SERIOUS CHARGES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24833, 5 February 1942, Page 6

SERIOUS CHARGES

LABOURER ON TRIAL (P.A.) AUCKLAND, Feb. 4. Charges of knowingly assisting a woman patient to escape from the Kingseat Mental Hospital on June 15 last were denied in the Supreme Court to-day by Frank Orr Peers, a labourer, aged 33 (Mr Ackins), and Emma Joan McDiarmid, aged 18 (Mr Sullivan). *A further charge against Peers of having carnal knowledge at Wellington on June 22 of a woman detained* under the provisions of the Mental Defectives Act was also denied. The trial was conducted by Mr Justice Fair, and the Crown prosecutor, Mr Meredith, prosecuted. Mr Meredith said that the patient had been taken away from the Kingseat Mental Hospital by the accused. On an earlier occasion Peers had taken a girl from the Sunnyside Mental Hospital in Christchurch to Wellington, where he lived with her. While on holiday last June, he brought this girl to Auckland and got in touch with the accused McDiarmid. They paid two visits to Kingseat, where McDiarmid passed herself off as a niece of a natisnt, the girl whom they took away in a car. Peers took this girl to Wellington, where he and the two girls he had taken from the institutions lived in his one-roomed bach. In a statement to the police, Mr Meredith said that Peers claimed that another woman and McDiarmid had planned to get this patient away from Kingseat, as they had a position for her. He denied that he had ever taken her to Wellington. McDiarmid, in her statement, said that Peers had represented himself as a solicitor and told her that money was coming to her from the estate of a man whose sister was in Kingseat. It was to see about this will that they visited Kingseat. The medical superintendent at Kingseat, Dr Childs, gave evidence that ths patient who had been removed was mentally deficient and was unable to give evidence. The hearing was adjourned.