ATTEMPTING TO SACRIFICE HERSELF SHE NEARLY BURNS AN ALMSHOUSE.
PORTSMOUTH, N. H., Aug. 1.—The city almshouse came near being burned about 3 o’clock this morning. It appears that a partially insane inmate named Isette Spiuney, aged about 68, took her feather bed, with all her clothing but one dress, together with a quantity of kindilings [sic], piled them on a chair in the corner of her room, and then set fire to them. The smoke awoke a sleeper in the apartment above, and when Overseer Shannon and his assistants burst into the room the flames had gained considerable headway. The woman was in a nude state, being badly burned about the stomach, chest, head and arms, and nearly suffocated. A delay of a few seconds more would have killed her. A detail of men was employed with buckets of water to quench the flames. which was accomplished only after the apartment had been badly scorched. On questioning the woman as to the cause for the act, she stated that as Christ was crucified, the spirits had prompted her to self-cremation, that being, she insisted, her intention when she set the fire. It was a narrow escape for the inmates of the almshouse, of whom there are many.
From the Collection of The Comtesse DeSpair
The 1879 Morbid Scrapbook
A very Tragical Accident happened at Water-Town, the beginning of this Month, an Old man, that was of somewhat a Silent and Morose Temper, but one that had long Enjoyed the reputation of a Sober and a Pious Man, having newly buried his Wife, The Devil took advantage of the Melancholly [sic] which he thereupon fell into, his Wives discretion and industry had long been the support of his Family, and he seemed hurried with an impertinent fear that he should now come to want before he dyed, though he had very careful friends to look after him who kept a strict eye upon him, least he should do himself any harm. But one evening escaping from them into the Cow house, they there quickly followed him found him hanging by a Rope, which they had used to tye their Calves withal, he was dead with his feet near touching the Ground.
Culled from the very first issue of PUBLICK OCCURRENCES, Both FORREIGN and DOMESTICK, Boston, Thursday Sept. 25th, 1690.
It’s time for another ghastly tale from our troubled past, this one courtesy of Joy Kemnitz who sends a clipping from the November 5, 1868 issue of the The Sweetwater Forerunner, Sweetwater, Tennessee. As Joy says, “They really don’t pull any punches in the old article descriptions” – and that is why the Comtesse loves them so!
A Train on the O.&M. Rail-Road Blown to Atoms.
Special dispatch to the Louisville Journal.
CINCINNATI, Oct. 30.–One of the most horrible railroad accidents that has occurred in this vicinity for some time past, took place at Gravel Pit, a station distant about eighteen miles from this city, on the Ohio and Mississippi road last night about 8 o’clock. A special freight train left this city at 6:25 last evening in charge of Mr. Mills Howe, conductor, and Jos. Gardner engineer. Reaching Gravel Pit about 7 1/2 o’clock, the train was stopped on the main track for the purpose of taking in wood for the engine.
Shortly after the train stopped, while the brakeman was passing the wood aboard the tender, the engineer oiling the engine, the fireman piling the wood as it came on board, and the conductor and a party of little boys who had gathered about to see the locomotive standing alongside the engine, a powerful freight locomotive exploded her boiler with a report that was heard for miles around, and with such force that it killed the conductor, fireman, and one of the boys outright, and wounded two more of the boys, who have since died.–The engineer and a brakeman named Henry Howe, brother to the conductor, were also injured quite severely.
So terrible was the force of the explosion that the engine was shattered into fragments, some of which were blown to the Kentucky side of the river, a distance of nearly a mile, while others, large and small, have since been picked up around the scene of the accident within a radius of a thousand yards. The wood in the pile alongside was sent flying in the air in every direction, and a stationary engine used for sawing the wood and the house that enclosed it were blown to fragments.
The conductor was lifted up and thrown against the wood pile, struck in the face and body with several fragments of the boiler, and so fearfully mangled and burned by the escaping steam as to be almost unrecognizable. Both legs were broken and his body crushed to jelly, and his face and neck gashed and skull crushed. The fireman, John Malone, who was standing near the fire doors in a position to feel the full force of the explosion, was also horribly mangled and died instantly. His limbs were broken, body covered with cuts and bruises, and his skull blown off and brains spattered all over the river side of the water tank.
One of the boys named John Smith, son of one of the employees of the road, residing at the gravel pit, was blown a long distance of 300 yards against a gravel bank and instantly killed. He was about twelve years of age. His brother, a few years younger was also blown a long distance, together with the flying wood, and so badly injured that he has since died. The boy, Thos. Murphy, about fifteen years old, was lifted up and thrown a distance of fifty feet against a wood-pile, which fell on his body, completely hiding it from view. He died in a few minutes after being taken from the debris. His little brother, about six years of age was blown a distance of forty feet into a lot of tall weeds, where he was found crying lustily, but slightly injured.
