ORDEALS IN DOCK

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 April 1927, Page 3

ORDEALS IN DOCK

DRIVEN INSANE BY WORRY. ' Twenty-one years ago Mrs Rosa Kowen, who has died in the Hellesdon Mental Hospital, aged 58, was tile central figure in ode of the most dramatic trials of recent years. She was twice tried on the charge of murdering her husband, each hearing lasting four days, and the jury on each occasion disagreed. Eventually the Crown decided not to proceed with the case, but the terrible ordeal had. been too much for Mrs Kowen, and she lost her reason. Janies Kowen, the husband of the dead woman, was found in the sittingroom of their house with terrible wounds in the head and burns on different parts of the body. It was suggested that an attempt had been made to destroy traces of the murder that, had undoubtcdlly taken place by setting fire to the house, and when Mrs Kowjen and her children were rescued from the upper part of the burning building she was arresjted on the capital charge. The case excited interest from the outset because Mr Kowen was a prominent figure in the friendly society movement, and because of the similarity between the crime and one that occurred at Peasanhall, near Norwich, three years before. The latter was the notorious case of Rose Harsent, a servant girl, who had been done to death and the body burned in almost the same manner as in the case of Mr Kowen.

The parallel between the two tragedies was further emphasised by the fact that, as in the case of the Sun-

day school superintendent Gardner, who was tried for the murder of Rose llarsent, the jury at Norwich Assizes also disagreed twice, and the Crown dropped the prosecution. In both cases the defence was conducted by Mr Ernest Wild, now Sir Ernest Wild, Recorder of the City of London. The Kowen drama, however, had a less happy ending, because shortly after she had passed through her ordeal Mrs Kowen became insane and was removed to an asylum in Kent. She was afterwards transferred to the institution in which she has just died. It was patent to those in court that Mrs Kowen felt her position terribly, and during the interval between the two trials she declared her regret the jury had not found her guilty instead of disagreeing. “Anything is to be preferred to this uncertainty,” she declared. “I cannot stand it any longer. My mind is giving way, and another month in prison will drive me mad.” When the second trial came on Mrs Kowen was reduced to such a pitiful plight that she had to be carried up the stairs to the dock. When the second trial ended in another disagreement her despair knew no bounds. There was some doubt as to the course the prosecution would take in face of this new disagreement, and the additional uncertainty preyed qh the mind of the accused woman to such an extent that her hair turned grey in a night. When release came at last she could .scarce credit it, but it was too late to save her reason, and it was obvious to her closest friends that she was broken mentally and physically. In one of her lucid intervals she tried to describe something of what she had

suffered during the period the charge was hanging over her. “My eyes hardly ever closed in sleep, and in the silence of my cell tears were never absent from them,” she said, “I cried and cried until I

felt that the fountain of tears had dried up for ever, and now I would give anything to be able to weep because it would bring relief to my tortured soul. I could not get away from the thought of the scaffold with which I was menaced.

“When I tried to sleep I could hear the hammering that I associated in my mind with the erection of the scaffold, and, even in the court, I could see before my eyes the grim figure of the judge donning the black cap to sentence me.” With freedom her greatest mental torture was to come, for ,she was obsessed with the idea that everywhere she went people were pointing her out as the woman who ought to have been hanged. Though generally protesting her innocence of the crime with which she had been charged, she had fits in which she not only accused herself of this crime, but imagined she was guilty of slaying Rose Hasent as well.