Wife Gets Two Black Eyes: Husband Gets One Month’s Gaol

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 2, 28 November 1947, Page 5

Wife Gets Two Black Eyes: Husband Gets One Month’s Gaol

Pleading guilty to assaulting his wife at Ruatoki on Tuesday evening, Oliver Stacey Murdoch, factory hand, was convicted in the Police Court at Whakatane yesterday and sentenced to one month’s imprisonment in the local gaol. Rfessrs L. D. Lovelock and C. H. Christensen J’s P were on the Bench.

The Police charged that Murdoch struck his wife in the face with his clenched fist, and kicked her in the face. Murdoch admitted hitting her, but firmly denied that he ever kicked her.

Sergeant M. Farrell, prosecuting, said that, according to Mrs Murdoch’s statement to Constable Thomassen, she and her husband had had some beer before and after dinner on the evening in question, and had both become more or less “under the influence.” A quarrel had started over her having left a sick child for a short while to go to a neighbour’s place, and that argument had led to the alleged assault. “Eye-Wash”

Murdoch told the Court that quite a lot of the statement produced by the police was “all eye-wash.” Particularly the part about the beer. He said he had no beer in the house at that time, and there would not have been any there unless someone had “planted” it after he left with the Constable.

Questioned from the Bench, Constable Thomassen said he had not seen any beer there. Mrs Murdoch had said there had been about half a dozen bottles. Husband’s Version

Murdoch’s version of the story was that he had had no liquor at all that day, but that he had had extreme provocation to strike his wife. He said one of the children had chicken pox, and was “pretty crook” He alleged that his wife had been away from home from 9.30 that morning until he had carried her home in the evening. He said she had been at a tangi or some similar “do” at the pah, and when he finally found her after work she was drunk. He asked her to go home to the sick child, about whom he was seriously worried. When he said the child looked likely to die, she said she hoped it would. That was when he hit her. He admitted giving her the two black eyes she had when the Constable saw her.