BIGHT TEARS IN GAOL

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVI, Issue 105, 3 April 1926, Page 11

BIGHT TEARS IN GAOL

... COOGEE CASE SENTENCE. ATTACK ON WIDOW. SYDNEY, March 15. William Henry Curtis, aged 43, a musician, was sentenced to eight years’ penal servitude by Mr Justice Campbell, at the Central Criminal Court to-day, on a charge of having wounded Annie Louisa Timson, widow, of Brook-street, Coogee, with intent to do grievous bodily harm. The charge of attempted murder wak not pressed by the Crown. On November 19, Crown Prosecutor said, Mrs Timson had put an advertisement “of a matrimonial character” in tho newspapers. Among the replies which reached her was one from tho accused. A meeting was arranged and tho couple used to walk out. At lunch-time on November 30 Curtis called at the woman’s house. He complained of a nail in his boot. She got a hammer and knocked out the nail. Afterwards ho played the piano, and she sat on the settee and conversed with him. She remembered nothing more. HEAD BATTERED. The reason that the woman had no recollection of subsequent events, Mr Coyle said, was that the prisoner had actually battered in her head with a hammer until she became unconscious. He then bolted from the house, taking two shillings off the tabic, a ring and two letters, which he,had written to her. Ho sought to elude arrest by taking a boat to New Zealand. For six weeks Mrs Timson was an in-patient at St. Vincent’s Hospital, her principal injury having been a scalp wound eight inches long, penetrating to the bone. In asking for mercy, Mr McTague said that Curtis was of the neurotic type. This abnormality was probably the result of war service. A court-martial conviction in France for having received both public and regimental funds, and for having been absent without leave, was mentioned against Curtis, also several convictions at Rockhampton for theft in 1921, involving a sentence of three years’ imprisonment. In passing sentence of eight years’ penal servitude, Mr Justice Campbell said that there were no extenuating circumstances. It was lucky for Curtis that he had escaped a charge of murder.