Mrs Mellish Says She Is Hungry

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31726, 9 July 1968, Page 13

Mrs Mellish Says She Is Hungry

(N.Z. Press Association-Copyright) SYDNEY, July 8. Wallace Mellish’s lone fight against authority entered its seventh day today with still no sign that the gunman was willing to leave the house where he is holding hostage his teen-age wife and her baby son.

Meanwhile, Mellish’s bride of almost six days, Mrs Beryl Mellish, aged 18, has complained in an interview with a Sydney newspaper that she had not eaten for three days.

The “Daily Telegraph” reported today that Mrs Mellish told a reporter in a telephone interview yesterday: “My baby has not eaten since last night, and I have not eaten for three days.”

“I’ve had jam, and stuff like that, but I’d love a salad sandwich —it’s been a long time since our wedding breakfast.”

The wedding breakfast was provided by Police Commissioner Norman Allan, who had also arranged a special dispensation so that the couple could be married. The youthful bride and her three-month-old son, Leslie, who are being held hostage by Mellish under the threat of a battery of arms, including an Armalite rifle, have been pawns in Mellish’s deadly game to keep a small army of police at bay in a tiny cottage in Glenfield, a Sydney suburb, since Tuesday.

Since a power failure in the cottage on Saturday night, the cottage has been bathed In the powerful glare of police arc lights. In Mrs Mellish’s telephone call to the paper—her second telephone interview for the day—she startled the interviewer by replying, “Ever been to a morgue?” when he asked her how she thought tt would all end.

As she spoke, the young bride said Mellish was sitting 10 feet away with the baby in one arm and the shotgun on his knee. Tm scared, believe me,

I’m scared,” Mrs Mellish said. “He’s not bluffing.” Before hanging up at the request of Mellish, she said she did not like his “crankiness.”

“I didn’t know he was like this when I married him,” she added.

Earlier she had rung a radio station reporter and appealed to the police to abandon their siege. Commissioner Allan later repeated to reporters that Ke would not allow the baby to starve. “We know she has one and a half tins of baby food, which are more than enough,” he said.

According to a newspaper report, police surrounding the house rained a barrage of stones on the cottage roof at 20-minute intervals before dawn to prevent the gunman from sleeping. Contrary to Mr Allan’s instructions that Mellish was not to be disturbed, the newspaper said, detectives carried on their own private war of nerves, yelling abuse calculated to draw him out “Unlike Mr Allan, they treated Mellish with little respect, standing in full view of his house while they read the newspapers and cooked barbecued breakfasts," the newspaper said. But at a press conference last night, Mr Allan denied knowledge of any stonethrowing incidents. Mr Allan today defended the action of the police in not arresting the besieged gunman when opportunities seemed available. “I have never told them not to arrest Mellish and I would have been foolish to do so,” he said. “After all, that is the purpose of this exercise arrest Mellish, but without injury or death.”