Mr. Gardner was knocked down and badly injured in the head, shoulder, and hip.
Henry Howe, the brakeman, had his hip and knee crushed, and received internal injuries, which, it is feared, will prove fatal. Several other person were bruised by the flying fragments. The trucks of the engine were not moved from the track, nor the tender moved more than three feet backwards. the force seems to have acted from below, lifting the boiler up and scattering the fragments in all directions.
Culled from the Thursday, August 6, 1896 issue of The World newspaper (New York, New York).
SLAIN BY HER SISTER.
The Girl Was Mad and Chopped Her Head to Pieces While She Slept.
HACKED UNTIL SHE WAS TIRED.
Then Washed Her Hands, Slipped from a Window and Told the Police How She Did It.
ALICE HEANEY WAS HARMLESSLY INSANE.
Kate Larkin, Her Sister, Had Been a Mother to Her for Years–Now She Is Dying in a Hospital.
For several years poor Alice Heaney has been regarded as “harmlessly insane.” Yet at 3 o’clock yesterday morning, lighted only by the moonbeams which streamed in through the open windows of the little home at No. 123 Classon avenue, Brooklyn, she attacked her sleeping sister with an axe, and hacked the defenseless head into an almost unrecognizable mass.
The victim is Mrs. Kate Larkin, a hard-working, self-supporting widow who for years had surrounded the demented girl – her sole blood relative – with devotional care and a mother’s love. A spark of life still lingered in the terribly mutilated body after the mad sister had thrown away her weapon through sheer weariness, but the physicians pronounce Mrs. Larkin’s case as hopeless.
Sergt. White was nodding half asleep at his desk in the De Kalb Avenue Police Station at 3:30 A. M. when a small, pale-faced woman slipped quietly in from the street. The early visitor was well but plainly dressed in a muslin skirt and fresh shirt waist. At first glance there was nothing unusual in her appearance.
“I wish to give myself up,” said the woman quietly, very much as another would have said, “Good morning.”
“You do, hey?” queried the sleepy sergeant, thinking that his visitor was about to ask for a night’s lodging. But the girls’ answer awoke the officer like an electric shock.
Told of the Murder
“You see, sir,” she said, in that even, unemotional tone. “I have just killed my elder sister with an axe. You will find her dead at home at No. 123 Classon avenue.”
“Do you know what you are saying, Miss?” demanded the astonished policeman.
“Yes, indeed,” replied the visitor, smiling at the bluecoat’s surprise. “I killed her because I feared her. She was cross to me yesterday and threatened to cut my throat. Before I went to bed last night I prayed for her – oh, how earnestly! We sleep together, you know, and at 3 o’clock this morning I awoke to find the moonlight pouring over the bed. It was bright and beautiful. I grasped at the moonbeams. She stirred and muttered in her sleep.”
The light of madness came into the shifting eyes of the queer little creature as she leaned far over the sergeant’s desk and whispered the balance of her terrible story.
“Yes, she stirred,” continued the woman, “and I made up my mind that she should die. So I just slipped out of bed and stole barefooted into the yard. There I found the axe. It was a great big one, with a blade as keen as a razor. Going softly in to our sleeping room, right up tot he bedside, I stood over my sister. The moonlight was full upon her and showed me where to strike. She shrieked at the first blow, but I cut her down again and again. She had to die. I did not dare to let her live.”
The Sergeant Shuddered.
Sergt. White is a well-seasoned officer, but the mad woman’s story, as he afterwards confessed, brought out the cold perspiration.
Detaining his visitor he telephoned the facts to the Clermont Avenue Station in which precinct is the Classon avenue house.
Sergt. O’Connell sent Policemen Gallagher and Lynch to investigate. They found the little two-story frame house tightly closed, its inmates seemingly fast asleep.
It required a dozen tugs at the doorbell to get a response from Mrs. Mary Bodie, the aged owner of the little cottage, who sleeps on the top floor. She nearly swooned in terror when the policeman bluntly explained the object of their visit.
“It must be a mistake,” she gasped. “Mrs. Larkin and her young sister Alice occupy my basement. The girl is silly, but harmless, and the widow is more than a mother to her.”
