MOTHER DROWNS CHILD

Greymouth Evening Star, 25 May 1935, Page 12

MOTHER DROWNS CHILD

“COULD NOT SEE HER SUFFER.”

LONDON, April 16.

How a distraught mother drowned her deformed 16-months-old daughter to save her from further pain, and than took her own life, was described at an inquest at Dunkirk, Kent, on Saturday, on Mrs. Alice, Howland, 37, and her daughter Jean. # It was stated that after the child was dead, the mother carefully dried her and put on a fresh nightdress. After also putting a clean nightdress on her four-year-old daughter Kathleen and on herself, she went with Kathleen into the scullery and turned on the gas stove. They were found by her 13-y ear-old son, whose prompt action enabled Kathleen’s life to be saved. Tho husband, Ernest Alfred Howland, told the coroner that his daughter Jean had been suffering from infantile paralysis since September. She had twice been’in the hospital for that complaint'and twice for diphtheria, and it was understood that she was to go to hospital again. His wife thought the child was not going to live. It was very deformed in the legs, arms and back. When ho left home on Friday she seemed all right. Alfred John Howland, the 13-year-old son, said that on his return from school on Friday afternoon he found tho house lockeel. On getting a ladder and looking through a bedroom window, he saw the baby apparently dead in hex* cot.

He told a neighbour and afterwards got in through a window. He smelt gas and turned off the taps. His mother was lying on the floox* with hex* lied in the gas oven. Kathleen was lying beside her “snoring.” He picked her up and handed her to a neighbour through a window. Kathleen recovered. It was stated that a message was found on the table reading: “I could not see her suffer any longer. 1 drowned her.”

The jury found that the mother murdered her child and then committed suicide.