The details in this essay may shock you.
Don’t read on unless you want to understand why some people commit multiple murders. In order to understand, we will have to go into the grisly details. Steel yourself or turn away and pretend it isn’t true.
Everything in this essay is absolutely true nonfiction, 1,000%.
…
It was not too long after the Civil War, in the remote mountains of eastern Kentucky, USA.
A woman murdered her husband, by poisoning him.
Then she preserved his body, and kept him sitting in a chair, fully dressed, in a locked room, eyelids closed. (They had a taxidermy business, well-known in the area.)
Then she murdered two other men, both of whom asked too many questions.
She preserved both and also kept them in the locked room, sitting in chairs with their clothes on.
She convinced her 17-year-old son that he was no longer himself, that he had literally become his own father.
And she became pregnant with her own son. She believed that both the new baby and her 17-year-old son really were her dead husband returned to her – even though she was the one who’d murdered him in the first place.
Her other son, a 14-year-old, was also made to believe that he played a special role in all of this.
But he never really bought into any of it, although he was loyal to her and played his role to the hilt, probably in the same manner as the 17-year-old sometimes.
The sheriff discovered these horrors, by sneaking in through the window where the three preserved bodies were kept, pistol in hand.
The woman and her two sons caught him in the act.
The 17-year-old tried to attack him and the sheriff shot him dead on the spot in terrified self-defense.
The mother and the 14-year-old now went peacefully as he handcuffed them and took them away to the nearest town, which was three hours distant down the mountain trails.
Of course, he brought the baby with them as well.
The baby was sent away to another state, for adoption or to the orphanage.
The mother and her 14-year-old son were given their date with the hangman.
The answer of the town was more murder. Four people are dead because of you. Now you die too.
Hundreds came out to see it, just like people always did back then. Hangings were social occasions, among other things.
The boy apologized, wept, begged forgiveness.
The mother remained firm.
She never thought she had done anything wrong at all.
She was a true believer until the end.
The sheriff never got over it.
…
I don’t want to cast stones at this woman and say how evil she was.
Everyone knows that her behavior was “evil.” (Not everyone, in fact. There are many just as mad as she was among us even now – or especially now.)
…
I don’t want to cast stones at this woman.
I want to know why she did it.
…
The Drifter has compiled a list of eleven reasons why she did it.
Only when ALL of these reasons are combined and considered, separately and at once, can any kind of rational, scientific explanation be made for her actions. (The entire essay is just under 1,200 words in length.)
But if you add all eleven of these up, put them together in different combinations, and think about them deeply, her motivations do indeed become exceedingly clear.
…
She was an artist. Her house was filled with bizarre art which visitors described as looking both overly civilized and demonically primitive at the same time.
Some visitors ignored it.
Others were unnerved by it, and described it as “unnatural,” although they didn’t know why.
…
Rural isolation. The family lived three hours away from the nearest town, an hour away from the nearest village, and almost as far away from their nearest neighbor, as well. They went days, and sometimes weeks, and sometimes in the winter, months, without seeing other people, except themselves.
…
Preservation and butchering of animals. The family ran a well-known taxidermy business. And they also ran a farm, where they daily killed most of the animals they used for meat. Such closeness to death inures the subject to death on more than one level.
…
DEATH ITSELF. We live in a universe of death, and it does weird things to people.
…
Religious mania. One of this woman’s responses to living in a universe of death was to become fanatically religious, so that she no longer believed in death. After someone was dead, they weren’t dead. At least not in her mind.
(And on the other hand, almost no one didn’t believe in the afterlife back then. Even Darwin himself was only ambivalent, not a hardcore unbeliever. Because believing in evolution doesn’t mean you don’t believe in a Creator God. His timeline is, to say the least, different than ours.)
…
Childhood trauma. There is a high likelihood that she was the victim of massive trauma during childhood. God knows what was done to her, by whom, or where and when, when she was an innocent child.
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Genetics. She was almost surely born with a mind predisposed to go insane.
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The patriarchy. She was forced to follow her husband’s orders to a large extent. And if she didn’t follow those orders, and keep her mouth shut about it, too, physical beatings and other punishments (like involuntary confinement) would not have been at all uncommon.
…
Love AND hatred. She clearly hated the man or she wouldn’t have poisoned him. And she clearly loved him since she couldn’t get rid of him. Her last words on the gallows were, “Now I’m going to where my husband is.”
…
The will. Her will and her willpower made her want to rule her own world and to elude capture.
…
America. She lived in a time right after the bloodiest war in human history up to that point, where modern warfare came into its own, where the South had been ravaged and destroyed, and also the American world of outsiders, gun fighters, outlaws, desperadoes. And a world that had seen the Native Americans decimated. But where your own family (if you were white) could also be decimated by angry Native Americans. And a world of slavery (although the area in which she lived didn’t have slavery), a world of the most brutal slavery humankind has ever invented. And also a world where the individual was very much encouraged to do whatever you wanted (if you were white at the time), an idea that was technically made for men by men, but that surely influenced the women, too.
…
When we add up all these reasons, we might even ask ourselves why it was that everyone didn’t go insane.
…
Digression Coda: In America THE GUN means “no one can tell me what to do.” It’s one reason why people who’ve been bullied and beaten down turn to the gun. Until we can convince the average populace that their true freedom really lies in other means, we’re gonna have a gun problem.
Final Detail: Her artwork was burned.
Saragun Springs 
Hello Drifter
Seems harsh the 14 year old was hanged. But the rope was pretty liberal back then.
