Following are excerpts from two articles about an East St. Louis man, Alexander Belleville, who, from 1856-1898, had been marries seven times and widowed seven times. He
related the story of his fifth marriage to Mary Shell, whom he married in 1874 and
afterwards was told she was suspected of murdering two husbands, so far. Their
marriage, which was fraught with violent acts on the part of the wife, lasted
only five months before she died of pneumonia.
[Note: One article spells the name as “Shell,” the other as
“Schell.”]
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EXCERPT: “Three months after my last misfortune I met and
married Mary Shell [sic] of St. Louis. Mary was a blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked
woman, and looked like she would live forever, but, would you believe it, she
only stayed with me five months? Then she took pneumonia and died.”
[“Buried 7 Wives.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Mo.), May 29,
1898, p. 19]
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EXCERPT: “Then I got bit again – worse a whole lot than the
first time. I tackled Mary Schell, a Tennessee widow, and, say, she must ‘a’
been a niece or somethin’ closer to Old Harry* Himself! [*slang for "The Devil"].
“After we got married somebody told me that she had murdered
two husbands in Tennessee. I got to believin’ the story after noticin’ that she
always went to bed with a razor under her pillow. I mustered up courage onct or
twice to ask her what she had the razor for, and she said if I’d ‘tend to my own
business it wouldn’t bother me tryin’ to find out other people’s. we had
several set-tos, but I always managed to quit before she got to the razor act,
till one day she got my French up. I went home from work that evening and
didn’t see my two children about the premises. She hated the children because
they wasn’t hers and I was always scared that she would put them out of the way
somehow.
“I said, ‘Mary, where’s Ed and Annie’, meanin’ the two kids.
She said:
“’None of your durned business.”
Just then I heard Eddie say:
“’Here I am, pa.’
“I looked around and found the kids in a barrel covered over
with a rock almost too heavy for me to lift to weight it down. That woman had
kept them kids in that barrel 12 long hours with nothin’ to eat or drink, and
mebbe I wasn’t mad! But she pulled the razor and chased me and the kids off the
premises. Failing to find an officer I armed myself and went back to the house,
and found everything sliced up into ribbons. When the woman saw my armory she
lit a rag. I went uptown to get her arrested. The police asked me to help ‘em
and then locked us both up. Soon as I got out I applied for a divorce, but
before the trial she came back to the house and nearly carved me to pieces with
that same razor. Then I believed that the Tennessee story was straight goods and
got the divorce.
[“Alexander Belleville Talks of Matrimony And His Seven
Wives – Belleville’s Epigramatic Estimate of Married Life.” St. Louis
Post-Dispatch (Mo.), Oct. 1, 1899, p. 42]
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For links to other cases of woman who murdered 2 or more husbands (or paramours), see Black Widow Serial Killers.
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[53-21/2/21]
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