MARRIED AT 15

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 121, 18 November 1943, Page 6

MARRIED AT 15

BIGAMY CASE STORY

AUCKLAND, This Day.

During the hearing of a most unusual bigamy charge in the Police Court this morning the accused woman, aged 23, who went through a form of marriage with a soldier after he returned to Auckland on furlough, declared that when only 15 she was persuaded by her mother to marry an elderly man, father of her two children. The Magistrate,- Mr. Morling, made an order against publication of the names in the meantime. The woman, who admitted bigamy, was committed to the Supreme Court for sentence. While the soldier sat in Court nursing the woman's four-year-old son the accused, seated in "a. chair in front of the dock, sobbed throughout the hearing. The first witness was a man aged 52, the accused's husband, he having married her in August, 1935. Two boys, aged 2 and 4, were children of the marriage. Owing to a difference, the witness said, his wife left him a year ago. The witness denied that he knew the accused was 15 when her mother put her age at 17 at the time of the marriage. The soldier said he met the accused at a dance. She introduced herself as a single woman working in a factory. A month later he proposed marriage and she agreed. In the licence she described herself as a spinster. A week after the marriage he learnt that she was a married woman, but when he spoke to' her about it she denied it. She was still living with him. He intended to marry her legally. A detective, in evidence, said he obtained from the Accused a statement that she was boarding at a convent till she was 14. Then she and her mother lived in a one-roomed home. She had had differences with her husband whom she considered too old, and she finally left him because he told her to get out.