Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 165, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 July 1915 — Burk Girl Says She Murdered to Defend Self. [ARTICLE]

Burk Girl Says She Murdered to Defend Self.

Still protecting her sweetheart, Frank Taylor, Inez Burk, 16-year-old slayer of her mother, Mrs. Archie McClain, again confessed the killing in a written statement to Prosecutor A. Guy Monday. Taylor, who is 17, also made a statement in which he denied knowledge of the killing. The couple affirmed the statement made after they had been arrested in Pekin, Hl. Though facing a charge of murder, the girl, surrounded by officers, and with tear-stained, remorseful countenance, stolidly maintained that she struck her mother in self defense with an axe and cut her with a paring knife. She sobbed out to the officers the details of her fight in the squalid rooms on Sunday afternoon, July 4, and said that when she fled she did not think she had killed her mother. She said she had lived in misery for a long time. When her mother attacked her Sunday she said she struck her twice with an axe and felled her with the blows. She exonerates Taylor of any participation whatever in the crime.