Chilling, and it speaks of Ed Gein who was raised by his hyper religious mother in isolation (though not as profoundly out in the sticks). And Ed made home implements and art out of the bodies he dug up. I resist placing quotation marks around art.
Your reasons make sense and I imagine each one contributed to a psychological accident in the woman’s mind. All of those things needed to be present.
Gives one cause to think.
Leila
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Leila
Weirdly enough I drove by Ed Gein’s hometown the other day not on purpose on the way toward where I am now in northern Wisconsin. It seems like an occasional fascination with this sort of material is required for anyone who wants to strive toward some sort of understanding of both the USA, and human nature itself. The primitive exists side by side with or within civilization. That is one reason why empires go around seizing other people’s territory. Or, as Kurtz cried out in the midst of expiring upon his death bed, “The horror, the horror!” We get astonished by individual criminals as we should and meanwhile the bombs always keep falling somewhere in the world, no one knows why (however much they say they do know).
D
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A terrible story of insanity – was it caused by isolation? I suppose that’s possible but then the family were there all together and it was not that uncommon for tiny groups to be isolated. I wonder how many of them were on the verge of madness, maybe more than we would like to think. Reaction to childhood trauma – but her sons didn’t suffer her trauma. But then as their mother she had power of them and there was no outside influence to dilute that. Was it familiarity with killing, blood and death and the preservation of creatures? In that case why don’t more people who work in abbatoirs and on farms commit murder? It’s a mystery and probably inexplicable in many ways. Something that I find a puzzle also is the fact that she preserved the bodies and yet seems to have believed that the ‘souls’ were elsewhere as she was going to join them. Not like those religions who believe the body, as far as possible, must be together to ensure travel to the next life. More like the peoples who mummified the bodies of their important people but then, is that a sort of immortality (I believe those bodies should be left alone, taking them out and examining them is a bizarre form of grave robbing – but that’s another thing) For me, it doesn’t matter how I consider this all I can think is that she had a predisposition to be insane but that leads down another rabbit hole regarding her sons. Well, you have addled my mind this Sunday morning! Thank you for such an interesting post. dd
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Diane
It seems like one half of humanity sensationalizes this kind of thing and the other half pretends it doesn’t exist. But not quite half on either side because there are a precious few in the middle who have the ability to think more deeply about these things. And that is what sites like Saragun are all about (or one thing they’re about), so thanks for contributing these brilliant speculations and for engaging with this material. For the most part we block these things out so we can function on a daily basis but pretending they don’t exist creates only ignorance. Thanks again!
D
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Hey Drifter
This is really compelling as The Drifter delivers on some true crime.
There have been some bad folks in Kentucky. The Harpe brothers “Big and Little Harpe” come to mind.
This woman and what she did was insanity and debauchery all rolled up with some kind of religiosity and necrophilia-ism. She and her little shop of horrors are quite a subject. And those boys banging Mama are not so great either, lol.
I think the really fascinating part of the essay are your reasons why this happened. A lot of really good historical context is involved and society has to be taken into account. Also you mention a biological disposition to commit murder through (not said) but probably incest.
The Civil War, Slavery, Genocide upon the Indians and their rampages… Our country may have come up with a new form of government, (currently being dismantled by an insurrectionist) but we haven’t come up with a new kind of people. People walk around with the mark of Cain in their eyes.
You mentioned her artistic approach—and how this business of death changes a person. Death does change people. Sometimes, I look at a farm and I don’t see this wonderful place of cows and happy pigs. They are slaughter houses and prisons for torturing animals. They make me want to become a vegetarian.
You are a great writer my friend!
Christopher
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CJA
In researching it recently (for some reason) I discovered that cannibalism has been a lot more common upon these shores and from coast to coast then I had originally believed. In the nineteenth century, especially, it seems, there were many people who went mad in so many different horrific ways that it boggles the mind to say the least. And the cannibalism I’m referring to isn’t the kind where you either eat or die, it’s the kind that’s entirely voluntary and often involves fooling other people into eating unspeakable things they don’t know they’re eating. Jeffery Dahmer was at least as much a throw-back as he was a new phenomenon, even though the local news treated him like he was something humanity had never seen before.
It also explains someone like Edgar Allan Poe in the same way that John Wayne Gacy explains Pennywise, or vice versa.
A fascinating twist to this tale is how the mother was literally able to convince her son that he had turned, literally, into his own father. Something like brainwashing without a real word to describe it which involved sleep deprivation and other methods.
From the drama Oedipus Rex to the song “The End” by the Doors with stops along the way at Hamlet and some of Freud’s writings, this nearly unspeakable theme makes the mind recoil even as one instinctively recognizes its primordial roots. “I didn’t create this world, I’m only passin’ through” is an old Hank Williams line that rings bells in the context of this.
The Drifter tried to turn himself into a kind of Sherlock Holmes figure for this particular effort. Although I did not inject a mixture of cocaine and morphine like Holmes was so fond of doing.
All the other characters in this tale remained distant for me. But the woman became someone I started to think of as almost beautiful, not because she was a murderer and child molester, but in spite of those things.
D
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I’ve other stories of other such crimes – probably have the names wrong
Black Heart in White City – Killer at the Chicago World’s fair
Isolated rental place with a woman who killed the lodgers
Gein of course who inspired Alfred Hitchcock
Scots (?) family lived in a cave and killed wanderers
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mirthful
…my original contributions to the genre R the poetic prose and the 11 Reasons – which R a blend of professional literary studies and amateur psychology – with a dash of shakes-peerean tragic grandeur implied (however lamely)…
drifter
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