BOY COMMITTED FOR TRIAL

Press, Volume LXXX, Issue 24160, 20 January 1944, Page 3

BOY COMMITTED FOR TRIAL

* ATTEMPTED MURDER CHARGE STATEMENT TO POLICE (P.A.) BLENHEIM, Jan. 19. The story of a 15-year-old boy’s plot to exterminate a whole household was unfolded by the police to-day in the case in which Allan Joseph Pope was charged with attempting to murder Muriel Marguerita Robertson, a widow, of Nelson, at the home of her son-in-law, Arthur Gordon Roberts, of Ward, on October 4. With, as he thought, one victim to his credit, the boy’s nerve failed him, and instead of setting out for Invercargill to rescue a friend from the Borstal Institute, he made a confession to the postmistress at Ward, and waited for the police to come, and arrest him. In a statement, to Detective-Sergeant Hayhurst, of Nelson, and put in as evidence, accused said that what he did was the result of an agreement with another boy, with whom he had got into trouble in Wellington, that if either should be put into the institution, the other would do his utmost to free him. Last July the friend was sent to Borstal, while Pope was placed by the Child Welfare Officer with Roberts, by whom he was treated like one of the family. Almost immediately, however, Pope began to plan how to get rid of the Roberts household, finally deciding on poison. An attempt to procure potassium cyanide under the pretext that he was interested in entomology failed, but Mrs Robertson lent him a bottle of oil of wintergreen. as he told her he had rheumatism. Taking advantage of the absence of Mr and Mrs Roberts in Blenheim on October 4, he poured the poison into the soup being prepared for the Roberts’ evening meal, which Mrs Robertson had asked him to give an eye to. However, the scheme was discovered because the odour was so strong that Mrs Robertson smelt it immediately she came back to the kitchen. As neither Mrs Roberts nor Mrs Robertson took soup, he had to cast about for another weapon to silence them, and had decided upon a large spanner used for breaking up coal. This he secured during the morning of October 4, and carried about with him awaiting an opportunity to use it. This came after lunch when Mrs Robertson was bending over the refrigerator. He struck her three times and then ran upstairs and stole two £1 notes and, some silver from her room. Next he broke open the storeroom in the detached house where he slept, and made a parcel of tinned foods, such as condensed milk and spaghetti. He tried to catch Mr Roberts’s hack with the intention of riding towards Picton, and entering a few houses on the way, thus securing money for the trip south. The horse would not be caught, however, and Pope, realising that he could not get very far on a bicycle, and there being no train until the next day, decided to give himself up, and rode to the Ward Post Office for that purpose. It had been his intention on reaching Invercargill, to try to smuggle some nitroglycerine, which he knew how to make, to his mate, so that he might blast his way out of the Borstal Before he left Mr Roberts’s house he left a note for him stating that he did not know what made him do what he had done. After the evidence of Mrs Robertson. Roberts, and the postmistress at Ward had been heard, accused pleaded not guilty and was committed for trial. His counsel, Mr A. A. Mac Nab, intimated that he would like accused examined by a psychiatrist In Wellington.