CHARGE OF MURDER IN AUCKLAND.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1021, 24 October 1882, Page 3

CHARGE OF MURDER IN AUCKLAND.

An extraordinary charge h&s been made by a daughter against her father in Auckland. She accuses him of having poisoned h«r mother 16 months ago, and it hashed to the body, which has since been buried, being exhumed for the purpose of having it subjected to a post mortem examination. The story is to the following effect :—ln August, 1879, a man named John Cobb Hedges left London for Auckland, accompanied by his wife, four daughters, and a son. and they arrived there three months later. The mother died on the 20th June, 1881, and Dr Bayntun, who was called in during her last moments, gave a certificate to the effort that death was the result of apoplexy. Amy Charlotte Hedges, the elnest daughter, who is 16 years of age, says that some time before they left London, her father sent her out to purchase some arsenic, with which he intended to poison rats and mice. Some of it was placed on bread and 1 eft for rate. She did not again see the bottle containing the poison till the Sunday before her mother’s death, Mrs Hedges had bien ill for some time, and was almost entirely confined to bed during the two months prior to her demise. One day previous to the Monday in question she (th e daughter) was in an excited state of mind concerning her mother’s health, and going to the bedroom window and looking through the room from the verandah, she saw her father at her mother’s bedside. He was giving an egg to her mother, who was lying on the bed, and she says she is positive that she saw the bottle of arsenic in his hand. She cried out to her mother, * Mother, don’t take any of that down your throat or you will he dead.’ The girl says she then screamed out to some neighbors who lived next door, after which she trout into the home, and continued the performance of her household duties. Next day she went toiler work at service in Karangahnpe rood, as usual, and her father also wont to his work, leaving before her mother died. At twenty minutes to three o’clock that afternoon Mrs Lemon, their next door neighbor, had her attention called to the had stale of Mrs Hedges, and when Dr Bayntun came to see the sufferer immediately after tie said she was dying. Hedges did not reach the house fill two hours after Mrs Hedges’ death, and the girl did not know of it until night.

1 {lodges was in the habit of treating j his wife with homeopathic medicines, | wliieli ho kept in the house. Hedges is a bailor. The girl fitrenncmsly asserts he is only her stepfather, but lie is prepared to prove otherwise. H- married Mrs Hedges 17 years ago, and the girl in question was born 16 years ago. In a further statement she says her mother had told her sister, a girl 9 years old, that her father had given her something which hastened her death. The police interviewed the child, who remembers the Sunday before the death of lie 1 ’ mother, and the fact of her father administering the food referred to, but she did not hear her sister’s call, nor did she remember what her mother was alleged to have said. The contents of the stomach of the deceased will be analysed. Hedges is a very respectable man.

Additional evidence goes to show that the girl lias been eccentric, and subject to fainting fits, and that she claimed to see visions. She had run away from home several times. Mr Bell, who lived with Hedges four months, states that Airs Hedges informed him ou one occasion that unless the child got better she would have to be put under restraint.