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Martha M.
PLACE
Classification: Murderer
Characteristics:
Jealousy
Number of victims: 1
Date of murder: February 7, 1899
Date of arrest:
Same day
Date of birth: 1854
Victim profile: Ida Place, 17 (her stepdaughter)
Method of murder:
Suffocation with a pillow
Location: New York City, Kings County, New York, USA
Status:
Executed
by electrocution at Sing Sing prison on April 8, 1899 (the
first woman to die in the electric chair)
Martha M. Place
was the first of 26 women (including one juvenile) to die in the
electric chair when she was executed on April 8, 1899 at Sing Sing
prison.
Born in New Jersey,
Martha Place was struck in the head by a sleigh at age 23. Her brother
claimed that she never completely recovered and that the accident left
her mentally unstable.
Martha married
widower William Place in 1893. Place had a daughter named Ida from a
previous marriage. William married Martha to help him raise his
daughter, although it was later rumored that Martha was jealous of
Ida. William called the police at least once to arrest his wife for
threatening to kill Ida.
On February 7, 1899,
William Place arrived at his Brooklyn, New York home and was attacked
by Martha who was wielding an axe. Place called for help and when the
police arrived, the bloodied body of 17 year old Ida was discovered
under a bed, her mouth burnt from having acid forced into it. The
evidence indicated Ida was smothered to death.
Martha proclaimed
her innocence while awaiting trial. One contemporary newspaper report
described the defendant in this way: "She is
rather tall and spare, with a pale, sharp face. Her nose is long and
pointed, her chin sharp and prominent, her lips thin and her forehead
retreating. There is something about her face that reminds one of a
rat’s, and the bright but changeless eyes somehow strengthen the
impression."
Martha Place was
found guilty of the murder of her stepdaughter Ida and sentenced to
death on March 20, 1899. Her husband was a key witness against her.
Having never
executed a woman in the electric chair, those responsible for carrying
out the death warrant devised a new way to place the electrodes upon
her. They decided to slit her dress and place the electrode on her
ankle. Edwin Davis was the executioner. According to the reports of
witnesses, she died instantly.
The governor of the
State of New York Theodore Roosevelt was asked to pardon Place, but he
refused. Martha Place was buried in the family cemetery plot in East
Millstone, New Jersey without religious observances.
Martha M. Place (1854 or 1855 – March 20,
1899) was the first woman to die in the electric chair. She was
executed on March 20, 1899 at age 44, in Sing Sing prison for the
murder of her stepdaughter Ida Place.
Background
Born in New Jersey, Martha Place was struck in the
head by a sleigh at age 23. Her brother claimed that she never
completely recovered and that the accident left her mentally unstable.
Martha married widower William Place in 1893. Place had a daughter
named Ida from a previous marriage. William married Martha to help him
raise his daughter, although it was later rumored that Martha was
jealous of Ida. William called the police at least once to arrest his
wife for threatening to kill Ida.
Murder
On the evening of February 7, 1898, William Place
arrived at his Brooklyn, New York home and was attacked by Martha, who
was wielding an axe. William escaped for help and when the police
arrived, they found Martha Place in critical condition lying on the
floor with clothes over her head and gas from burners escaping into
the room. Upstairs they discovered the dead body of 17-year-old Ida
Place lying on a bed. Her mouth was bleeding and her eyes disfigured
from having acid thrown in them. The evidence later indicated Ida
Place died from asphyxiation. Martha Place was hospitalized and
arrested.
Trial
Place proclaimed her innocence while awaiting
trial. One contemporary newspaper report described the defendant in
this way:
"She is rather tall and spare, with a pale, sharp
face. Her nose is long and pointed, her chin sharp and prominent, her
lips thin and her forehead retreating. There is something about her
face that reminds one of a rat’s, and the bright but changeless eyes
somehow strengthen the impression".
Martha Place was found guilty of the murder of her
stepdaughter Ida and sentenced to death. Her husband was a key witness
against her.
