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The Detective Who Discovered HE Was the Murderer: Historic Sleepwalking Cases

Khalid Elhassan February 9, 2025 15 min

Sleepwalking - Robert Ledru commits murder in his sleep — Robert Ledru commits murder in his sleep. Pinterest

14. The Mother Who Killed Her Daughter in an Attempt to Save Her From Imaginary North Korean Soldiers

North Korean soldiers celebrate a battlefield victory during the Korean War. Imgur

In 1950, Ivy Cogdon was a fifty-year-old mother from a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, who suffered from various nervous complaints. Among other things, she was afflicted with night terrors. Although unwell, few could have predicted Cogdon’s macabre acts on August 11^th of that year. In the dead of night, with an ax in hand, she entered the room of her nineteen-year-old daughter, 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, Ivy killed her daughter, instead.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.