16. A Somewhat Overprotective Mother?
In 1950, Ivy Cogdon was a fifty-year-old mother from a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, who was afflicted with a variety of nervous complaints. Among other things, she suffered from night terrors. Although unwell, few could have predicted Cogdon’s macabre acts on August 11th of that year. In the dead of night, with an ax in hand, she entered the room of her nineteen-year-old, Patricia, and smashed her skull. When police arrived, Cogdon admitted what she had done, and was duly arrested and charged with murder.
In her defense, Cogdon claimed that she was sleepwalking when she left her bedroom. While in that somnambulistic state, she thought that North Korean soldiers had invaded her suburban home and were attacking her daughter. So she grabbed an ax, and rushed to her daughter’s defense. As she swung at the imaginary North Korean soldiers to fend them off, she killed her daughter, instead. 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“.