WOMAN BURNED TO DEATH WHILE DRUNK.

Patea Mail, Volume VI, Issue 506, 7 April 1880, Page 3

WOMAN BURNED TO DEATH WHILE DRUNK.

A shocking- fatality has occurred at Wellington. A woman of intemperate habits, Catherine McColl, aged sixty, housekeeper to Mr John McLaghan, residing on the Terrace, appears to have been sitting or lying on a sofa before going to bed', and being quite drunk, she probably set fire to her clothes with a lighted candle. The body was found burned all over, and in some places charred, as if the woman had been roasted slowly to death. It is strange that no sound was noticed by Mr McLaghan between the time he saw her sitting drank on the conch on Thursday evening, and his discovery of the body in the same place next morning. The screams of a woman awaking to find her clothes on fire would be likely to rouse any person within the house, and probably be heard much beyond it, for death-agony is a terrible incentive to screaming, whore the power of the lungs remains. It is conceivable that this woman may have been slowly suffocated by the smoke from her clothes rising to her nostrils, before the material broke into a blaze. Another theory has been suggested by two newspapers in Wellington. They set forth that, the woman’s body was burned and .charred fiom spontaneous combustion. This means that her system having become saturated with alcohol, her intemperance had reached an excess which "caused the body to flare up with spontaneous combustion. A theory so fanciful should bo supported with overwhelming evidence before persons of average sense can be expected to accept it. Is the present case of burning so mysterious as to justify any presumption other than that of ordinary cause and effect? The woman was drunk, and fell asleep. She had a lighted candle on the table when last seen alive. What more likely than that, waking from her stupor, she seized the candle intending to rise, then falling back on the sofa with tipsy stupidity, and pulling the candle with her, she set some garment on fire, which smouldered and smoked till she became insensible amid the vapour. Probably the clothing eventually broke into flame more or less, and so consumed the garments and charred the body black in places where the half-subdued flame was most ardent. The furniture in the room was not ignited, only the couch and carpet near her showing signs of scorching.. Speculators in horrible mysteries may believe that a human body can burst into flame spontaneously from within, but they have never yet produced a clear demonstration of this grisly miracle. The evidence in this Wellington case only makes their theory ridiculous. A coroner’s inquest has been held, and the jury found that the woman had been burned to death accidentally while in a state of intoxication.