Execution
Having never executed a woman in the electric
chair, those responsible for carrying out the death warrant devised a
new way to place the electrodes upon her. They decided to slit her
dress and place the electrode on her ankle. Edwin F. Davis was the
executioner. According to the reports of witnesses, she died
instantly.
The governor of the State of New York Theodore
Roosevelt was asked to commute Place from the death sentence, but he
refused. Martha Place was buried in the family cemetery plot in East
Millstone, New Jersey without religious observances.
Although Place was the first woman to die in the
electric chair, she was not the first woman sentenced to it; that
woman was Maria Barbella, who was later found not guilty of her crime
and released.
Wikipedia.org
PLACE,
Martha Garretson (USA)
Many
people aspire to achieve records, but Martha Place achieved a place in
the record books for which she would rather not have qualified, for
she became the first woman to be executed in the electric chair.
As
Martha Garretson she was employed by widower William Place as his
housekeeper, but their relationship became closer and they got
married. William already had a daughter, Ida, by his first wife, and
Martha resented the affection shown by her new husband towards the
17-year-old girl to such an extent that it apparently affected her
mental balance, for on 7 February 1898, after an argument in which Ida
had sided with her father before he left for work, she viciously
attacked Ida, throwing acid into her eyes.
As the
girl covered her face in agony, Martha picked up an axe and felled her
with several violent blows; Ida collapsed on the floor, Martha then
piling pillows on her face and suffocating her. Newspapers were later
to describe the force of the axe blows, how a deep gash over the top
of her head reached down to her neck, her face being horribly burned
by the acid.
A
little while later, William came home to be the immediate target of
Martha’s axe; although with a severely fractured skull he managed to
struggle out of the house, neighbours then sending for the police. On
entering the house, the officers found Mrs Place unconscious, having
turned on the gas in an attempt to commit suicide. Medical help was
forthcoming, and she was revived – and arrested.
Such
was the horrific nature of her crimes that at her trial her defence
sought to enter a plea of insanity, but this proved unsustainable and
she was declared sane. Confident that she would at least be reprieved
at a re–trial, her spirits sank when this was refused.
In the
condemned cell in Sing Sing Prison she had several hysterical
outbursts, although following frequent prayer sessions with her
priest, and perhaps due to his guidance, she regained her
self-assurance when, on 20 March 1899, she was led to the execution
chamber where the executioner Edwin Davis awaited. There, seated in
the chair, she sat still and unresisting, holding a Bible in her hands
while her hair was clipped short, preparatory to the head electrode
being positioned.
A
female warder tightened the straps around her, attached the leg
electrode and covered her face with the mask. Davis then sent 1,760
volts surging through her body and after about four seconds had
elapsed, a further 200 volts were given, followed by a third wave of
current, this series of power bringing death to the murderess Martha
Garretson Place.
One of
the many newspaper journalists present reported that the execution was
a success, going on to describe how Martha’s death was certified ‘by a
woman physician dressed in the height of fashion, immaculate in a grey
dress and a huge hat with pronounced crimson trimmings’. Must have
been tricky using a stethoscope.
Amazing
True Stories of Female Executions by Geoffrey Abbott
Mrs. Place’s
execution
Electricity.
Whenever you sit down to count your blessings, count it among them.
Who knows how many lives have not been lost to house fires thanks to
the regulation of this phenomenon.
When
electricity first came into widespread use, it was hailed as a
cure-all -- useful to eliminate darkness, treat frigidity and
impotence and all manner of disease, and, -- let's get to it, execute
murderers.
One of the
first electrical executions, witnessed by Thomas Edison himself, was
not of a human but of an elephant. Apparently the elephant had killed
a man who'd fed it a lit cigar. The execution was pretty awful per the
account I heard -- the unfortunate animal "made a whole lot of smoke."
