Ivy Cogdon
In 1950, Ivy Cogdon was a 50-year-old mother from a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, who was afflicted with a variety of nervous complaints, including night terrors. On August 11th of that year, she entered her 19-year-old daughter’s room with an ax in hand, and smashed her skull. When police arrived, Ivy admitted what she had done, and was duly arrested and charged with murder.
In her defense, she claimed that she was sleepwalking when she left her bedroom, and in that somnambulistic state, she thought North Korean soldiers had invaded her suburban home and were attacking her daughter. So she reacted by grabbing an ax and rushed to her daughter’s defense, swinging at the imaginary North Korean soldiers to fend them off, and in the process, ended up killing her daughter. As she told detectives: ” I dreamt the [Korean] war was all around the house. I heard 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“.
While Ivy Congdon’s actions were bizarre, her underlying fear was not uncommon at the time in Australia, where there was a widespread of Asians and Asian communists. The country was only 5 years removed from WW2, when it had been threatened by the Japanese invasion. More recently, Mao’s communists had won control of China, and only two months earlier, the North Koreans had crossed the 38th parallel to invade South Korea, sparking the Korean war.
She pled not guilty on grounds that she was sleepwalking at the time and unaware of her actions. At a coroner’s inquest, a psychiatrist testified that he thought Ivy was a somnambulist or sleepwalker. As described by other doctors who had been treating her prior to the killing, her medical history included powerful night terrors, and they had described her as a “hysterical type” prone to blackouts and somnambulism. Their conclusion was that Mrs. Cogdon would not have known what she was doing when she killed her daughter.
At trial, she testified that of her many fears, her greatest was of the recently started Korean War, and of how she would protect her family from invading Korean soldiers. She was particularly worried that the invaders would “pollute” her daughter, and on the night of the killing, those fears were exacerbated and made more vivid when her daughter told her that she would volunteer as a transport driver if the Koreans invaded Australia. As she lay worrying, her daughter told her: “Mummy, don’t be silly worrying about the war. It is not at your front door“. That attempted reassurance only worsened matters and made Mrs. Cogdon imagine what would happen if the war actually did come to her front door – and crossed the threshold.
Based on the medical evidence, Mrs. Cogdon’s mental history, and testimony by family and friends that she had been a loving mother, devoted to her daughter, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty on grounds that she was unaware of her actions at the time, and thus not responsible. It was the first time in Australia that somebody successfully used sleepwalking or somnambulism as a defense, so the case, Regina v. Cogdon, made legal history.