Melveau, the Crown prosecutor, pointed out on Monday, Mrs. Anderson had made two extraordinary statements —one to the effect that she had heard a shot and saw her husband fall, but knew nothing else —the other admitting that the gun found in the water trough was her husband's and that she was carrying it at the time, but protesting that it went off by accident, and that she had no intention of injuring him. A very curious feature of the inquiry was the production of the "Thelma Smith" letters already submitted to the coroner. These letters, which Mrs. Anderson admitted having written— though she now says that her husband compelled her —were handed to a third part}' for transmission to Morey after the trial. They professed affection for Morcy and offered him sympathy and help, and it is not strange that Morcy, in his desperate strait, attempted to

respond to the appeals of his unknown admirer. Yet when he was brought up from Long Bay gaol tins week to the Criminal Court be could only say that he did not know Mrs. Anderson and had never met her. Apparently the only feasible explanation'that can be offered for this strange is the one suggested by the Crown prosecutor—• that Mrs. Anderson, who is emotional and weak-minded, had fallen a victim to the-habit, not uncommon among certain types of humanity, of "lionising murderers." But, of course, this professed affection and solicitude for Morey might well supply a motive for the murder of the husband, and .Morey was called by the counsel defending Mrs. Anderson to testify that her alleged interest in him had no personal basis and was, in fact, wholly imaginary and fictitious. - Accusing Her Dead Husband. But the trial, sensational enough so far, had not yet exhausted its dramatic possibilities. For Mrs. Anderson, from the dock, proceeded to make a statement which, if the "jurors had no previous hint of what was coming, must have almost taken their collective breaths away. She told a long and circumstantial story, with a wealth of minute detail, the summary of which is that it was her husband, Moncrieff Anderson, and not Edward Morey, now under sentence of death for murder, who had killed Percy Smith. She talked of a quarrel between her husband and a man who had camped near them, of threats used by her husband against the man, of her husband's absence for some days from the camp, of finding a bloodstained shirt after his return, of reading a letter which spoke of selling a wagonette and sharing the money, and finally, she asserted, Moncrieff Anderson had confessed to her that he had murdered Percy Smith, and had put the body into a sack and had thrown it into the river—making the one mistake of leaving some of the clothes near the bank. Of course the woman added that she was afraid of her husband, that he had frequently struck and ill-treated her and that he had threatened to kill her if she revealed his fatal secret. On the other hand, she explained, . when the police came to question her. though she had not meant to kill her husband she was terrified and confused and said anything that occurred to her, regardless of fact or reason. Woman of Dull Intellect. The purposes of this more or less ingenious but vastly improbable story was, in the first place, to save Morey,

and in the second place to arouse sympathy for herself by incriminating her dead husband. Naturally the Crown Prosecutor tossed this evidence eon temptuously aside. But it is possible that it helped to confuse the jury and to suggest some doubt as to tile degree bi the woman's responsibility. More effective evidence in her favour was tlw testimony of two doctors called by ths defence. Dr. Holloway, surgeon at Long Bay, said that Mrs. Anderson, though not insane, is a woman of dull intellect, and though 23 years old, she is no, bettor developed mentally than a child of 1-1 years; and Dr. Bond, an alienist, also thought that she is ■'mentally retarded." These facts, coupled with the morbid and neurotic condition evidenced by the "Thelma Smith" letters, seem to have influenced the jury, and, after being locked up all night, they failed to agree on a verdict and were discharged. Xo doubt Mrs. Anderson will have to submit to a second trial, but in the meantime it is probable that she will Incalled to participate in another phase of these strange and seemingly endless proceedings. For Morey has appealed against the death sentence, ami his counsel intends to call Mrs. Anderson as a witness on his behalf.