Jasper County Democrat, Volume 12, Number 71, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 December 1909 — WEIRDEST TALE IN SNEAD CASE [ARTICLE]

WEIRDEST TALE IN SNEAD CASE

Mother Says Aunt Watched and Waited For Niece’s Death.

THREE SISTERS ARE ACCUSED

Uncanny Vigil In Loqjly and Bare House In Which Young Woman Was Found Dead In Bathtub Was Maintained For a Day and a Night, According to <Story Related by Woman In Tombs Charged With the Murder of Her Daughter.

New York, Dec. 17.—-Strangest of all the weird tales that have sprung from the mystery of the death of Mrs. Ocey W. M. Snead in East Orange 'was the one told lit the Tombs by Mrs. Caroline Wardlaw Martin, mother of the woman found drowned in a bathtub. The mother is awaiting extradition to New Jersey to face a charge of murder. She told how her sister, Virginia Wardlaw had sat in the bare rooms on the first floor of a vacant house in East Orange waiting for Mrs. Snead to take her own life. Mrs. Martin declared that Miss Wardlaw lingered for a day and night before she dared go upstairs to learn whether her niece, the ailing woman whom she had left alone on a cot in an unfurnished bedroom, had committed suicide. She had heard Ocey Snead say that on that day the light would go out for her; she had known that the sick wdman had written letters forecasting death by her own hand. Yet Virginia Wardlaw sat in the lower part of the desolate house in East Orange until darkness had come and gone, waiting and afraid. When she finally decided to climb the stairs to the bathroom she found that death had come into the house during her vigil. Mrs. Mary Snead, the third of the Wardlaw sisters to be involved in the mystery, also is under arrest.