Reluctantly the old lady piloted the policeman down the narrow stairs to the basement. As the aged woman and the two men stood in the lower hall groping in the darkness for the door of Mrs. Larkin’s room, they caught a faint sound, as of dripping water.
Gallagher entered the front room used by the sisters as a sleeping apartment and stopped short just within the threshold. The sight that brought him to a standstill would have staggered most men, had their nerves been ever so strong.
On the bed, in the full light of the moon, lay Mrs. Larkin. Blood ran from a score of terrible wounds on head and face, and dripped from the saturated bedding to the uncarpeted floor. The patter of the red drops was the sound that had caught the attention of the policemen as they stood in the outer hall.
The axe with which the butchery had been done lay on the floor close by the bed, its heavy blade clotted thick with blood. Mrs. Larkin had evidently made no struggle for her life – the first crushing blow had rendered her unconscious.
Her mad assailant, satisfied that her victim was dead, had deliberately washed the blood stains from her hands and, after dressing with considerable care, had left the house by a rear window connecting with an alley and the street. She had then walked straight to the De Kalb Avenue Station, three blocks away, and made her startling confession to the sleepy sergeant.
Mrs. Larkin still lived when the police found her, but the pulse of life was beating faintly. Policeman Gallagher sent in a hurry call that brought an ambulance in hot haste from the Homeopathic Hospital.
The unconscious sufferer was taken to that institution, where House Surgeon W. W. Blackman found three separate and distinct fractures of the skull, each of itself almost inevitably fatal. One terrible stroke of the axe had cut out the woman’s right eye and smashed the bridge of her nose. Fifteen other blows had each left a deep scalp wound covering the head with a net work of mutilations.
Identified Her Sister.
Mrs. Larkin partially regained consciousness an hour after reaching the hospital, and managed to identify the mad sister as her assailant. Then she sank into semi-consciousness and throughout the day lay writhing in convulsions, which grew steadily weaker as her life ebbed away. The physicians do not regard her recovery as possible.
Alice Heaney was taken before Justice Teale late in the day and committed, to await the result of her sister’s injuries. She was perfectly cool and self-possessed, and retold her gruesome story with few additions.
“I killed her,” she said, “because she had beaten me and had threatened to cut my throat.”
The prisoner showed no sign of regret for her mad act until she was led from the court Raymond Street Jail. Then, turning to a court officer she whispered, in a frightened way:
“I meant to murder her, you know, but I’m sorry now that I did it.”
Mrs. Larkin was the wife of Perry Larkin, an old-time professional ball player who drank hard and embittered her life. She was finally forced to leave him and make a home for herself and sister Alice. Two years ago she took possession of the little basement in Classon avenue, and began her single-handed struggle for bread.
Alice Had Religious Mania.
Alice, now twenty-two years old, has from early childhood been known as queer. Once she was seized with religious mania and kept the neighbors so alarmed with her ravings and prayers that it became necessary to remove her to the Flatbush Asylum, but several months ago she was returned to her sister’s care as “harmless.”
Mrs. Larkin earned her living as a washerwoman, and won the respect and friendship of her neighbors by her indomitable energy and never-failing cheerfulness.
During the day preceding the tragedy Mrs. Larkin worked hard over her tubs, while the demented sister moved quietly about the little home, giving no sign of approaching madness. The sisters chatted pleasantly with neighbors until 9 P.M., and then retired, seemingly in perfect accord.
Alice, in her cell at Raymond Street Jail, passed a quiet day, but at nightfall a returning fit of madness seized her. Physicians were summoned from the Brooklyn Hospital, but they could do little for the frenzied woman. At a late hour preparations were being made for her removal to a padded cell.
Follow-Up from the August 13, 1896 issue of The Standard Union (Brooklyn).
SHE IS A LUNATIC.
Dr. King Examines Alice Heaney as to Her Sanity.
FINDS SHE IS CERTAINLY MAD.
THE GIRL MURDERESS WILL PROBABLY GO TO THE ASYLUM FOR INSANE CRIMINALS AT MATTEAWAN– MR. BACKUS APPOINTS LAWYER “BOB” ELDER TO LOOK AFTER HER INTERESTS.
An inquiry was held in the office of District Attorney Backus this morning by Dr. James S. King, of 146 McDonough street, who was yesterday appointed a commission to determine the mental condition of Alice Heaney, who on Aug. 5 assaulted her sister, Mrs. Kate Larkin, at her home, 123 Classon avenue, with an ax, inflicting injuries from the effects of which she died in the Homeopathic Hospital two days later.
