Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 January 1912 — KILLS SELF ON GIRL'S GRAVE [ARTICLE]

KILLS SELF ON GIRL'S GRAVE

Cedarville (Pa.) Youth, Unable to Live Without Sweetheart, Com. mite Suicide.. »“ —I . 1., _ Allentown, Pa. —Investigation that ensued when the body of a handsome young man was found in the grave yard of Cedarville church revealed a pathetic love suicide. It turned out that Joseph W. McCarthy, aged twenty years, had killed himself on the grave of his sweetheart, Queenie M. Nickum, who had been burled on Thanksgiving day, a victim of typhoid fever. 1 Shortly after dark he appeared, lonely and forlorn, in the neighborhood of the church. Ellsworth Reinhard who passed him. took him for one of the boys of the neighborhood, but on greeting him received no response. David Kehn saw him enter the front yard of the church and took him' for one of the choir members going to practice. Shortly after daylight Thomas Rebenold, sexton, yelled across the road to Mr. Kehn that he had found a corpse, and the crowd that gathered soon recognized it as that of the young man who had wept so bitterly at the Nickum girl’s funeral. He had drunk carbolic acid os her grave and stuck the bottle underneath the wreath that he had given as a flower tribute. A letter addressed to the girt’s grandfather requested that he be buried beside her. The letter wound up as follows: “If her relatives will not . allow me to be burlqg beside toy sweetheart then deposit my body in the river. In some lonely spot tn- a field or tn the woods, or cast it into the sea."