TO THE GUILLOTINE

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 533, 10 December 1928, Page 12

TO THE GUILLOTINE

MURDERESS SENTENCED TO DEATH For the first time in half a century a woman may be beheaded in France. She is Junka Kures, the Serbian, who was sentenced to death for the murder of Carmen Burniaux, a pretty child of 12 years, whom she strangled in the Bois de Boulogne after she had entered the home of the child’s parents with a skeleton key and stolen £26. The woman maintained remarkable self-possession during her trial, but when sentence of death was passed, she screamed, “My son! My son!” and fainted. The Judge read the articles of the criminal code to the effect that “Every persfhi sentenced to death shall be beheaded,” and Kures was carried from the Court in a state of collapse. When she had recovered she was asked whether she would sign a notice of appeal against the sentence, but refused. Her only hope that she will not be sent to the guillotine is that the President of the Rpublic will commute her sentence to one of penal servitude for life, but such horror has been aroused by her brutal murder of the child that it is by no means certain that the President will exercise his powers. Women’s organisations are the most insistent that the condemned woman should suffer the same penalty as a man.