COURT SCENE

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 167, 17 July 1942, Page 4

COURT SCENE

RENT-FREE LIVING

MAN AND WIFE IMPRISONED

(0.C.) SYDNEY, July 15. Painful scenes were witnessed at the quarter sessions yesterday when Judge Markell, sending a man and his wife to gaol for 18 months, released their 16-year-old daughter on a two-year bond. "Mumrro , thej cantake you away from me, she cried in the dock, then put hex arms around her Mother and still crying said to the judge, Oh, please, please." Her mother, on the point of leaving the dock, turned back and mother and child embraced before the police finally led the mother « ana father awav. Judge Markell said to the jury, ' r I am terribly sorry you had to witness all this. You had a duty to perform and so did I, no matter how hard it was/' The girl, Irene O'Donnell, her mother, Mrs. E. A. M. J. O'Donnell, and her father, Patrick O Donnell, 54, had all been found guilty of having conspired to defraud house agents, landlords and tradespeople over more than two years. It was alleged that for more than two years they had lived almost rent free by the simple process of renting a three or four guinea flat or house in a good-class suburb under some high-sounding name, paying some rent in advance, and then paying nothing more. When the long civil process of ejecting a tenant began to catch up with them they would move into a new place.

It was alleged that on occasions when a landlord or tradesman found one of them at home various excuses would be given; that the girl had once said her mother had taken a sleeping draught and would not waken for four hours, that the father had said he was only the gardener and the people were out.

One landlord said that on one occasion nobody answered hi? call, but he could see people inside the house peering through the windows.