Murder Turns Love To Hatred

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 270, 13 November 1937, Page 2 (Supplement)

Murder Turns Love To Hatred

GLADYS MacKNIGHT, 17-year-old choir singer, threw a leg over the arm of her chair. Her waist, culottes, and bare legs were smeared with blood. After asking for a cigarette, she eat thinking for 15 minutes. "I told the t:uth," muttered Donald Wightman, her strapping, 18-year-old boy friend, also a chorister. "Why don't you?"

Gladys turned slowly: "So what?" Then she told Bayonne, N.J., police about the ten-hour-old death of her mother. Case-hardened detectives stared in amazement at her calm, carefully

worded story.

"I asked my mother if we could have something to eat. My mother said, 'Yes, if you get it yourself.' She had a butcher's knife in her hand . . . Donald was standing behind her. My mother and I quarrelled, and she waved the knife. Donald grabbed my mother and' held her arms. I struck her on the head with the hatchet. After she fell to the floor, Donald said to me, 'H:t her again!' I did." After a panicky flight through Northern New Jersey, they had returned and surrendered. One detective said of Gladys, "She's the coldest one I've seen in 25 years."

After their ten-day trial for murder, Donald's love had turned to hate. Gladys had repudiated her confession and told the jury a new version of the killing. She and Donald planned to play tennis, she said, and went to her home for an early dinner. Mrs. Mac Knight walked into the kitchen, found Donald making love to her, and brandished a knife. Gladys grappled with her; Mrs. Mac Knight fell to the floor, blood gushing from her head. Gladys looked around and saw Donald clutching a reddened axe. "Donald did it." Gladys smiled while the boy testified bitterly. His version: He entered the kitchen; saw Mrs. Mac Knight threatening her daughter with a knife; he tackled her from behind, put his hand over her mouth to keep her quiet; she slumped to the floor; Gladys had a bloody hatchet in her hand. "Gladyi did it." *

The State insisted both had committed premeditated murder. The prosecutor displayed a picture of Gladys taken at the Bayonne police station nine hours after the crime. It showed her with arms folded, smiling—"The Gladys the State has been picturing to you—a cold, unfeeling, and brutal girl who killed her mother." Deliberating only thr -i hours, the jury found both guilty v ot second-degree murder, punishable by one to 30-year sentences. Gladys slied a single tear. Donald shouted at his ex-sweetheart: "You—you made a murderer out of me!"