MAD FATHERS

Hokitika Guardian, 10 September 1926, Page 4

MAD FATHERS

TRAGEDIES IN AUSTRALIA. SYDNEY. Aug. 20. There is a- theory among the police that certain classes if crimes run- in cycles. Whether there is any truth in this or not, the fact remains that in Melbourne and Sydney there have been throe climes within the last two months in which the acts of demented lathers have been responsible for wholesale deaths in their families. First, there was the case of Stanley Beer, a returned soldier, who lived with his wife and three-ycar-old child at P-onslmrst, a suburb of Sydney. A friend, .going to visit them one Sunday a couple of uirullis ago. was .surprised to find the bouse locked up, mid on becoming suspi< ions, burst open a door and found tin- family if three dead. Li was aftervlirtls proved that Beer had murdered I-is wile and 0.,i!<1. and then committed suicide while under an aberration that lie was gong blind as the result of disease. Then a month or so later, a man named Nicholls. suffering from tuberculosis, treated his wife and two hoys with brutal cruelty, killed them with a ! emu hn \vk , set (ire to their cottage at Cronulla, and shot himself. Then lest week-end came newts' of a similar tiv.it! dead by a .Melbourne lather. He was a gardner named Sydney Oakley, and appears to have. been a shiftless, worthless individual, who had time and time again gone beyond the pale c-f his wife’s affections, only to 1,0 fr.: given his misdeeds for the sake cf the familv of five children. Last Saturday morning, as the mother ms prewiring breakfast, piercing streams rang out from the bedroom of their poorly-furnished homos. The frantic moth,or ran into the room, to find her demented husband slashing at tin l throats of two of their sons, aged live years and three vmrs, with a razor. The desperate little mother snatched up the two boys, a ml rushed from the house, little dreaming that- her other three children, a son aged eight years, it- daughter aged two, and ir soil aged 17 days, were already dead with their threats- cut. Police, were hurried to the house, but on arrival found that Oakley had killed himself. This distressing tragedy followed upon a scries of quarrels between the woman and her husband, who seems to. have been a man without any of the finer instincts, one who committed (hose smaller outrages

of domestic brutality that presage such a tragedy as occurred. To complete this cycle of family tragedies came news, also during last week-end, from a lonely Queensland selection in the St. George district. This tragedy was not discovered until two days after it happened. The victims were the selector, his 17-vcar-old on lighter, and his mother-in-law. The man. Henderson, poisoned himself after shooting the woman and the girl. No neighbours lived within miles of Henderson’s holding, but police believe that domsetic quarrels wore responsible for this tragedy of the bush.