Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 April 1878 — AN AWFUL DEED. [ARTICLE]

AN AWFUL DEED.

Inhuman Dotchwry of * Woman in New York by. Her Husband Nitric Acid Poured’ Down Her Throat by the Mon-ster-Suicide of the Murderer. A horrible crime was that of Lanncelot Fogarty, of New York, who murdered hia wife and then committed suicide, besides attempting the lives of his three children. We glean from the New York papers the following particulars of the blood-curdling tragedy : Fogarty went home in the evening and quarreled with his wife. He left, aajd returned aljout 1 o’clock in the moraing. He had a key to the kitchen. His children were sleeping in the room next to the grocery, and his wife was asleep in the room between that and the kitchen. He had a book-binders’ knife, with a long, keen blade, also a vial of laudanum, and one of nitric acid. He lit the lamp, removed his coat and collar, rolled up his sleeves, and took off his shoes. He then poured, the liquids into small glasses and went through his wife’s room toward the children. She awoke and he seized her. He had both the laudanum -and acid, and it is thought he intended to* use the laudanum'ori the children to keep -them asleep. Holdipg tjie when she opened her'mofrth4o reream he poured the nitric acid down her throat. It went to her stomach, eating through her internal organs and tearing her intestines into threads. The little she forced out of her mouth ran frickli g down her cheek and back, burning off the flesh all along its course, and eating holesthough the pillow into the mattress. The woman in fearful agony threw the murderer from her. He ran to the kitchen and brought in the knife. Seeing his wife standing in the middle of the floor he went up and dunged the long, thin, keen blade into her, left breast up to the handle, the blade penetrating the lung. At this the children awoke and ran into the street, shrieking. Fogarty, satisfying himself his wife was dead, laid her on the floor, put a pillow under her head, and went into the kitchen. Going up to the small mirror on tho wall, he stretched his neck and plunged the bloody knife into it on the right side. The knife went through toward the front, coming out through the windpipe. He made a similar wound,ion the left side of his neck, the knife coming out without severing the nbterv. He then staggered to the ■ table on the opposite side of the room and fell to the floor. Fogarty was found lying on his face in a pool of blood, dead. His wife was dead, lying with her body in her bedroom and her head on the pillow just across the kitchen door-sill. The kitchen floor was covered with tracks of blood. Underneath the mirror was a large pool of blood. Mrs. Fogarty’s body was covered with blood, w’hich could not be accounted for by the presence of the wounds on the body. Her flesh was charred on the right cheek and down her neck and back. Her right eye was burned out, the right ear burned'almost off, and part of her clothes and part of the bed-clothes burned to powder. Fogarty left a letter, in which he signed himself “a broken-hearted man.” The troubles of the family began in 1868. The wife was an educated woman, and Fogarty was worth £13,000 in 1860 when he married her in Australia. Drink brought him down. He ruined his wife’s business after deserting her twice, once going to Chicago and squandering $1,500 there.