Baby

The body of a newly-born child was found in Connaught Park Road in Dover.

The body was found by a boy who lived in Military Road who had been playing with his dog in the bushes on the side of Connaught Park Road near the middle Park entrance. It was wrapped up in a brown paper parcel. He said that when he opened it up, he saw the body of a child and then took it to the police station.

A policeman that examined the parcel said that when he saw it, it was tied up with black tape and that some pieces of the brown paper were completely saturated with water and were sticking to the body and added that the paper tore as soon as it was touched. He said that when he examined the packaging, he found no marks at all.

The doctor that examined the child's body said that it was that of a newly born male child that had not been properly attended to at birth. He said that the only external injury was that a piece of tape had been tied tightly with a hard knot round the neck.

He noted that a certain amount of decomposition had set in by the time he carried out his examination but thought that the child had been dead for about three or four days.

He said that when he carried out the post-mortem he found evidence that the child had had a separate existence, stating that the child's lungs were fully distended, perfectly healthy and well developed. He said that the child's heart was perfectly empty, arising from the loss of blood through inattention at birth causing haemorrhage.

He concluded by stating that he thought that the child's immediate cause of death was strangulation and said that the child must have lived for several minutes for the lungs to have become fully distended.

He noted that the tape was tied so tightly round the child’s neck that it almost touched the vertebrae.

When the coroner summed up he said that the child had evidently died from strangulation and as that could only be done wilfully, the jury would be justified in returning a verdict of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown. He added that he thought that there was a good deal of over-sentimentality in dealing with such cases and that he was not quite sure whether girls having committed such offences and then being patted on the back was not an inducement to others. He said that someday there would be a Judge on the Bench who would take a severer view, but that there would then be a cry of hardship. He said that of course one could always show sympathy to those in trouble but noted that the country had not yet arrived at the time when it was the fashion to do away with children who were inconvenient. He then noted that from his duties he had a good insight into what was going on and said that he thought that it was a great pity to show any inducement to others to try the same thing on.

After listening to the coroner speak the jury returned an open verdict.