BOY MURDERED

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 28 July 1924, Page 5

BOY MURDERED

BY DEMENTED MOTHER. PITIABLE CASE. (BY TELEGRAPH—PREBS ASSOCIATION.! AUCKLAND, July 27. A shocking tragedy occurred at Mt. Albert this morning, when Helena Harriet Darth murdered her 9-vear-old son. Harold, by cutting his .throat- with a razor.

Mrs Darth, who killed her little son with a razor and then committed suicide at Mt. Albert, has suffered acutely from a nervous breakdown and had been subject to delusions. She had been in the case of a trained nurse for the last three weeks and was under the impression that- someone was going to poison her with arsenic or strychnine. When a visitor called about midday on Sunday Mrs Darth asked the housemaid to tell her son Harold that his mother wanted * him. She walked along the .passage and met the boy at the bathroom door. She took him into the bathroom and shut the door. The nurse, heard a, scream fromthe bathroom and entered by a window and found Mrs Darth bleeding copiouslv from a wound in her throat. She told the nurse that she had. cut Harold’s throat and also her own.. She- died within a few minutes. The boy had escaped from the bathroom, ran round the house and fell into his father’s arms and immediately collapsed and died. Apparently the demented woman too,lc a razor from a cabinet in the bathroom, and while speaking softly' to her son slashed his throat, the jugular vein being severed.