THE BLACK CAP.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 116, 22 June 1914, Page 5

THE BLACK CAP.

HONEYMOON SHOTS IN A LINEE. Sentence of death, translated word by word into Portuguese, was passed at Liverpool Assizes last month by Mr Justice Bray upon Albert Oliviero Coelho, a Portuguese confectioner, who was found guilty of murdering his wife by shooting her while the orchestra was playing in the social hall on board the Royal Mail steamer Deseado when two days out from Lisbon on the way to Rio.

The defence was that the prisoner was insane at the time he shot his wife, and when indicted he replied "Not guilty" with a good English accent. The only point at which Coelho evinced interest in the proceedings was when the jury returned into Court with their verdict, and it was explained to him. in Portuguese, the interpreter standing on the right of the judge. '' My wife wanted to put me in an asylum when we reached Rio,'' declared Coelho passionately in his native tongue. "I am not guilty, because I didn't understand what I did. I wanted to commit suicide."

Putting on the black cap, the judge, speaking a few words at a time, then pausing that they could be translated to the prisoner, passed sentence. The jury had rejected, he said, the plea of insanity put forward in the prisoner's defence, and the law allowed but one sentence.

Coelho flung up his hands in a gesture of hopeless despair, and was forcibly removed to the cells. The evidence showed that Coelho followed the woman from Rio to Oporto, where he married her, and it was on the return voyage that he shot her twice with a pistol.