JAZZ GIRL’S CRIME

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLV, Issue 126, 1 May 1925, Page 11

JAZZ GIRL’S CRIME

QGRQTHY EI-UNGSON ADJUDGED INSANE. SAN FRANCISCO, April 11. Besides entertaining the fleet, 'this pity is gettjng aq amazing tjirill, according to the best newspaper accounts, out of the trial of Dorothy Elhngson, the wild, qqtaqiea jazz girl, 17 years of age. Dorothy stayed out all night, for which her mother upbraided her, and the girl shot her parent dead. Sjjqce then Dorothy has been much in the courts, and the murder trial has now ended, in its fourth week. Dorothy was anxious to plead guilty, and get it all over. But that does not suit the American procedure in this of case, and so the spectators have daily been given exciting spectacles of the girl’s battle with sharp-witted attorneys. “I could choke you,” she cried, when her own lawyer demanded if she was a frequenter of San "‘Francisco's night life haunts. The girl fainted whenever details of the murder were recalled, but that did not prevent her from throwing a glass of water across the court room whenever she became peevish.

The murder of her mother by Dorothy Ellingson, because she was forbidden to go to a wild party with a number of companions, was the sensation of the year in San Francisco, and one of the most surprising features of it was the girl’s attitude after her arrest, and after she had made a confession of her guilt. . ", She gave frequent interviews to reporters, and wrote prose and poetry iu her ceil while she awaited trial.

Luther Burbank, a famous American naturalist and authority on evolution, wrote in Hie San Fraiiciscq Examiner his views on the possible “influence* of jazz in connection with tjhe crime, which had horrified all America.

“America is particularly prone tq strange crimes and strange criminals,” he said, in the course of his article. “There’s no mystery about thatnot to anyone who has ever studied either plant or animal or distinctly human life. We are a nation of hybrids—and hybrids always produce strange flowers. “We have.more geniuses and more criminals than any other nation. That is to be expected. “If I breed a white flower and a blue flower, do I lose the brightness of the blue and cloud the whiteness of the white? “I do not—l heighten the blue and I clear the white, and the flower of the mixed breed will fie larger, it will bloom oftener and more richly—than either of the parent plants—but every once ?n a while there will be a ‘runt’ or a ‘sport’ or a ‘throwback,’ and when that comes I pull it up, and throw it away. I have to, or the whole stock will degenerate.”