AN EXCITING SCENE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 9581, 4 August 1894, Page 2 (Supplement)

AN EXCITING SCENE.

A LUNATIC IN A LADY'S BEDROOM. At liingston-on-Thames, the other day a middle-aged man named William Fowler was brought up, supposed to bo a lunatic, and accused of the most extraordinary conduct. It appeared from the evidence that about 0.30 that morning Mrs. Baker, of Red Lion Lane, Tohvorth, Surbiton, was awakened by the prisoner creatine a noise downstairs. He had evidently entered by the door, which her husband and son had left unlocked on going to their work. The man went to the kitchen grate, picked up a pair of tongs, and ascended the stairs. The children in the bedroom, five in all—the youngest being a baby and the eldest a girl of fifteen— instantly left their beds and clung to their mother, terror-stricken. Before tho man could'' enter the room, however, the two eldest girls, clad only in their nightdresses, made their escape through the bedroom window and ran into a field, screaming loudly. The mother, also in her nightdress, followed their example, placing tho three remaining children on a scullery roof near the bedroom window. The man thereupon burst into the room, jumped on to one of the bods, thence on to the baby's cot, and ultimately on to the ledge of the bedroom window, where he stood brandishing the tongs in a threatening manner, whilst the mother made her way round the chimney-pots and dropped her children on to the ground, 6fb below ; the roof of the scullery. Mrs Baker asserted that but for her timely escape and the arrival of some men who captured the prisoner, she and her children would have been murdered. The prisoner was a total stranger to her. Evidence as to the apprehension of the man haying been given, prisoner made a rambling statement about telephones and other objects, and was remanded to the . workhouse, in order that the state of his mind might be medically testified to.