A Most Exceptional Case

A wing commander of the R.A.F. in Malaya brought Mrs. Elizabeth Parsons the news: her airman husband, Flight Lieut. D. R. Parsons, had just been killed in a bombing strike on the Malayan Communists.

That night, Elizabeth Parsons had a few drinks to calm her nerves, and an R.A.F. doctor gave her sodium amytal as a sedative. Shortly after 9 o'clock, she went into the rooms where her two sons, Darryl John, 2 1/2, and Edmund, 4, lay sleeping. Later, the wing commander and his wife found her standing in the bathroom, clad in a sarong, with her slashed wrists bleeding into the bathtub. "I have planned it a long time," said Mrs. Parsons. "If one of us went, the other would not live. I have killed my children. We loved him so much, and you know how much he loved us. He would be so frightened if I did not get to him quickly ... I couldn't leave my babies behind . . ."At the hospital, doctors stitched up Elizabeth Parsons' wounds, but she tried to stab herself to death with a safety pin.

Last week Elizabeth Parsons, an attractive, auburn-haired woman of 28, sat in the assize court of Penang, on trial for the murder of her children. She was the first white, woman to go on trial for her life in Malaya since the famous case 30 years ago which Somerset Maugham dramatized in The Letter. To a jury of three Britons, three Chinese and a Sikh, the crown prosecutor outlined his case. "This is not common murder." said he, "but a most exceptional case. There is no motive here. It is a tragedy, and your reaction must be one of pity, but you must not let this feeling overcloud your reasons." Elizabeth Parsons, with one wrist still wrapped in bandages, sat with bowed head as her counsel strove to prove that she had been in no condition to know what she did, or that what she did was wrong.-

The R.A.F. doctor who administered the sodium amytal conceded that, administered in conjunction with alcohol at a time of emotional unbalance, it could have "an unusual effect." Another doctor testified that such a dose could well have left her incapable of knowing what she was doing.

"I didn't at any time think of killing my children," testified Elizabeth Parsons. "But I remember I stabbed Darryl."

Prosecutor: What about Edmund?

Mrs. Parsons: I cannot remember anything except cleaning his face when blood came out of his mouth.

Mrs. Parsons gripped the dock rail tightly as the verdict was read: not guilty because of unsound mind at the time of the crimes. R.A.F. wives wept.

-The classic insanity defense under the no-year-old M'Naghten Rules, named for a Scot who in 1843 tried to kill British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, and killed Sir Robert's secretary by mistake. The defense pleaded that M'Naghten was under the delusion that he had a grievance against Sir Robert. M'Naghten was found insane, and acquitted. Shortly afterwards, the famous Rules were formulated; they provide that "every man is presumed sane, and to possess a sufficient degree of reason to be responsible for his crimes": to prove otherwise, it must be shown that at the time of the crime he did not "know the nature or quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he was not aware he was doing what was wrong."

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