(I heard this story from my husband; Mr. James is a walking
encyclopedia of Edison lore; he insisted that we give our first child
the middle name Edison; I told him that it was awful to think about
killing an elephant this way, and it sounded to me as though the
elephant was guilty of manslaughter at most, and the story disturbed
me; he rolled his eyes and said something sarcastic about my taste in
true tales.)
But the
development of state-sponsored death by electrocution was seen as a
vast improvement over the method that preceded it, death by hanging.
Botched executions resulted from misjudgment of the required
counterweight, strength of rope, specific knot, or length of drop, and
any number of people were accidentally beheaded or slowly choked to
death when their necks failed to break.
In the state
of New York, prison officials were so upset when they witnessed the
execution of one woman who took fifteen minutes to die that they
resolved to find a better way. Electrocution promised to be a neat and
tidy and hands-off way of ending life that would keep the body intact
for Christian burial.
Executions by
electricity came into regular use in the 1890s; on this date, March
20, in 1899, the first woman was put to death in an electric chair in
Sing Sing prison in New York State.
Her name was
Martha Place. She had very little to recommend her; she was described
in the newspapers as "homely, old, ill-tempered, not loved by her
husband." The crime that sent her to the chair was the murder by
smothering of her stepdaughter Ida. She begrudged the young girl the
attentions of her father, William Place. "It was a murder so
shocking," said one journalist, "that nothing worse could be thought
of -- that is to say, only one thing worse could be thought of, and
that was the electric killing of the old woman."
New York is a
liberal state and the death sentence imposed on the woman was not
supported by public sentiment, and there was loud clamor for a
reprieve. No woman had been executed in New York for many years
because the governors who ruled there wouldn't allow it.
But when it
came time to make good on the sentence for Mrs. Place, the
conservative Teddy Roosevelt occupied the governor's office, and he
refused to be swayed by what he called "mawkish sentimentality."
There are
particulars about her death that are interesting, aside from the new
method. She was not informed of the exact time; instead, a few days
before the event, she was told that all hope of pardon was lost and
she was to prepare herself to go at any moment. She spent the last
several days of her life eating at the warden's table and exhibiting a
calm demeanor. The actual execution seems to have gone alright, as
these things go. She died very quickly.
It
was, per the prison doctor at Sing Sing, "the best execution that has
ever occurred here."
Accused Murderess Faces Her Victim
Mrs. Martha
Place Confesses that She Threw Acid in Ida’s Face
The World (New
York, N.Y.)
February 9,
1898
Mrs. Martha
Place, the woman who killed her step-daughter and tried to kill her
husband and herself on Monday in Brooklyn, made a partial confession
yesterday. She acknowledged everything but the foot that she had
murdered the girl. She said she threw acid in the girl’s face. She had
to be confronted with the corpse of her victim before she would talk.
William W.
Place, the husband, will recover. Only the outer wall of the skull was
fractured in one place by the axe blows. The splinters of bone were
removed and the operation of trephining successfully performed in the
afternoon. Mrs. Place spent Monday night in St. John’s Hospital,
Brooklyn. There the doctors found that there was little the matter
with her; that she had not inhaled enough gas to stir the pulse of a
baby.
Nevertheless
she feigned unconsciousness until about 6 A. M. yesterday. She moaned
and mumbled all night, calling for her husband.
“Where is
Willie? Why don’t Willie come to me?” she cried.
All the time
her husband was in the ward just above her, and the physicians did not
know then whether the axe wounds would kill him or not.
Woman Taken
from the Hospital
At 8 o’clock
A. M. Detective Becker told the woman to get ready to go to the Ralph
Avenue Police Station. She kept on moaning and walked with eyes half
closed to the trolley car in which she rode to the station-house.
There Capt.
Ennis and the detectives spent an hour trying to get her to say
something, but she kept up her wandering talk. Then the Captain told
Policeman North to go to the Hancock street house and get the dead
girl’s clothes and the blood-stained axe and bring them back to see if
they would shock her into talking. This was done, but without result.
