Morbid Fact Du Jour!

Today’s Corrosive Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The swallowing of corrosive poisons—acids, alkalis and metallic salts—causes a particularly unpleasant kind of death. These agents erode and destroy the tissues with which they come into contact. Death from corrosive poisoning is commonly the result of suicide or accident. The ready availability of compounds such as metal polishes, bleaches, toilet cleansers and disinfectants make them convenient agents for suicide. The widespread industrial use of corrosive materials, also increases the dangers of accidents.

The destructive nature of the mineral acids has led to their criminal use in disfigurement and in the disposal of bodies.

When a corrosive is swallowed the tissues in contact with it are in some measure destroyed: the victim feels a burning sensation in the mouth and throat, and there is intense stomach pain: this is followed by vomiting of shreds of blood-stained material, accompanied by intense thirst. Choking is common, and the air passages will probably be congested, especially if the poison is volatile, such as ammonia or fuming acid.

There will be signs of corrosion around the mouth and lips—grey or brownish stains. Consciousness is usually of color as respiration breaks down, and death usually follows within a few hours of a fatal dose, and results from a combination of shock, extensive tissue damage and respiratory failure. Post-mortem examination will show the destruction of those tissues affected by the corrosive. The extent and coloration of damage will identify the agent used if that is in doubt.

Hydrochloric Acid and Sulfuric Acid –> Grey/black
Nitric Acid –> Red/brown
Caustic alkalis –> Grey/white
Cresols –> Brown
Mercury Chloride –> Blue/white

Some corrosive agents have a double effect—attacking the tissues directly and also acting on the central nervous system: such poisons are carbolic acid and oxalic acid. Carbolic acid in its pure form is phenol, and is used as a component in many branded disinfectants. These agents have a corrosive action which is partly modified by their anesthetic effect—vomiting is therefore uncommon. But they also have a depressant action, and death usually results within about three hours from respiratory or cardiac failure; a fatal dose may be as low as 4 ml. but recoveries have been recorded from much higher doses. Phenol may also be absorbed through the skin.

Sulphuric acid—Oil of Vitriol—is one of the strongest corrosive poisons. It is used extensively in its most concentrated form for industrial purposes and also in laboratory work, but battery acid (30% sulphuric acid) is still sufficiently strong to cause corrosive poisoning. Sulphuric acid acts by extracting water from the tissues and, in the process, generates considerable heat. This has a charring and blackening effect. Perforation of the esophagus and stomach is likely to follow this.

Accidentally inhalation of sulphuric acid

Hydrochloric and nitric acids give off irritant fumes and therefore involve the respiratory system. Their destructive effects are less severe than those of sulphuric acid.

The principle alkaline corrosive poison is ammonia. It has an intensely irritating vapor and usually involves the air passages; it is commonly used in suicide and is frequently taken by accident. Many cleaning fluids contain ammonia in large proportions. The choking fumes of concentrated ammonia may cause cardiac failure, and they are particularly dangerous when inhaled, as they dissolve in the mucous membranes, thereby prolonging their action.

Culled from: Crimes and Punishment, the Illustrated Crime Encyclopedia #1

Post-Mortem Portrait Du Jour!

Baby Bundled in Paisley Quilt
Ambrtotype 1/6 Plate, Circa 1862

Culled from: Sleeping Beauty III

Garretdom!

A Madman’s Horrible Deed.

TROY, N. Y., Sept. 19.—Dexter P. Wager, a farmer at Cropseyville, this county, has for a week past manifested signs of insanity. Yesterday morning he drove his wife and mother-in-law from the house. When they returned it was found that Wager had cut from ear to ear the throat of his daughter, aged three years. After a struggle the madman was secured and committed to jail.

Culled from the collection of The Comtesse DeSpair
1886 Morbid Scrapbook

Today’s Ripped Open Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Marvin Lesley Schrader, 30, of Spokane, Washington, became Yellowstone’s first bison fatality on July 12, 1971, at Fountain Flats north of Old Faithful. Schrader, his wife, and three children spotted a solitary bull buffalo lying down in a meadow just east of Rush Lake that day. Schrader walked to within twenty feet of it to take its picture. The one-ton bison stood up, charged Schrader, and tossed him more than twelve feet. The animals’ horns ripped open the man’s upper right abdomen, and pierced his liver. With a large hole in his side, Schrader attempted unsuccessfully to rise onto one elbow, then lay on the ground groaning for a few minutes while his wife and children watched him die. Mrs. Bonnie Schrader admitted later that they had been too close to the bison. In the family’s possession was the park’s read “Danger” pamphlet that warned of wild animals.

