TERRIBLE TRAGEDY.

Waipa Post, Volume XX, Issue 1243, 16 May 1922, Page 5

TERRIBLE TRAGEDY.

MOTHER'S DEMENTED ACT. (By Telegraph. Press Association.) AUCKLAND, This Day. James Arthur Thornton, residing in Gardner Road, Epsom,' on returning from work in the city about 10 o'clock last night, found his wife and four children (a boy aged seven years, a girl aged four years, a boy aged two years, and an infant six months old) drowned in a bath.

Thornton, who is a foreman cleaner on the railways, left his wife and children at home about 12.30 p.m. yesterday, his wife and family being ,then in ordinary health and spirits. Returning home, he found both front and back doors locked, with the gas alight in the breakfast room. Getting no response to his knocking, he burst open the front door and found his wife naked in the bath, with the infant child on her breast. Both were dead. The bath was empty of water, probably through the woman's feet dislodging the plug.

Ascertaining that life was extinct, Thornton looked for the other three children, and found all dead in their beds in a bedroom facing the bath room. Each body was wrapped in a separate sheet, and the children's hair was saturated with water, arid froth was coming from their mouths. The theory is that the mother un dressed each child, drowned it in the bath, wrapped it in a sheet, and laid the body on the bed, pulling the bed clothes over it. There were no other signs of violence on the bodies.