Then an open
patrol wagon was called and Detectives Becker and Mitchell lifted the
woman in and the driver was told to proceed to her home. Mrs. Place
did not want to enter the house.
The detectives
rushed her up the stoop. They had to wait there a moment, and the
woman’s eyes wandered to the bell where the undertaker had fastened a
long string of lilies, white roses and smilax. The woman started at
this emblem of her crime.
Found the
Body of the Victim
Inside she was
half lifted up the stairs and into the little back room where the body
of the girl lay on the bed under a sheet. Becker stepped forward and
pulled the sheet aside, disclosing the face of the once beautiful
young girl.
The
step-mother stopped back, turned her eyes upward and refused to look
down.
“Why don’t you
look at her and say why you killed her?” said Becker.
Mrs. Place did
look down and said in a low voice:
“I didn’t kill
her. I threw acid in her face. That was all. I don’t know anything
about killing her.”
Without delay
the detectives took her to the patrol-wagon and back to the
station-house. There the matron talked with the woman and to her Mrs.
Place said her husband would not allow her to have her boy and that it
always worried her.
Then Captain
Ennis and the detectives again took her in hand, and after questioning
she made a partial confession.
Mrs.
Place’s Story of the Tragedy
“My husband
and myself had a dispute yesterday morning before he went to
business,” she said. “Ida had told him some stories about me. He asked
me about them. I denied them, and we had a sharp talk. Finally he hit
me in the face with his hand.
“When he had
gone I went to Ida’s room. She was dressing. I asked her what she
meant by telling such stories about me to her father. She answered me
sharply. We talked and argued for some time, and finally I left the
room slamming the door.
“I went into
my room. Then I saw a bottle with acid in it. I don’t know what kind
of acid it was. I poured the stuff into a cup, and again going to
Ida’s room. I opened the door and threw the stuff into her face. Then
I closed the door and did not go near her again.
“I spent most
of the day attending to the household work. I went downstairs to the
cellar to feed the furnace and saw the axe there. I expected that Mr.
Place would blame me when he came home. When I went down in the cellar
again I brought up the axe and kept it near me. I was afraid my
husband would strike me.
Hacked Her
Husband Twice
“When I heard
him come in I rushed toward him and struck him with the axe. When he
ran toward the door I struck him again. Then I went upstairs and tried
to kill myself.”
That is all
she would say. At 1 o’clock P. M. she was taken down to Police
Headquarters, where she was questioned by Deputy Chief MacKellan and
Assistant District-Attorney Clark. A stenographer was on hand to take
down her statement. Coroner Delai was also on hand. She practically
reported what she had told Capt. Ennis a short time before.
From Police
Headquarters she was taken to the Gates Avenue Police Court and
arraigned before Judge Worth a 2:30 o’clock, after a long wait in a
private room.
Detective
Baker made the forma charge against her of homicide by choking her
stepdaughter and pouring acid in her face of assault in the first
degree by attacking her husband with an ax and of attempting suicide
by inhaling gas. The woman stood with bowed head be fore the Justice,
her hands tightly clutching the brass railing project in from his desk
and tilting backward at such an angle that it seemed she would topple
over.
“No, No,
No,” She Kept Repeating
Two court
officers stood on either side of her. They had to almost drag her into
the room and then every few seconds they kept pushing her up to the
railing. All the time the charge was being read she kept repeating in
a high-pitched voice, but which could not be heard half a dozen feet
away:
“No! no! no! I
did not do that.”
As she had no
counsel, Lawyer Knittie was assigned to her, and he waive examination.
The hearing will be continued Feb. 15, at 2 P. M. From the court the
woman was taken to the Raymond Street Jail where she was placed in a
cell in the woman’s division. The Warden place a special guard at the
cell door to prevent her from killing herself.
She reached
the jail at 4 o’clock, an for five hours she walked up and down. She
was very nervous.
At 4 P. M.