Dr. Ira O. Tracy, assistant physician at the Long Island State Hospital, testified that the prisoner was an inmate of the asylum for six weeks in August and September, 1895. Her condition was that of an imbecile suffering hallucinations of sight, and that she frequently “saw saints and angels.” He considered her insane. Sergeant James P. White, of the Fourth precinct testified to the prisoner’s visit to the station house on Aug. 5, when she said her sister wanted to cut her throat, and she had hit her with an ax.
Patrolman Thomas F. Gallagher testified that he arrested the murderess. When the officer referred to Mrs. Larkin’s death the prisoner burst into tears, and said that was the first she had heard of her sister’s death.
Dr. King made a formal report to the effect that the prisoner was incapacitated of understanding the proceeding of a trial, and that it was dangerous to public peace and safety to have her at large.
She will therefore be committed to the insane asylum for criminals until the Grand Jury meets, in October next.
NEW YORK, Oct. 3.—Brazilla Vanderveer, aged twenty-six years, a native of Red Bank, N.J., but lately living in this city, was brutally murdered to-day by John Hughes, known as the “Dangerous Blacksmith.” Hughes and some friends went into an oyster saloon to get some chowder. Young Vanderveer went into the place and sad down to eat. The roughs refused to pay for their meal and assaulted the cashier, who grappled with his assailant. The cashier was a little man and Vanderveer went to his assistance. Hughes struck him a terrible blow on the forehead, felling him to the floor. Vanderveer was picked up and a physician called. Before he arrived the young man was dead. His skull had been fractured by the blow. Hughes escaped. A general alarm was sent out to all the precincts.
From the Collection of The Comtesse DeSpair
The 1886 Morbid Scrapbook
READING, Pa., Dec. 6.—Joseph Seaman, of this city, met a friend on the street today, who had a bottle, which he jokingly said contained old rye, and offered Seaman a drink. Seamon placed the bottle to his mouth, and before he could be stopped drank some of its contents, which proved to be ammonia. His stomach and intestines were so badly burned that he became unconscious at once. His injuries will prove fatal.
From the Collection of The Comtesse DeSpair
The 1886 Morbid Scrapbook
YOUNG FINN’S JEALOUSY.
He Tells His Adored to Call at a Hotel,
Where She Finds Him Dead.
NEW YORK, Dec. 5.—Thomas F. Finn registered at the West Side Hotel, Sixth avenue and Fifteenth street, on Friday evening, and got a room for the night. When it was entered yesterday morning he was found lying on his bed with a bullet hole in his breast and a discharged revolver in his hand. He had been dead for hours. A letter addressed to the landlord of the hotel stated that he was going to take his life, and asked that in case he failed to make a good job of it, he should be sent to the New York Hospital.
Finn was twenty years old, and has been a head messenger for the Mutual District Telegraph Company. He committed suicide through jealousy of the attentions by young men to a girl named Kitty Daly, twenty years old, who works in Stein’s silk factory. The suicide left a note which read: “K.D. has been the cause of this. She will understand all. Finn.”
The girl says she knew him since childhood. For a year past the couple have kept company. She refused to marry him once, but kept up the acquaintance. He was of a very jealous disposition. He met her on Friday by appointment, and said he had intended to kill her and himself, but Father Wall, of St. Agnes’ Church, had been trying to dissuade him, so he had told the priest that he would let the girl live, but made no promise about himself. Upon leaving her he told her to call at the West Side Hotel next day. She went there yesterday and learned his fate.
From the Collection of The Comtesse DeSpair
The 1886 Morbid Scrapbook
February 2, 1867 Froze to Death. Another Drunkard Gone.
Mr. Thomas Warner, a man of superior intelligence and information and once a minister of the gospel, froze to death, while in a helpless state of intoxication, near Elysian, Le Sueur county, on the night of the 16th of January. The day previous to his death and most of the night he had spent in a saloon in the village and left for his home, near morning, in a state of intoxication. When within one hundred rods of home, he commenced falling down every few rods until at last he was obliged to crawl on his hands and feet, which he did until he got within ten or twelve rods of his own door, but could get no farther, then falling forward from his crawling position died. He leaves a very interesting family.
Thus another victim to intemperance has gone − perished in a snow bank, almost at his own door, and the tears of the widow and orphan are falling and aching hearts are almost bursting in breasts that know no comfort.
We have been fearful for the past winter or two that we should have a similar case to the above to report, as having occurred in this village, but so far, thank God, all have escaped, but no one knows for how long.
Culled from the February 2, 1867 issue of the Chatfield Democrat (Minnesota), as reprinted in Coffee Made Her Insane.
