FULL TEXT (Article 1 of 3): Medina, O., March 20. – Mrs.
Martha Wise, whose “funeral complex” resulted in the poisoning of seventeen
persons, three of whom died, made a supplemental confession today.
Under the questioning of Joseph Seymour, county prosecutor,
the Hardscrabble widow, admitted setting fire to ten houses and barns in the
neighborhood of her home in the last few months.
The confession clears up a series of arson plots on which
authorities have been working.
Mrs. Wise also said that she had stolen numerous pieces of
jewelry from neighbors and relatives.
In each case she wept bitterly and gave the same explanation
offered for the poisonings:
“The devil made me do it – he told me so.”
Mrs. Wise will probably be sent to the Lima hospital for the
criminally insane.
She said the lure of funerals and suffering caused her to
poison her relatives.
[“Had ‘Funeral Complex’ – Mrs. Martha Wise Poisoned
Seventeen Persons and Set Fire to Houses and Barns.” Evening State Journal
(Lincoln, Ne.), Mar. 20, 1925, p. 6-A]
***
Why
had the Evil One selected this remote county in northern Ohio for his
unholy attention? Why had he picked their homes and areas to blast with
fire and brimstone, themselves and their cattle with mysterious,
agonizing death? What had they done to deserve this terrible affliction
that was being visited upon them?
It
was just 17 years ago, on New Year’s Day, 1925, that Satan or one of
his emissaries first made his presence felt in the small community of
Valley City, not far from the county seat at Medina.
New
Year’s, along with Christmas, Thanksgiving and such few funerals as
might be, were about the only times the Valley kinfolk and neighbors had
a chance to get together In anything like holiday mood, and usually
they made the most of it.
Fred
Geinke, a prosperous, hard-working farmer, together with his wife Lily,
their six children and several near relatives celebrated the day in
traditional style with roast suckling pig, an apple in its mouth, mounds
of steaming vegetables and four kinds of pie topped off with foaming
glasses of not-too-hard cider.
They rose from the table, stuffed almost to overflowing, content and entirely unaware of their impending fate.
Sometime
later a farm wife who lived across the road heard anguished screams
coming from the Geinke home and hurried to investigate. What she saw
sent her as fast, as she could go to the nearby home of Martha Hasel
Wise, Lily’s niece.
“Quick,
Martha!” the terrified woman cried. “It’s the Devil! The devil’s took
all the Geinkes sick unto dying. Hurry! I’ll go for the doctor.”
Martha, better known to the entire Valley as the sick-nursing
“Widow Wise,” hastily threw a shawl over her gaunt, bony shoulders,
called to her children to stay, in the house, hiked her rusty black
dress to her knees, and ran.
The
ghastly scene that greeted her in the Geinke parlor would have
convinced a far less pious woman than Martha Wise that the Devil had
indeed been at work there.
Nine-year-old
Walter, his face contorted with pain, clawed feebly toward his mother’s
side. As Martha, watched, he collapsed in merciful unconsciousness.
Young Fred Jr. writhed in the grip of a monstrous fit. Two of the other
children, Marie and Rudolph, were trying to rise but their legs wilted
as though made of rubber at every attempt. The rest lay moaning
piteously on the floor.
Exerting
almost superhuman strength, the Widow Wise managed somehow to get them
to bed. That done, she drew a pall of cold water from the well, tore
towels into strips and gently bathed their sweat-beaded foreheads with
work-gnarled fingers.
She
was so engaged when two physicians arrived and quickly administered
emetics, anxious neighbors rushed Marie and Rudolph, who seemed the
sickest, to the Medina County hospital.
“Some kind of food poisoning,” it was agreed. “That big dinner—”
When all were resting easier, Martha, herself obviously on the verge of collapse, had to be treated also.
In a few hours, however, It looked as though the worst were about over.
In
reality it was just the beginning. For a series of mysterious fires
broke out up and down Hardscrabble Valley. Night after night haystacks
burst into flames; houses caught fire, apparently without reason; barns
burned to the ground, destroying horses and cattle.
People started to whisper: “It’s the Devil! There’s a curse on us. But why? Why?”
Cattle sickened and died inexplicably in the fields, in barnyards, in their stalls.
The Valley grew frantic at this new scourge, but there was more to come.
Things
began disappearing from their homes—prized heirlooms, pieces of
jewelry, knickknacks, even family portraits — as though snatched away by
an invisible hand, and with never a single clew left behind.
All
the superstitions they had inherited from their Old World ancestors
came to the surface. Tales of ancient black magic and witchcraft
commenced to circulate. They took to double bolting their doors at
night. Few stirred outside after dark for fear of meeting the Evil One
himself face to face. For the Devil was causing all this misfortune.
