TERRIBLE TRAGEDY.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIII, Issue 398, 16 May 1922, Page 5

TERRIBLE TRAGEDY.

FIVE PERSONS DROWNED IU OATH. WIFE AND FOUR CHILDREN. (Per Press Association.) AUCKLAND, May 16. James Arthur Thornton, residing in Gardener road, Epsom, on returning from work in the city about 10 o'clock last night found his wife and four children—a boy aged seven years, a girl of four years, a boy of two years, and an infant of six months—had been drowned in a hath.

LATER PARTICULARS.

AWFUL DISCOVERY MADE

AUCKLAND, May 16

James Thornton, foreman cleaner on tho railways, left his wife and children at home shortly after mid-day yesterday, his wife and family being in their ordinary health and spirits. On returning home alter work he found both the front and back doors locked, and the gas alight in the breakfast room. Getting no response to his knocking, lie burst open the front door and found his wife naked in the bath and their infant child on her breast, both being dead.

The bath was empty of water, probably through the woman's feet dislodging the plug. Ascertaining that life was extinct, Thornton looked for the other three children, and found them all dead in bed in a bedroom facing file bathroom. Each body was wrapped in a separate sheet, with the hair saturated with, water, while froth oozed from their mouths.

The theory is that the mother {stripped each child, and drowned it in the bath, and then wrapped it in a sheet, laid the body on ihe bod, and pulled the bod clothes over it. There were no other signs of violence on the bodies.