Night Terrors

The Sleepwalking Murder of Patricia Cogdon

Ivy Cogdon suffered from nightmares that were often so bad she believed them.

The 50-year-old mother from the Melbourne suburb of Carnegie was prone to ‘nervous complaints’ – as anxiety and associated psychological conditions were referred to in the earlier half of last century – and she was under the care of several doctors.

On the night of 11 August 1950, Mrs Cogdon’s night terrors were so real to her that she did the unthinkable. Her only child Patricia, 19, was asleep when Mrs Cogdon entered her room with an axe in hand, and smashed her daughter’s skull. Poor Patricia was found in the early hours of the morning, dead in her bed, with the bloodstained axe near her body.

Mrs Cogdon was interviewed by police and charged with her daughter’s murder on Saturday, 12 August. Detectives told newspapers that Mrs Cogdon had made ‘certain admissions’ during the interview.

It was a shocking case – a mother killing her own daughter in such a brutal way – but there was more sensation to come.

Mrs Cogdon’s admissions would have seemed far-fetched to most people, and certainly did to the detectives. Mrs Cogdon told the interviewing detectives, ‘I dreamt the war was all around the house. I head Pat screaming and rushed into her room, it was full of soldiers. I hit at them. I remember hitting the bed. Oh Pat, I don’t want to live now.’

Mrs Cogdon pleaded not guilty to her daughter’s murder. Her defence was that she was sleepwalking at the time she killed Patricia and believed she was protecting her girl from Korean soldiers who had invaded their suburban home.

At the coroner’s inquest into Miss Cogdon’s death, Dr Henry Stephens, a Spring Street psychiatrist, said he thought Mrs Cogdon was a somnambulist – a sleepwalker. Several other doctors, who had been treating her told the court they believed Mrs Cogdon would not have known what she was doing at the time of the killing.

Her complex neurosis included severe nightmares that were disclosed to the doctors who were treating her condition. According to medical experts who assessed her, Mrs Cogdon was a ‘hysterical type’ who could suffer blackouts and was prone to sleepwalk.

Mrs Cogdon’s trial by jury began in December 1950 and made national – and international – headlines for her unusual defence.

Mrs Cogdon’s sister, Florence Millar, said the day before the gruesome event, Mrs Cogdon told her she had awoken from a terrible nightmare about red spiders and found herself in her daughter’s room brushing imagined creepy crawlies off the girl.

Mrs Cogdon told the court Pat awakened while she was trying to get rid of the ‘red spiders’ and said, ‘What is the matter, Mummy? What are you doing?’

‘I said I was just tucking her in,’ Mrs Cogdon recalled tearfully. Her fear of red spiders was prompted by the knowledge that someone in Carnegie bred these spiders and sold them as pets. When Mrs Cogdon heard that these people let the spiders in their house as a hobby, she told the court she ‘shuddered’ at the mere thought.

During his cross-examination by the Crown, Dr Edward Campbell, a psychologist and lecturer at Melbourne University said that Mrs Cogdon had developed a ‘tyrannical super-ego’, which drove her to ‘overprotect’ her daughter.

The concept of the ‘super-ego’ was introduced to psychology in the 1930s by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality. According to Freud, personality is composed of three elements: the id, the ego and the super-ego, which work together to create complex human behaviours. The id is driven by basic instinctive needs (such as hunger and thirst), the ego is driven by reality, and the super-ego is driven by morality, and works to act in socially acceptable ways (i.e. judging right and wrong).

Mrs Cogdon’s super-ego was overworking but not aligning with reality. Dr Campbell said his tests had revealed that Mrs Cogdon had remarkably low tolerance to perceived problems or challenges, which meant she was likely to quickly overreact to common worries such as war.

Dr Campbell said Mrs Cogdon had recounted her nightmares to him including one where three ghosts had stood at the end of her bed and told her they had ‘come to take Pat’.

Her greatest fear was the Korean War and protecting her family from invading soldiers. The night she died, Patricia had mentioned to her mother that she might become a transport driver if the Korean conflict hit Australian shores (the Korean War lasted for three years from 1950 to 1953). In particular, she worried her beloved daughter would be ‘polluted’ by any invading soldiers.

Mrs Cogdon said she had lain awake worrying and Patricia had called out, ‘Mummy, don’t be silly worrying about war. It is not at your front door.’

Not long after Pat would be dead because of her mother’s neurotic fears.

Appearing extremely fragile on the dock, Mrs Cogdon collapsed at one point, dragging her nurse along with her. The nurse sat alongside the accused murderer to comfort her during the trial, which lasted less than two days. Her husband, Arthur Cogdon, quickly went to her aid, along with several doctors present who had given evidence during the trial.

The sleepwalking defence was backed up by psychiatrist Dr Henry Stephens. Under cross-examination he said he had met with the accused 25 times since her arrest and he found she suffered from hysteria and somnambulism, with associated amnesia.

Dr Stephens’ evidence startled the court because he said Mrs Cogdon could have acted silently while getting the axe and hitting her daughter – whom she believed was a soldier sitting on Patricia’s bed.

Crown prosecutor Mr M Cussen asked how the axe blows could have fallen on the same area of Patricia’s head if Mrs Cogdon was in a sleepwalking state.

Dr Stephens replied, ‘I do not think that was the target. I think the blows were aimed at a hallucinatory body or satyr, or some object which was trying “to pollute” her daughter.’

