Saturday, February 24, 2018

A Kentucky Courtship.


Tom Moore had been courting the daughter of Bud Reynolds, a well-known distiller of Prestonsburg, Kentucky, against the wishes of the old man. On October 29, 1896, Moore walked into town and told his friends that before nightfall he intended to either marry his sweetheart or kill her father. He did not marry his sweetheart.

Saturday, February 17, 2018

A Maniac's Deed.

For several weeks in November 1892, Herman Siegler had been depressed and melancholy. Siegler was a wood carver employed by Wolf Bros. of West Erie Street, Chicago and was known as a man of good disposition who had, to all appearances, a happy domestic life. He and his wife Emilia had been married for eleven years and had three children, the oldest was 10-years-old and the youngest just a few months old. None of his family or friends could explain his recent depression.

Saturday, February 10, 2018

A Newark Wife Murder.

John Chisholm
Lottie Chisholm left her husband John and, taking their two children, went to stay at her parents’ home in Newark, New Jersey. John had a history of abusing his wife and this time she planned to file a formal complaint. The afternoon of June 23, 1883, John Chisholm went to his in-laws’ house to get his wife and children back. He saw Lottie at a rear bedroom window, sitting with her sister Ella at a sewing machine. According to Ella, John grabbed Lottie through the open window as Ella moved away.

“So, you have been making a complaint against me!” John Said, “I’ll fix you.”

Ella heard Lottie say, “O, Ella, he has got a pistol.”

What happened next is uncertain. Ella said that John raised the pistol and fired at her sister. He put the pistol back in his pocket and ran from the yard. Lottie staggered outside the died a few minutes later.

Saturday, February 3, 2018

A Peculiar Affair.

Mrs. Fanny Bennett excitedly knocked on the door of Charles Bates, the morning of September 10, 1896. Mrs. Bennett, a widow who lived about a mile away in Troupsburg, New York, had come to tell him about an attempted assault at her house at around midnight the previous night. She said that a man entered the window of the bedroom she shared with her 14-year-old daughter, grabbed her by the hand and said: “Lie down there or I will kill you.”

Mrs. Bennett grabbed a revolver and shot him twice. Bleeding profusely, the man snatched the pistol from her then left the same way he came in. Fearing another attack, Mrs. Bennett and her daughter barred all the doors and windows and stayed up until morning. The intruder had been another of their neighbors, Leonard Wilkinson; Mrs. Bennett had recognized him right away.