A Bigamist Pleads Guilty

New York, 1895

It was a busy day in the court of sessions Tuesday. At 5 o'clock the grand Jury filed into the court and the foreman handed Judge Garretson a batch of indictments. William G. Bennett, the bigamist of Ozone Park, pleaded guilty and asked the mercy of the court.

Bennett is about 36 years old. He said that when he was quite young he married Mary Ballington in Albany. They did not live happily and after a year's separation he met his wife, and she promised to live with him again. He furnished a house and was ready to receive her, when she sent him a note telling him that she had obtained a divorce. He remained single for six years, when he married Evelina Howard of Ozone Park. Like the first marriage his second union was unhappy. His wife quarreled with him frequently. Judge Garretson told the prisoner that he would take his story into consideration.

—The Long Island Farmer, Jamaica, NY, March 8, 1895, p. 8.

A Woman Held for Bigamy

New York, 1895

Eva Kate Schmidt, aged 21 years, was arrested on Bushwick avenue, Brooklyn, Friday afternoon on a charge of bigamy. She was arraigned before Justice Monteverde in Newtown, who held her in $1,000 bail.

—The Long Island Farmer, Jamaica, NY, Jan. 25, 1895, p. 1.

Threw Wife Over Cliff; Hurled Dog After Her

1915

Husband Did This, Says Man Who Helped Him

Confesses They Took Mrs. Frederick T. Price to Lonely Spot, Gave Her Fling Over Embankment

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CONSIDERED SIGNIFICANT

Mrs. Frederick T. Price met her death in a mysterious manner Nov. 28, 1914, one day after she had been given $60,000 by her father.
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MINNEAPOLIS, Minn., Dec. 16. — Confessing, according to George Armstrong, county prosecutor of Hennepin County, Minnesota, that he aided Fredrick T. Price of Minneapolis in hurling Price's wife to death over a cliff, Charles D. Etchison, a traveling salesman of Washington, D. C., is in Minneapolis where he must face legal action.

Etchison was arrested in Washington by operatives of a private detective agency and was brought here. Accompanying him was Armstrong, who announced that the prisoner had confessed.

"Mrs. Price was the daughter of David B. Fridley, member of one of the oldest Minneapolis families," Etchison is reported to have said in his confession, "and the day after she got the money, she and Price and I went to a matinee. Later Price suggested an auto ride.

"She sat in the rear with her dog — Price and I in front. Price stopped the ear near a steep embankment. He muttered something about tire trouble, and asked his wife if she didn't want to get out and give the dog some exercise.

Threw Wife Over Cliff.

"As Mrs. Price stepped out, Price put one arm in front of her, and I put an arm in front and we gave a fling. Down she went. Price picked up the dog and threw it after his wife."

When they climbed down the embankment, Etchison is reported to have said, they found the woman still alive and Price struck her head with a stone.

"We told everybody that she stepped over the cliff to save her dog," the officials said Etchison confessed. "Price canceled my notes for $1,200 he held and gave me $3,500 to boot."

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"I deny it all. I swear it is not true," declared Fredrick T. Price, when told in his cell at the county jail of the confession of Charles D. Etchison, that he aided Price in the murder of the latter's wife Nov. 28, 1914. "I do not care to say anything further except to reiterate that the confession is not true."

Price was indicted by the county grand jury for bigamy and murder.

After his wife's death Price sued the city of Minneapolis for $7,500 for leaving the river bank unprotected where he said his wife had fallen over. A detective revealed that Price had been married twice before and he dismissed his suit.

Last Christmas Price married Miss Carrie Olson, a Minneapolis bookkeeper. While his wife was living, it is said, he promised Miss Olson to get a divorce. It is charged he did not get a divorce from one of his three wives.

—Saturday Blade, Chicago, Dec. 18, 1915, p. 11.

Note: Price was convicted of the murder by a jury in district court, Minneapolis, in Jan. 1916. Etchison repeated the substance of his confession from December.

