DYING WOMAN’S CRY

Evening Star, Issue 19763, 13 January 1928, Page 2

DYING WOMAN’S CRY

LOCKED ROOM MYSTERY. How ’a dying woman of forty-eight was kept locked in a back room was told at a Camberwell inquest on Miss Susan Eliza Turner, of Elsted street. Mrs Edith Walker said bliss Turner and her mother lived in a back room in her house. The mother went out to work every day and locked the door of the room on the daughter, “ because the catch would not work.” For six or nine months, said Mrs Walker, Miss Turner had not been out of the room. Sometimes she could be heard walking about, and occasionally crying. The window was never open. , On November 6 Mrs Walker 2was called to the Turners’ room in the afternoon, and saw Miss Turner in bed, unconscious. Apparently no doctor had attended her. Mrs Rose Morris told the coroner: “ I often heard the daughter crying day and night.” The Coroner: Did you ever hear her mother chastise her?—l have heard her mother say, “Shut up crying.” Did her mother ever beat her so far as you know?—No. It was not .until Mrs Turner wrote to the relieving officer, “Send a doctor at once, urgent,” that the daughter was moved to the infirmary. She was then comatose, said the doctor, and her heart beat very faintly. She could not do anything for herself nor would she explain how she got into that condition. Yet she was “very well nourished.” Mrs Turner, the mother, was warned that she need not make a statement that might be used in evidence against her. She remained silent. The jury found that death was accelerated by the gross neglect of the mother. “That means a verdict of manslaughter,” said the Coroner. He committed Mrs Turner for trial on a charge of manslaughter.