Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 August 1879 — EXTRAORDINARY SUICIDE. [ARTICLE]

EXTRAORDINARY SUICIDE.

Two Maitlen Lsulics, Ifesjwilwl of Their Property, Kesolve to Hang Themselves— The Horrible l)e«l Deliberately Executed. | From the Chicago Times.] The cli'gaiit three-story brick residence at No. 12(1 Langley avenue, in the village of Hyde Park, was on last night the scene of one of tue most shocking suicides ever perpetrated. The place was the house of three maiden ladies named Annie, Elizabeth and Emma Trowbridge, the eldest 42, the second 40, and the youngest *SO years of age. Some time ago the.r mother died, leaving them, by will, a handsome property in the shape, of down-town lauds and houses. The rental of this gave them an income sutlicient to supply all their wants and enable them to move in the best society. They were members of a fashionable church, gave liberally to the cause of missions, and donated in an unassuming manner in response to the calls of charities. They were, in a word, three Christian ladies of means and culture, who strove as best they might to make the world better for the fact of their having lived. lint, hardly had they come into full enjoyment of their heritage when trouble arose. Their father, a well-preserved old man, remarried, and from the moment of the wedding he aimed to break his dead wife’s will and gain control of the property. In this, it is said, he was abetted and encouraged by his spouse. The result was a long and tedious lawsuit, which ended last week in the defeat of the sisters and the triumph of the father, who at once took possession of the entire income, leaving his daughters absolutely destitute. They sought their lawyer, and he told them there was no use of longer continuing the fight. They looked around them and could fee the future barred across by a great wall of despair. Tenderly nurtured, with those accomplishments which make women ornaments of society, but leave them destitute of resource to earn their daily bread, the sisters saw no avenue open save that leading down to starvation. They spent nights in planning and weeping. They laid out impracticable schemes which could avail naught, and finally, on last Saturday, they spent their last penny to pay the hired girl, discharged her, and came face to face with utter pgnury. Their house was elegantly furnished, but they knew that a sale would leave them not even a straw tick after the immediate wants of nature were for a time supplied. And so, with grim, gaunt hunger staring at them, their courage gave away. What, indeed, could three modest, retiring, shrinking women, already past the age of attractions, do against a busy, remorseless world? “We can,” exclaimed the eldest, “at least die.”

And then and there the sisters sat down and calmly discussed how and when they should put an end to their existence. They talked until the day had dawned, and the first glad Sabbath chimes rang out on a morning of perfect beauty. Then they slept for a little while, and, arising, donned their best attire and attended the last church service they were ever to know on earth. The remainder of Sunday was spent as had been the night before, anu yesterday saw them fully settled in their resolve. The two older sisters would die by hanging. Emma should live to tell their story, and be a witness to their awful end. There was no food in the house, but that mattered not. They cared for none. Finally, as the afternoon settled down in the somber gloom of the night, they made their preparations. Annie and Elizabeth bathed with all the neatness and nicety born of aristocratic habits. They then put on their clothes, as white and pure as those of a nun. After this the three read aloud from the Bible the Sermon on the Mount, and, kneeling down together, prayed. They besought their Creator to forgive what they were about to do; they asked the pardon of the mother dead and gone; they begged forgiveness for the father. This done, they closed all the blinds, nailed up the windows and doors with great “ten-penny” nails, and drove two spikes in the wall—one just over the center of the folding hall-door, the other in a similar place above the open double doors of the connecting parlors. There was another prayer, the three met in a last embrace, and Emma retired to her room in the story above. There, shivering, sobbing and moaning like one bereft of reason through grief, the poor girl sat from 7 o’clock till !). She listened with that sense of the horrible upon her which, in her case, was unique. She heard the preparations completed, heard the chairs drawn out of place, heard the same chairs fall, heard a choking, final protest of life against suicide, and then came silence—silence so awful and torturing as to more than parallel the suffering inflicted on the damned. She went down stairs, and her straining eye-balls met the hideous sight she knew awaited her. The two loved ones hung suspended and inanimate from ropes tied to the spikes driven in above the door. Two chairs lay beneath them, and the open Bible, wet with tears, was on the center-table. Neither face was distorted, although each wore a purplish hue, and the tongues protruded somewhat. The poor girl saw all in an instant, and then fell fainting to the floor. But mercilul oblivion was not granted to her long, and she awoke again—awoke to moan and cry out, and try to call back the dead companions of a lifetime. She crawled to where they hung, and kissed their feet, and begged them to speak to her. Neighbors heard the unusual noise and broke in. Never, they say, shall they forget the sickening spectacle. The ropes were at once cut, and the forms of the dead women neatly composed on the floor of the parlor it had been their pride to adorn and beautify. The one still alive, now nearly a maniac, it was found necessary, as a matte r of common humanity and precaution, to take to the Hyde Park police station. She, too, wanted to die, and the solemn imprecations she called down upon the heads of relatives responsible for the calamity were blood-curdling in the intensity of their hatred. The news of the suicide soon spread, and people of the vicinage gathered about to gape and wonder and comment. Then the night grew denser, and the hours passed by in procession, until all was again silence, and the lonely house stood like the abode of lost souls, with its flickering gas, its dead inmates, and its solitary blue-coated guardian. The Empress of Austria likes a solitary ljunting expedition. With

favorite rifle in hand, she goes deep into the wooded mountains and solitary valleys which stretcli around the Imperial domain in every direction. Dressed in the rough costume of the Tyrol, she will often make excursions of two or three days’ duration, staying at night at some distant cot, where the fare, besides the game she brings with li3r, is goat cheese and milk, with black bread.