Sane Woman Describes Her Experiences in Insane Asylum

1905

"Ordeals There Would Drive Any One Crazy"

NEW YORK, Dec 2. — "The best way to make a sane person demented is to send him or her to a lunatic asylum. It is death in life. Men and women with staring eyes look into yours and despite your certainty that your sanity is perfect, you suffer one of the most horrible sensations that a human being can have — you feel that the men who are watching you believe that behind your eyes lies the same distortion of intellect that is harbored by the heads which wag from side to side around you."

Mrs. Sara Dean Reid, bride of Capt. Albert Dean Reid, who is in the Tombs on a charge of bigamy, talked thus last night in Mount Vernon about her nerve-wrecking experience as an inmate of Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, from which she was released by order of Judge Platt, who, at the demand of her counsel, John M. Digney, had her sanity investigated. Mrs. Reid was placed in the institution at the request of her three brothers a few days after her marriage. The woman is heiress to a large estate.

"The most vivid imagination cannot conceive," said Mrs. Reid, "the horrors of an insane asylum. I felt as one might feel if suddenly transferred to another planet. Everything was strange. The voices were not human, the glances were full of terror, the treatment was brusque, and the life so mechanical and circumscribed that I am astonished I was not driven crazy myself.

"The one thing that helped me to fight off the impulse to shriek as the unfortunates around me did was writing. Day by day since a year ago I have jotted down my impressions of the awful place, and I shall some time publish a book on the subject.

"An insane asylum spells monotony. You rise in the morning, bathe, eat, walk, and, after the hours have worked themselves out with the dreariness of the ticking of a clock, you go to bed again while all around are mental wrecks. You cannot sleep. You never lose the consciousness that you are sane among the insane, that mad people who may at any moment rend the air with shrieks that will kill the slumbers you woo are almost within arm's reach.

"I was treated by the attendants just as if I were really insane. They watched me constantly. I could walk nowhere without having eyes following me. I could not go out without having two nurses, grim and reticent.

"About seventy insane people were in the ward to which I was assigned. There were all manner of lunatics, and when I tried to sleep at night the babble of their incoherent, senseless voices awakened me with a start.

"There is one prayer I have added to those I learned in childhood, and it is 'God keep the sane from the asylums.' "

Mrs. Reid will not return to her brothers. She has decided to live at Mamaroneck, for a time, as the guest of the Rev F. F. Gerran, rector of St. Thomas' Episcopal Church.

Woman Traps "Spirit" Hand

1920

Boy "Dip's" Exploit in Movie Show Lands Him in Jail

CHICAGO — While watching a film drama entitled "The Spirit Hand" in a Chicago movie house, Mrs. Samuel Marks felt a phantom mitt steal gently into her purse on her lap. Though aware that the spooks are hard to catch, Mrs. Marks grabbed the hand. The owner, a 17-year-old youth, broke her clutch and danced over many bunions in dashing from the theater. He was finally cornered in a restaurant, where he declared "the picture had made his hand absent-minded."

—The Saturday Blade, Chicago, Feb. 28, 1920, p. 8.


Eight Is Too Many Wives

Last Bride of Ex-Soldier Has Her Marriage Annulled

WORCESTER, Mass. — Mary W. Cooper of Worcester told Judge Lawton in Superior Court that when she married James W. Treat, an ex-soldier in the Army, she never dreamed he was such a much-married man. She learned, she said, after she went through the ceremony, that Treat has gone through a similar ceremony with seven other women, and that he had not taken the trouble to divorce any of them. She asked that her marriage be nullified, and Judge Lawton granted her petition.

A Printer's Apprentice Who Can't Spell

Humor, 1874

A printer in Glasgow was sadly bothered with an apprentice who could not, or would not, be initiated into that portion of grammar which treats of the proper disposition of letters in words. One day he presented such a shockingly inaccurate proof as made his master, after starting with amazement, take the spectacles from off his nose, and give the ill-disposed "devil" the following recipe:
"My man, just gang hame the night, and tell your mither to boil Fulton & Knight's Dictionary in milk, and take it for your supper, as that seems the only way you'll ever get spelling put into ye."



