AN AMERICAN CRIME.

Motueka Star, Volume IV, Issue 171, 10 April 1903, Page 4

AN AMERICAN CRIME.

At Fallsburg lived one Lafayette Taylor and his wife, with a girl of fourteen, who was the woman's child by an earlier marriage. Some weeks ago the man disappeared. He had not lived happily With his wife, and was given to drink. She was not an ignorai\t woman, for in the public school she had stood at the head of her class. A few days after Taylor disappeared she confessed to her uncle that she had killed him. The story was so dreadful that he could not protect her by concealing it. She was arrested, and is now on trial. Her own confession, as now given to the press, does not differ materially from the story she told her uncle, or from the testimony of her little daughter (who was a witness of all the awful proceedings), except in the J assertion that she did not intentionally kill I her husband, but shot him by accident in self defence while both were struggling to get possession of the pistol with which 3 he threatened her. The testimony of her daughter and her uncle tends to show, however, that she shot the man deliberately while he was lying on a couch. What was she to do with the body? There is' no conflict of testimony as to what she did with it. She and her daughter agreed about that. She dragged the corpse into the kitchen, got an axe from the woodpile, and set out to cut it to pieces; first an arm, then the head, she cut off, and cast into the stove. All that night she worked, trying to burn portions of the body. When morning came she carried what was left to I the woodhouse, and there completed the , work of dismemberment. For two davs the fire in the kitchen stove was slowly consuming this awful fuel. "It took me ' two days," says the woman. " I thought I ' should die. But I did not stop until the work was finished. I did not hate him ; I was sorry tor him. But he never had been sorry for me. He made me suffer. My little girl, bless her. had nothing!to do with the deed." Taylor had been threatening, she said, to divorce her and marry another woman, whom they both knew. The fire in the ordinary cooking stove did not consume the bones. I hcse the woman ground into powder, which she gave to her chicks. Then she burned all the bloodstained clothing, and covered with fresh paint the stains on the floor and furniture. Possibly she might have escaped detection if she had not confided in her uncle. • i