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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

13. The Korean War as Background to a Family Tragedy Thousands of Miles Away

Sleepwalking - Ivy Cogdon — Ivy Cogdon. Herald Sun

As Ivy Cogdon 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“. Cogdon’s actions were weird, but her fears were not unusual in 1950 Australia, gripped at the time with borderline public panic and hysteria about Asians and Asian communists. The country was only five years removed from World War II, when it had been threatened by a Japanese invasion. More recently, Mao’s communists had won control of China, and only two months earlier, the North Koreans had sparked the Korean War when they crossed the 38^th parallel to invade South Korea. Cogdon pled not guilty on grounds that she was sleepwalking at the time and unaware of her actions.

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.