Ballinmullin, County Tyrone, farmer Owen McAleer suffered from hallucinations that his wife Annie intended to bring a gang of men to kill him. Deeply disturbed, he decided to spend the night of APRIL 17th, 1914, at the home of a friend.

Next morning he rose early and went to his own house, where he beat Annie and their two children, Mary, four, and Bernard, a baby of six months, to death with what was later described as “great violence.”

He left his wife’s body in a pool of blood, and his children dead in a lane, then threw himself into a quarry full of water on his own land, where he drowned.