At Herts Summer Assizes, Amy Elizabeth Marr (23), a married woman, was found guilty of endeavouring to conceal the birth of her child in the parish of South Mimms, near Barnet, on 28th May.
It was stated that the prisoner was a married woman with one child alive, and that her husband was in Egypt where he had been serving with the army for 18 months, so that the child who was the subject of this charge could not possible be his. The motive for the crime, said Counsel, was no doubt to conceal the birth from her husband, for the first thing she said when the police called to make enquiries was “Will it get into the papers?”
The prisoner admitted to the police that the child was hers. It was found in a pool of water on the golf links by a man named Thomas Jacques, and Dr Whitmarsh, who made a post-mortem examination, said that the child had lived about 3 hours, the internal organs were healthy, it was a fully developed female child, and that the cause of death was syncope caused by haemorrhage from the umbilical cord.
The Judge said it was a bad case of its kind, and that the prisoner had not even got the excuse of being a single woman in trouble. He sentenced her to 12 months’ hard labour.
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