MUST TAKE HIS MEDICINE

NZ Truth, Issue 1167, 12 April 1928, Page 7

MUST TAKE HIS MEDICINE

(From "N.Z. Truth's" Specia TWELVE months ago every woman m New Zealand was shuddering at the frightful outrage which Robert Vaughan Venables committed against a young Dunedin girl. Now we find the man whom the late Mr. Justice Alpers described as "a beast, for which the law would have to provide a cage," asking leave to appeal against his sentence of seven years' hard labor, but when hi s application came before the Court of Appeal last week it was decided that Venables — already a human monster at the age of thirty — m ust ta ke his medicine and atone m. part for a bestial assault upon a defenceless girl. It may be well to recall some of the elements which went to make up the damning case against Venables, who, despite an airy, devil - may - care attitude during his trial, collapsed across the front of the dock when the judge passed sentence upon him. Venables met the girl during the Dunedin Exhibition and some two years later he encountered her with her aunt at a Petone street corner. Having ingratiated himself on the score of giving them a lift home m his car, he secured the aunt's permission to take the girl to tea and a dance afterwards.

-1 Wellington Representative.) After tea he suggested showing her the panorama of Wellington and its harbor lights at night, but when they had gone a little way along a disused road near Wellington, Venables stopped the car and made certain improper suggestions to the girl, meanwhile proffering her some liquor from a bottle hidden m one of the car pockets. She begged him to take her home, but her entreaties fell upon unaccustomed ears. Then followed a wild struggle for mastery — the girl for her honor, the man that his animal passions might be app c a sed — and hours afterwards the girl staggered her way to the Hutt Road, delirious and exhausted. During his tri a ) m the Supreme Court, Vena b\ c s attempted to show that the girl had encouraged him to believe they had gone to the tills with a set purpose m view, but his honor peremptorily ordered him to desist and made it clear that the court, at any rate, would not countenance the vilification of an innocent girl. Venables, true to the craven principles of his kind, has squealed at the punishment, but has found that cowardly bleatings avail him nothing.