Читать книгу Parents Who Kill - Shocking True Stories of The World's Most Evil Parents - Carol Anne Davis - Страница 33

In a compassionate society, the courts would surely have decided that Beth had suffered enough and allowed her to return to her loving husband and sons. Instead, she was sent to Broadmoor, the psychiatric hospital, where she joined a hundred other women who had murdered their children whilst in the grip of post-natal psychosis, in those days known as puerperal insanity. Some of these women would remain there for the rest of their lives…

Though she recovered physically and mentally, Beth had no memory of drowning the two girls. She told other inmates that she must have done it because everyone said that she had, and she sometimes expressed the wish that she’d been given the death sentence. Meanwhile, her husband sank into a deep depression which lasted a year and the children had to be raised by his mother and an unmarried sister. After this, he got a new house for his family and began to petition various legal bodies for his wife’s release.

On 4th December 1921, 43-year-old Beth was allowed home to her ecstatic husband and sons. Prematurely grey and somewhat depressed, she remained an inveterate worrier for the next 30 years.

Bert died when Beth was 71 and she married an old friend, but her mind began to unravel. When she tried to set fire to her underclothes, she was committed to a psychiatric hospital. She was frequently visited by her concerned relatives but soon she no longer recognised them. She died of a pulmonary embolism on 15 September 1957, aged 79, but her memory has been kept alive in her great-granddaughter Sian Busby’s beautifully-written book on the subject, The Cruel Mother, subtitled A Family Ghost Laid To Rest.