They were sure of it.
Then on Feb. 9th, Fred Geinke, who had seemed well on the way to recovery, suddenly grew worse and died.
His
wife, still bedridden as a result of her illness acquired on New Year’s
Day, called in her niece, the Widow Wise, to take charge of the funeral
arrangements.
Funeral
arrangements in Hardscrabble Valley were a two-day chore. The whole
house had to be cleaned, the musty parlor aired. Neighbors who came to
pay their respects must be greeted. And there was the cooking to do in
preparation for the friends and relatives who would come from far and
near. Pies and cakes to bake; jars of pickles and relishes to be got up
from the cellar. For funerals in the Valley, if not exactly gala
affairs, were as nearly so as decency permitted.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” Lily Geinke told her niece when it was all over.
Still
the fires, the deaths of livestock and the strange disappearances of
articles continued. And three days later, just after the family
physician had predicted it would only be a short time now until she was
fully recovered, Lily Geinke suffered an unexpected relapse and died in
agony before the good doctor could be summoned.
He
signed the certificate of death as due to coronary thrombosis, a form
of blood clotting which stopped the heart. A veritable epidemic of the
terrible “Devil’s Malady” broke out. Men, women and children were taken
with sudden seizures the Valley’s over-worked physicians found difficult
to diagnose.
The
Geinke children were again stricken, Martha Wise’s two brothers and a
cousin, Mrs. Rose Adams. Martha herself was rushed to the hospital where
quick action by the doctors saved her, although she still had a badly
infected and which, due to her rundown condition from work and worry
failed to heal.
This
brought the number of casualties since the first strange visitation of
New Year’s Day to seventeen, to say nothing of the thousands of dollars
in property losses and damage.
A wave of mass hysteria swept the Valley. Where would the Devil strike next?
Who would be next to go? What—oh, what have we done to deserve all this?
County
Prosecutor Joseph Seymour and Sheriff, George Roshon had not lie en
idle during these two awful months. Hard-headed men, they scoffed at the
idea that Satan was on the loose in Hardscrabble but they had
practically no definite clews to go on.
Although
they had grilled the entire Valley without result they had picked up
little things here and there that they were painstakingly but surely
piecing together into a pattern. If a fiend were responsible for this
orgy of violence and terror it was a human one. Of that they were
convinced. To begin with they knew Mrs. Sophie Hasel, Lily Geinke’s
72-year-old sister, and mother of Martha.
Wise, had died suddenly three weeks before New Year’s.
Wise, had died suddenly three weeks before New Year’s.
Further,
it was a significant fact that most of the strange seizures had taken
place in households belonging either to the Hasel or the Geinke
families.
They
knew, too, that a certain person’s children had been warned not to
drink water at Mrs. Sophie Hasel’s place or at that of Fred Geinke.
“Could poison have caused the deaths?” they asked the attending physicians eagerly.
“Yes,” the doctors agreed.
“Certain poisons—arsenic, for instance—might have caused them.”
Sheriff
and prosecutor had to cover a lot of ground but they finally
established that the person who had warned the children had recently
made two purchases of arsenic “to kill rats.”
Prosecutor Seymour obtained a court order for the exhumation of Lily Geinke’s body. An autopsy was performed,
“Arsenic all right,” the coroner reported. “Enough of it to kill a dozen people.”
Prosecutor and sheriff questioned those closest involved once more but got nothing.
“I’ve told you all I know,” Martha Wise said, a break in her voice, “I wish I could help you. Mother, Aunt Lily, Uncle Fred—”
“You’d
better go up to Cleveland for a couple of weeks and have that infection
treated, Martha,” Prosecutor Seymour said gently, indicating her
still-bandaged arm.
“And get a good rest. You’ve been through a lot.”
She
left the following day, March 1st. Two weeks went by. Not a single
fire, no one strangely sick, nothing reported missing throughout the
entire Valley. Sheriff and prosecutor nodded grimly.
“Got Martha Wise!” Seymour said.
Rain
drummed steadily on the roof of Sheriff Roshon’s car the night he drove
the Widow Wise back from Cleveland. It was drumming on the tin roof
outside the proctor’s window as she sat down and faced him across his
desk.
“We know you did it, Martha,” he said.
“Why not confess and get it off your conscience?”
“You’re wrong, Mr. Seymour. I would never a done such a thing.”
He
told her about the arsenic in Lily Geinke’s stomach, showed her the
druggist’s register of her purchases, explained how they knew she’d
warned her children not to drink water at “grandma’s or Uncle Fred’s.”
Still she shook her head in stony-faced denial.
For
several minutes they faced each other across a silence broken only by
the rain on the roof. Then Mrs. Ethel Roshon, the sheriff’s wife, took a
hand.