Drs. Henderson and Moser under the direction of Coroner Delap, began
the autopsy on the girl’s body in the Hancock street house. Dr. Moser
is a pathologist. The autopsy was not finished until, after 6 P. M
Then Coroner Delap made his report.
Girl Died
from Suffocation
“The girl
undoubtedly came to her death by suffocation,” he said: “her eyes were
burned with acid; what kind of acid we do not yet know. The doctors
have taken with them certain portion of the stomach, which will be
examine microscopically.
“The result of
their examinations will be known on Thursday. We cannot yet tell If
there is poison in the stomach The acid in the girl’s eyes burned them
so that had she lived she would have been stone blind.
“The only
wound on the body was found just above the left ear. We cannot tell
whether it was caused by a blow or a fall. There was a clot of blood
on the brain.”
Last night the
undertaker took charge of the body. The funeral will take place
to-morrow.
Theodore Place
will confer to-day with his brother, father of the murdered girl,
about the funeral.
Father
Learns of Ida’s Death
It was not
intended to inform the unhappy man of his daughter’s terrible death,
but a young friend of the family visited the hospital early yesterday
morning and gave him some clippings from the morning papers. It was in
this way the father learned of the death of his daughter.
The police had
a long talk yesterday with Hulda Talm, the servant employed in the
Place household. From what she said and their own investigations they
believe Mrs. Place killed Ida between 8:30 and 9 o’clock, after a hard
struggle.
Mrs. Place,
they believe, began by scolding the girl while the latter was
dressing. The girl replied sharply and in a fit of rage the
step-mother got the acid, which is supposed to have been diluted
vitriol, and dashed it in the girl’s eyes.
Police
Theory of the Murder
Then, to
deaden the screams of the suffering girl, who was slight and an infant
in strength to the muscular woman, he step-mother threw Ida on the
bed, pulled a large pillow over the girl’s face and then knelt on it
until Ida became still. The stillness was death.
Hulda Talm
said yesterday she heard one scream from Ida’s room early in the day
but supposed it was merely one of the usual quarrels between the
laughter and stepmother.
Hulda said
Mrs. Place kept her out if the house all day Monday on various
errands, as told in yesterday’s World.
Edward
Scheldecker, the young man engaged to marry Ida, remembered yesterday
morning that the girl’s fox-terrier Trilby and four puppies were in
the house. He went around to get them to care for them.
Police Say
the Food Was Poisoned
“I went down
in the dining-room,” laid young Scholdecker to a World reporter, “and
thinking the dogs were hungry started to give them some food from the
table. The policemen then told me to look out, that I would kill the
dogs.
“They said all
the food on the table was poisoned and that all the food in the house
had been fixed. It looks as if she had intended to kill all hands that
way, but changed her mind.”
Ida Place’s
girl chum was Gertrude Elebbard, daughter of Mrs. Anna M. Hobbard, of
No. 268 Reid avenue. Gertrude Hcblxinl was engaged to marry Frederick
Fahreivkarg, a private detective employed by the American Detective
Association.
Mr. Place
Wanted a Divorce
Several months
ago Mr. Place hired Fahrenkarg, according to Miss Hebbard’s statement
to a World reporter to shadow Mrs. Place and if possible obtain
evidence on which he could begin divorce proceedings.
For a long
time Fahrenkarg followed Mrs. Place every time she went out. He
followed her to Newark when she went to visit her son, and to New
Brunswick when she visited her brother. He obtained no evidence.
Mrs. Hebbard
and Ida had arranged to be married at the same time and place. Late on
Monday night young Scheidecker visited Miss Hebbard.
“There will be
no double wedding now. Ida is dead.”
That was the
way the girl learned of her friend’s death.
Theodore
Place, brother of the injured man, said yesterday that he believed his
sister-in-law was crazy from drink when she committed the crime. He
said she had the most fearful temper that he ever saw in any human
being.