‘Do you think it possible for a frail woman to wield a six-pound [2.7-kilogram] axe and bring it down twice with great force on the bed without waking herself up?’ Mr Cussen queried.

Dr Stephens said he thought it was possible.

The three doctors who gave evidence also concluded that Mrs Cogdon was not insane and showed no psychotic traits in the numerous tests she underwent.

One of the doctors, Collins Street psychiatrist Dr J Hurt said he had examined the accused for seven hours and believed her hysteria manifested in sleepwalking. He recounted that Mrs Cogdon had told him she had done things such as turn on gas jets in the middle of the night and been found wandering in the street in her nightdress. Dr Hurt said he had witnessed a sleepwalker in action and disputed the popular belief that they walked with their arms outstretched to stop themselves bumping into objects. He told the court that sleepwalkers had been reported to step over and around obstacles in their path while they were in their somnambulistic state. But the doctor said he had never known of a sleepwalker to commit a violent act.

It was clear to the court that Mrs Cogdon was an extreme sleepwalker.

Mrs Cogdon’s love for her daughter was not questioned. She admitted she was devoted to Patricia and loved her deeply. The pair had a close, loving relationship. The brutal death Pat suffered at her mother’s hand was at complete odds with the evidence given by family about how much Mrs Cogdon almost worshipped her daughter.

On the strength of the medical evidence, the jury found Mrs Cogdon not guilty. She collapsed in the dock when the verdict was announced.

The case made legal history in Australia because it was the first time a person accused of murder had successfully used sleepwalking as a defence in the country.

Prior to Mrs Cogdon’s case there were very few other documented cases where sleepwalking was used as a defence.

In 1846, American man Albert Jackson Tirrell was acquitted of the murder of his lover Maria Bickford. Tirrell had visited the Boston brothel where the victim worked, slit her throat from ear to ear and then set three fires at the scene. He went into hiding after the crime. Tirrell’s lawyer managed to convince a jury that his client had been sleepwalking when he killed Ms Bickford and was unaware of his violent actions. However, according to the US-based research organisation Sleep Forensics Associates, Tirrell’s attempt at covering his tracks by lighting the fires and running away from the scene are not actions that are consistent with sleepwalking. Tirrell’s sleepwalk defence would probably be unsuccessful if he were tried in a courtroom of today.

Following Mrs Cogdon’s case, there have been a number of other cases of the ‘sleepwalking defence’ worldwide.

In 1955, another Australian woman used sleepwalking as a defence for murder. Alice Lange, 47, was charged with murder after she shot her sheep farmer husband Theodore at their home in Wesburn, Victoria. Mr Lange was shot in the back of the head as he slept. Mrs Lange told police her husband was a ‘terrible man’; however, her two adult children and members of the small rural community in the Yarra Valley said the family was well respected and happy. Mrs Lange had undergone shock treatment for depression a few years before.

Daughter Valda, 19, gave evidence that her mother had ‘a faraway look’ in her eyes on the morning of the shooting.

Mrs Lange told police she got out of bed and crept into her son Ronald’s room and got a shotgun in the early hours of 16 August. In her statement she said, ‘I went back to the bedroom and laid [the shotgun] on my pillow, with the barrel at my husband’s head … I waited for over a quarter of an hour before I could pull the trigger.’

Mrs Lange’s counsel was high-profile criminal defence lawyer Frank Galbally, who presented the sleepwalking defence to a packed courtroom – the case had attracted much attention from newspapers.

Mrs Lange was found not guilty on the grounds she was insane at the time of the killing but she was kept at Pentridge Prison ‘until the governor’s pleasure be known’ (that is, indefinitely).

The most-well-documented case of the ‘sleepwalking defence’ is that of Canadian man Kenneth Parks. In 1987, Parks, who at the time was 23 and had a baby daughter, drove 22 kilometres to the home of his mother-in-law and stabbed her to death. He also choked his father-in-law into unconsciousness. Parks then drove himself to a police station and said, ‘I think I have killed some people … my hands.’ He had deep cuts to the tendons in his wrists that required surgery. Parks, who had a good, close relationship with his in-laws and was described as a ‘gentle giant’, had no memory of the event. Initially specialists and law enforcement did not believe Parks’ claims but after exhaustive medical tests and an investigation, there seemed no other alternative explanation. In 1989, amid worldwide media attention, Parks was acquitted of murder and attempted murder. In 1992, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the acquittal.

In 2005, a British man was acquitted of murdering his father because he was sleepwalking. Jules Lowe, then 32, was found not guilty on the grounds he was insane when he battered his father to death in 2003. An expert found Mr Lowe was in a state of ‘insane automatism’ when he committed the violent act, meaning he could not be held responsible for his father’s death. Automatism is the legal definition of ‘acting involuntarily’. Mr Lowe was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital, and released after 10 months.

In 2010, Western Australian man Vernon Silich was found guilty of the murder of his parents Robert and Faye. In 2008 Silich kicked them to death, while wearing steel-capped boots, as they slept. He pleaded not guilty to the crime and claimed he could not remember the event and woke after a heavy night of drinking and found his parents’ bodies. Silich’s defence told the court that the accused had a history of sleepwalking and had involuntarily attacked his parents, with whom he apparently had a close relationship. Silich is serving a life sentence with a minimum of 19 years.

Would Mrs Cogdon get away with murder today? What is certain is that her case would attract intense media attention.

Records show Mrs Cogdon died in 1952 at Mont Park, a mental hospital, located in the Melbourne suburb of Kew, which was closed in 1999.