“DEAD” SON ALIVE

Greymouth Evening Star, 4 July 1933, Page 2

“DEAD” SON ALIVE

FATHER’S INSURANCE FRAUD. LONDON. May 26. A man who admitted obtaining from a doctor a death certificate for his 6-year-old son who was not dead, registering the “death,” amt collecting £l5 from an insurance company on a policy, was sent to prison for six months at Glasgow yesterday. It was stated that prisoner, Michael O’Donnell, craneman, Gallowgate, Glasgow, looked after his four children, their mother being dead. He conceived the idea of saying that his son Michael, who had contracted pneumonia was dead, in. order to “raise the wind.”

Ho visited a local doctor who had attended the child, declared that the boy was dead, and secured a death certificate without the doctor seeing the body. On the strength of the certificate he registered the boy as dead and then made a similar false statement to the Co-operative Insurance Society, of London-road. When the insurance officials were making inquiries regarding the duration of the boy’s illness they were astonished to find that he was still alive.