Mrs. Place
used to ride a bicycle; so did Ida; but they seldom rode out together.
Crowds
Around the House
That part of
Brooklyn in the vicinity of Hancock street was on the tiptoe of
curiosity all day yesterday. There were seldom less than 500 people
about the house.
After school
hours hundreds of boys and girls collected: there were women in fine
clothes, some of them wheeling infants in carriages and others
carrying babies in their arms or attended by nurse girls.
In hunting for
the motive of the strange crime, the police and relatives agree that
it was simply the ignorant jealousy of Mrs. Place. She was a
house-servant when Mr. Place married.
The husband is
a quiet, scholarly man, fond of pleasures of which his second wife
knew nothing. He likes books, is fond of music and is a clever
musician in an amateur way; he is interested in photography and has a
fancy for dabbling in many of the sciences. Ida was like her father.
The two
brothers of Mr. Place. Theodore and Charles, who lived in the
immediate neighborhood. could not tolerate Mrs. Place. They and their
families ostracized her.
Blamed
Husband, Then the Girl
Mrs. Place
blamed her husband first, and when Ida began to grow into womanhood,
she blamed her. She saw the girl gradually usurp her place in the
household. The little house at No. 598 Hancock street was in Ida’s
name.
But the great
obstacle to happiness in the household was the refusal of the husband
to allow his wife to bring to the home a son by her first husband.
This boy is now fourteen years old. He was christened Ross Savacool.
When he was
three years old his mother and father separated. The father went West,
and it is supposed to be still living. After the separation the mother
was left in poor circumstances. She could not support the child and
arranged for its adoption by William B. Aschenbach, a wealthy harness
manufacturer on South Orange avenue, Vallsburg, near Newark. They
changed the name of the boy to William J. Aschenbach, jr., for a son
they had just lost.
Had the
Temper of a Tigress
Every time Mr.
Place refused his wife shelter for her son she would lose control of
her temper, and the real tigress in her would come to the surface. She
would yell and screech at the top of her voice and threaten the father
and daughter with violence.
More than once
Ida had to leave the house and stop with friends to escape the
frenzied outbreaks of the stepmother. For months the woman knew that
her life would end in some fearful tragedy.
As long ago as
September last she made preparations by writing a letter to her niece,
Grace Garretson, in New Brunswick, N. J.. and arranging for the
payment of $200 to her son Ross.
This letter
was only mailed Monday after Ida was dead. Other letters were mailed
at the same time to her brother, Peter Garretson, a baggage-master on
the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Her New Jersey
friends declare that Mrs. Place was injured some twenty years ago by
being thrown out of a carriage and striking on her head. They say she
always asserted that she suffered from pains in her head. The defense
for her crime will certainly be insanity.
Clever at
Simulating Insanity
The Brooklyn
police said yesterday she was a clever actress at simulating insanity;
that she posed as demented from the hour of the discovery of her crime
until confronted with the distorted body of her step-daughter.
Mrs. Place is
about 6 feet 7 Inches in height. She is not stout, but looks hard and
muscular. She weighs about 150 or 160 pounds. Her hands are large and
bony.
Her face Is
not pleasant. She is forty-eight years old. Her hair is scant and
thin. It is a colorless brown, streaked with gray. Yesterday it was
rolled up in a tiny knot at the back of her head. Her face is seamed
with lines. She looks like a woman who has spent most of life fretting
and worrying.
Eyes That
Evade Inspection
Her eyes are a
cold gray and do not look squarely at a person talking to her. Her
nose is thin, straight and with wide nostrils. Her lips arc thin and
bloodless and are held tightly against the teeth.
The forehead
is low and narrow. The chin is full at the sides and tapers almost to
a point in front. Her cheekbones stick out and her jaws are square.
Altogether her
face is a strange one. To those who knew her crime and saw her for the
first time yesterday it was an appropriate face; one that seemed
capable of exquisite cruelty, but not brutality, like that of Mrs.
