Sleeping Tablets Allegedly Put In Landlady’s Porridge

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27637, 19 April 1955, Page 14

Sleeping Tablets Allegedly Put In Landlady’s Porridge

(New Zealand Press Association)

AUCKLAND, April 18. A woman who allegedly put sleeping tablets into her 85-year-old landlady’s porridge appeared in the Auckland Magistrate’s Court today before Mr M. C. Astley, S.M. The accused, Beryl Lillian Reeves Bennett, aged 49, a manageress and domestic, pleaded not guilty to a charge that, with intent to injure Ann Eliza Harsant, she caused her to take a noxious thing—amytal. After hearing the evidence, the Magistrate committed the accused to the Supreme Court for trial. The complainant, Miss Harsant, gave

evidence that the accused and her husband and three sons rented two bedrooms and two sitting rooms in her home for £3 a week. The accused and she had never been very friendly, the witness said. She had had considerable trouble with the accused, but had never argued with her because she was “too unreasonable” and always in a bad temper. The witness said that on Monday, March 28, her porridge tasted “so dreadful” she could not eat it. It tasted, she said, like Epsom salts. She told a neighbour about the porridge, and this woman took the rest of the porridge away in a pan. Gordon Walter Stace, assistant Government analyst, said he found 10 grains of in the Boz sample of porridge given to him. Detective-Sergeant D. J. Dwan said that when he interviewed the accused about the alleged offence, she admitted placing the contents of some of the amytal capsules in Miss Harsant’s porridge. He produced a statement by the accused in which she explained that Miss Harsant had been “very nosey” and would not leave things alone.

On the morning of the alleged offence, the statement continued, the accused saw Miss Harsant’s pot of porridge on the stove. “I thought I would give her a bit of a tummy-ache and keep her quiet for a while,” the statement went on.

“I went to my dressing table and got out a packet of amytal capsules and shook them into the pot of porridge.” “When I read the charge to her,” added the witness, “the accused said, ‘No, no—l did not intend to injure her.”’

Serious Flooding in Nagasaki.—Nine persons in Nagasaki were killed and 15 injured in widespread floods caused by torrential rains over the last 48 hours. Seven thousand persons in the Saga Prefecture in north-east Kyushu were cut off as raging rivers burst their banks. —Nagasaki. April 17.