July 16, 1936: Woman found deceased inside sofa bed after drinking binge
An Edmonton woman suffocated to death in a freak accident after a folding sofa bed she was lying on was folded up.
The body of Annie Phelan was found in the closed bed in the living room of her southside home. The 48-year-old woman was discovered by her husband, Albert, a firefighter, when he returned home in the morning after working a night shift.
Her friend, Elizabeth (Betty) Hill, alias Betty Pearson, was charged with manslaughter later that day in connection with Phelan’s death. She turned herself in to police on hearing that the coroner’s officer was searching for her.
Hill, 46, told police she had arrived at the Phelan home at 11 p.m. the night before and the two women had gone out to buy some wine, returning home an hour later.
Phelan’s two sons, ages 21 and nine years old, had gone to bed and were asleep upstairs.
The two women sat up drinking rubbing alcohol and wine before falling asleep together on the open folding bed. Around daylight, both women woke up and Hill got up to get something, then threw up on the bed. The bed closed on Phelan and Hill remembered struggling to try to open it and release her friend, but couldn’t do it.
Hill then left the house and took a taxi to a rooming house on the north side of the river. She said she did not know that Phelan was dead and had wondered why police were looking for her.
At the inquest the next day, the coroner’s jury found that Annie Phelan “came to her death by suffocation through a misadventure of the folding bed closing, on which the deceased was reclining, caused by her associate moving said bed to procure a bottle of alcohol, at the request of the deceased, which had fallen under the bed.”
Hill testified at that inquest that Phelan was snoring and seemed all right in the closed bed.
On leaving Phelan’s house, Hill was picked up by a police officer and taken to a police station where she was threatened with a charge of being drunk in public before being released. She then took a cab to the rooming house and fell asleep.
Albert Phelan, who had married his wife in Leeds, England, in 1914 before they immigrated to Canada, testified he came home to a dark front room with the blinds drawn. He noticed the sofa bed was out of its usual position and partially closed.
“Something prompted me to put my hand in the bed and I felt a head.”
He pulled the bed away from the wall so he could open it and dragged out his wife’s lifeless body. Both he and his oldest son tried artificial respiration before the doctor arrived.
The physician said Phelan had been dead about four hours.
Provincial pathologist Dr. J.J. Ower testified he saw no external evidence of violence and that a red mark on the victim’s neck was probably caused by her head being forced down on her chest by the pressure of the bed blocking her windpipe.
The manslaughter charge against Hill was dropped.