Father Attacked With Slipper

Manawatu Times, Volume 61, Issue 5, 7 January 1936, Page 10

Father Attacked With Slipper

DAUGHTER’S SELF-DEFENCE. MURDER VERDICT ROUSES AMERICA. NEW YORK, Dec. 1. A strange story comes from the mountains of Virginia. Trigg Maxwell, farmer and blacksmith, reared a family of boys and girls according to tho strict code of the simple folk that lived for generations there. His sons went off to the cities, leaving their mother and three girls at home. The eldest, Edith, desiring to become a teacher among her own people, went to the State Teachers’ College, tho cost of her education being borne by her sister’s husband. Graduated, she returned and taught forty children in her homo villago of Pound, Virginia. Edith, now 21; resented her father’s admonition that slio bo indoors every night before 9 o'clock. She went to a dance in a neighbouring settlement, and did not return till nearly midnight. Meantime her father, who had been on a drinking spree, uttered various threats as to what punishment he would give her. The girl came in and immediately faced her father. “I>m going to whip you,” ho said. “Not while you’re drunk,” she answered. Picking up a butcher’s knife from the table, ho grabbed his daughter by the hair. She tripped over a rocking-chair. As sho did so licr slrpper came off and she beat her father over the head with it. He sat down. An hour after he died of a clot of blood on the brain. Before he passed .away they were reconciled. Sentence Rouses Country.

Edith and her mother were taken to gaol, tho latter charged with being an accessory, as she pleaded for tho girl with her husband. At tho trial the jury was composed of farmers, all of ivhpm were convinced from boyhood that a father or husband has full control over his -womenfolk, and that a woman’s place is in the home. Witnesses for tho State told of quarrels between daughter and father. The mother gave evidence that her husband was “roarin’” drunk. Edith, who wept throughout tho trial, said, “I wouldn’t have harmed him for anything. I loved my father when he was sober.”

“No father has the right to chastise his 21-year-old daughter; all forms of life have a right to protect themselves,” said counsel for the defence. “No daughter has the right to kill her pappy,” said the District Attorney. Tho jury, after retiring for only thirty minutes, returned a verdict of guilty, and the girl was sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment in the penitentiary. Tho crowd murmured its approval.

The nation was shocked at the trial and the verdict. Funds for an appeal have since been coming in from New York and other centres. In the largest city in the Tennessee coal belt women say they want to save “a Southern girl from rank injustice.” In the mountain country the menfolk, and some of the women, say that twenty years or so in prison will correct a modern girl’s notions about her father’s rights. Tho young teacher is becoming a national figure, while the conflict still rages between the highlanders and the lowlanders of Virginia and other Southern States.