Complimentary

A lumbering old stage-coach, that plies between two inland towns, is called Noah's Ark. The other morning a pompous traveler yelled at the driver, who had got under way, to "hold on."
"Do you want to get into the Ark?" asked the driver.
"Yes," said the traveler.
"Hurry up, then," was the response, "for we've all the animals aboard already except the donkey."



What does man love more than life,
Hate more than death or mortal strife;
That which contented men desire,
Which poor men have, and rich require?
The miser spends, the spendthrift saves,
And all men carry to their graves?
Nothing.



A young couple were sitting together in a romantic spot, with birds and flowers about them, when the following dialogue ensued:
"My dear, if the sacrifice of my life would please thee, most gladly would I lay it at thy feet."
"Oh, sir, you are too kind! But it just reminds me that I wish you'd leave off using tobacco."
"Can't think of it. It's a habit to which I am wedded."
"Very well, sir; since this is the way you lay down your life for me, and as you are already wedded to tobacco, I'll take good care you are never wedded to me, as it would be bigamy."



Don't quarrel with a spiritualist. He can always turn the tables on you!


What fish is most valued by a loving wife? Her-ring.

Hotel Clerk Charged as Bigamist

1903

HOTEL CLERK IS A BIGAMIST

Boy Cook Arrested for Having One Wife Too Many.

Marshalltown, March 2.—A young man named Roy Cook, formerly night cleric at the Pilgrim hotel here, was arrested on the charge of bigamy. The charge was preferred by a woman who claims to be his first wife and who is now living in Sioux City. She claims she was married to Cook in Sioux City in May, 1901. He acknowledges the truth of the claim, but says he has not lived with the woman for some time and that he believed when he married his second wife that he had been legally divorced.

The second wife of Cook was a young widow named Clara Thompson, She is a daughter of John Swift of this city. She was a clerk at the cigar stand in the Pilgrim hotel when Cook met her and they have been married since Oct. 27, 1902. She declared her faith in her husband this afternoon, after he was arrested and said she was sure he had not done wrong in marrying her, that he fully believed he had been divorced from the first wife.

—Davenport Daily Republican, Davenport, Iowa, March 3, 1903, page 2.

Charged With Having Too Many Wives

William Parsons, Alias Smith is Held, to Gallipolis on Bigamy Charge, Say He Got Third Wife in Mansfield.

William Parsons, a man who was married in Mansfield in September, 1908, under the name of William Smith, was arrested in Gallipolis Tuesday on the charge of having three wives and was bound over to common pleas court by the mayor, before whom the preliminary examination was conducted.

It is claimed that Parsons was married in Gallipolis in 1904 and that in 1907 he was married to Rosa Thompson, in Huntington, W. Va., also that in September of last year he was married to a girl in Mansfield. The charge is that all of these wives are living and that none of them have been divorced.

Parsons stated after he was arrested that he did not know whether he had married the West Virginia girl or not. He said that he awoke one morning after a spree and that she claimed to be his wife.

Wife No. 2 made the complaint against him and Wife No. 3, who is said to be the Mansfield girl, produced a marriage certificate in court Tuesday.

The record of the marriage license department of the probate court of Richard county shows that on September 10, 1908, a marriage license was issued to William Smith, aged 23 years, and Pearl Loiselle, aged 21. Smith's place of residence was given as Mansfield and his occupation as a cook. Lucas was given as the bride's place of residence. The Rev. S. L. Stewart was mentioned in the license as the officiating clergyman but it appears that other arrangements were made as the return of the ceremony having been performed was made by Justice Dickey, the date of the ceremony having been Sept. 14, four days after the license was issued.

--The Mansfield News, Mansfield, Ohio, April 21, 1909, page 6.