Brother Hacked To Death With Axe

[bloodrayne]

Thankless brother hacked to death in NZ
November 12, 2003
A 36-year-old New Zealand man hacked his sleeping brother to death with an axe because he was annoyed he had not been thanked for cooking dinner.

Fergus John Glen pleaded guilty in the High Court at Wellington to murdering his 33-year-old brother, Craig, on March 7 this year.

The mealtime slight was the final straw in a long-running feud between the men, court documents say.

Glen, single and unemployed, admitted striking his brother, who was married with three children, eight times across the face and neck with a wood-splitting axe.

He had selected the axe from several in the basement of his parents' house, stood in the open doorway of the room his brother was sleeping in, and "swung the ... axe over his shoulder and brought it down on to the ... victim", the documents say.

The room was in darkness but light shining in from the corridor behind him made it possible to make out where his brother's head lay, he said.

Almost all the victim's blood drained out of his body.

After the murder, Glen returned the axe to the basement.

Meeting his mother on the stairs, he calmly told her: "I've done him ... [with] an axe."

The sound of the blows raining down had jolted her awake. She told police later she thought she had heard "wood-chopping noises".

The documents say that on the night of the attack Glen was "happy and jovial", drinking whisky in front the television.

As his brother, father and mother drifted off to bed a darker mood came over him, he told police.

He sat on his own, "festering" over a fist fight between him and his brother four months earlier.

Eventually "everything came to a head".

About 1am he descended the stairs to the basement and made his way to the axes.

"He just annoyed me and I did it. I'm not proud, but I did it."

The victim's wounds included one that severed his spine.

The papers say Craig Glen was unlikely to have felt anything. The first blows would have knocked him unconscious or killed him.

Details of the brothers' feud leading up to the murder were withheld at the request of Glen's lawyers, Louise Sziranyi and Helen Croft.

Justice Goddard remanded Glen in custody pending a probation report. Glen is to be sentenced on November 21.