SHOT WIFE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 154, 3 July 1939, Page 5

SHOT WIFE.

HUSBAND ON TRIAL.

LOVED HER TO THE END.

PLEA OP INSANITY.

I HOBART, June 23. "Something seemed to snap in my head. and. from that moment, until T woke up in a cell. T know nothing: about what happened. Despite what occurred between Williams and my wife. T was very much in love with my wife, rijrht up to the end." In those terms, Cyril Esteourt. 22. woodcutter, for whom his counsel, in the Criminal Court, entered a plea of insanity, explained his condition during the shooting of three persons, including his wife, at Grass Tree Hill, on April 23.

J Esteourt is charged with the murder of Mrs. Laurel Doreen Estcourt. 19. Alfred Lamley Webb, 45, and Norman Henry Albert Williams, 40. •In a statement by Estcourt presented to the Chief Justice, Sir Harold Crisp, by his counsel, Mr. Wm. Irvine, defendant declared that he wae married six months previously. "Better Man." At Grass Tree Hill, it soon became apparent, the statement said, that Williams and Mrs. Estcourt were very fond of each other. » Williams several times took his wife Ito Hobart, and on one occasion stayed away some days. He could stand it' no longer and informed his wife that they would move to their own shack. Afterwards, when his wife disappeared for three days, she said she had spent two nights with Williams. On many occasions he found Williams at his house.

"I beseeched her to have nothing further to do with him, but she told me he was a much better mar. than I was and tha* I could do what I liked about it," tki stateuu'iit said.

Finally she left him, he said, and on April 20. while he was absent, his wife, her mother and Williams took furniture from his house. "Something Snapped." On the day of the shooting, Estcourt said, his wife told him he had better not be caught speaking to her, or there would be toruble. Later he went to Williams' house and asked his wife whether she was going to take more furniture. Williams said: "I will take it when I am ready." Something seemed to snap in his head then, he said. i Counsel said the question whether' Estcourt fired the gun was not denied, but the defence was relying on the insanity of accused at the time the shooting occurred. Evidence would be called that, from his earliest days, Estcourt was not normal. He went to school at four, and when he left at 14 was still in the bottom class. He was not able to tell the time until he was IS, and could not read and write now. He had run wild, like an animal of the field, since his earliest times. One of his youthful practices was to carry live snakes round with him and chase people.