UNUSUAL BIGAMY CHARGE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 87, Issue 274, 19 November 1943, Page 4

UNUSUAL BIGAMY CHARGE

WOMAN, IVLXRRIID AT 15, WEDS RETURNED SOLDIER

(P - A ) . Auckland, Nov. 18. During the hearing of a most unusual bigamy charge in the Police Court tnis morning, the accused woman, aged 23, who went through a form of marriage with a soldier after he returned to Auckland on furlough, declared that when only 15 years of age she was persuaded by her mother to marry an elderly man, the father of her two children.

Mr. J. Morling, S.M., made an order against publication of names. Meantime the woman, who admitted bigamy, was committed to the Supreme Court for sentence, while the soldier sat in the Court nursing the the woman’s four-year-old son. Accused, seated in a chair in front of the dock, sobbed throughout the hearing.

( The first witness was a man aged 52. accused’s husband, having married her in Atigust, 1935. Two boys, aged 2 and 4. were children of the marriage. Owing to a difference, witness said, his wife left him a year ago. Witness denied that ne knew accused was 15 when her mother put her age at 17 at the time of the marriage. The soldier said he met accused at a dance. She introduced herself as a single woman, working In a factory. A month later he proposed marriage and she agreed. In the licence she described herself as a spinster. A week after the marriage he learnt she was a married woman, but when he spoke to her about it she denied it. She was still living with him and he intended to marry her legally. A detective, in evidence, said he obtained from accused a statement that she was boarding at a convent till 14. Then she and her mother lived in a one-roomed home. She had had differences with her husband who, she considered, was too old, and she finally left him because he told her to “get out.”