Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Edna Hancock, False Rape Accuser Indicted for Perjury – New York, 1944


FULL TEXT: (New York, N. Y.) – Mrs. Edna Hancock, thirty-one-year-old former hospital attendant, who is charged with having falsely accused Murray Goldman, salesman, of attempted rape, was indicted yesterday for first-degree perjury.

The indictment against Mr. Goldman, who was convicted last fall on Mrs. Hancock’s charges and as a result faced a possible ten years in Sing Sing, was dismissed last Tuesday,  by Judge Samuel S. Leibowitz, of Kings County Court, who at the same time ordered Mrs. Hancock held in $25,000 on a perjury charge.

Mr. Goldman was freed by Judge Leibowitz after a lie detector test given two months after his conviction because new evidence uncovered during the trial raised doubts about his guilt in the minds of both his guilt in the minds of both Judge Leibowitz and the prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney John E. Cone.

The indictment handed up yesterday by the grand jury said that Mrs. Hancock stated under oath at the trial that “while the attempted attack took place she screamed and hollered for twenty minutes, while in fact she did not.” The indictment added that Mrs. Hancock stated under oath at the trial that “while the attempted attack took place she screamed and hollered for twenty minutes, while in fact she did not.” The indictment added that Mrs. Hancock also stated under oath that she did not know Murray Goldman until the day of the alleged attempt, July 1, 1943, while she actually met him in May and at the time rode about town with him in the subway and in an automobile.

According to Mrs. Hancock the attempted attack took place at the nurses’ home in the Brooklyn Hospital, 681 Clarkson Avenue, Brooklyn, where she was employed.

Mrs. Hancock, who is being held in the Women’s House of Detention in Manhattan, was in court yesterday to hear the indictment read. Her lawyer, Vincent O’Connor, asked that pleading be postponed until Monday. Judge Leibowitz again fixed bail at $25,000.

Mr. O’Connor later told reporters that Mrs. Hancock had sent a telegram to her husband, William Clark Hancock, a Seabee, stationed in Dansfield, R. I., asking him to try to get leave to come to New York for the trial.

A perjury conviction could bring five years in prison on a $25,000 fine.

[“Indict Woman For Perjury in Goldman Case – Jurors Find Discrepancies in
Mrs. Hancock’s Story of His Alleged Attack,” New York Herald-Tribune (N.Y.), Feb. 18, 1944, p. 16]

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More historical cases of False Rape Accusations

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