Culled from: Death in Yellowstone

Civil War Injury Du Jour!

G. Porubsky, Co. B. 46th NY volunteer displaying excision of humerus. This photograph from Bontecou’s teaching album shows the drawn-in suspected path of the bullet. Bontecou’s operation of bone removal in the upper arm left the patient with a useless limb. Many were amputated in the antiseptic surgical era of the 1880s.

Culled from: Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Photography by R.B. Bontecou

Garretdom!

COULD NOT LEAVE ETHEL.

A Mother Drowns Her Little Daughter and Then Hangs Herself.

The Shocking Tragedy that Broke Up a Happy Home in Brooklyn and Drove a Fond Husband and Father Almost to the Verge of Insanity.

NEW YORK, Sept. 19.—A shocking domestic tragedy occurred yesterday at 438 Monroe street, Brooklyn, the residence of Wm. H. Hubbell, the Adjutant of the Forty-seventh Regiment, and for nearly twenty years an employee in the dry goods commission-house of Van Valkenburg & Co. in Worth street, near Church, in this city. Mr Hubbell, his wife Annie, aged thirty-six years, his seventeen-year-old crippled son George, and his seven-year-old daughter Ethel composed the little household. Mrs. Hubbell, although for some time in rather delicate health, attended to her own house-hold duties, and no servant was employed. According to the stories of relatives and neighbors Mr. Hubbell was a kind husband, and the relations between him and his wife had always been harmonious. Last night he was suffering from a shock which almost deprived him of his reason.

During his absence at business yesterday his wife sent her crippled son to his grandmother’s house in Greenpoint, summoned her daughter Ethel from play with some other children in front of the house, stripped her naked and drowned her in the bath tub, and then hanged herself from the bath room door.

Mr. Hubbell made the shocking discovery when he returned home about five o’clock. He was surprised on reaching the house to find all the windows closed and the blinds drawn down. This was unusual, as his wife and blue-eyed little daughter generally sat at the basement window every evening awaiting his return from business and greeted him with kisses. On ascending the stoop and opening the front door he found a note in the vestibule. The envelope bore his name and this significant warning: “Do not come in alone.”

The writing was in pencil, and he recognized it as his wife’s. He was much alarmed especially when he tried to open the inside door with his latch key and found it bolted. Tearing open the envelope and throwing it aside he read the contents of the note. It informed him that his wife had determined to end her life, and that she could not find it in her heart to leave Ethel behind her. She bade her husband a sad farewell and begged him to forgive her of the act, and to remember her kindly. With terrible apprehensions of what had taken place Mr. Hubbell burst open the door and after searching in vain for his wife and the children, rushed upstairs. In the little bath-room, between the front and back rooms, on the second floor he found his wife dead suspended by the neck from a hook on the back of the door, and with her face pressed against the door, and her feet almost touching the ground. Little Ethel had drowned face upward, in the bath-tub which was almost filled with water.

The spectacle appalled him, and he rushed from the house to the residence of his brother-in-law on Quincy street, a few blocks distant. He sent a messenger for Mr. George C. Jaffreys, the family physician….

Everything indicated that both the murder and the suicide were deliberate. About noon Mrs. Hubbell kissed her son and told him to go to his grandmother’s house in Greenpoint and remain there until his father went for him. About one o’clock she called to Ethel, who was playing with some children on the opposite side of the street.

“Come in, Ethel, I want to give you a bath before you go to your grandmother’s.”