Nack’s [another infamous murderess of the time]. Detective Becker, who
was with her constantly from the time of her arrest Monday night until
she was locked up in Raymond Street Jail at 4 P. M. yesterday, said
last night:
“She has a
cruel face, a cruel heart and she is a great actress.”
New
Brunswick Was Shocked
The news of
the crime of Mattie Garretson Place caused intense surprise in New
Brunswick, N. J., where she lived for many years and where she is well
known. Her youthful victim, too, had many acquaintances In New
Brunswick. Ida Place spent all last summer in New Brunswick as the
guest of the family of Hendricks Vliet, a wealthy clothing dealer. She
was a beautiful and daring bicyclist, and always over her short, crisp
curls she wore a military fatigue cap.
Mrs. Place was
the daughter of Isaac V. M. Garretson, a farmer, who owned a place
near Millstone, about six miles from New Brunswick. She went to New
Brunswick to live after her father had given up farming. About fifteen
years ago she and her sister, now dead, conducted a dressmaking
business in New Brunswick.
Mattie married
a man named Savacool at Newark. One child was them – a boy whom they
named Ross. Four years after marriage they separated. Then the woman
went to Asbury Park to live. She did dressmaking for a time and later
became housekeeper for William M. Place, then living at Asbury Park.
Subsequently she went to his home at Brooklyn.
Mrs.
Place’s Brother Overcome
All of Mrs.
Place’s family are dead with the exception of one brother, Peter
Garretson, who lives at No. 318 Seaman street, New Brunswick. He was
almost overcome with the shock of the news that his sister was in such
trouble. he said:
“When I
reached Jersey City this morning I tried to go over to Brooklyn to see
Mattie, but I couldn’t get up the sand. There isn’t the slightest
doubt that she was insane. All these stories that she was jealous of
Ida must be wrong. Why, she loved that little girl.
“Ever since
she was forced to let her boy Ross go among strangers she has worried
and fretted over that. She was wonderfully attached to him. I think
that brooding over her future to get the boy turned her brain, which
was none too strong on account of a carriage accident.”
Before
checking her trunk to her brother Mrs. Place wrote several letters.
Garretson received these letters in the morning mall. There were two
letters, one of which contained several notes written in pencil, on
the back leaves torn from a blank-hook.
The other
envelope contained similar enclosures, also the key of the trunk, the
check for the trunk, a ticket from Brooklyn to New York purchased on
Feb. 7, on which the trunk had been checked, and $25.
Sent Her
Money to Her Brother
There were six
notes in all, two addressed to her niece, Grace Garretson and the rest
to her brother. In addition to the letters she sent two bankbooks, one
No. 103,086, on the Howard Savings Institution of Newark, showing
deposits of $1.074.08, and the other No. 312,312 on the Brooklyn
Savings Bank, showing deposits of $213.83.
[She was
thought to have] some intention of killing herself, if not the rest of
her family, for some time. One letter that bears date of Sept. 20,
1897, and is addressed to Grace Garreton, is as follows:
“Dear Grace
Garretson: If anything should happen to me please take $200 for
yourself and keep the rest for my on Ross when he comes of age and he
to use it for a good purpose. Hoping you will favor my request. I
remain – “MATTIE M. PLACE, “598 Hancock street.”
This letter is
written on a piece of legal cap. It is written in ink. But crawled
across the bottom in pencil in a tremulous hand, as if the writer were
laboring under great mental agitation, were the words: “Now is the
time. Get our papa to attend to this.”
All of the
other letters are similar in tenor.
Capt. Ennis,
of the Ralph Avenue Station, who telegraphed to the New Brunswick
police to have Mrs. Place’s trunk sent back to him, received word late
last night that this could not be one just yet because of objections
lade by the railroad company, which refused to give it up until its
ownership is settled.
Martha Place
was executed on March 20, 1899 at Sing Sing. She was the first woman
to die by means of electric chair.
