Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 October 1878 — A Wife’s Crime. [ARTICLE]

A Wife’s Crime.

Mr. and Mrs. George Hoffman, living near Vesper, N. Y., quarreled for years. They had nine children. The mother sent her 14-year-old boy to Vesper to purchase a quantity of arsenic. She met the boy on the road home. She examined the poison he had obtained and told him to go home, and, if his father had not eaten his supper, to put a quantity of the drug in his tea. If tea was over, the boy was charged to put the poison in his father’s breakfast tea. The mother then went to Vesper and remained with a relative. The boy found that his father had been to tea. Next morning he steeped some of the arsenic in his father’s tea. Shortly after drinking it the old man was taken sick. He sent for his wife. She would not go to him. The boy who had given the poison then went for his mother. He told her his father was dead. She started home. On the way she said to her son, taking him by the neck : “If you ever say a word about this I’ll kill you the first chance I get.” The boy did tell what had been done, however, and he and his mother are in jail. Hoffman was 67 years old. His widow was his second wife.