“Listen, Martha. Do you hear those raindrops? Do you hear what they’re saying?
They’re
saying: ‘Drop-drip-drip. You-did-it. Drop-drip-drip. You-did-it.’ You
did it, Martha! You know you did! Listen to it, Martha. It’s the voice
of God. He’s telling you to tell the truth!”
The Widow Wise listened—and then she broke.
“Oh,
my God,” she moaned. “Yes, I did it. I put arsenic in the water bucket.
But it was the Devil told me to. He came to me, laughing and grinning,
while I baked my bread. He came to me when I was a-hoin’ in the fields.
He kept telling me to do it while he follered me in the meadow. It was
the Devil done it.”
She looked down at her work-gnarled hands.
“They
told me I had no business wantin’ to get married again. Said I was old
and ugly. They laughed at me when that young fellow threw me over. I
hated them and the Devil said: ‘Kill them!’ And I did.”
Her eyes lighted with unholy glee.
“I
liked their funerals. I could get dressed up and see folks and talk to
them. I didn’t miss a funeral in twenty years. The only fun I ever had
was after I kilt people.”
She signed a complete confession.
At
her trial defense lawyers tried to prove she was an epileptic and had
been insane since birth, but the jury did not agree with them.
They
found Martha Hazel Wise guilty and she was sentenced to life
imprisonment in the Ohio State Penitentiary for Women at Marysville
where she still is today. No one ever knew how she set all those fires
and committed her mysterious thefts. Perhaps the Devil did have a hand in those terrible months after all.
[Ben
Nelson, “The Devil In Hardscrabble Alley,” The American Weekly
(magazine section of the San Antonio Light) (San Antonio, Tx.), Jan. 4,
1942, p. 9]
***
VICTIMS:
For more cases, see Sicko Nurses
***
FULL
TEXT (Article 3 of 3): Columbus, Ohio – The woman who once was known as “the
Poison Widow of Hardscraple,” has found freedom to be a temporary thing.
Mrs.
Martha Wise, 79, left Marysville Reformatory for Women Thursday afternoon on a
parole after serving more than half her life there for first-degree murder. Now
she is on her way back there – because nobody wants her. Rowland Lutz,
supervisor of probation and parole, said Mrs. Wise’s parole is being resdence and
her case taken under further study until a home can be found for her.
Thursday
night she stayed in Cincinnati with a parole officer. At the time she was
convicted in Medina in 1924 of the poison murder of a niece, Mrs. Lilly Gienke,
she was known as the Poison Widow of Hardscrabble. Mrs. Wise lived in
Hardscrabble community near Medina. At that time authorities blamed the other
poison deaths on Mrs. Wise.
The
victims were her mother, Mrs. Sophia Hasel, and Mrs. Gienke’s husband, Fred.
Thirteen persons were made ill by arsenic poisoning.
Mrs.
Helen Nicholson, the parole officer, said she brought Mrs. Wise home with her
after Mrs. Muriel Worthing of Blanchester changed her mind about taking the
aged woman into her home as a boarder.
Mrs.
Nicholson said Mrs. Worthing apparently became fearful of the reaction in a
small town such as Blanchester.
Parole
officials in Columbus said Mrs. Wise’s relatives – two brothers, three sons a
daughter and a sister, have all declined to be responsible for her.
[“Poison Widow Back In Cell,” The Daily
Reporter (Dover, Oh.), Feb. 2, 1962, p. 11]
***
VICTIMS:
Died:
Sophie Hasel (mother of Martha Wise), poisoned on Nov. 27,
1924, Thanksgiving evening, died December 13, 1924.
Fred Gienke, (uncle of Martha Wise), poisoned on Dec. 31,
1924, died February 1925.
Lily Gienke (Fred’s wife, poisoned on Dec. 31, 1924, died
February 1925.
Survived:
Nov. 27, 1924, Thanksgiving evening, several members of the
family, poisoned, survived.
Several children of Martha’ Wise’s uncle poisoned on Dec.
31, 1924, recovered.
***
NOTE: “Female serial killers are rare” is a false stereotype
that was invented in the late 20 the century. This faulty claim
based on the fact that, due to prejudice and chivalry, criminologists have
traditionally avoided looking at female styles of criminality seriously and
thus fail to put devote adequate resources to research the topic. The
introduction of fallacious Marxian theories in the post-1960s period has
exacerbated this state of affairs by
fostering outright distortions and censorship in the study of female
violence among scholars.
SEE: “Three women Who Admit Poisoning 29 Persons,”
syndicated, Lock Haven Express (Pa.), May 1, 1925, p. 2
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For more cases, see Sicko Nurses
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[16751-1/4/21]
***
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