Woman Attempts Drowning Apprentice over Affair with Husband

Mrs Eunice Akpais is 37 years old and a successful seamstress also known as fashion designer by all standards. But she is now battling hard to convince the men of the Nigeria Police that she did not deliberately push a young woman, Ladun, who also is her apprentice into a well. Eunice’s fashion designing outfit is situated around Omoladun Street, Alagbado area of Lagos State while she lives with her husband, Frank, at Willy Bankole Street, Off Ile-Epo area of Agbado/Oke-Odo Local Government Area of the state. Eunice reportedly has no fewer than seven matured girls learning the fashion designing trade under her auspices. Frank, her husband, reportedly works for a brewery in Sango-Ota, Ogun State. Frank’s schedule of work in his office includes two days off from work every week. This, he reportedly often spends in company of his wife. Of all the seven apprentices under her, Eunice is said to have a soft spot for Ladun and this she does not. Ladun, 24, is so trusted by her boss that she is the only one that the latter allows to go on errands for her in her house. It was reported that on countless oc-casions, Eunice had invited Ladun to social outings outside their fashion de-signing work. Also, anytime there was a backlog of work that might require pass-ing the night in the shop, it was always Ladun that would be asked to stay with her by her boss in the shop while the oth-ers would be asked to go home.  

It was reported that when Eunice put to bed two years ago, Ladun spent a week at her boss’s residence helping to tend to the new born. However, all that had become history.Unknown to Eunice, however, the young woman she loved so much had started dating her husband, though, at Frank’s promptings. A neighbour of the Akpas told Saturday Mirror on condition of anonymity that Ladun had always come home many times when Frank was observing his days off, apparently without her boss’s knowledge. The neighbour claimed that a friend of Eunice in the compound had once hinted the mother of two of the am-orous relationship between her husband and Ladun, but Eunice had reportedly dismissed the tale with the wave of the hand. When the news of Ladun’s romance with her boss’s husband became persistent, Eunice became uncomfortable and decided to test the veracity of the story. On Monday, June 25, 2012, the secret hitherto hidden for Eunice came to light. That day was the beginning of Frank’s two-day break. He had reportedly told his wife that he would be attending a house warming ceremony of a friend somewhere in Ayobo and would not be back until the following day.
Early that Monday morning, Eunice had received a call from Ladun that her mother was ill and she needed to accompany her to the hospital, a request Eunice granted without blinking an eye. But barely two hours after Ladun called her boss, her mother, who had traveled out of the state since the previous Friday, headed to Ladun’s shop hoping to retrieve their house key from her daugh-ter.
Eunice was shocked to the marrow when she saw Ladun’s mother walked briskly into her shop. When confronted with the story of her illness as relayed by her daughter, the old woman laughed it off and told Eunice that her daughter might not want to come to shop that day.
She claimed she had been out of town for the past three days. The woman later left when she learnt that her daughter was absent from work that day.Once Ladun’s mother left the shop, Eunice became worried. She began to link the shocking discovery of Ladun’s lies and her husband strange excuse to be out of home for the day.
Apparently disturbed about the development, Eu-nice left the shop and headed home. As fate would have it, the bus she rode in to her house, which had taken a course towards another root, for fear of heavy traffic build up, had stopped by a filling station to refill its tank. Just as the bus Eunice rode in was about refueling, she saw her husband’s car also wanting to refill too. Lo and behold, Ladun, clad in one of the cloths Eunice had given her, was seating beside Frank in the car.
The shocked Eunice hurriedly got down and headed towards the car. But Frank having sighted his wife advancing, quickly started his car and sped off. Eunice only yelled as her husband’s car sped past her.
At the close of work that day, rather than go to her house, Eunice went straight to Ladun’s. When Eunice arrived there, she met Ladun washing clothes beside the well in the compound. Without waiting for explanation, Eunice pounced on Ladun, giving her the beating of her life. She reportedly tore all her clothes too.
The two of them soon engaged in fierce fighting. In the heat of the fight, Eunice allegedly wrestled Ladun towards the well and pushed her inside it. At this stage, some neighbours had gathered.
While wanting to escape from the compound, she was apprehended by some men around; another man reportedly entered the well to bring Ladun out. But for the timely intervention of the man that jumped inside the well, Ladun would have died. She was rescued al-most immediately, albeit half drowned. She was reportedly rushed to a private hospital close by while Eunice was sub-jected to some beatings and question-ing.
Giving her account of the story, Eunice claimed she never intended injur-ing her beloved apprentice, but “wanted to teach her a lesson.” “I had been told many times before that the idiot (Ladun) was dating my husband, but I so trusted her that I never believed the stories. It was by divine grace that I caught them and I wanted to teach her a lesson,” Eunice told Sat-urday Mirror on telephone. Frank, however, claimed that he met Ladun on his way from a party and decided to give her a ride to her house being a nice girl to his family. “How can I be sleeping with my wife’s apprentice? That is unthinkable. Don’t mind my wife; she was just being unnecessarily jealous of the girl. She knows I like the girl because of all that she has been doing for us,” he said. Asked why he had a sudden change of mind from spending the night outside that day, he said that he decided to spend just an hour at the party when he was feeling cold. Frank however declined to give out his friend’s telephone number or address for the confirmation of the latter’s house warming story