HUSBANDS ACQUITTED

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 13, 19 August 1946, Page 4

HUSBANDS ACQUITTED

ALLEGED MURDER OF WIVES t DECISION OF BRITISH JURIES Two men—a soldier home from overseas and an ex-naval chief stoker —are free after being acquitted by British juries of killing their wives. The ease of the returned soldier lasted only % four hours. The jury freed him in seven minutes. In the case of the ex-chief stoker the jury took two hours and eight minutes to reach a Not Guilty verdict. Private Frederick Marshall Booth aged 33, of Congleton, Cheshire, came home last November after serving with the Chindits in Burma. In the early hours of November 12 his 32 year old wife Ivy was found dead. > At Chester Assizes he told Mr Justice Stable that when he came home his wife admitted she had “been out” with other men. The morning she died she refused his embraces. He pleaded; “Lets forget everything.” She refused. Then. “Everything seemed to happen in a split second. I ‘saw’ the men she she had been out with.” Patrick Hartney, aged 51, was discharged from the Royal Navy suffering from a wasting disease. At the Old Bailey Hartney left the dock for the witness box and said: “I loved my wife, I had no other relative in the world beside her. I did not murder her.”