MANSLAUGHTER

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 56, 7 March 1942, Page 5

MANSLAUGHTER

PRISON FOR 10 YEARS

ACQUITTAL OF WOMAN

(0.C.) SYDNEY, March 3. Charged with the murder of Stanley Edwin Bartlett, 54, timber worker, Cecil Raymond Ellem, 21, was found guilty of manslaughter by a Grafton jury. Mrs. Constance Olga Davison, 24, who was charged with him, was acquitted. During the five days of the trial the Court was crowded, mostly by women. Early proceedings were reported last week. In the concluding stages of the trial the police produced three statements which they said Mrs. Davison had made.

First she said the last she saw of Bartlett was When he was talking to Ellem. Then she said that twice at hotels Bartlett had struggled with her, but she had fought him off. She stated: "I visited his hut to see if he had some of our plates. He caught hold of me and had me half-way down when I got a lump of wood and hit him on the head. He didn't let me go, so I hit him on the head with an axe. He fell to the ground. Next day I got a rope, tied it under his arms and dragged him along a creek about half a mile. I packed wood on the body. It burned pretty good." 1 In her third alleged statement Mrs. Davison said she did not want anything tip happen to Ellem, as she loved him very much. She said she was washing some clothes when she accepted an invitation from Bartlett to go to his hut for tea. He tried to pull her down. Then Ellem arrived and the two men had a fight.

In a statement from the dock Ellem said Bartlett died after a fight. He was carrying the body to put it on a lorry to take it to a doctor when something snapped in his brain and he made a fire to burn it. Later he noticed that the body had only been scorched, and used an axe to knock it into the fire, hitting Bartlett's head several times. "The statement made by Mrs. Davison shows her love for me and her courage, but it is untrue," he said. "She had nothing to do with the killing or burning of Bartlett." When Ellem was later sentenced to ten years, he broke down and ?ried. The judge said the full penalty for manslaughter was imprisonment for life, but he had been influenced by EUem's previous good character and the jury's recommendation to mercy.