Ethel hurried across and entered the house with her mother, who was noticed a few minutes later by one of the neighbors closing the windows and pulling down the blinds in the front of the house. The children’s clothes and hoses were carefully laid at the foot of the bath tub, and the little one was evidently conscious until the last moment of her mother’s intention. Marks on her neck indicated that she had been forcibly held under the water until the mother was satisfied that she was dead. A flatiron was found in the bath-room, and it is supposed to have been used by the mother in keeping the body under the water. In taking her own life Mrs. Hubbell had tied one end of a piece of clothes line around the top binge of the door and fastened the other around her neck, adjusting a large knot under the left ear. She then twisted the slack of the rope around an iron hook several times until her feet were raised from the ground and thus strangled herself to death. Her face was much contorted. She wore a calico wrapper and slippers. She was a small woman of delicate appearances, and she could not have weighed more than ninety or ninety-five pounds. She had been in poor health for some time and frequently she suffered from fits of despondency, caused as it is supposed, through sympathy for her crippled son. She has never, however, threatened suicide, and the tragedy was a startling surprise to all her relatives and friends. She was married when she was eighteen years old, and until a few years ago was of a cheerful disposition. Dr. Jaffreys said last night:

“I have been Mr. Hubbell’s family physician for some time, and have known that Mrs. Hubbell’s health has been a cause of great anxiety to him. She suffered mentally as well as physically for several months, but there was nothing in her condition in either respect to excite any special claim. I have no doubt that she committed this act while she was suffering from emotional insanity. Her husband, I know, was kind an affectionate, and this morning while leaving the house his wife, he tells me, kissed him, and told him to come home as early as possible. Little Ethel was a bright, blue-eyed, brown-haired girl and was a great favorite with the children in the neighborhood.”

Culled from the collection of The Comtesse DeSpair
1886 Morbid Scrapbook

Today’s Horrifying Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The most horrifying attacks  against “witches” in the 16th century German lands were made in the Catholic territories. Though the new Protestant magistrates also prosecuted for witchcraft, they did not keep up with the prince-bishops and archbishop-electors of the Catholic ecclesiastical lands, executing one witch to the Catholics’ three. At Trier between 1587 and 1593, for example, under the direction of the Jesuit demonologist Peter Binsfeld, 368 witches were burned from twenty-two villages, a hunt so devastating that two villages were left with only one woman apiece. The abbot of Fulda was responsible for the deaths of over 700 witches at the beginning of the seventeenth century. A particularly vicious outbreak occurred at Ellwangen, where 390 person were burned between 1611 and 1618. The Teutonic Knights ordered the deaths of 124 in just two years, 1628 to 1630. In the conventual land of Quedlinburg, 133 witches were executed on one day in 1589. At Eichstätt, 274 person were burned at the stake apparently in one year, 1629.

Peter Binsfeld, what a dick!

The first wave of German trials victimized mainly women of the poor or middling sort, midwives like Walpurga Hausmänin, but as the supply of poor women ran low, accusers turned to women and men of the establishment. The nine hundred person put to death by the prince-bishop of Würzburg, for example, included nineteen of his priests and his own nephew. The archbishop-elector of Cologne ordered the deaths of the wives of his chancellor and his secretary. And at Bamberg the bishop executed six hundred witches, including his own chancellor and the burgermeister. Most grotesque was the execution of forty-one young children at Würzburg, a custom that grew in Germany until most major trials included children as both victims and accusers. These later witch hunters turned to younger victims, to men, and to persons of their own class. This last apparently led to a slackening of the craze (as in Offenburg), as the elite, fearful for their own lives, used their clout to stop the madness.

Poor Walpurga’s execution

Culled from: Witchcraze

Post-Mortem Portrait Du Jour!

Boy Rests With Eyes Half Open
Daguerreotype 1/6 Plate, Circa 1848

Culled from: Sleeping Beauty III

Garretdom: Race Riot Edition!

FOUR-MILE-RUN’S TRAGEDY

An Irishman Killed in a Fight, and an Italian Fatally Wounded.

PITTSBURG, Pa., Sept. 19.—Four-Mile-Run, in the Fourteenth ward, was the scene of a bloody race riot at noon to-day, in which two of the participants received fatal injuries. The fight was the result of bad feeling existing among the Irish and Italian laborers who have their abode in that neighborhood. On Saturday night, while Joseph Vernard, an Italian, was on his way home, he was attacked by a gang of Irishmen. There were six in the assailing party, and it is said they were under the leadership of two brothers named Daly. Vernard was terribly beaten, but managed to escape to his home. No more trouble occurred until noon to-day, when a gang of twenty Irishmen called at Vernard’s house and demanded admittance. A number of Italian boarders were in the house at the time, and the doors were quickly barred. The assailants, however, battered the doors down and rushed into the house.

