DEATH OF MRS COTTON

Evening Star, Issue 19427, 9 December 1926, Page 5

DEATH OF MRS COTTON

OLD-TIME MURDER RECALLED HAH KHIFED AT WAIFORI Mrs Margaret Cotton, widow of Mr Robert Cotton, of Waipori, died yesterday, aged about seventy-eight. She was a very fine woman, much respected in the district. Early in' her life she had ft sensational experience. It was when she was the wife of Thomas Dickson. They were a young couple, she only about seventeen or eighteen. They went to the Waipori district in 1865, and opened a store about three miles from the Waipori township, on the Lawrence side. Her father, llichard Atkinson, wont there from Dunedin to pay the Dicksons a visit, and never got away. He was savagely murdered under strange circumstances. Whilst in the act of hanging a piece of moat on a ceiling hook in the store, or taking it down, a miner named William Jones picked up a butcher’s knife and stabbed Atkinson in the abdomen as he stood on a box to reach the hook. This stabbing took place on Saturday, December 23, 1865, and Jones was arrested next day. Atkinson died on the 30th, after a week’s suffering. The reason for the murderous assault was never found out. It did not come to the surface at or before the trial, and it remains a mystery to this day. After Jones had stabbed Atkinson he started to charge the (Mrs Dickson) with the knife still in his hand. She ran for her life round the store, tho man after her, and just as she was entering tho door he pounced upon her and stabbed her in the thigh. Her father, though mortally wounded, managed to reach his pistols, and whilst on his knees on the floor he put up such a menace as to drive Jones off. thus saving Mrs Dickson and himself from further injury; but he didn’t -hoot, tho threat being sufficient. Mrs Dickson’s screams as she ran round the store were heard by .some minors who were working hard by, and they ran up hurriedly, but too late to Intervene, for Jones was by this time frightened off by Dickson’s pistols and nnlcing towards a spur down tbo river. Ho was arrested the following day in miner’s hut at Timber Gully.

The trial took place at Dunedin on 'Larch 10. Ho was found guilty and hanged in tho Dunedin Gaol—the second person to bo executed there. Some years afterwards Mrs Dickson, then a widow, married Robert Cotton, who was well known as a runholder, end chairman of the Tuapoka County Council. In his early days at Waipori he drove a bullock lodge, and he was •it Gabriel’s in 1301.

A couple of years ago Mr W. E. S. Knight called attention to tho fact that the headstone over Atkinson’s grave in the Waipori cemetery gave ISG6 as the year of the death, but tho mistake has never been corrected. This is worth neniioning, in view of the possibility of some stranger quoting tho “ 1860 ” as evidence against tho accuracy of this narration. _ The death was in 1865, tho execution in 1860.