WIFE MURDER.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CV, Issue 12428, 18 February 1901, Page 5

WIFE MURDER.

A MAN SENTENCED TO DEATH. United Press Association—By Electric Telegraph—Copyright. MELBOURNE, Feb. 16. A man named Edward Nash has been sentenced to death for the murder of his wife at Richmond in December. (John Edmund Nash was a man. of about fifty years of age, a baker by trade, who lived with his wife at Burnley. After a drinking bouti that lasted all day on Saturday, Dec. 29 last, Nash had a quarrel with his; wife, Alice Nash, a. woman of thirtyfive years of age. During the day, May, aged nine years, the eldest of four children, had been sent out five or six times for beer, and -the lather and mother were both engaged in a drinking orgy. They had been quarrelling and agreeing all day, and in the quieter periods they went out alternately to the nearest hotel for a fresh supply of liquor. This continued till nine o'clock", when the children went to bed with their mother in the only bedrooan, Nash, occupying a stretcher in the sittingroom. After the children went to bed their parents renewed their quarrelling, and at midnight tho woman ran out of the house and appealed to a neighbour for protection from her husband, whose conduct towards her caused her to fear he would murder her. She was i induced to go back to her husband. Later on the man, almost beside himself with rage, came into the bedroom to shoot his wife, using a singlebarrelled shot-gun. This, however, was not done till after tho woman had run out through the kitchen into a lean-to - , and thence to the yard, where she turned and faced him, to renew her supplication for mercy. But Nash raised the gun and discharged the full stream of shot into her neck. She died almost instantaneously. It was pleaded for Nash, that he had suffered from sunstroke some years ago and never completely recovered, and that his drinking bout had so inflamed his brain as to render him, for the time being, a dangerous lunatic.)