A free fight followed, in the progress of which “Paddy” Rocco, an Italian, had his skull crushed with a chair, and Patrick Constantine, an Irishman, was shot in the abdomen. The sight of the prostrate men seemed to frighten the others, and a general stampede took place, so that by the time the police arrived all had escaped. The wounded men were removed to a hospital, where Constantine died a few hours later. Rocco is still living , but his recovery is considered doubtful. Five of the Italians were arrested this afternoon, but the Irishmen are still at liberty. It is believed that the latter intended to drive the Italians from the neighborhood.

Culled from the collection of The Comtesse DeSpair
1886 Morbid Scrapbook

Today’s Decorated Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

More often than not, when trophy skulls from the Pacific War and Vietnam are found in America today, they are decorated with writing, pictures and paint, often courtesy of the soldiers who took them in the first place, but sometimes thanks to a subsequent owner. One skull, brought home from the Second World War by a Navy medic, was found later by his grandson, who spray-painted it gold, tied a bandana around it and put it in his bedroom, until he became frightened of it and threw it in a lake. [Some people should not be allowed to have nice things! – DeSpair]  Another,  brought back from Okinawa and painted entirely in red and silver, was handed over to a forensic team in the United States in the early 1980s. One skull taken from the skeletonized pilot of a crashed plane and brought back to Morgan County, Tennessee, had been enlarged to hold a light bulb at Halloween. Others have been found covered in graffiti and pictures, coloured with crayon, felt pen or paint, and stained with soot and wax from the candles they have held. These processes of domesticating the dead, and turning them from a person into a prop, began on the battlefield.

While on duty, decorating bones was, at one level, simply something to do, in a world where bones were everywhere. The time invested in this kind of artistry may tell of tedious days spent at base camp, but it also suggests a sense of pride and the desire to layer personal identity onto enemy bones. Perhaps these artefacts were an attempt to take control, to make death more familiar and manageable: to convert the confusing and violent death of another into the reassurance of caring for oneself. There was a catharsis to the craft. Decorated skulls and bones were simultaneously attractive playthings, memento mori and an assertion of power over the enemy. The act of appropriation could even be an expression both of supremacy and, perhaps, of solidarity or even affection.

Marine Recruiting Sergeant John Shough of Springfield holds the skull of a Japanese sniper who was killed on Guadalcanal 20 years ago during World War II.  Before the Japanese sniper was spotted tied high in a tree, he killed a young Marine who had gained quite a name for himself during the fighting. To avenge his death, other Marines in his group beheaded the sniper and upon his skull painted the emblem of the First Marine Division and the American Flag.

Culled from: Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

Ghastly!

Yosuke Yamahata photographed the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 10, 1945.  Here’s one of his haunting images from the book Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, August 10, 1945.

Garretdom!

MURDERED AT HIS MEAL.

James Keevan’s Wife Breaks His Head With a Sugar Bowl at the Tea-table.

PRINCETON, N. J., Sept. 23.—News was received here yesterday that a terrible murder was committed Tuesday evening at Kingston, between here and New Brunswick. The victim was James Keevan, who lived alone with his wife on the north side of the village. Both were over sixty-five years of age. It is supposed that Keevan was murdered by his wife after he had sat down to supper, the crime being the result of a quarrel. His dead body was found in a chair at the table on which he was leaning. A knife and fork were still in his hands. There was a frightful gash in his head and the fragments of a heavy sugar-bowl were scattered over the floor near the chair in which the murdered man sat. Keevan was a laborer and had had two or three wives. The murder caused the greatest excitement at Kingston and the surrounding country. The authorities at Somerville have been notified and they will take charge of the body, and probably arrest the woman.

Culled from the Friday, September 24, 1886 issue of the Louisville Courier-Journal

Follow-Up Article from the Evening Gazette (Pittston, PA), Thursday, December 30, 1886.

A Woman Guilty of Murder.

SOMERVILLE, N. J., Dec. 30.—Seldom has this community been in such a state of excitement as it has been since Monday, when the trial of the old woman Catharine Keevan for the murder of her husband, James Keevan, at Kingston, Sept. 21, begun before Judge Magie in the Somerset county court. The strange features of the horrible crime made it one of the most noteworthy in the criminal annals of the county. She killed her husband by smashing his head with a sugar bowl. She was found guilty of murder in the second degree and thus saved from the gallows.