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Law: Dark MacDonalds | TIME

Compared to the shame which heaped upon Tennessee when its laws were found Dowerless to prevent child marriages (TIME, Feb. 15),* a domestic relations case up last week in California brought obloquy far deeper & darker. The story reminded newsreaders of the powerful poetry of California’s Robinson Jeffers, whose plots of incest the polite public shrinks from as wilful departures from reality.

Into Riverside County Superior Court went one Marjorie MacDonald, 19, seeking annulment of her marriage with Anstruther MacDonald. She charged him with rape and also with incest, for Anstruther MacDonald is her father. He and her mother had separated when Marjorie was 3. She had not seen him again until she was 12. When she was 14, her mother having died and her foster-father remarried, she went to live with Anstruther MacDonald. Within a year she was not only his daughter but his mistress.

Temperamental, volatile, they loved and quarreled violently. In one tantrum, she reported his crimes. He admitted his guilt and went to prison for having contributed to the delinquency of a minor. She wrote to him during the eleven months of his confinement and after he was paroled she went back to live with him in Indio, Calif, where he, a skilled electrician, onetime technical chief of Radio Station KFI, had found work as electrical foreman on an aqueduct.

The day after Christmas, 1936, they went to Phoenix, Ariz, and were married. She had borne him a son two months before. Last April they had another of their fierce quarrels and again she went to the district attorney. On July 12 a jury of the people of California will start considering what next to do with dark Marjorie and Anstruther MacDonald.

*Last week Tennessee’s new law setting 16 years as the minimum age for brides brought 12-year-old Geneva Hamby Peel and gangling, 32-year-old Homer Peel into court at Madisonville. But Judge A. T. Stewart sent the child back to the hills with her husband in the belief that she would be better off there than with her ne’er-do-well mother or in a State institution.

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Valentine Belue

Update: 2024-08-09